the human province

I've had my fair share of visa problems in the last year or two. I've had Libya, Sudan and now Syria all do their best to stop me from visiting. I've given up on the first two for the time being, but I'm still holding out for Syria.

So I'm in Beirut for the time being. It's difficult to work on my Arabic here, because classes are prohibitively expensive, and almost everyone speaks English or French much better than I speak Arabic. It seems like a little bubble here in Beirut. A bubble filled with beautiful women, bars and short skirts.

A few hours away, Israel has taken out several bridges, destroyed electricity transformers in Gaza, and detained a third of Hamas' cabinet and an unknown number of lawmakers. The Israelis have flown over Syrian President Assad's summer house on the coast and spoken of attacking the leader of Hamas' military wing, who lives in Damascus. On all sides of Lebanon, the tension can be felt, but here, we?re going out and drinking, watching the world cup and sipping coffee.

Brazil beat Ghana the other night; there were fireworks and dancing in the streets.

In his op-ed, A Threat That Belongs Behind Bars, professor Eric Posner informs us that the indefinite detention of "dangerous aliens," regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime, should not be opposed on general principle. While it is true that there are precedents of such action in the alien and sedition acts and the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, it is both disappointing and disconcerting that such black spots on American history are being held up as a defense of unconscionable behavior not befit of a civilized democracy. In these times, when the United States is committing torture, unlawful detentions and violent war crimes in the name of the war on terror, what our nation needs are more, not fewer, appeals to general principle.

I've just arrived in Beirut after a hectic few days of getting everything prepared for this trip. I'll be in the Middle East until September and will be trying to blog from here as much as possible - hopefully more than usual.

I never managed to get my visa for Syria, so I'll probably try my luck at the border in the next few days. Some friends want me to come to Jordan, but you have to go through Syria to get to Jordan from Lebanon, so I might not be able to make it, which would be a shame, because it would be nice to stay with a family in Amman and then maybe go visit Petra as well.

There is a certain sense of home that I feel here in Beirut. I felt it the first time I came, and I'm feeling it again, now that I'm back. There was the same sign of Ronald McDonald saying "Welcome to Lebanon" at the airport and I was able to direct the cab driver directly to my friend's place, no small feat considering how bad my sense of direction is.

I lucked out at the airport, because there was some sort of a problem with the visa stand, so they just let everyone have their visa for free. It's only $17, but it's a nice feeling all the same.

I'm going to try to post pictures from time to time also, because I think this blog needs some spicing up...

Esquire magazing has an interesting piece on John Walker Lindh, the American guy who was fighting in the ranks of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance when the US invaded in 2001. Strangely, part of his sentence is that he's not allowed to speak Arabic in prison, which means he cannot pray out loud. Talking to a friend of mine last night about the article, he reacted to it by saying that if the sentence isn't cruel, it certainly is unusual.

The article is a little long and written with an odd tone of deference or piety that I'm not sure really works, but it is very interesting and worth a read nonetheless.

An editorial in le Monde today takes the US to task for Guantanamo Bay (in French, translation mine):

Upon the discovery of the suicide of three detainees, two Saudis and one Yemeni, the reaction of the commander of the camp in Guantanamo illustrates the gulf that separates American authorities from the rest of the world on the sinister issue of the prison in Guantanamo. The collective suicide is "an act of asymmetric war waged against us," declared Rear Admiral Harry Harris on 10 June. Colleen Graffy, in charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, qualified the detainees' gesture as a "good PR move to draw attention."

Without falling into otherworldliness faced with the essential fight against international terrorism, how can we make the United States listen to reason about this black stain on the democratic world that the prison in Guantanamo has become? Because, when Admiral Harris evokes an act of war against America, he is forgetting that American blindness towards the treatment of the detainees suspected of belonging to Al-Qaida, in Guantanamo or in the secret prisons run by the CIA, exposes all western democracies to Islamic propaganda and radicalization. It is to our suburbs and our Muslim communities in Europe that the recruiters of Al-Qaida and other fundamentalist proselytizers come to fill their ranks, with arguments graciously given to them by the military leaders of the Pentagon and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It hasn't been enough to say that Guantanamo Bay, opened in January 2002 and where 460 prisoners are still being held without trial, is legal nonsense; it hasn't been enough to say that it constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and human rights; it hasn't been enough to write that it is unworthy of a country universally admired for having established respect for the rule of law in its constitutional system; it hasn't been enough to show surprise that the Bush administration manifests, by its stubbornness, such disdain for its own Supreme Court, which told it in June 2004 to authorize the Guantanamo detainees to defend themselves before an American civil court, and for public opinion, which, after an initial indifference, has included a growing number of voices denouncing the conditions in the prison. Nor has it been enough to bring up relevant historical errors, from the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to Margaret Thatcher's vain stubbornness faced with IRA members on hunger strike in 1981.

The United States remains deaf to all these arguments. The least that European leaders can do from now on is to no longer hold high level meetings with Americans without demanding the closing of Guantanamo Bay. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has recently served as a good example. The French should follow suit.

In addition to Kuperman's piece, David Rieff has also penned a case against intervention in Darfur in the New Republic, which Reeves hotly and thoroughly counters.

He sees the issue through the lense of Iraq in 2003 instead of, say, Rwanda in 1994 or Iraq during the genocidal al Anfal campaign to Arabize Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1908s. Rieff casts doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and says that those who call for intervention in Darfur are ignoring the politics of Darfur (which he seems to be less than well-versed in himself, the truth be told):

Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.

One debilitating defect of the liberal interventionism is that it ignores the political implications of what it calls for. ...

...[A]n intervention, however good it may be for the Darfuris, may be terrible for the rest of the world.

Reeves criticizes Rieff for mistakenly attributing secessionist ambitions to the Darfuri rebels, not discussion the spread of the genocide into Chad, irresponsibly casting doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and generally being ignorant on Darfuri politics.

In fact, we must wonder what "agency" a nine-year-old girl has when she is brutally gang-raped by the Janjaweed, or what "agency" a five-year-old boy has as he is thrown screaming into a bonfire along with his brothers, or indeed what "agency" a one-year-old boy has when the Janjaweed slice off his penis and he bleeds to death. "Political interests" here is an abstraction that can have meaning for very few besides David Rieff. There are real political issues in Darfur, including competition over natural resources and power in governance, as well as competing visions of equitable distribution of land and wealth. Rieff captures none of this in his account.

If the Abuja accord does fail, if violence then inevitably rapidly escalates in Darfur and Chad, it will be too late for hundreds of thousands of lives. We have simply waited too long, with too many sufficiently encouraged by specious arguments of the sort so abundant in Rieff's account. In this sense it is perhaps useful to have Rieff articulate his factitious "realism," to invoke so glibly the difficult "politics" of Darfur, to pretend that Iraq has somehow changed the imperative of responding to massive genocidal destruction.

Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in her TMPCafe piece, Rethinking Darfur that after reading Kuperman and Rieff, she's having second thoughts. She doesn't go into any specifics, but the gist of her piece is that maybe we shouldn't intervene, because the situation is complicated:

I want to help the victims of the Janjaweed as much as anyone. But the Europeans have been arguing for some time that the situation is far more complicated than a simple morality tale would make it out to be. And surely if Iraq has taught us anything, it is to think very hard about what happens AFTER we go in and stop the initial killing. It may well be that even if an AU solution is slower and less effective up front, it will be more effective over the long term, whereas if the U.S. or NATO go in, we will find ourselves again "in charge" of a situation we barely understand and cannot control, ultimately visiting yet more chaos and death on the very people we seek to help.

To my mind, this is similar to seeing a woman getting raped and murdered on the street and hesitating to do anything about it because the situation is likely to be complicated. What will other people in the neighbourhood think if I intervene? What did that woman do to make those men decide to rape and murder her?

Of course the situation is complicated, as are most conflicts. We don't live in a world of black and white, and we never have. Just because the sitauation surrounding a genocide is complex does not mean that there is any less of a moral imperative to stop it. The politics of Darfur are complex, as were the politics of Rwanda in 1994. What is not complex is that genocide is being committed, and either one believes that genocide carries the weight of a moral imperative or it doesn't. Finally, Slaughter seems more interested in wringing her hands and hoping against all odds for the best. Rieff at least calls a spade a spade when he asks brings up the idea that even if intervention is better for Darfuris, maybe it would be bad for the rest of the world.

This is an interesting question that smacks of utilitarianism. But before answering it, we should ask ourselves two questions: First, given the number of dead incurred during World War II, should the international community have given up Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria and the Jews in those countries in order to avoid the tens of millions of deaths that were a result of direct military confrontation between Axis and Allied powers? And second, are we sure that there will not be more death and conflict as a result of allowing a genocide to happen?

The first question is of a moral nature and can be difficult in some instances, if not in this one. The second one is about history and its consequences. Would the Congo be such a hellhole if we had not let the Rwandan genocide come to pass? In the case of Darfur, it is important to look at what this genocide means for Chad, and by consequence, the Central African Republic and Cameroon. If Khartoum is emboldened and allowed to topple Deby's (distasteful) regime in Chad, the bloody and ongoing history of the Congo might repeat itself.

I would like to comment on Alan Kuperman's polemical piece in the New York Times yesterday (31 May), "Strategic Victimhood in Sudan." In this particular article, Kuperman tells us that the regime in Khartoum responded to Darfuri rebel insurgency with genocide, and that "[b]ecause of the Save Darfur movement ... the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure," which has in turn led the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) movement and Nur's part of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) to reject the recent peace treaty signed at Abuja.

Kuperman's analysis of events is not specific to his take on Sudanese politics; rather it is but further evidence of his larger hypothesis. Generally speaking, the crux of his argument can be found in the first sentence of an article he wrote on the Rwandan genocide, "Provoking genocide: A revised history of the Rwandan Patriotic Front": "In most cases of mass killing since World War II­­ -- unlike the Holocaust -- the victim group has triggered its own demise by violently challenging the authority of the state."

Although he emphasizes that his theory is "not intended to excuse of justify the genocide in any way, but merely to understand more fully its causes," Kuperman's argument seems to come dangerously close to blaming the victims. While he would surely protest that he is blaming rebel groups and not the victims of the genocide (a polemical claim in and of itself), this is not at all clear when he says, "the victim group has triggered its own demise." (To be fair, with the exception of the opening sentence, the article focuses mostly on the RPF, not Tutsis in general.)

But I'll save the more general moral debate about whether or not a genocidal regime's culpability can be shared with a rebel group that has purportedly "provoked" genocide for another time. What I would like to focus on here is the specifics of Darfur.

I don't pretend to be an expert on Sudanese or Darfuri politics, and I agree with Kuperman when he says that the situation in Darfur is complex. However, it seems strange that after stressing that the situation there is not the "simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations," he would himself make claims like these:

The region's blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago -- denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. ... [The rebels] took up arms not to stop genocide -- which erupted only after they rebelled -- but to gain tribal domination.

To paint the situation during the maja al-gatila (the famine that kills) in Darfur in 1984-5 as one in which "blacks ... were the oppressors" is terribly simplistic in more than one way. Without lingering on the complexities of ethnicity in Darfur and the difficulty in categorizing Darfuris as either "black" or "Arab," the facile claim that "blacks" were oppressing "Arabs" seems to overlook the fact that the nearly 100,000 deaths during the famine were largely due to apathy or incompetence on the part of Khartoum. According to Prunier,

Everyone knew that this catastrophe would have been perfectly preventable with a little bit of planning, money and, especially, political will. Everyone knew that the mass deaths [hécatombe] were the result of Khartoum's negligence. But the consequences happened to be unequally distributed [translation mine].

The drought and famine forced the nomads to prematurely go south in search of grazing areas, which just so happened to be the meager and not-yet-harvested fields of the farmers. Alex de Waal, who has studied the famine in depth, describes the delicate balance that was violently disturbed in 1985 as the "moral geography" of Darfur.

Kuperman's other claim, that the rebels "picked up arms ... to gain tribal dominance," also seems to be woefully ill-informed. According to Julie Flint and de Waal, the roots of JEM go back to 1993, when the original aim was to reform the National Islamic Front (NIF) from within. Dissidents like Nur compiled evidence illustrating the economic and political marginalization of Darfur into a document they called "The Black Book." JEM purports to combat Darfur's status as an outlying periphery dominated by the center of Sudanese economic and political life. Nur explains the situation in Darfur thusly:

There was too much suffering. I travelled 60 kilometers to go to primary school, in Kornoi, when I was 7; 350 kilometers to go to intermediate school, in Geneina; 400 kilometers to go to secondary school, in Fasher; and 1,000 kilometers to go to university, in Khartoum. It was forbidden to speak the Zaghawa language in school. In primary school, the teacher gave us a blue ticket to pass to any boy who spoke Zaghawa. At the end of the day, anyone who had the ticket was whipped. The whole of Kutun province, with a population of more than 551,000, had one general doctor and no specialists. Women walked more than eight hours daily to get less than 60 liters of water. We were excluded from all key posts and had no way of communicating with the international community to ask for help.

JEM's five-point manifesto calls for a national solution to the Sudan's problems. It calls for a unified country, justice and equality rather than political repression, "radical and comprehensive constitutional reform," basic services for all Sudanese and human development in all the regions of Sudan.

The SLM/A, on the other hand, has its roots in Darfuri irregular militias that were created in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s when conflict was already rife in the region. In 1999 already, over 100,000 Masalit had fled to Chad.

The fact of the matter is that the events leading up to the genocide in Darfur are many and varied, involving the famine, the political situation in Chad, Libyan involvement and sometimes de facto ruling of Darfur, Islamic movements (both domestic and imported from Tripoli or Cairo) and a politics of systematic neglect of the periphery by the center in Khartoum. To say that the rebels provoked genocide by vying for tribal domination is either disingenuous or uninformed.

This is not to say that the Darfuri rebel movements are saints; we know that they are not. But that's not the point. Whether the rebel movements have "provoked" Khartoum is neither here nor there in the long run. The rebels, despite their claims to represent all of Darfur, are not the ethnic groups as a whole, just as the RPF is not synonymous with the Tutsis in Rwanda.

De Waal sums up the situation quite succinctly in his piece in the London Review of Books, "Counter-insurgency on the cheap":

The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers' claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.

And this brings me to Kuperman's advice not to intervene: ...we should let Sudan's army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes." It's hard to believe that such a naïve statement could be penned by anyone who has read much about the regime in Khartoum. We're talking about "routine cruelty" and "genocide by force of habit." What Kuperman doesn't see is that the Sudanese regime is "handling" the rebels in the same way it dealt with the South and the Nuba Mountains.

To lay the blame for such acts at the feet of the rebels (rather than at the feet of the regime committing genocide), or even worse, the "victim group," is morally irresponsible. The Fur and Zaghawa and other "black" tribes in Darfur are no more responsible for the organized campaign to destroy them than the Armenians were for their forced march into the sands of Syria.

If Alan Kuperman is content to take Khartoum at its word and trust that it will "eschew" the "war crimes" that it denies committing in the first place, allowing the regime to "handle" the rebels and "defend its sovereignty" in the meantime, I, for one, am not.

Kuperman advises the United States to announce a policy of non-intervention. This is confusing to me, because after all, isn't that the policy that Samantha Powers describes so well in her book, "A Problem from Hell"? Isn't that the policy that has been silently announced throughout the twentieth century to Armenians, Rwandans, Iraqi Kurds, Cambodians and now the Sudanese?

Here are a few interesting links that I've come across in the last few days:

A story from ABC about Chinese Muslims wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo and then finally released after 4.5 years. They couldn't be sent to China since the government there persecutes Uighurs, and despite being found innocent of any charges (NLEC, or No Longer Enemy Combattant, in Guantanamo Bay terminology - Mr Kafka could not have made this up if he had tried), being put away by the Americans for 4.5 years is enough to garner a bad reputation. So apparently, no country would take them, the US included, with the single and solitary exception of Albania:

We are very pleased that the Albanian government and the Albanian people opened their hearts and welcomed us. Despite the fact that all the strong, powerful, democratic countries are able and capable of accepting us, they did not do that. We are having some problems ... there are no Uighurs in Albania, and we don't speak the Albanian language. ...

Were hoping that the United States government would recognize the mistake that it has done and accept, allow us to enter the United States. U.S. government captured us, U.S. government incarcerated us, locked us up in prison, and U.S. government said that we were not a threat and should be released.

Uighur-Americans came forward, made an offer to the United States government to accept us into Uighur-American society and community. They even went into the courts and contacted the lawyers and wrote a letter to the U.S. government officials asking them to consider releasing us into the United States. Unfortunately, it did not happen, a rather disappointing decision.

Otherwise, the Post ran a really interesting first person piece about Iraq, the Republic of Fear, which makes one fearful that Baghdad is slowly but surely turning into Beirut, circa 1980:

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis. ...

Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed neighborhoods are "purified." In Amriya, dead bodies are being found on the main street at a rate of three or five or seven a day. People are afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, for fear that they, too, will be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya and other once-diverse neighborhoods, Shiites are being forced to leave. In Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are being targeted.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

This made me remember reading a piece in Harper's that said that maybe the best thing for Iraq would be for the US to withdraw and let them have their full-fledged civil war. (It was by Edward Luttwak and was adapted from a piece in Foreign Policy, which can be found here) The version in Harper's ends like this:

...American forces continue to suffer casualties in combat against factions that should be confronting one another instead. Perhaps what the new Iraqi state needs in order to achieve stability is precisely a certain amount of civil war. Preventing it may impede a natural and perhaps very desirable political evolution. Americans would not today be happier if European Great Powers, horrified by the carnage of our own Civil War, had enforced an armistice between North and South that might endure still between two feeble states. ...

It's hard for me to know what to make of this idea. I'm not convinced that an all-out civil war would result in anything but a division of Iraq, or even worse, a regional war that would involve Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and probably Turkey as well. The latter is obviously a horrible idea, but I haven't decided how I feel about the former.

Finally, the atrocities in Haditha make me think that maybe Luttuk and Rosen are right and the US should just get out as soon as possible.

I can't get over this. I know that similar things happened in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and I know that we're talking about kids who have been put in an extremely dangerous and stressful situation, and that sometimes people just crack. But I just don't understand how someone can shoot a one-legged man in a wheelchair nine times. Or how someone can shoot a 1-year old baby. Say that again: a 1-year old baby. I just don't understand.

At some point on Nov. 19, Marines in an armored convoy arrived at Haditha's hospital. They placed the bodies of the victims in the garden of the hospital and left without explanation, said Mohammed al-Hadithi, one of the hospital officials who helped carry the bodies inside. By some accounts, some of the corpses were burnt.

The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs' Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. "Democracy assassinated the family that was here," graffiti on one of the houses declared.

I just came across a piece by the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times entitled, If Iraq was wrong, is Darfur right?

The New Republic has recently come out with an issue on Darfur (only some of which is available to non-subscribers), and they come out as a whole for American intervention in Darfur. Kaplan's piece, however, brings up the question of Iraq and asks why it is all right to intervene in Darfur but not in Iraq:

As their criticism of the particulars of the Iraq war has hardened into a broader indictment of U.S. foreign policy, the mostly progressive voices calling for action in Darfur have become caught in a bind of their own devising. Even as they demand intervention in Sudan, they excoriate Washington for employing U.S. military power without due respect to the opinion of the international community and against nations that pose no imminent threat to our own -- which is to say, precisely the terms under which U.S. power would have to be employed in the name of saving Darfur.

He then goes on to argue that neither the African Union nor the UN will intervene or is capable of intervening, leaving the US as the only capable, if not willing, power equipped to intervene.

To my mind, the main reason why I am for intervention in Darfur but was against it in Iraq can be summed up in a single word: genocide. It's happening in Darfur but wasn't happening in Iraq. Now had the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s been continuing, I would have been for intervention in Iraq. This is not to say that genocide should be the threshold for international intervention, but it would at least be a good start. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) responds similarly to Kaplan's jab against him:

Once President Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word "genocide" to describe the carnage in Darfur, the United States and every other civilized nation had a moral imperative to act. Those who find it painful to explain the deception and misinformation preceding our invasion of Iraq should not hide behind the victims in Darfur.

As for whether or not the AU or UN could or would stop the genocide, the AU is already there but lacks a proper and muscular mandate that would allow their forces to protect civilians. As it is, they can only protect themselves. Likewise, when and if a UN force intervenes, it would be important for them to have a good mandate and be properly funded, because we know what happens to underfunded blue helmets without a real mandate. As it stands, there are 7,000 AU troops already in Darfur, which could be folded into a UN force; France has at least 1,000 troops in Chad already; and if the UK could be convinced to provide the 5,000 troops that they offered in 2004, then that would make a force of 13,000. Other nations like South Africa and Ghana could also donate more troops, and the US could help shoulder the financial and logistics costs of such an intervention.

While writing this, I've come across an interesting (and much more detailed) plan by the International Crisis Group To Save Darfur, which is similar to my idea:

Crisis Group has long contended that because AMIS has reached the outer limits of its competence, and a UN mission authorised today would not be fully ready to take over from it for some six months, a distinct and separate multinational force should be sent to Darfur to bridge that gap and help stabilise the immediate situation. We have argued, and continue to believe, that NATO would be best from a practical military point of view. Unfortunately, political opposition to this in Khartoum, within the AU and even perhaps within the Atlantic Alliance itself, means it is not achievable at this time.

What we now propose, therefore, is a compromise driven by the urgent need for a more robust force in Darfur. A militarily capable UN member state -- France seems most promising since it already has troops and aircraft in the area -- should offer to the Security Council to go now to Darfur, wearing blue helmets, as the lead nation in the first phase of the incoming UN mission. It could be joined from the outset by forces from one or two other militarily capable UN members (and would probably need to be if the desirable target of around 5,000 personnel for this force is to be achieved). This stabilisation force would be a self-contained, separately commanded UN mission with identified functional or geographic divisions of responsibility that would work beside AMIS and through a liaison unit at its headquarters until arrangements were in place for a 1 October transition to the full UN mission. That full mission would need to be recruited from the best AMIS elements as well as a wider circle of Asian and other member states -- no easy task at a time when several large UN peacekeeping missions in Africa and elsewhere have exhausted the capabilities of many contribution candidates.

The U.S. and other NATO states should respond generously and quickly to requests from it or AMIS to provide logistical help as well as regular access to satellite imagery, air mobility and close air support, especially to deter or react to egregious movements of men or heavy weapons in the border area.

They finish by coming up with a list of recommendations for each of the major parties involved (with the exception of the belligerent parties):

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the African Union:

1. Request the immediate deployment of a UN-mandated stabilisation force to help bolster the AMIS troops and focus on the Chad-Sudan border and the Tawila-Graida corridor.

2. Seek quick negotiation of a single, enhanced ceasefire document to remove the ambiguities of the existing overlapping agreements.

3. Begin immediately to map the location of forces in Darfur so as to manage and enforce the ceasefire better.

4. Begin immediately identifying, defining and profiling the government-allied militias.

5. Improve the reporting mechanisms and procedures for monitoring ceasefire violations and urgently revive and upgrade the compliance and sanctions mechanisms of the ceasefire.

6. Negotiate a series of humanitarian ground rules, in collaboration with the UN, to help hold the parties accountable for the protection of humanitarian operations in their respective areas.

To the United Nations Security Council:

7. Authorise a two-phase intervention in Darfur under Chapter Seven of the Charter, with the following elements:

(a) for the first phase, to be accomplished within a month, a lead nation would serve as the advance element of the full UN mission by sending the bulk of an initial 5,000 troops to Darfur, with three main stabilisation tasks:

i. interdiction of military activities across the Chad-Darfur border;

ii. protection of civilians in Darfur, primarily in the Tawilla-Graida corridor; and

iii. rapid-reaction support of AMIS forces until the transition to a full-fledged UN peace support operation in October 2006.

(b) for the second phase, immediate planning for a peace support operation of some 15,000 troops -- none of whom should be diverted from the mission of the existing UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) -- with a mandate emphasising civilian protection, ceasefire enforcement and monitoring of the Chad-Sudan border, to take over from AMIS as of 1 October 2006.

8. Strengthen the existing sanctions regime by implementing the recommendations in the 30 January 2006 report of the Panel of Experts.

9. Authorise the Secretariat's peacekeeping department (DPKO) to begin planning on an urgent basis and together with the AU both phases of this operation, with priority tasks to include:

(a) identifying areas for early cooperation in Darfur, such as immediate deployment of UN experts to help support the establishment of a functioning ceasefire commission secretariat and the deployment of human rights monitors and translators, including women, to help improve the reporting capacity of AMIS; and

(b) identifying the lead nation to deploy in the initial phase to support AMIS by performing the tasks set out in recommendation 7(a) above and serve as the advance element of the full UN mission.

To Donor Governments:

10. Convene an early pledging conference to ensure that AMIS is fully funded until the UN mission can take over in October 2006.

To the U.S., the EU and its member states and others with a strong interest in regional peace and stability:

11. Undertake major diplomatic efforts to:

(a) persuade Sudan to accept and the AU to confirm transition of AMIS into a strong UN peacekeeping mission as of 1 October 2006 and request in the interim dispatch of an advance force of some 5,000 blue-helmets to assist AMIS by performing essential stabilisation tasks;

(b) persuade the Security Council to authorise a mission of some 15,000, including the strongest AMIS elements and with a strong Chapter VII mandate focused on civilian protection; and

(c) identify the lead nation to contribute the bulk of the advance element to assist AMIS and perform essential stabilisation tasks immediately upon Security Council authorisation, and be prepared to help with all necessary material and logistical support.

12. Concurrently with efforts to strengthen international forces on the ground, pursue the other elements of a coordinated three-part strategy to resolve the Darfur conflict by:

(a) reinforcing AU efforts to negotiate an enhanced ceasefire and a political settlement at Abuja, including by naming special envoys; and

(b) seeking accountability and an end to impunity by enforcing the Security Council's sanction regime and supporting human rights monitoring mechanisms and the work of the ICC.

An article in the Post reports today that Iranian President Ahmadinejad sent a letter to President Bush in order to propose "new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation in the world." It mentions the quote put forth by the Times that Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." Since this comment was reported on, it has been used as a reason why Iran should not have nuclear weapons. I've been somewhat skeptical about the translation, and as it turns out, there is some disagreement about what was actually said. This disagreement has pitted Christopher Hitchens against Juan Cole, the latter being the only one of the two who actually speaks Farsi. A good summary of the online fight can be found here.

The actual sentence in question seems to be this: "een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad." I don't speak Farsi, but several of my colleagues are Iranian, and I've sent them the text to see what they think about it. The only word I can recognize is qods which is Farsi for al Quds, which is Jerusalem in English. Cole's translation is "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time." As it turns out, the Israeli group Memri offers a translation that is very similar to Cole's ("eliminated from the pages of history").

As it turns out, after the comments, the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki denied the remarks:

Mottaki also denied during a press conference in Brussels that Tehran wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map."

"Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," he said. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime."

Another denial came on CNN's Late Edition from Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh:

SOLTANIEH: The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has announced, more than two years, and few cases, the Western media have reflected to public of the world, that if the divine religions -- followers of the divine religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims, in that area follow a referendum, democratic referendum, and are one (ph) with homeless Palestinians, Iranian government and Iranian people would respect their decision.

Therefore, these are fabricated news that they are threatening and using this as an excuse for the military aggression or the aggressive policy. [...]

BLITZER: I have to wrap this up, but I want to get your response to this issue of Israel because it's become such a prominent issue in this whole discussion over nuclear plans that Iran may or may not have. This is what the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on October 26 at that World Without Zionism conference.

He said, "Israel must be wiped off the map of the world, and god willing, with the force of god behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionists."

You understand why people in the West, especially here in the United States, are so concerned about your program, your nuclear program, given those kinds of direct threats against Israel, which happens to be a strong ally of the United States.

SOLTANIEH: I want to very briefly remind you that the policy of Islamic Republic of Iran and according to spirit and letter of our constitution is against any sort of school of thought or regime such as apartheid, Zionism, racism, and this is a matter of principle.

Therefore, what you are talking about as apartheid was disappeared and it could not be accepted by civilized world, this Zionism and aggression of racism is also condemned. [...]

BLITZER: Does your support for the removal of Zionism mean you want to see Israel destroyed?

SOLTANIEH: I have already explained to you and reflected to you the policy echoed by our supreme leader.

It means that if in that region, the divine religion followers of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, that all three are very respectful -- and we have Jews in Iran, which are peacefully living and they are represented in our parliament, they are fully respected -- if they come with the Palestinians, homeless Palestinians, to come and through following the democratic process will decide on a government and live in peace as they were living a thousand years of coexistence of these divine religions, Iran will support because we are looking for and we support peaceful settlement of the whole issue and peaceful coexistence of these divine religions in the Middle East. Let's hope for the peace.

BLITZER: But should there be a state of Israel?

SOLTANIEH: I think I've already answered to you. If Israel is a synonym and will give the indication of Zionism mentality, no.

But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or we they have to be massacred or so, this is fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so.

So it seems that the statements by Ahmadinejad, or at the very least official Iranian policy, is much more nuanced than the Western media would have us believe. Furthermore, it is important to remember that Ahmadinejad does not control Iranian foreign policy. In an interesting article in the New York Review about Iran and the bomb, Christopher de Bellaigue has this to say:

Iran's enmity toward Israel is more nuanced than Ahmadinejad's statements suggest. The President's declarations that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and that the Holocaust is a "myth," understandably aroused fears that Iran might be considering an attack on Israel. But Iran's senior civilian and military officials have insisted that Iran will strike Israel only if Israel strikes first. More significantly, the President and supreme leader have both reiterated Iran's longstanding demand for a referendum on the status of Israel that would involve all Palestinian refugees. This official position would not seem to be consistent with an ambition to destroy Israel by force, least of all by using nuclear arms, which would endanger the very Palestinians whom the Iranians claim to be protecting. Several senior Iranian officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who heads a powerful arbitration council in Tehran, have not disguised their irritation with the President's comments. But Ahmadinejad has benefited from the furor. By raising his prestige among hard-line Islamists around the world, the President has made it harder for his domestic opponents, who include Rafsanjani, to undermine him.

I will post the English translation later this week, once my Iranian colleagues have had the chance to get back to me.

I've had my fair share of visa problems in the last year or two. I've had Libya, Sudan and now Syria all do their best to stop me from visiting. I've given up on the first two for the time being, but I'm still holding out for Syria.

So I'm in Beirut for the time being. It's difficult to work on my Arabic here, because classes are prohibitively expensive, and almost everyone speaks English or French much better than I speak Arabic. It seems like a little bubble here in Beirut. A bubble filled with beautiful women, bars and short skirts.

A few hours away, Israel has taken out several bridges, destroyed electricity transformers in Gaza, and detained a third of Hamas' cabinet and an unknown number of lawmakers. The Israelis have flown over Syrian President Assad's summer house on the coast and spoken of attacking the leader of Hamas' military wing, who lives in Damascus. On all sides of Lebanon, the tension can be felt, but here, we?re going out and drinking, watching the world cup and sipping coffee.

Brazil beat Ghana the other night; there were fireworks and dancing in the streets.

In his op-ed, A Threat That Belongs Behind Bars, professor Eric Posner informs us that the indefinite detention of "dangerous aliens," regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime, should not be opposed on general principle. While it is true that there are precedents of such action in the alien and sedition acts and the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, it is both disappointing and disconcerting that such black spots on American history are being held up as a defense of unconscionable behavior not befit of a civilized democracy. In these times, when the United States is committing torture, unlawful detentions and violent war crimes in the name of the war on terror, what our nation needs are more, not fewer, appeals to general principle.

I've just arrived in Beirut after a hectic few days of getting everything prepared for this trip. I'll be in the Middle East until September and will be trying to blog from here as much as possible - hopefully more than usual.

I never managed to get my visa for Syria, so I'll probably try my luck at the border in the next few days. Some friends want me to come to Jordan, but you have to go through Syria to get to Jordan from Lebanon, so I might not be able to make it, which would be a shame, because it would be nice to stay with a family in Amman and then maybe go visit Petra as well.

There is a certain sense of home that I feel here in Beirut. I felt it the first time I came, and I'm feeling it again, now that I'm back. There was the same sign of Ronald McDonald saying "Welcome to Lebanon" at the airport and I was able to direct the cab driver directly to my friend's place, no small feat considering how bad my sense of direction is.

I lucked out at the airport, because there was some sort of a problem with the visa stand, so they just let everyone have their visa for free. It's only $17, but it's a nice feeling all the same.

I'm going to try to post pictures from time to time also, because I think this blog needs some spicing up...

Esquire magazing has an interesting piece on John Walker Lindh, the American guy who was fighting in the ranks of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance when the US invaded in 2001. Strangely, part of his sentence is that he's not allowed to speak Arabic in prison, which means he cannot pray out loud. Talking to a friend of mine last night about the article, he reacted to it by saying that if the sentence isn't cruel, it certainly is unusual.

The article is a little long and written with an odd tone of deference or piety that I'm not sure really works, but it is very interesting and worth a read nonetheless.

An editorial in le Monde today takes the US to task for Guantanamo Bay (in French, translation mine):

Upon the discovery of the suicide of three detainees, two Saudis and one Yemeni, the reaction of the commander of the camp in Guantanamo illustrates the gulf that separates American authorities from the rest of the world on the sinister issue of the prison in Guantanamo. The collective suicide is "an act of asymmetric war waged against us," declared Rear Admiral Harry Harris on 10 June. Colleen Graffy, in charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, qualified the detainees' gesture as a "good PR move to draw attention."

Without falling into otherworldliness faced with the essential fight against international terrorism, how can we make the United States listen to reason about this black stain on the democratic world that the prison in Guantanamo has become? Because, when Admiral Harris evokes an act of war against America, he is forgetting that American blindness towards the treatment of the detainees suspected of belonging to Al-Qaida, in Guantanamo or in the secret prisons run by the CIA, exposes all western democracies to Islamic propaganda and radicalization. It is to our suburbs and our Muslim communities in Europe that the recruiters of Al-Qaida and other fundamentalist proselytizers come to fill their ranks, with arguments graciously given to them by the military leaders of the Pentagon and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It hasn't been enough to say that Guantanamo Bay, opened in January 2002 and where 460 prisoners are still being held without trial, is legal nonsense; it hasn't been enough to say that it constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and human rights; it hasn't been enough to write that it is unworthy of a country universally admired for having established respect for the rule of law in its constitutional system; it hasn't been enough to show surprise that the Bush administration manifests, by its stubbornness, such disdain for its own Supreme Court, which told it in June 2004 to authorize the Guantanamo detainees to defend themselves before an American civil court, and for public opinion, which, after an initial indifference, has included a growing number of voices denouncing the conditions in the prison. Nor has it been enough to bring up relevant historical errors, from the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to Margaret Thatcher's vain stubbornness faced with IRA members on hunger strike in 1981.

The United States remains deaf to all these arguments. The least that European leaders can do from now on is to no longer hold high level meetings with Americans without demanding the closing of Guantanamo Bay. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has recently served as a good example. The French should follow suit.

In addition to Kuperman's piece, David Rieff has also penned a case against intervention in Darfur in the New Republic, which Reeves hotly and thoroughly counters.

He sees the issue through the lense of Iraq in 2003 instead of, say, Rwanda in 1994 or Iraq during the genocidal al Anfal campaign to Arabize Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1908s. Rieff casts doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and says that those who call for intervention in Darfur are ignoring the politics of Darfur (which he seems to be less than well-versed in himself, the truth be told):

Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.

One debilitating defect of the liberal interventionism is that it ignores the political implications of what it calls for. ...

...[A]n intervention, however good it may be for the Darfuris, may be terrible for the rest of the world.

Reeves criticizes Rieff for mistakenly attributing secessionist ambitions to the Darfuri rebels, not discussion the spread of the genocide into Chad, irresponsibly casting doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and generally being ignorant on Darfuri politics.

In fact, we must wonder what "agency" a nine-year-old girl has when she is brutally gang-raped by the Janjaweed, or what "agency" a five-year-old boy has as he is thrown screaming into a bonfire along with his brothers, or indeed what "agency" a one-year-old boy has when the Janjaweed slice off his penis and he bleeds to death. "Political interests" here is an abstraction that can have meaning for very few besides David Rieff. There are real political issues in Darfur, including competition over natural resources and power in governance, as well as competing visions of equitable distribution of land and wealth. Rieff captures none of this in his account.

If the Abuja accord does fail, if violence then inevitably rapidly escalates in Darfur and Chad, it will be too late for hundreds of thousands of lives. We have simply waited too long, with too many sufficiently encouraged by specious arguments of the sort so abundant in Rieff's account. In this sense it is perhaps useful to have Rieff articulate his factitious "realism," to invoke so glibly the difficult "politics" of Darfur, to pretend that Iraq has somehow changed the imperative of responding to massive genocidal destruction.

Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in her TMPCafe piece, Rethinking Darfur that after reading Kuperman and Rieff, she's having second thoughts. She doesn't go into any specifics, but the gist of her piece is that maybe we shouldn't intervene, because the situation is complicated:

I want to help the victims of the Janjaweed as much as anyone. But the Europeans have been arguing for some time that the situation is far more complicated than a simple morality tale would make it out to be. And surely if Iraq has taught us anything, it is to think very hard about what happens AFTER we go in and stop the initial killing. It may well be that even if an AU solution is slower and less effective up front, it will be more effective over the long term, whereas if the U.S. or NATO go in, we will find ourselves again "in charge" of a situation we barely understand and cannot control, ultimately visiting yet more chaos and death on the very people we seek to help.

To my mind, this is similar to seeing a woman getting raped and murdered on the street and hesitating to do anything about it because the situation is likely to be complicated. What will other people in the neighbourhood think if I intervene? What did that woman do to make those men decide to rape and murder her?

Of course the situation is complicated, as are most conflicts. We don't live in a world of black and white, and we never have. Just because the sitauation surrounding a genocide is complex does not mean that there is any less of a moral imperative to stop it. The politics of Darfur are complex, as were the politics of Rwanda in 1994. What is not complex is that genocide is being committed, and either one believes that genocide carries the weight of a moral imperative or it doesn't. Finally, Slaughter seems more interested in wringing her hands and hoping against all odds for the best. Rieff at least calls a spade a spade when he asks brings up the idea that even if intervention is better for Darfuris, maybe it would be bad for the rest of the world.

This is an interesting question that smacks of utilitarianism. But before answering it, we should ask ourselves two questions: First, given the number of dead incurred during World War II, should the international community have given up Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria and the Jews in those countries in order to avoid the tens of millions of deaths that were a result of direct military confrontation between Axis and Allied powers? And second, are we sure that there will not be more death and conflict as a result of allowing a genocide to happen?

The first question is of a moral nature and can be difficult in some instances, if not in this one. The second one is about history and its consequences. Would the Congo be such a hellhole if we had not let the Rwandan genocide come to pass? In the case of Darfur, it is important to look at what this genocide means for Chad, and by consequence, the Central African Republic and Cameroon. If Khartoum is emboldened and allowed to topple Deby's (distasteful) regime in Chad, the bloody and ongoing history of the Congo might repeat itself.

I would like to comment on Alan Kuperman's polemical piece in the New York Times yesterday (31 May), "Strategic Victimhood in Sudan." In this particular article, Kuperman tells us that the regime in Khartoum responded to Darfuri rebel insurgency with genocide, and that "[b]ecause of the Save Darfur movement ... the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure," which has in turn led the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) movement and Nur's part of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) to reject the recent peace treaty signed at Abuja.

Kuperman's analysis of events is not specific to his take on Sudanese politics; rather it is but further evidence of his larger hypothesis. Generally speaking, the crux of his argument can be found in the first sentence of an article he wrote on the Rwandan genocide, "Provoking genocide: A revised history of the Rwandan Patriotic Front": "In most cases of mass killing since World War II­­ -- unlike the Holocaust -- the victim group has triggered its own demise by violently challenging the authority of the state."

Although he emphasizes that his theory is "not intended to excuse of justify the genocide in any way, but merely to understand more fully its causes," Kuperman's argument seems to come dangerously close to blaming the victims. While he would surely protest that he is blaming rebel groups and not the victims of the genocide (a polemical claim in and of itself), this is not at all clear when he says, "the victim group has triggered its own demise." (To be fair, with the exception of the opening sentence, the article focuses mostly on the RPF, not Tutsis in general.)

But I'll save the more general moral debate about whether or not a genocidal regime's culpability can be shared with a rebel group that has purportedly "provoked" genocide for another time. What I would like to focus on here is the specifics of Darfur.

I don't pretend to be an expert on Sudanese or Darfuri politics, and I agree with Kuperman when he says that the situation in Darfur is complex. However, it seems strange that after stressing that the situation there is not the "simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations," he would himself make claims like these:

The region's blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago -- denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. ... [The rebels] took up arms not to stop genocide -- which erupted only after they rebelled -- but to gain tribal domination.

To paint the situation during the maja al-gatila (the famine that kills) in Darfur in 1984-5 as one in which "blacks ... were the oppressors" is terribly simplistic in more than one way. Without lingering on the complexities of ethnicity in Darfur and the difficulty in categorizing Darfuris as either "black" or "Arab," the facile claim that "blacks" were oppressing "Arabs" seems to overlook the fact that the nearly 100,000 deaths during the famine were largely due to apathy or incompetence on the part of Khartoum. According to Prunier,

Everyone knew that this catastrophe would have been perfectly preventable with a little bit of planning, money and, especially, political will. Everyone knew that the mass deaths [hécatombe] were the result of Khartoum's negligence. But the consequences happened to be unequally distributed [translation mine].

The drought and famine forced the nomads to prematurely go south in search of grazing areas, which just so happened to be the meager and not-yet-harvested fields of the farmers. Alex de Waal, who has studied the famine in depth, describes the delicate balance that was violently disturbed in 1985 as the "moral geography" of Darfur.

Kuperman's other claim, that the rebels "picked up arms ... to gain tribal dominance," also seems to be woefully ill-informed. According to Julie Flint and de Waal, the roots of JEM go back to 1993, when the original aim was to reform the National Islamic Front (NIF) from within. Dissidents like Nur compiled evidence illustrating the economic and political marginalization of Darfur into a document they called "The Black Book." JEM purports to combat Darfur's status as an outlying periphery dominated by the center of Sudanese economic and political life. Nur explains the situation in Darfur thusly:

There was too much suffering. I travelled 60 kilometers to go to primary school, in Kornoi, when I was 7; 350 kilometers to go to intermediate school, in Geneina; 400 kilometers to go to secondary school, in Fasher; and 1,000 kilometers to go to university, in Khartoum. It was forbidden to speak the Zaghawa language in school. In primary school, the teacher gave us a blue ticket to pass to any boy who spoke Zaghawa. At the end of the day, anyone who had the ticket was whipped. The whole of Kutun province, with a population of more than 551,000, had one general doctor and no specialists. Women walked more than eight hours daily to get less than 60 liters of water. We were excluded from all key posts and had no way of communicating with the international community to ask for help.

JEM's five-point manifesto calls for a national solution to the Sudan's problems. It calls for a unified country, justice and equality rather than political repression, "radical and comprehensive constitutional reform," basic services for all Sudanese and human development in all the regions of Sudan.

The SLM/A, on the other hand, has its roots in Darfuri irregular militias that were created in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s when conflict was already rife in the region. In 1999 already, over 100,000 Masalit had fled to Chad.

The fact of the matter is that the events leading up to the genocide in Darfur are many and varied, involving the famine, the political situation in Chad, Libyan involvement and sometimes de facto ruling of Darfur, Islamic movements (both domestic and imported from Tripoli or Cairo) and a politics of systematic neglect of the periphery by the center in Khartoum. To say that the rebels provoked genocide by vying for tribal domination is either disingenuous or uninformed.

This is not to say that the Darfuri rebel movements are saints; we know that they are not. But that's not the point. Whether the rebel movements have "provoked" Khartoum is neither here nor there in the long run. The rebels, despite their claims to represent all of Darfur, are not the ethnic groups as a whole, just as the RPF is not synonymous with the Tutsis in Rwanda.

De Waal sums up the situation quite succinctly in his piece in the London Review of Books, "Counter-insurgency on the cheap":

The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers' claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.

And this brings me to Kuperman's advice not to intervene: ...we should let Sudan's army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes." It's hard to believe that such a naïve statement could be penned by anyone who has read much about the regime in Khartoum. We're talking about "routine cruelty" and "genocide by force of habit." What Kuperman doesn't see is that the Sudanese regime is "handling" the rebels in the same way it dealt with the South and the Nuba Mountains.

To lay the blame for such acts at the feet of the rebels (rather than at the feet of the regime committing genocide), or even worse, the "victim group," is morally irresponsible. The Fur and Zaghawa and other "black" tribes in Darfur are no more responsible for the organized campaign to destroy them than the Armenians were for their forced march into the sands of Syria.

If Alan Kuperman is content to take Khartoum at its word and trust that it will "eschew" the "war crimes" that it denies committing in the first place, allowing the regime to "handle" the rebels and "defend its sovereignty" in the meantime, I, for one, am not.

Kuperman advises the United States to announce a policy of non-intervention. This is confusing to me, because after all, isn't that the policy that Samantha Powers describes so well in her book, "A Problem from Hell"? Isn't that the policy that has been silently announced throughout the twentieth century to Armenians, Rwandans, Iraqi Kurds, Cambodians and now the Sudanese?

Here are a few interesting links that I've come across in the last few days:

A story from ABC about Chinese Muslims wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo and then finally released after 4.5 years. They couldn't be sent to China since the government there persecutes Uighurs, and despite being found innocent of any charges (NLEC, or No Longer Enemy Combattant, in Guantanamo Bay terminology - Mr Kafka could not have made this up if he had tried), being put away by the Americans for 4.5 years is enough to garner a bad reputation. So apparently, no country would take them, the US included, with the single and solitary exception of Albania:

We are very pleased that the Albanian government and the Albanian people opened their hearts and welcomed us. Despite the fact that all the strong, powerful, democratic countries are able and capable of accepting us, they did not do that. We are having some problems ... there are no Uighurs in Albania, and we don't speak the Albanian language. ...

Were hoping that the United States government would recognize the mistake that it has done and accept, allow us to enter the United States. U.S. government captured us, U.S. government incarcerated us, locked us up in prison, and U.S. government said that we were not a threat and should be released.

Uighur-Americans came forward, made an offer to the United States government to accept us into Uighur-American society and community. They even went into the courts and contacted the lawyers and wrote a letter to the U.S. government officials asking them to consider releasing us into the United States. Unfortunately, it did not happen, a rather disappointing decision.

Otherwise, the Post ran a really interesting first person piece about Iraq, the Republic of Fear, which makes one fearful that Baghdad is slowly but surely turning into Beirut, circa 1980:

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis. ...

Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed neighborhoods are "purified." In Amriya, dead bodies are being found on the main street at a rate of three or five or seven a day. People are afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, for fear that they, too, will be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya and other once-diverse neighborhoods, Shiites are being forced to leave. In Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are being targeted.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

This made me remember reading a piece in Harper's that said that maybe the best thing for Iraq would be for the US to withdraw and let them have their full-fledged civil war. (It was by Edward Luttwak and was adapted from a piece in Foreign Policy, which can be found here) The version in Harper's ends like this:

...American forces continue to suffer casualties in combat against factions that should be confronting one another instead. Perhaps what the new Iraqi state needs in order to achieve stability is precisely a certain amount of civil war. Preventing it may impede a natural and perhaps very desirable political evolution. Americans would not today be happier if European Great Powers, horrified by the carnage of our own Civil War, had enforced an armistice between North and South that might endure still between two feeble states. ...

It's hard for me to know what to make of this idea. I'm not convinced that an all-out civil war would result in anything but a division of Iraq, or even worse, a regional war that would involve Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and probably Turkey as well. The latter is obviously a horrible idea, but I haven't decided how I feel about the former.

Finally, the atrocities in Haditha make me think that maybe Luttuk and Rosen are right and the US should just get out as soon as possible.

I can't get over this. I know that similar things happened in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and I know that we're talking about kids who have been put in an extremely dangerous and stressful situation, and that sometimes people just crack. But I just don't understand how someone can shoot a one-legged man in a wheelchair nine times. Or how someone can shoot a 1-year old baby. Say that again: a 1-year old baby. I just don't understand.

At some point on Nov. 19, Marines in an armored convoy arrived at Haditha's hospital. They placed the bodies of the victims in the garden of the hospital and left without explanation, said Mohammed al-Hadithi, one of the hospital officials who helped carry the bodies inside. By some accounts, some of the corpses were burnt.

The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs' Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. "Democracy assassinated the family that was here," graffiti on one of the houses declared.

I just came across a piece by the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times entitled, If Iraq was wrong, is Darfur right?

The New Republic has recently come out with an issue on Darfur (only some of which is available to non-subscribers), and they come out as a whole for American intervention in Darfur. Kaplan's piece, however, brings up the question of Iraq and asks why it is all right to intervene in Darfur but not in Iraq:

As their criticism of the particulars of the Iraq war has hardened into a broader indictment of U.S. foreign policy, the mostly progressive voices calling for action in Darfur have become caught in a bind of their own devising. Even as they demand intervention in Sudan, they excoriate Washington for employing U.S. military power without due respect to the opinion of the international community and against nations that pose no imminent threat to our own -- which is to say, precisely the terms under which U.S. power would have to be employed in the name of saving Darfur.

He then goes on to argue that neither the African Union nor the UN will intervene or is capable of intervening, leaving the US as the only capable, if not willing, power equipped to intervene.

To my mind, the main reason why I am for intervention in Darfur but was against it in Iraq can be summed up in a single word: genocide. It's happening in Darfur but wasn't happening in Iraq. Now had the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s been continuing, I would have been for intervention in Iraq. This is not to say that genocide should be the threshold for international intervention, but it would at least be a good start. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) responds similarly to Kaplan's jab against him:

Once President Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word "genocide" to describe the carnage in Darfur, the United States and every other civilized nation had a moral imperative to act. Those who find it painful to explain the deception and misinformation preceding our invasion of Iraq should not hide behind the victims in Darfur.

As for whether or not the AU or UN could or would stop the genocide, the AU is already there but lacks a proper and muscular mandate that would allow their forces to protect civilians. As it is, they can only protect themselves. Likewise, when and if a UN force intervenes, it would be important for them to have a good mandate and be properly funded, because we know what happens to underfunded blue helmets without a real mandate. As it stands, there are 7,000 AU troops already in Darfur, which could be folded into a UN force; France has at least 1,000 troops in Chad already; and if the UK could be convinced to provide the 5,000 troops that they offered in 2004, then that would make a force of 13,000. Other nations like South Africa and Ghana could also donate more troops, and the US could help shoulder the financial and logistics costs of such an intervention.

While writing this, I've come across an interesting (and much more detailed) plan by the International Crisis Group To Save Darfur, which is similar to my idea:

Crisis Group has long contended that because AMIS has reached the outer limits of its competence, and a UN mission authorised today would not be fully ready to take over from it for some six months, a distinct and separate multinational force should be sent to Darfur to bridge that gap and help stabilise the immediate situation. We have argued, and continue to believe, that NATO would be best from a practical military point of view. Unfortunately, political opposition to this in Khartoum, within the AU and even perhaps within the Atlantic Alliance itself, means it is not achievable at this time.

What we now propose, therefore, is a compromise driven by the urgent need for a more robust force in Darfur. A militarily capable UN member state -- France seems most promising since it already has troops and aircraft in the area -- should offer to the Security Council to go now to Darfur, wearing blue helmets, as the lead nation in the first phase of the incoming UN mission. It could be joined from the outset by forces from one or two other militarily capable UN members (and would probably need to be if the desirable target of around 5,000 personnel for this force is to be achieved). This stabilisation force would be a self-contained, separately commanded UN mission with identified functional or geographic divisions of responsibility that would work beside AMIS and through a liaison unit at its headquarters until arrangements were in place for a 1 October transition to the full UN mission. That full mission would need to be recruited from the best AMIS elements as well as a wider circle of Asian and other member states -- no easy task at a time when several large UN peacekeeping missions in Africa and elsewhere have exhausted the capabilities of many contribution candidates.

The U.S. and other NATO states should respond generously and quickly to requests from it or AMIS to provide logistical help as well as regular access to satellite imagery, air mobility and close air support, especially to deter or react to egregious movements of men or heavy weapons in the border area.

They finish by coming up with a list of recommendations for each of the major parties involved (with the exception of the belligerent parties):

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the African Union:

1. Request the immediate deployment of a UN-mandated stabilisation force to help bolster the AMIS troops and focus on the Chad-Sudan border and the Tawila-Graida corridor.

2. Seek quick negotiation of a single, enhanced ceasefire document to remove the ambiguities of the existing overlapping agreements.

3. Begin immediately to map the location of forces in Darfur so as to manage and enforce the ceasefire better.

4. Begin immediately identifying, defining and profiling the government-allied militias.

5. Improve the reporting mechanisms and procedures for monitoring ceasefire violations and urgently revive and upgrade the compliance and sanctions mechanisms of the ceasefire.

6. Negotiate a series of humanitarian ground rules, in collaboration with the UN, to help hold the parties accountable for the protection of humanitarian operations in their respective areas.

To the United Nations Security Council:

7. Authorise a two-phase intervention in Darfur under Chapter Seven of the Charter, with the following elements:

(a) for the first phase, to be accomplished within a month, a lead nation would serve as the advance element of the full UN mission by sending the bulk of an initial 5,000 troops to Darfur, with three main stabilisation tasks:

i. interdiction of military activities across the Chad-Darfur border;

ii. protection of civilians in Darfur, primarily in the Tawilla-Graida corridor; and

iii. rapid-reaction support of AMIS forces until the transition to a full-fledged UN peace support operation in October 2006.

(b) for the second phase, immediate planning for a peace support operation of some 15,000 troops -- none of whom should be diverted from the mission of the existing UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) -- with a mandate emphasising civilian protection, ceasefire enforcement and monitoring of the Chad-Sudan border, to take over from AMIS as of 1 October 2006.

8. Strengthen the existing sanctions regime by implementing the recommendations in the 30 January 2006 report of the Panel of Experts.

9. Authorise the Secretariat's peacekeeping department (DPKO) to begin planning on an urgent basis and together with the AU both phases of this operation, with priority tasks to include:

(a) identifying areas for early cooperation in Darfur, such as immediate deployment of UN experts to help support the establishment of a functioning ceasefire commission secretariat and the deployment of human rights monitors and translators, including women, to help improve the reporting capacity of AMIS; and

(b) identifying the lead nation to deploy in the initial phase to support AMIS by performing the tasks set out in recommendation 7(a) above and serve as the advance element of the full UN mission.

To Donor Governments:

10. Convene an early pledging conference to ensure that AMIS is fully funded until the UN mission can take over in October 2006.

To the U.S., the EU and its member states and others with a strong interest in regional peace and stability:

11. Undertake major diplomatic efforts to:

(a) persuade Sudan to accept and the AU to confirm transition of AMIS into a strong UN peacekeeping mission as of 1 October 2006 and request in the interim dispatch of an advance force of some 5,000 blue-helmets to assist AMIS by performing essential stabilisation tasks;

(b) persuade the Security Council to authorise a mission of some 15,000, including the strongest AMIS elements and with a strong Chapter VII mandate focused on civilian protection; and

(c) identify the lead nation to contribute the bulk of the advance element to assist AMIS and perform essential stabilisation tasks immediately upon Security Council authorisation, and be prepared to help with all necessary material and logistical support.

12. Concurrently with efforts to strengthen international forces on the ground, pursue the other elements of a coordinated three-part strategy to resolve the Darfur conflict by:

(a) reinforcing AU efforts to negotiate an enhanced ceasefire and a political settlement at Abuja, including by naming special envoys; and

(b) seeking accountability and an end to impunity by enforcing the Security Council's sanction regime and supporting human rights monitoring mechanisms and the work of the ICC.

An article in the Post reports today that Iranian President Ahmadinejad sent a letter to President Bush in order to propose "new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation in the world." It mentions the quote put forth by the Times that Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." Since this comment was reported on, it has been used as a reason why Iran should not have nuclear weapons. I've been somewhat skeptical about the translation, and as it turns out, there is some disagreement about what was actually said. This disagreement has pitted Christopher Hitchens against Juan Cole, the latter being the only one of the two who actually speaks Farsi. A good summary of the online fight can be found here.

The actual sentence in question seems to be this: "een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad." I don't speak Farsi, but several of my colleagues are Iranian, and I've sent them the text to see what they think about it. The only word I can recognize is qods which is Farsi for al Quds, which is Jerusalem in English. Cole's translation is "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time." As it turns out, the Israeli group Memri offers a translation that is very similar to Cole's ("eliminated from the pages of history").

As it turns out, after the comments, the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki denied the remarks:

Mottaki also denied during a press conference in Brussels that Tehran wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map."

"Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," he said. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime."

Another denial came on CNN's Late Edition from Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh:

SOLTANIEH: The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has announced, more than two years, and few cases, the Western media have reflected to public of the world, that if the divine religions -- followers of the divine religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims, in that area follow a referendum, democratic referendum, and are one (ph) with homeless Palestinians, Iranian government and Iranian people would respect their decision.

Therefore, these are fabricated news that they are threatening and using this as an excuse for the military aggression or the aggressive policy. [...]

BLITZER: I have to wrap this up, but I want to get your response to this issue of Israel because it's become such a prominent issue in this whole discussion over nuclear plans that Iran may or may not have. This is what the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on October 26 at that World Without Zionism conference.

He said, "Israel must be wiped off the map of the world, and god willing, with the force of god behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionists."

You understand why people in the West, especially here in the United States, are so concerned about your program, your nuclear program, given those kinds of direct threats against Israel, which happens to be a strong ally of the United States.

SOLTANIEH: I want to very briefly remind you that the policy of Islamic Republic of Iran and according to spirit and letter of our constitution is against any sort of school of thought or regime such as apartheid, Zionism, racism, and this is a matter of principle.

Therefore, what you are talking about as apartheid was disappeared and it could not be accepted by civilized world, this Zionism and aggression of racism is also condemned. [...]

BLITZER: Does your support for the removal of Zionism mean you want to see Israel destroyed?

SOLTANIEH: I have already explained to you and reflected to you the policy echoed by our supreme leader.

It means that if in that region, the divine religion followers of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, that all three are very respectful -- and we have Jews in Iran, which are peacefully living and they are represented in our parliament, they are fully respected -- if they come with the Palestinians, homeless Palestinians, to come and through following the democratic process will decide on a government and live in peace as they were living a thousand years of coexistence of these divine religions, Iran will support because we are looking for and we support peaceful settlement of the whole issue and peaceful coexistence of these divine religions in the Middle East. Let's hope for the peace.

BLITZER: But should there be a state of Israel?

SOLTANIEH: I think I've already answered to you. If Israel is a synonym and will give the indication of Zionism mentality, no.

But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or we they have to be massacred or so, this is fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so.

So it seems that the statements by Ahmadinejad, or at the very least official Iranian policy, is much more nuanced than the Western media would have us believe. Furthermore, it is important to remember that Ahmadinejad does not control Iranian foreign policy. In an interesting article in the New York Review about Iran and the bomb, Christopher de Bellaigue has this to say:

Iran's enmity toward Israel is more nuanced than Ahmadinejad's statements suggest. The President's declarations that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and that the Holocaust is a "myth," understandably aroused fears that Iran might be considering an attack on Israel. But Iran's senior civilian and military officials have insisted that Iran will strike Israel only if Israel strikes first. More significantly, the President and supreme leader have both reiterated Iran's longstanding demand for a referendum on the status of Israel that would involve all Palestinian refugees. This official position would not seem to be consistent with an ambition to destroy Israel by force, least of all by using nuclear arms, which would endanger the very Palestinians whom the Iranians claim to be protecting. Several senior Iranian officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who heads a powerful arbitration council in Tehran, have not disguised their irritation with the President's comments. But Ahmadinejad has benefited from the furor. By raising his prestige among hard-line Islamists around the world, the President has made it harder for his domestic opponents, who include Rafsanjani, to undermine him.

I will post the English translation later this week, once my Iranian colleagues have had the chance to get back to me.

I've had my fair share of visa problems in the last year or two. I've had Libya, Sudan and now Syria all do their best to stop me from visiting. I've given up on the first two for the time being, but I'm still holding out for Syria.

So I'm in Beirut for the time being. It's difficult to work on my Arabic here, because classes are prohibitively expensive, and almost everyone speaks English or French much better than I speak Arabic. It seems like a little bubble here in Beirut. A bubble filled with beautiful women, bars and short skirts.

A few hours away, Israel has taken out several bridges, destroyed electricity transformers in Gaza, and detained a third of Hamas' cabinet and an unknown number of lawmakers. The Israelis have flown over Syrian President Assad's summer house on the coast and spoken of attacking the leader of Hamas' military wing, who lives in Damascus. On all sides of Lebanon, the tension can be felt, but here, we?re going out and drinking, watching the world cup and sipping coffee.

Brazil beat Ghana the other night; there were fireworks and dancing in the streets.

In his op-ed, A Threat That Belongs Behind Bars, professor Eric Posner informs us that the indefinite detention of "dangerous aliens," regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime, should not be opposed on general principle. While it is true that there are precedents of such action in the alien and sedition acts and the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, it is both disappointing and disconcerting that such black spots on American history are being held up as a defense of unconscionable behavior not befit of a civilized democracy. In these times, when the United States is committing torture, unlawful detentions and violent war crimes in the name of the war on terror, what our nation needs are more, not fewer, appeals to general principle.

I've just arrived in Beirut after a hectic few days of getting everything prepared for this trip. I'll be in the Middle East until September and will be trying to blog from here as much as possible - hopefully more than usual.

I never managed to get my visa for Syria, so I'll probably try my luck at the border in the next few days. Some friends want me to come to Jordan, but you have to go through Syria to get to Jordan from Lebanon, so I might not be able to make it, which would be a shame, because it would be nice to stay with a family in Amman and then maybe go visit Petra as well.

There is a certain sense of home that I feel here in Beirut. I felt it the first time I came, and I'm feeling it again, now that I'm back. There was the same sign of Ronald McDonald saying "Welcome to Lebanon" at the airport and I was able to direct the cab driver directly to my friend's place, no small feat considering how bad my sense of direction is.

I lucked out at the airport, because there was some sort of a problem with the visa stand, so they just let everyone have their visa for free. It's only $17, but it's a nice feeling all the same.

I'm going to try to post pictures from time to time also, because I think this blog needs some spicing up...

Esquire magazing has an interesting piece on John Walker Lindh, the American guy who was fighting in the ranks of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance when the US invaded in 2001. Strangely, part of his sentence is that he's not allowed to speak Arabic in prison, which means he cannot pray out loud. Talking to a friend of mine last night about the article, he reacted to it by saying that if the sentence isn't cruel, it certainly is unusual.

The article is a little long and written with an odd tone of deference or piety that I'm not sure really works, but it is very interesting and worth a read nonetheless.

An editorial in le Monde today takes the US to task for Guantanamo Bay (in French, translation mine):

Upon the discovery of the suicide of three detainees, two Saudis and one Yemeni, the reaction of the commander of the camp in Guantanamo illustrates the gulf that separates American authorities from the rest of the world on the sinister issue of the prison in Guantanamo. The collective suicide is "an act of asymmetric war waged against us," declared Rear Admiral Harry Harris on 10 June. Colleen Graffy, in charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, qualified the detainees' gesture as a "good PR move to draw attention."

Without falling into otherworldliness faced with the essential fight against international terrorism, how can we make the United States listen to reason about this black stain on the democratic world that the prison in Guantanamo has become? Because, when Admiral Harris evokes an act of war against America, he is forgetting that American blindness towards the treatment of the detainees suspected of belonging to Al-Qaida, in Guantanamo or in the secret prisons run by the CIA, exposes all western democracies to Islamic propaganda and radicalization. It is to our suburbs and our Muslim communities in Europe that the recruiters of Al-Qaida and other fundamentalist proselytizers come to fill their ranks, with arguments graciously given to them by the military leaders of the Pentagon and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It hasn't been enough to say that Guantanamo Bay, opened in January 2002 and where 460 prisoners are still being held without trial, is legal nonsense; it hasn't been enough to say that it constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and human rights; it hasn't been enough to write that it is unworthy of a country universally admired for having established respect for the rule of law in its constitutional system; it hasn't been enough to show surprise that the Bush administration manifests, by its stubbornness, such disdain for its own Supreme Court, which told it in June 2004 to authorize the Guantanamo detainees to defend themselves before an American civil court, and for public opinion, which, after an initial indifference, has included a growing number of voices denouncing the conditions in the prison. Nor has it been enough to bring up relevant historical errors, from the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to Margaret Thatcher's vain stubbornness faced with IRA members on hunger strike in 1981.

The United States remains deaf to all these arguments. The least that European leaders can do from now on is to no longer hold high level meetings with Americans without demanding the closing of Guantanamo Bay. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has recently served as a good example. The French should follow suit.

In addition to Kuperman's piece, David Rieff has also penned a case against intervention in Darfur in the New Republic, which Reeves hotly and thoroughly counters.

He sees the issue through the lense of Iraq in 2003 instead of, say, Rwanda in 1994 or Iraq during the genocidal al Anfal campaign to Arabize Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1908s. Rieff casts doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and says that those who call for intervention in Darfur are ignoring the politics of Darfur (which he seems to be less than well-versed in himself, the truth be told):

Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.

One debilitating defect of the liberal interventionism is that it ignores the political implications of what it calls for. ...

...[A]n intervention, however good it may be for the Darfuris, may be terrible for the rest of the world.

Reeves criticizes Rieff for mistakenly attributing secessionist ambitions to the Darfuri rebels, not discussion the spread of the genocide into Chad, irresponsibly casting doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and generally being ignorant on Darfuri politics.

In fact, we must wonder what "agency" a nine-year-old girl has when she is brutally gang-raped by the Janjaweed, or what "agency" a five-year-old boy has as he is thrown screaming into a bonfire along with his brothers, or indeed what "agency" a one-year-old boy has when the Janjaweed slice off his penis and he bleeds to death. "Political interests" here is an abstraction that can have meaning for very few besides David Rieff. There are real political issues in Darfur, including competition over natural resources and power in governance, as well as competing visions of equitable distribution of land and wealth. Rieff captures none of this in his account.

If the Abuja accord does fail, if violence then inevitably rapidly escalates in Darfur and Chad, it will be too late for hundreds of thousands of lives. We have simply waited too long, with too many sufficiently encouraged by specious arguments of the sort so abundant in Rieff's account. In this sense it is perhaps useful to have Rieff articulate his factitious "realism," to invoke so glibly the difficult "politics" of Darfur, to pretend that Iraq has somehow changed the imperative of responding to massive genocidal destruction.

Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in her TMPCafe piece, Rethinking Darfur that after reading Kuperman and Rieff, she's having second thoughts. She doesn't go into any specifics, but the gist of her piece is that maybe we shouldn't intervene, because the situation is complicated:

I want to help the victims of the Janjaweed as much as anyone. But the Europeans have been arguing for some time that the situation is far more complicated than a simple morality tale would make it out to be. And surely if Iraq has taught us anything, it is to think very hard about what happens AFTER we go in and stop the initial killing. It may well be that even if an AU solution is slower and less effective up front, it will be more effective over the long term, whereas if the U.S. or NATO go in, we will find ourselves again "in charge" of a situation we barely understand and cannot control, ultimately visiting yet more chaos and death on the very people we seek to help.

To my mind, this is similar to seeing a woman getting raped and murdered on the street and hesitating to do anything about it because the situation is likely to be complicated. What will other people in the neighbourhood think if I intervene? What did that woman do to make those men decide to rape and murder her?

Of course the situation is complicated, as are most conflicts. We don't live in a world of black and white, and we never have. Just because the sitauation surrounding a genocide is complex does not mean that there is any less of a moral imperative to stop it. The politics of Darfur are complex, as were the politics of Rwanda in 1994. What is not complex is that genocide is being committed, and either one believes that genocide carries the weight of a moral imperative or it doesn't. Finally, Slaughter seems more interested in wringing her hands and hoping against all odds for the best. Rieff at least calls a spade a spade when he asks brings up the idea that even if intervention is better for Darfuris, maybe it would be bad for the rest of the world.

This is an interesting question that smacks of utilitarianism. But before answering it, we should ask ourselves two questions: First, given the number of dead incurred during World War II, should the international community have given up Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria and the Jews in those countries in order to avoid the tens of millions of deaths that were a result of direct military confrontation between Axis and Allied powers? And second, are we sure that there will not be more death and conflict as a result of allowing a genocide to happen?

The first question is of a moral nature and can be difficult in some instances, if not in this one. The second one is about history and its consequences. Would the Congo be such a hellhole if we had not let the Rwandan genocide come to pass? In the case of Darfur, it is important to look at what this genocide means for Chad, and by consequence, the Central African Republic and Cameroon. If Khartoum is emboldened and allowed to topple Deby's (distasteful) regime in Chad, the bloody and ongoing history of the Congo might repeat itself.

I would like to comment on Alan Kuperman's polemical piece in the New York Times yesterday (31 May), "Strategic Victimhood in Sudan." In this particular article, Kuperman tells us that the regime in Khartoum responded to Darfuri rebel insurgency with genocide, and that "[b]ecause of the Save Darfur movement ... the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure," which has in turn led the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) movement and Nur's part of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) to reject the recent peace treaty signed at Abuja.

Kuperman's analysis of events is not specific to his take on Sudanese politics; rather it is but further evidence of his larger hypothesis. Generally speaking, the crux of his argument can be found in the first sentence of an article he wrote on the Rwandan genocide, "Provoking genocide: A revised history of the Rwandan Patriotic Front": "In most cases of mass killing since World War II­­ -- unlike the Holocaust -- the victim group has triggered its own demise by violently challenging the authority of the state."

Although he emphasizes that his theory is "not intended to excuse of justify the genocide in any way, but merely to understand more fully its causes," Kuperman's argument seems to come dangerously close to blaming the victims. While he would surely protest that he is blaming rebel groups and not the victims of the genocide (a polemical claim in and of itself), this is not at all clear when he says, "the victim group has triggered its own demise." (To be fair, with the exception of the opening sentence, the article focuses mostly on the RPF, not Tutsis in general.)

But I'll save the more general moral debate about whether or not a genocidal regime's culpability can be shared with a rebel group that has purportedly "provoked" genocide for another time. What I would like to focus on here is the specifics of Darfur.

I don't pretend to be an expert on Sudanese or Darfuri politics, and I agree with Kuperman when he says that the situation in Darfur is complex. However, it seems strange that after stressing that the situation there is not the "simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations," he would himself make claims like these:

The region's blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago -- denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. ... [The rebels] took up arms not to stop genocide -- which erupted only after they rebelled -- but to gain tribal domination.

To paint the situation during the maja al-gatila (the famine that kills) in Darfur in 1984-5 as one in which "blacks ... were the oppressors" is terribly simplistic in more than one way. Without lingering on the complexities of ethnicity in Darfur and the difficulty in categorizing Darfuris as either "black" or "Arab," the facile claim that "blacks" were oppressing "Arabs" seems to overlook the fact that the nearly 100,000 deaths during the famine were largely due to apathy or incompetence on the part of Khartoum. According to Prunier,

Everyone knew that this catastrophe would have been perfectly preventable with a little bit of planning, money and, especially, political will. Everyone knew that the mass deaths [hécatombe] were the result of Khartoum's negligence. But the consequences happened to be unequally distributed [translation mine].

The drought and famine forced the nomads to prematurely go south in search of grazing areas, which just so happened to be the meager and not-yet-harvested fields of the farmers. Alex de Waal, who has studied the famine in depth, describes the delicate balance that was violently disturbed in 1985 as the "moral geography" of Darfur.

Kuperman's other claim, that the rebels "picked up arms ... to gain tribal dominance," also seems to be woefully ill-informed. According to Julie Flint and de Waal, the roots of JEM go back to 1993, when the original aim was to reform the National Islamic Front (NIF) from within. Dissidents like Nur compiled evidence illustrating the economic and political marginalization of Darfur into a document they called "The Black Book." JEM purports to combat Darfur's status as an outlying periphery dominated by the center of Sudanese economic and political life. Nur explains the situation in Darfur thusly:

There was too much suffering. I travelled 60 kilometers to go to primary school, in Kornoi, when I was 7; 350 kilometers to go to intermediate school, in Geneina; 400 kilometers to go to secondary school, in Fasher; and 1,000 kilometers to go to university, in Khartoum. It was forbidden to speak the Zaghawa language in school. In primary school, the teacher gave us a blue ticket to pass to any boy who spoke Zaghawa. At the end of the day, anyone who had the ticket was whipped. The whole of Kutun province, with a population of more than 551,000, had one general doctor and no specialists. Women walked more than eight hours daily to get less than 60 liters of water. We were excluded from all key posts and had no way of communicating with the international community to ask for help.

JEM's five-point manifesto calls for a national solution to the Sudan's problems. It calls for a unified country, justice and equality rather than political repression, "radical and comprehensive constitutional reform," basic services for all Sudanese and human development in all the regions of Sudan.

The SLM/A, on the other hand, has its roots in Darfuri irregular militias that were created in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s when conflict was already rife in the region. In 1999 already, over 100,000 Masalit had fled to Chad.

The fact of the matter is that the events leading up to the genocide in Darfur are many and varied, involving the famine, the political situation in Chad, Libyan involvement and sometimes de facto ruling of Darfur, Islamic movements (both domestic and imported from Tripoli or Cairo) and a politics of systematic neglect of the periphery by the center in Khartoum. To say that the rebels provoked genocide by vying for tribal domination is either disingenuous or uninformed.

This is not to say that the Darfuri rebel movements are saints; we know that they are not. But that's not the point. Whether the rebel movements have "provoked" Khartoum is neither here nor there in the long run. The rebels, despite their claims to represent all of Darfur, are not the ethnic groups as a whole, just as the RPF is not synonymous with the Tutsis in Rwanda.

De Waal sums up the situation quite succinctly in his piece in the London Review of Books, "Counter-insurgency on the cheap":

The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers' claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.

And this brings me to Kuperman's advice not to intervene: ...we should let Sudan's army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes." It's hard to believe that such a naïve statement could be penned by anyone who has read much about the regime in Khartoum. We're talking about "routine cruelty" and "genocide by force of habit." What Kuperman doesn't see is that the Sudanese regime is "handling" the rebels in the same way it dealt with the South and the Nuba Mountains.

To lay the blame for such acts at the feet of the rebels (rather than at the feet of the regime committing genocide), or even worse, the "victim group," is morally irresponsible. The Fur and Zaghawa and other "black" tribes in Darfur are no more responsible for the organized campaign to destroy them than the Armenians were for their forced march into the sands of Syria.

If Alan Kuperman is content to take Khartoum at its word and trust that it will "eschew" the "war crimes" that it denies committing in the first place, allowing the regime to "handle" the rebels and "defend its sovereignty" in the meantime, I, for one, am not.

Kuperman advises the United States to announce a policy of non-intervention. This is confusing to me, because after all, isn't that the policy that Samantha Powers describes so well in her book, "A Problem from Hell"? Isn't that the policy that has been silently announced throughout the twentieth century to Armenians, Rwandans, Iraqi Kurds, Cambodians and now the Sudanese?

Here are a few interesting links that I've come across in the last few days:

A story from ABC about Chinese Muslims wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo and then finally released after 4.5 years. They couldn't be sent to China since the government there persecutes Uighurs, and despite being found innocent of any charges (NLEC, or No Longer Enemy Combattant, in Guantanamo Bay terminology - Mr Kafka could not have made this up if he had tried), being put away by the Americans for 4.5 years is enough to garner a bad reputation. So apparently, no country would take them, the US included, with the single and solitary exception of Albania:

We are very pleased that the Albanian government and the Albanian people opened their hearts and welcomed us. Despite the fact that all the strong, powerful, democratic countries are able and capable of accepting us, they did not do that. We are having some problems ... there are no Uighurs in Albania, and we don't speak the Albanian language. ...

Were hoping that the United States government would recognize the mistake that it has done and accept, allow us to enter the United States. U.S. government captured us, U.S. government incarcerated us, locked us up in prison, and U.S. government said that we were not a threat and should be released.

Uighur-Americans came forward, made an offer to the United States government to accept us into Uighur-American society and community. They even went into the courts and contacted the lawyers and wrote a letter to the U.S. government officials asking them to consider releasing us into the United States. Unfortunately, it did not happen, a rather disappointing decision.

Otherwise, the Post ran a really interesting first person piece about Iraq, the Republic of Fear, which makes one fearful that Baghdad is slowly but surely turning into Beirut, circa 1980:

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis. ...

Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed neighborhoods are "purified." In Amriya, dead bodies are being found on the main street at a rate of three or five or seven a day. People are afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, for fear that they, too, will be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya and other once-diverse neighborhoods, Shiites are being forced to leave. In Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are being targeted.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

This made me remember reading a piece in Harper's that said that maybe the best thing for Iraq would be for the US to withdraw and let them have their full-fledged civil war. (It was by Edward Luttwak and was adapted from a piece in Foreign Policy, which can be found here) The version in Harper's ends like this:

...American forces continue to suffer casualties in combat against factions that should be confronting one another instead. Perhaps what the new Iraqi state needs in order to achieve stability is precisely a certain amount of civil war. Preventing it may impede a natural and perhaps very desirable political evolution. Americans would not today be happier if European Great Powers, horrified by the carnage of our own Civil War, had enforced an armistice between North and South that might endure still between two feeble states. ...

It's hard for me to know what to make of this idea. I'm not convinced that an all-out civil war would result in anything but a division of Iraq, or even worse, a regional war that would involve Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and probably Turkey as well. The latter is obviously a horrible idea, but I haven't decided how I feel about the former.

Finally, the atrocities in Haditha make me think that maybe Luttuk and Rosen are right and the US should just get out as soon as possible.

I can't get over this. I know that similar things happened in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and I know that we're talking about kids who have been put in an extremely dangerous and stressful situation, and that sometimes people just crack. But I just don't understand how someone can shoot a one-legged man in a wheelchair nine times. Or how someone can shoot a 1-year old baby. Say that again: a 1-year old baby. I just don't understand.

At some point on Nov. 19, Marines in an armored convoy arrived at Haditha's hospital. They placed the bodies of the victims in the garden of the hospital and left without explanation, said Mohammed al-Hadithi, one of the hospital officials who helped carry the bodies inside. By some accounts, some of the corpses were burnt.

The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs' Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. "Democracy assassinated the family that was here," graffiti on one of the houses declared.

I just came across a piece by the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times entitled, If Iraq was wrong, is Darfur right?

The New Republic has recently come out with an issue on Darfur (only some of which is available to non-subscribers), and they come out as a whole for American intervention in Darfur. Kaplan's piece, however, brings up the question of Iraq and asks why it is all right to intervene in Darfur but not in Iraq:

As their criticism of the particulars of the Iraq war has hardened into a broader indictment of U.S. foreign policy, the mostly progressive voices calling for action in Darfur have become caught in a bind of their own devising. Even as they demand intervention in Sudan, they excoriate Washington for employing U.S. military power without due respect to the opinion of the international community and against nations that pose no imminent threat to our own -- which is to say, precisely the terms under which U.S. power would have to be employed in the name of saving Darfur.

He then goes on to argue that neither the African Union nor the UN will intervene or is capable of intervening, leaving the US as the only capable, if not willing, power equipped to intervene.

To my mind, the main reason why I am for intervention in Darfur but was against it in Iraq can be summed up in a single word: genocide. It's happening in Darfur but wasn't happening in Iraq. Now had the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s been continuing, I would have been for intervention in Iraq. This is not to say that genocide should be the threshold for international intervention, but it would at least be a good start. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) responds similarly to Kaplan's jab against him:

Once President Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word "genocide" to describe the carnage in Darfur, the United States and every other civilized nation had a moral imperative to act. Those who find it painful to explain the deception and misinformation preceding our invasion of Iraq should not hide behind the victims in Darfur.

As for whether or not the AU or UN could or would stop the genocide, the AU is already there but lacks a proper and muscular mandate that would allow their forces to protect civilians. As it is, they can only protect themselves. Likewise, when and if a UN force intervenes, it would be important for them to have a good mandate and be properly funded, because we know what happens to underfunded blue helmets without a real mandate. As it stands, there are 7,000 AU troops already in Darfur, which could be folded into a UN force; France has at least 1,000 troops in Chad already; and if the UK could be convinced to provide the 5,000 troops that they offered in 2004, then that would make a force of 13,000. Other nations like South Africa and Ghana could also donate more troops, and the US could help shoulder the financial and logistics costs of such an intervention.

While writing this, I've come across an interesting (and much more detailed) plan by the International Crisis Group To Save Darfur, which is similar to my idea:

Crisis Group has long contended that because AMIS has reached the outer limits of its competence, and a UN mission authorised today would not be fully ready to take over from it for some six months, a distinct and separate multinational force should be sent to Darfur to bridge that gap and help stabilise the immediate situation. We have argued, and continue to believe, that NATO would be best from a practical military point of view. Unfortunately, political opposition to this in Khartoum, within the AU and even perhaps within the Atlantic Alliance itself, means it is not achievable at this time.

What we now propose, therefore, is a compromise driven by the urgent need for a more robust force in Darfur. A militarily capable UN member state -- France seems most promising since it already has troops and aircraft in the area -- should offer to the Security Council to go now to Darfur, wearing blue helmets, as the lead nation in the first phase of the incoming UN mission. It could be joined from the outset by forces from one or two other militarily capable UN members (and would probably need to be if the desirable target of around 5,000 personnel for this force is to be achieved). This stabilisation force would be a self-contained, separately commanded UN mission with identified functional or geographic divisions of responsibility that would work beside AMIS and through a liaison unit at its headquarters until arrangements were in place for a 1 October transition to the full UN mission. That full mission would need to be recruited from the best AMIS elements as well as a wider circle of Asian and other member states -- no easy task at a time when several large UN peacekeeping missions in Africa and elsewhere have exhausted the capabilities of many contribution candidates.

The U.S. and other NATO states should respond generously and quickly to requests from it or AMIS to provide logistical help as well as regular access to satellite imagery, air mobility and close air support, especially to deter or react to egregious movements of men or heavy weapons in the border area.

They finish by coming up with a list of recommendations for each of the major parties involved (with the exception of the belligerent parties):

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the African Union:

1. Request the immediate deployment of a UN-mandated stabilisation force to help bolster the AMIS troops and focus on the Chad-Sudan border and the Tawila-Graida corridor.

2. Seek quick negotiation of a single, enhanced ceasefire document to remove the ambiguities of the existing overlapping agreements.

3. Begin immediately to map the location of forces in Darfur so as to manage and enforce the ceasefire better.

4. Begin immediately identifying, defining and profiling the government-allied militias.

5. Improve the reporting mechanisms and procedures for monitoring ceasefire violations and urgently revive and upgrade the compliance and sanctions mechanisms of the ceasefire.

6. Negotiate a series of humanitarian ground rules, in collaboration with the UN, to help hold the parties accountable for the protection of humanitarian operations in their respective areas.

To the United Nations Security Council:

7. Authorise a two-phase intervention in Darfur under Chapter Seven of the Charter, with the following elements:

(a) for the first phase, to be accomplished within a month, a lead nation would serve as the advance element of the full UN mission by sending the bulk of an initial 5,000 troops to Darfur, with three main stabilisation tasks:

i. interdiction of military activities across the Chad-Darfur border;

ii. protection of civilians in Darfur, primarily in the Tawilla-Graida corridor; and

iii. rapid-reaction support of AMIS forces until the transition to a full-fledged UN peace support operation in October 2006.

(b) for the second phase, immediate planning for a peace support operation of some 15,000 troops -- none of whom should be diverted from the mission of the existing UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) -- with a mandate emphasising civilian protection, ceasefire enforcement and monitoring of the Chad-Sudan border, to take over from AMIS as of 1 October 2006.

8. Strengthen the existing sanctions regime by implementing the recommendations in the 30 January 2006 report of the Panel of Experts.

9. Authorise the Secretariat's peacekeeping department (DPKO) to begin planning on an urgent basis and together with the AU both phases of this operation, with priority tasks to include:

(a) identifying areas for early cooperation in Darfur, such as immediate deployment of UN experts to help support the establishment of a functioning ceasefire commission secretariat and the deployment of human rights monitors and translators, including women, to help improve the reporting capacity of AMIS; and

(b) identifying the lead nation to deploy in the initial phase to support AMIS by performing the tasks set out in recommendation 7(a) above and serve as the advance element of the full UN mission.

To Donor Governments:

10. Convene an early pledging conference to ensure that AMIS is fully funded until the UN mission can take over in October 2006.

To the U.S., the EU and its member states and others with a strong interest in regional peace and stability:

11. Undertake major diplomatic efforts to:

(a) persuade Sudan to accept and the AU to confirm transition of AMIS into a strong UN peacekeeping mission as of 1 October 2006 and request in the interim dispatch of an advance force of some 5,000 blue-helmets to assist AMIS by performing essential stabilisation tasks;

(b) persuade the Security Council to authorise a mission of some 15,000, including the strongest AMIS elements and with a strong Chapter VII mandate focused on civilian protection; and

(c) identify the lead nation to contribute the bulk of the advance element to assist AMIS and perform essential stabilisation tasks immediately upon Security Council authorisation, and be prepared to help with all necessary material and logistical support.

12. Concurrently with efforts to strengthen international forces on the ground, pursue the other elements of a coordinated three-part strategy to resolve the Darfur conflict by:

(a) reinforcing AU efforts to negotiate an enhanced ceasefire and a political settlement at Abuja, including by naming special envoys; and

(b) seeking accountability and an end to impunity by enforcing the Security Council's sanction regime and supporting human rights monitoring mechanisms and the work of the ICC.

An article in the Post reports today that Iranian President Ahmadinejad sent a letter to President Bush in order to propose "new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation in the world." It mentions the quote put forth by the Times that Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." Since this comment was reported on, it has been used as a reason why Iran should not have nuclear weapons. I've been somewhat skeptical about the translation, and as it turns out, there is some disagreement about what was actually said. This disagreement has pitted Christopher Hitchens against Juan Cole, the latter being the only one of the two who actually speaks Farsi. A good summary of the online fight can be found here.

The actual sentence in question seems to be this: "een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad." I don't speak Farsi, but several of my colleagues are Iranian, and I've sent them the text to see what they think about it. The only word I can recognize is qods which is Farsi for al Quds, which is Jerusalem in English. Cole's translation is "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time." As it turns out, the Israeli group Memri offers a translation that is very similar to Cole's ("eliminated from the pages of history").

As it turns out, after the comments, the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki denied the remarks:

Mottaki also denied during a press conference in Brussels that Tehran wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map."

"Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," he said. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime."

Another denial came on CNN's Late Edition from Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh:

SOLTANIEH: The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has announced, more than two years, and few cases, the Western media have reflected to public of the world, that if the divine religions -- followers of the divine religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims, in that area follow a referendum, democratic referendum, and are one (ph) with homeless Palestinians, Iranian government and Iranian people would respect their decision.

Therefore, these are fabricated news that they are threatening and using this as an excuse for the military aggression or the aggressive policy. [...]

BLITZER: I have to wrap this up, but I want to get your response to this issue of Israel because it's become such a prominent issue in this whole discussion over nuclear plans that Iran may or may not have. This is what the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on October 26 at that World Without Zionism conference.

He said, "Israel must be wiped off the map of the world, and god willing, with the force of god behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionists."

You understand why people in the West, especially here in the United States, are so concerned about your program, your nuclear program, given those kinds of direct threats against Israel, which happens to be a strong ally of the United States.

SOLTANIEH: I want to very briefly remind you that the policy of Islamic Republic of Iran and according to spirit and letter of our constitution is against any sort of school of thought or regime such as apartheid, Zionism, racism, and this is a matter of principle.

Therefore, what you are talking about as apartheid was disappeared and it could not be accepted by civilized world, this Zionism and aggression of racism is also condemned. [...]

BLITZER: Does your support for the removal of Zionism mean you want to see Israel destroyed?

SOLTANIEH: I have already explained to you and reflected to you the policy echoed by our supreme leader.

It means that if in that region, the divine religion followers of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, that all three are very respectful -- and we have Jews in Iran, which are peacefully living and they are represented in our parliament, they are fully respected -- if they come with the Palestinians, homeless Palestinians, to come and through following the democratic process will decide on a government and live in peace as they were living a thousand years of coexistence of these divine religions, Iran will support because we are looking for and we support peaceful settlement of the whole issue and peaceful coexistence of these divine religions in the Middle East. Let's hope for the peace.

BLITZER: But should there be a state of Israel?

SOLTANIEH: I think I've already answered to you. If Israel is a synonym and will give the indication of Zionism mentality, no.

But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or we they have to be massacred or so, this is fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so.

So it seems that the statements by Ahmadinejad, or at the very least official Iranian policy, is much more nuanced than the Western media would have us believe. Furthermore, it is important to remember that Ahmadinejad does not control Iranian foreign policy. In an interesting article in the New York Review about Iran and the bomb, Christopher de Bellaigue has this to say:

Iran's enmity toward Israel is more nuanced than Ahmadinejad's statements suggest. The President's declarations that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and that the Holocaust is a "myth," understandably aroused fears that Iran might be considering an attack on Israel. But Iran's senior civilian and military officials have insisted that Iran will strike Israel only if Israel strikes first. More significantly, the President and supreme leader have both reiterated Iran's longstanding demand for a referendum on the status of Israel that would involve all Palestinian refugees. This official position would not seem to be consistent with an ambition to destroy Israel by force, least of all by using nuclear arms, which would endanger the very Palestinians whom the Iranians claim to be protecting. Several senior Iranian officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who heads a powerful arbitration council in Tehran, have not disguised their irritation with the President's comments. But Ahmadinejad has benefited from the furor. By raising his prestige among hard-line Islamists around the world, the President has made it harder for his domestic opponents, who include Rafsanjani, to undermine him.

I will post the English translation later this week, once my Iranian colleagues have had the chance to get back to me.

I've had my fair share of visa problems in the last year or two. I've had Libya, Sudan and now Syria all do their best to stop me from visiting. I've given up on the first two for the time being, but I'm still holding out for Syria.

So I'm in Beirut for the time being. It's difficult to work on my Arabic here, because classes are prohibitively expensive, and almost everyone speaks English or French much better than I speak Arabic. It seems like a little bubble here in Beirut. A bubble filled with beautiful women, bars and short skirts.

A few hours away, Israel has taken out several bridges, destroyed electricity transformers in Gaza, and detained a third of Hamas' cabinet and an unknown number of lawmakers. The Israelis have flown over Syrian President Assad's summer house on the coast and spoken of attacking the leader of Hamas' military wing, who lives in Damascus. On all sides of Lebanon, the tension can be felt, but here, we?re going out and drinking, watching the world cup and sipping coffee.

Brazil beat Ghana the other night; there were fireworks and dancing in the streets.

In his op-ed, A Threat That Belongs Behind Bars, professor Eric Posner informs us that the indefinite detention of "dangerous aliens," regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime, should not be opposed on general principle. While it is true that there are precedents of such action in the alien and sedition acts and the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, it is both disappointing and disconcerting that such black spots on American history are being held up as a defense of unconscionable behavior not befit of a civilized democracy. In these times, when the United States is committing torture, unlawful detentions and violent war crimes in the name of the war on terror, what our nation needs are more, not fewer, appeals to general principle.

I've just arrived in Beirut after a hectic few days of getting everything prepared for this trip. I'll be in the Middle East until September and will be trying to blog from here as much as possible - hopefully more than usual.

I never managed to get my visa for Syria, so I'll probably try my luck at the border in the next few days. Some friends want me to come to Jordan, but you have to go through Syria to get to Jordan from Lebanon, so I might not be able to make it, which would be a shame, because it would be nice to stay with a family in Amman and then maybe go visit Petra as well.

There is a certain sense of home that I feel here in Beirut. I felt it the first time I came, and I'm feeling it again, now that I'm back. There was the same sign of Ronald McDonald saying "Welcome to Lebanon" at the airport and I was able to direct the cab driver directly to my friend's place, no small feat considering how bad my sense of direction is.

I lucked out at the airport, because there was some sort of a problem with the visa stand, so they just let everyone have their visa for free. It's only $17, but it's a nice feeling all the same.

I'm going to try to post pictures from time to time also, because I think this blog needs some spicing up...

Esquire magazing has an interesting piece on John Walker Lindh, the American guy who was fighting in the ranks of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance when the US invaded in 2001. Strangely, part of his sentence is that he's not allowed to speak Arabic in prison, which means he cannot pray out loud. Talking to a friend of mine last night about the article, he reacted to it by saying that if the sentence isn't cruel, it certainly is unusual.

The article is a little long and written with an odd tone of deference or piety that I'm not sure really works, but it is very interesting and worth a read nonetheless.

An editorial in le Monde today takes the US to task for Guantanamo Bay (in French, translation mine):

Upon the discovery of the suicide of three detainees, two Saudis and one Yemeni, the reaction of the commander of the camp in Guantanamo illustrates the gulf that separates American authorities from the rest of the world on the sinister issue of the prison in Guantanamo. The collective suicide is "an act of asymmetric war waged against us," declared Rear Admiral Harry Harris on 10 June. Colleen Graffy, in charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, qualified the detainees' gesture as a "good PR move to draw attention."

Without falling into otherworldliness faced with the essential fight against international terrorism, how can we make the United States listen to reason about this black stain on the democratic world that the prison in Guantanamo has become? Because, when Admiral Harris evokes an act of war against America, he is forgetting that American blindness towards the treatment of the detainees suspected of belonging to Al-Qaida, in Guantanamo or in the secret prisons run by the CIA, exposes all western democracies to Islamic propaganda and radicalization. It is to our suburbs and our Muslim communities in Europe that the recruiters of Al-Qaida and other fundamentalist proselytizers come to fill their ranks, with arguments graciously given to them by the military leaders of the Pentagon and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It hasn't been enough to say that Guantanamo Bay, opened in January 2002 and where 460 prisoners are still being held without trial, is legal nonsense; it hasn't been enough to say that it constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and human rights; it hasn't been enough to write that it is unworthy of a country universally admired for having established respect for the rule of law in its constitutional system; it hasn't been enough to show surprise that the Bush administration manifests, by its stubbornness, such disdain for its own Supreme Court, which told it in June 2004 to authorize the Guantanamo detainees to defend themselves before an American civil court, and for public opinion, which, after an initial indifference, has included a growing number of voices denouncing the conditions in the prison. Nor has it been enough to bring up relevant historical errors, from the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to Margaret Thatcher's vain stubbornness faced with IRA members on hunger strike in 1981.

The United States remains deaf to all these arguments. The least that European leaders can do from now on is to no longer hold high level meetings with Americans without demanding the closing of Guantanamo Bay. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has recently served as a good example. The French should follow suit.

In addition to Kuperman's piece, David Rieff has also penned a case against intervention in Darfur in the New Republic, which Reeves hotly and thoroughly counters.

He sees the issue through the lense of Iraq in 2003 instead of, say, Rwanda in 1994 or Iraq during the genocidal al Anfal campaign to Arabize Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1908s. Rieff casts doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and says that those who call for intervention in Darfur are ignoring the politics of Darfur (which he seems to be less than well-versed in himself, the truth be told):

Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.

One debilitating defect of the liberal interventionism is that it ignores the political implications of what it calls for. ...

...[A]n intervention, however good it may be for the Darfuris, may be terrible for the rest of the world.

Reeves criticizes Rieff for mistakenly attributing secessionist ambitions to the Darfuri rebels, not discussion the spread of the genocide into Chad, irresponsibly casting doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and generally being ignorant on Darfuri politics.

In fact, we must wonder what "agency" a nine-year-old girl has when she is brutally gang-raped by the Janjaweed, or what "agency" a five-year-old boy has as he is thrown screaming into a bonfire along with his brothers, or indeed what "agency" a one-year-old boy has when the Janjaweed slice off his penis and he bleeds to death. "Political interests" here is an abstraction that can have meaning for very few besides David Rieff. There are real political issues in Darfur, including competition over natural resources and power in governance, as well as competing visions of equitable distribution of land and wealth. Rieff captures none of this in his account.

If the Abuja accord does fail, if violence then inevitably rapidly escalates in Darfur and Chad, it will be too late for hundreds of thousands of lives. We have simply waited too long, with too many sufficiently encouraged by specious arguments of the sort so abundant in Rieff's account. In this sense it is perhaps useful to have Rieff articulate his factitious "realism," to invoke so glibly the difficult "politics" of Darfur, to pretend that Iraq has somehow changed the imperative of responding to massive genocidal destruction.

Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in her TMPCafe piece, Rethinking Darfur that after reading Kuperman and Rieff, she's having second thoughts. She doesn't go into any specifics, but the gist of her piece is that maybe we shouldn't intervene, because the situation is complicated:

I want to help the victims of the Janjaweed as much as anyone. But the Europeans have been arguing for some time that the situation is far more complicated than a simple morality tale would make it out to be. And surely if Iraq has taught us anything, it is to think very hard about what happens AFTER we go in and stop the initial killing. It may well be that even if an AU solution is slower and less effective up front, it will be more effective over the long term, whereas if the U.S. or NATO go in, we will find ourselves again "in charge" of a situation we barely understand and cannot control, ultimately visiting yet more chaos and death on the very people we seek to help.

To my mind, this is similar to seeing a woman getting raped and murdered on the street and hesitating to do anything about it because the situation is likely to be complicated. What will other people in the neighbourhood think if I intervene? What did that woman do to make those men decide to rape and murder her?

Of course the situation is complicated, as are most conflicts. We don't live in a world of black and white, and we never have. Just because the sitauation surrounding a genocide is complex does not mean that there is any less of a moral imperative to stop it. The politics of Darfur are complex, as were the politics of Rwanda in 1994. What is not complex is that genocide is being committed, and either one believes that genocide carries the weight of a moral imperative or it doesn't. Finally, Slaughter seems more interested in wringing her hands and hoping against all odds for the best. Rieff at least calls a spade a spade when he asks brings up the idea that even if intervention is better for Darfuris, maybe it would be bad for the rest of the world.

This is an interesting question that smacks of utilitarianism. But before answering it, we should ask ourselves two questions: First, given the number of dead incurred during World War II, should the international community have given up Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria and the Jews in those countries in order to avoid the tens of millions of deaths that were a result of direct military confrontation between Axis and Allied powers? And second, are we sure that there will not be more death and conflict as a result of allowing a genocide to happen?

The first question is of a moral nature and can be difficult in some instances, if not in this one. The second one is about history and its consequences. Would the Congo be such a hellhole if we had not let the Rwandan genocide come to pass? In the case of Darfur, it is important to look at what this genocide means for Chad, and by consequence, the Central African Republic and Cameroon. If Khartoum is emboldened and allowed to topple Deby's (distasteful) regime in Chad, the bloody and ongoing history of the Congo might repeat itself.

I would like to comment on Alan Kuperman's polemical piece in the New York Times yesterday (31 May), "Strategic Victimhood in Sudan." In this particular article, Kuperman tells us that the regime in Khartoum responded to Darfuri rebel insurgency with genocide, and that "[b]ecause of the Save Darfur movement ... the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure," which has in turn led the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) movement and Nur's part of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) to reject the recent peace treaty signed at Abuja.

Kuperman's analysis of events is not specific to his take on Sudanese politics; rather it is but further evidence of his larger hypothesis. Generally speaking, the crux of his argument can be found in the first sentence of an article he wrote on the Rwandan genocide, "Provoking genocide: A revised history of the Rwandan Patriotic Front": "In most cases of mass killing since World War II­­ -- unlike the Holocaust -- the victim group has triggered its own demise by violently challenging the authority of the state."

Although he emphasizes that his theory is "not intended to excuse of justify the genocide in any way, but merely to understand more fully its causes," Kuperman's argument seems to come dangerously close to blaming the victims. While he would surely protest that he is blaming rebel groups and not the victims of the genocide (a polemical claim in and of itself), this is not at all clear when he says, "the victim group has triggered its own demise." (To be fair, with the exception of the opening sentence, the article focuses mostly on the RPF, not Tutsis in general.)

But I'll save the more general moral debate about whether or not a genocidal regime's culpability can be shared with a rebel group that has purportedly "provoked" genocide for another time. What I would like to focus on here is the specifics of Darfur.

I don't pretend to be an expert on Sudanese or Darfuri politics, and I agree with Kuperman when he says that the situation in Darfur is complex. However, it seems strange that after stressing that the situation there is not the "simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations," he would himself make claims like these:

The region's blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago -- denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. ... [The rebels] took up arms not to stop genocide -- which erupted only after they rebelled -- but to gain tribal domination.

To paint the situation during the maja al-gatila (the famine that kills) in Darfur in 1984-5 as one in which "blacks ... were the oppressors" is terribly simplistic in more than one way. Without lingering on the complexities of ethnicity in Darfur and the difficulty in categorizing Darfuris as either "black" or "Arab," the facile claim that "blacks" were oppressing "Arabs" seems to overlook the fact that the nearly 100,000 deaths during the famine were largely due to apathy or incompetence on the part of Khartoum. According to Prunier,

Everyone knew that this catastrophe would have been perfectly preventable with a little bit of planning, money and, especially, political will. Everyone knew that the mass deaths [hécatombe] were the result of Khartoum's negligence. But the consequences happened to be unequally distributed [translation mine].

The drought and famine forced the nomads to prematurely go south in search of grazing areas, which just so happened to be the meager and not-yet-harvested fields of the farmers. Alex de Waal, who has studied the famine in depth, describes the delicate balance that was violently disturbed in 1985 as the "moral geography" of Darfur.

Kuperman's other claim, that the rebels "picked up arms ... to gain tribal dominance," also seems to be woefully ill-informed. According to Julie Flint and de Waal, the roots of JEM go back to 1993, when the original aim was to reform the National Islamic Front (NIF) from within. Dissidents like Nur compiled evidence illustrating the economic and political marginalization of Darfur into a document they called "The Black Book." JEM purports to combat Darfur's status as an outlying periphery dominated by the center of Sudanese economic and political life. Nur explains the situation in Darfur thusly:

There was too much suffering. I travelled 60 kilometers to go to primary school, in Kornoi, when I was 7; 350 kilometers to go to intermediate school, in Geneina; 400 kilometers to go to secondary school, in Fasher; and 1,000 kilometers to go to university, in Khartoum. It was forbidden to speak the Zaghawa language in school. In primary school, the teacher gave us a blue ticket to pass to any boy who spoke Zaghawa. At the end of the day, anyone who had the ticket was whipped. The whole of Kutun province, with a population of more than 551,000, had one general doctor and no specialists. Women walked more than eight hours daily to get less than 60 liters of water. We were excluded from all key posts and had no way of communicating with the international community to ask for help.

JEM's five-point manifesto calls for a national solution to the Sudan's problems. It calls for a unified country, justice and equality rather than political repression, "radical and comprehensive constitutional reform," basic services for all Sudanese and human development in all the regions of Sudan.

The SLM/A, on the other hand, has its roots in Darfuri irregular militias that were created in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s when conflict was already rife in the region. In 1999 already, over 100,000 Masalit had fled to Chad.

The fact of the matter is that the events leading up to the genocide in Darfur are many and varied, involving the famine, the political situation in Chad, Libyan involvement and sometimes de facto ruling of Darfur, Islamic movements (both domestic and imported from Tripoli or Cairo) and a politics of systematic neglect of the periphery by the center in Khartoum. To say that the rebels provoked genocide by vying for tribal domination is either disingenuous or uninformed.

This is not to say that the Darfuri rebel movements are saints; we know that they are not. But that's not the point. Whether the rebel movements have "provoked" Khartoum is neither here nor there in the long run. The rebels, despite their claims to represent all of Darfur, are not the ethnic groups as a whole, just as the RPF is not synonymous with the Tutsis in Rwanda.

De Waal sums up the situation quite succinctly in his piece in the London Review of Books, "Counter-insurgency on the cheap":

The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers' claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.

And this brings me to Kuperman's advice not to intervene: ...we should let Sudan's army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes." It's hard to believe that such a naïve statement could be penned by anyone who has read much about the regime in Khartoum. We're talking about "routine cruelty" and "genocide by force of habit." What Kuperman doesn't see is that the Sudanese regime is "handling" the rebels in the same way it dealt with the South and the Nuba Mountains.

To lay the blame for such acts at the feet of the rebels (rather than at the feet of the regime committing genocide), or even worse, the "victim group," is morally irresponsible. The Fur and Zaghawa and other "black" tribes in Darfur are no more responsible for the organized campaign to destroy them than the Armenians were for their forced march into the sands of Syria.

If Alan Kuperman is content to take Khartoum at its word and trust that it will "eschew" the "war crimes" that it denies committing in the first place, allowing the regime to "handle" the rebels and "defend its sovereignty" in the meantime, I, for one, am not.

Kuperman advises the United States to announce a policy of non-intervention. This is confusing to me, because after all, isn't that the policy that Samantha Powers describes so well in her book, "A Problem from Hell"? Isn't that the policy that has been silently announced throughout the twentieth century to Armenians, Rwandans, Iraqi Kurds, Cambodians and now the Sudanese?

Here are a few interesting links that I've come across in the last few days:

A story from ABC about Chinese Muslims wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo and then finally released after 4.5 years. They couldn't be sent to China since the government there persecutes Uighurs, and despite being found innocent of any charges (NLEC, or No Longer Enemy Combattant, in Guantanamo Bay terminology - Mr Kafka could not have made this up if he had tried), being put away by the Americans for 4.5 years is enough to garner a bad reputation. So apparently, no country would take them, the US included, with the single and solitary exception of Albania:

We are very pleased that the Albanian government and the Albanian people opened their hearts and welcomed us. Despite the fact that all the strong, powerful, democratic countries are able and capable of accepting us, they did not do that. We are having some problems ... there are no Uighurs in Albania, and we don't speak the Albanian language. ...

Were hoping that the United States government would recognize the mistake that it has done and accept, allow us to enter the United States. U.S. government captured us, U.S. government incarcerated us, locked us up in prison, and U.S. government said that we were not a threat and should be released.

Uighur-Americans came forward, made an offer to the United States government to accept us into Uighur-American society and community. They even went into the courts and contacted the lawyers and wrote a letter to the U.S. government officials asking them to consider releasing us into the United States. Unfortunately, it did not happen, a rather disappointing decision.

Otherwise, the Post ran a really interesting first person piece about Iraq, the Republic of Fear, which makes one fearful that Baghdad is slowly but surely turning into Beirut, circa 1980:

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis. ...

Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed neighborhoods are "purified." In Amriya, dead bodies are being found on the main street at a rate of three or five or seven a day. People are afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, for fear that they, too, will be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya and other once-diverse neighborhoods, Shiites are being forced to leave. In Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are being targeted.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

This made me remember reading a piece in Harper's that said that maybe the best thing for Iraq would be for the US to withdraw and let them have their full-fledged civil war. (It was by Edward Luttwak and was adapted from a piece in Foreign Policy, which can be found here) The version in Harper's ends like this:

...American forces continue to suffer casualties in combat against factions that should be confronting one another instead. Perhaps what the new Iraqi state needs in order to achieve stability is precisely a certain amount of civil war. Preventing it may impede a natural and perhaps very desirable political evolution. Americans would not today be happier if European Great Powers, horrified by the carnage of our own Civil War, had enforced an armistice between North and South that might endure still between two feeble states. ...

It's hard for me to know what to make of this idea. I'm not convinced that an all-out civil war would result in anything but a division of Iraq, or even worse, a regional war that would involve Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and probably Turkey as well. The latter is obviously a horrible idea, but I haven't decided how I feel about the former.

Finally, the atrocities in Haditha make me think that maybe Luttuk and Rosen are right and the US should just get out as soon as possible.

I can't get over this. I know that similar things happened in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and I know that we're talking about kids who have been put in an extremely dangerous and stressful situation, and that sometimes people just crack. But I just don't understand how someone can shoot a one-legged man in a wheelchair nine times. Or how someone can shoot a 1-year old baby. Say that again: a 1-year old baby. I just don't understand.

At some point on Nov. 19, Marines in an armored convoy arrived at Haditha's hospital. They placed the bodies of the victims in the garden of the hospital and left without explanation, said Mohammed al-Hadithi, one of the hospital officials who helped carry the bodies inside. By some accounts, some of the corpses were burnt.

The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs' Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. "Democracy assassinated the family that was here," graffiti on one of the houses declared.

I just came across a piece by the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times entitled, If Iraq was wrong, is Darfur right?

The New Republic has recently come out with an issue on Darfur (only some of which is available to non-subscribers), and they come out as a whole for American intervention in Darfur. Kaplan's piece, however, brings up the question of Iraq and asks why it is all right to intervene in Darfur but not in Iraq:

As their criticism of the particulars of the Iraq war has hardened into a broader indictment of U.S. foreign policy, the mostly progressive voices calling for action in Darfur have become caught in a bind of their own devising. Even as they demand intervention in Sudan, they excoriate Washington for employing U.S. military power without due respect to the opinion of the international community and against nations that pose no imminent threat to our own -- which is to say, precisely the terms under which U.S. power would have to be employed in the name of saving Darfur.

He then goes on to argue that neither the African Union nor the UN will intervene or is capable of intervening, leaving the US as the only capable, if not willing, power equipped to intervene.

To my mind, the main reason why I am for intervention in Darfur but was against it in Iraq can be summed up in a single word: genocide. It's happening in Darfur but wasn't happening in Iraq. Now had the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s been continuing, I would have been for intervention in Iraq. This is not to say that genocide should be the threshold for international intervention, but it would at least be a good start. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) responds similarly to Kaplan's jab against him:

Once President Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word "genocide" to describe the carnage in Darfur, the United States and every other civilized nation had a moral imperative to act. Those who find it painful to explain the deception and misinformation preceding our invasion of Iraq should not hide behind the victims in Darfur.

As for whether or not the AU or UN could or would stop the genocide, the AU is already there but lacks a proper and muscular mandate that would allow their forces to protect civilians. As it is, they can only protect themselves. Likewise, when and if a UN force intervenes, it would be important for them to have a good mandate and be properly funded, because we know what happens to underfunded blue helmets without a real mandate. As it stands, there are 7,000 AU troops already in Darfur, which could be folded into a UN force; France has at least 1,000 troops in Chad already; and if the UK could be convinced to provide the 5,000 troops that they offered in 2004, then that would make a force of 13,000. Other nations like South Africa and Ghana could also donate more troops, and the US could help shoulder the financial and logistics costs of such an intervention.

While writing this, I've come across an interesting (and much more detailed) plan by the International Crisis Group To Save Darfur, which is similar to my idea:

Crisis Group has long contended that because AMIS has reached the outer limits of its competence, and a UN mission authorised today would not be fully ready to take over from it for some six months, a distinct and separate multinational force should be sent to Darfur to bridge that gap and help stabilise the immediate situation. We have argued, and continue to believe, that NATO would be best from a practical military point of view. Unfortunately, political opposition to this in Khartoum, within the AU and even perhaps within the Atlantic Alliance itself, means it is not achievable at this time.

What we now propose, therefore, is a compromise driven by the urgent need for a more robust force in Darfur. A militarily capable UN member state -- France seems most promising since it already has troops and aircraft in the area -- should offer to the Security Council to go now to Darfur, wearing blue helmets, as the lead nation in the first phase of the incoming UN mission. It could be joined from the outset by forces from one or two other militarily capable UN members (and would probably need to be if the desirable target of around 5,000 personnel for this force is to be achieved). This stabilisation force would be a self-contained, separately commanded UN mission with identified functional or geographic divisions of responsibility that would work beside AMIS and through a liaison unit at its headquarters until arrangements were in place for a 1 October transition to the full UN mission. That full mission would need to be recruited from the best AMIS elements as well as a wider circle of Asian and other member states -- no easy task at a time when several large UN peacekeeping missions in Africa and elsewhere have exhausted the capabilities of many contribution candidates.

The U.S. and other NATO states should respond generously and quickly to requests from it or AMIS to provide logistical help as well as regular access to satellite imagery, air mobility and close air support, especially to deter or react to egregious movements of men or heavy weapons in the border area.

They finish by coming up with a list of recommendations for each of the major parties involved (with the exception of the belligerent parties):

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the African Union:

1. Request the immediate deployment of a UN-mandated stabilisation force to help bolster the AMIS troops and focus on the Chad-Sudan border and the Tawila-Graida corridor.

2. Seek quick negotiation of a single, enhanced ceasefire document to remove the ambiguities of the existing overlapping agreements.

3. Begin immediately to map the location of forces in Darfur so as to manage and enforce the ceasefire better.

4. Begin immediately identifying, defining and profiling the government-allied militias.

5. Improve the reporting mechanisms and procedures for monitoring ceasefire violations and urgently revive and upgrade the compliance and sanctions mechanisms of the ceasefire.

6. Negotiate a series of humanitarian ground rules, in collaboration with the UN, to help hold the parties accountable for the protection of humanitarian operations in their respective areas.

To the United Nations Security Council:

7. Authorise a two-phase intervention in Darfur under Chapter Seven of the Charter, with the following elements:

(a) for the first phase, to be accomplished within a month, a lead nation would serve as the advance element of the full UN mission by sending the bulk of an initial 5,000 troops to Darfur, with three main stabilisation tasks:

i. interdiction of military activities across the Chad-Darfur border;

ii. protection of civilians in Darfur, primarily in the Tawilla-Graida corridor; and

iii. rapid-reaction support of AMIS forces until the transition to a full-fledged UN peace support operation in October 2006.

(b) for the second phase, immediate planning for a peace support operation of some 15,000 troops -- none of whom should be diverted from the mission of the existing UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) -- with a mandate emphasising civilian protection, ceasefire enforcement and monitoring of the Chad-Sudan border, to take over from AMIS as of 1 October 2006.

8. Strengthen the existing sanctions regime by implementing the recommendations in the 30 January 2006 report of the Panel of Experts.

9. Authorise the Secretariat's peacekeeping department (DPKO) to begin planning on an urgent basis and together with the AU both phases of this operation, with priority tasks to include:

(a) identifying areas for early cooperation in Darfur, such as immediate deployment of UN experts to help support the establishment of a functioning ceasefire commission secretariat and the deployment of human rights monitors and translators, including women, to help improve the reporting capacity of AMIS; and

(b) identifying the lead nation to deploy in the initial phase to support AMIS by performing the tasks set out in recommendation 7(a) above and serve as the advance element of the full UN mission.

To Donor Governments:

10. Convene an early pledging conference to ensure that AMIS is fully funded until the UN mission can take over in October 2006.

To the U.S., the EU and its member states and others with a strong interest in regional peace and stability:

11. Undertake major diplomatic efforts to:

(a) persuade Sudan to accept and the AU to confirm transition of AMIS into a strong UN peacekeeping mission as of 1 October 2006 and request in the interim dispatch of an advance force of some 5,000 blue-helmets to assist AMIS by performing essential stabilisation tasks;

(b) persuade the Security Council to authorise a mission of some 15,000, including the strongest AMIS elements and with a strong Chapter VII mandate focused on civilian protection; and

(c) identify the lead nation to contribute the bulk of the advance element to assist AMIS and perform essential stabilisation tasks immediately upon Security Council authorisation, and be prepared to help with all necessary material and logistical support.

12. Concurrently with efforts to strengthen international forces on the ground, pursue the other elements of a coordinated three-part strategy to resolve the Darfur conflict by:

(a) reinforcing AU efforts to negotiate an enhanced ceasefire and a political settlement at Abuja, including by naming special envoys; and

(b) seeking accountability and an end to impunity by enforcing the Security Council's sanction regime and supporting human rights monitoring mechanisms and the work of the ICC.

An article in the Post reports today that Iranian President Ahmadinejad sent a letter to President Bush in order to propose "new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation in the world." It mentions the quote put forth by the Times that Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." Since this comment was reported on, it has been used as a reason why Iran should not have nuclear weapons. I've been somewhat skeptical about the translation, and as it turns out, there is some disagreement about what was actually said. This disagreement has pitted Christopher Hitchens against Juan Cole, the latter being the only one of the two who actually speaks Farsi. A good summary of the online fight can be found here.

The actual sentence in question seems to be this: "een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad." I don't speak Farsi, but several of my colleagues are Iranian, and I've sent them the text to see what they think about it. The only word I can recognize is qods which is Farsi for al Quds, which is Jerusalem in English. Cole's translation is "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time." As it turns out, the Israeli group Memri offers a translation that is very similar to Cole's ("eliminated from the pages of history").

As it turns out, after the comments, the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki denied the remarks:

Mottaki also denied during a press conference in Brussels that Tehran wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map."

"Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," he said. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime."

Another denial came on CNN's Late Edition from Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh:

SOLTANIEH: The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has announced, more than two years, and few cases, the Western media have reflected to public of the world, that if the divine religions -- followers of the divine religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims, in that area follow a referendum, democratic referendum, and are one (ph) with homeless Palestinians, Iranian government and Iranian people would respect their decision.

Therefore, these are fabricated news that they are threatening and using this as an excuse for the military aggression or the aggressive policy. [...]

BLITZER: I have to wrap this up, but I want to get your response to this issue of Israel because it's become such a prominent issue in this whole discussion over nuclear plans that Iran may or may not have. This is what the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on October 26 at that World Without Zionism conference.

He said, "Israel must be wiped off the map of the world, and god willing, with the force of god behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionists."

You understand why people in the West, especially here in the United States, are so concerned about your program, your nuclear program, given those kinds of direct threats against Israel, which happens to be a strong ally of the United States.

SOLTANIEH: I want to very briefly remind you that the policy of Islamic Republic of Iran and according to spirit and letter of our constitution is against any sort of school of thought or regime such as apartheid, Zionism, racism, and this is a matter of principle.

Therefore, what you are talking about as apartheid was disappeared and it could not be accepted by civilized world, this Zionism and aggression of racism is also condemned. [...]

BLITZER: Does your support for the removal of Zionism mean you want to see Israel destroyed?

SOLTANIEH: I have already explained to you and reflected to you the policy echoed by our supreme leader.

It means that if in that region, the divine religion followers of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, that all three are very respectful -- and we have Jews in Iran, which are peacefully living and they are represented in our parliament, they are fully respected -- if they come with the Palestinians, homeless Palestinians, to come and through following the democratic process will decide on a government and live in peace as they were living a thousand years of coexistence of these divine religions, Iran will support because we are looking for and we support peaceful settlement of the whole issue and peaceful coexistence of these divine religions in the Middle East. Let's hope for the peace.

BLITZER: But should there be a state of Israel?

SOLTANIEH: I think I've already answered to you. If Israel is a synonym and will give the indication of Zionism mentality, no.

But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or we they have to be massacred or so, this is fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so.

So it seems that the statements by Ahmadinejad, or at the very least official Iranian policy, is much more nuanced than the Western media would have us believe. Furthermore, it is important to remember that Ahmadinejad does not control Iranian foreign policy. In an interesting article in the New York Review about Iran and the bomb, Christopher de Bellaigue has this to say:

Iran's enmity toward Israel is more nuanced than Ahmadinejad's statements suggest. The President's declarations that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and that the Holocaust is a "myth," understandably aroused fears that Iran might be considering an attack on Israel. But Iran's senior civilian and military officials have insisted that Iran will strike Israel only if Israel strikes first. More significantly, the President and supreme leader have both reiterated Iran's longstanding demand for a referendum on the status of Israel that would involve all Palestinian refugees. This official position would not seem to be consistent with an ambition to destroy Israel by force, least of all by using nuclear arms, which would endanger the very Palestinians whom the Iranians claim to be protecting. Several senior Iranian officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who heads a powerful arbitration council in Tehran, have not disguised their irritation with the President's comments. But Ahmadinejad has benefited from the furor. By raising his prestige among hard-line Islamists around the world, the President has made it harder for his domestic opponents, who include Rafsanjani, to undermine him.

I will post the English translation later this week, once my Iranian colleagues have had the chance to get back to me.

I've had my fair share of visa problems in the last year or two. I've had Libya, Sudan and now Syria all do their best to stop me from visiting. I've given up on the first two for the time being, but I'm still holding out for Syria.

So I'm in Beirut for the time being. It's difficult to work on my Arabic here, because classes are prohibitively expensive, and almost everyone speaks English or French much better than I speak Arabic. It seems like a little bubble here in Beirut. A bubble filled with beautiful women, bars and short skirts.

A few hours away, Israel has taken out several bridges, destroyed electricity transformers in Gaza, and detained a third of Hamas' cabinet and an unknown number of lawmakers. The Israelis have flown over Syrian President Assad's summer house on the coast and spoken of attacking the leader of Hamas' military wing, who lives in Damascus. On all sides of Lebanon, the tension can be felt, but here, we?re going out and drinking, watching the world cup and sipping coffee.

Brazil beat Ghana the other night; there were fireworks and dancing in the streets.

In his op-ed, A Threat That Belongs Behind Bars, professor Eric Posner informs us that the indefinite detention of "dangerous aliens," regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime, should not be opposed on general principle. While it is true that there are precedents of such action in the alien and sedition acts and the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, it is both disappointing and disconcerting that such black spots on American history are being held up as a defense of unconscionable behavior not befit of a civilized democracy. In these times, when the United States is committing torture, unlawful detentions and violent war crimes in the name of the war on terror, what our nation needs are more, not fewer, appeals to general principle.

I've just arrived in Beirut after a hectic few days of getting everything prepared for this trip. I'll be in the Middle East until September and will be trying to blog from here as much as possible - hopefully more than usual.

I never managed to get my visa for Syria, so I'll probably try my luck at the border in the next few days. Some friends want me to come to Jordan, but you have to go through Syria to get to Jordan from Lebanon, so I might not be able to make it, which would be a shame, because it would be nice to stay with a family in Amman and then maybe go visit Petra as well.

There is a certain sense of home that I feel here in Beirut. I felt it the first time I came, and I'm feeling it again, now that I'm back. There was the same sign of Ronald McDonald saying "Welcome to Lebanon" at the airport and I was able to direct the cab driver directly to my friend's place, no small feat considering how bad my sense of direction is.

I lucked out at the airport, because there was some sort of a problem with the visa stand, so they just let everyone have their visa for free. It's only $17, but it's a nice feeling all the same.

I'm going to try to post pictures from time to time also, because I think this blog needs some spicing up...

Esquire magazing has an interesting piece on John Walker Lindh, the American guy who was fighting in the ranks of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance when the US invaded in 2001. Strangely, part of his sentence is that he's not allowed to speak Arabic in prison, which means he cannot pray out loud. Talking to a friend of mine last night about the article, he reacted to it by saying that if the sentence isn't cruel, it certainly is unusual.

The article is a little long and written with an odd tone of deference or piety that I'm not sure really works, but it is very interesting and worth a read nonetheless.

An editorial in le Monde today takes the US to task for Guantanamo Bay (in French, translation mine):

Upon the discovery of the suicide of three detainees, two Saudis and one Yemeni, the reaction of the commander of the camp in Guantanamo illustrates the gulf that separates American authorities from the rest of the world on the sinister issue of the prison in Guantanamo. The collective suicide is "an act of asymmetric war waged against us," declared Rear Admiral Harry Harris on 10 June. Colleen Graffy, in charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, qualified the detainees' gesture as a "good PR move to draw attention."

Without falling into otherworldliness faced with the essential fight against international terrorism, how can we make the United States listen to reason about this black stain on the democratic world that the prison in Guantanamo has become? Because, when Admiral Harris evokes an act of war against America, he is forgetting that American blindness towards the treatment of the detainees suspected of belonging to Al-Qaida, in Guantanamo or in the secret prisons run by the CIA, exposes all western democracies to Islamic propaganda and radicalization. It is to our suburbs and our Muslim communities in Europe that the recruiters of Al-Qaida and other fundamentalist proselytizers come to fill their ranks, with arguments graciously given to them by the military leaders of the Pentagon and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It hasn't been enough to say that Guantanamo Bay, opened in January 2002 and where 460 prisoners are still being held without trial, is legal nonsense; it hasn't been enough to say that it constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and human rights; it hasn't been enough to write that it is unworthy of a country universally admired for having established respect for the rule of law in its constitutional system; it hasn't been enough to show surprise that the Bush administration manifests, by its stubbornness, such disdain for its own Supreme Court, which told it in June 2004 to authorize the Guantanamo detainees to defend themselves before an American civil court, and for public opinion, which, after an initial indifference, has included a growing number of voices denouncing the conditions in the prison. Nor has it been enough to bring up relevant historical errors, from the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to Margaret Thatcher's vain stubbornness faced with IRA members on hunger strike in 1981.

The United States remains deaf to all these arguments. The least that European leaders can do from now on is to no longer hold high level meetings with Americans without demanding the closing of Guantanamo Bay. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has recently served as a good example. The French should follow suit.

In addition to Kuperman's piece, David Rieff has also penned a case against intervention in Darfur in the New Republic, which Reeves hotly and thoroughly counters.

He sees the issue through the lense of Iraq in 2003 instead of, say, Rwanda in 1994 or Iraq during the genocidal al Anfal campaign to Arabize Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1908s. Rieff casts doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and says that those who call for intervention in Darfur are ignoring the politics of Darfur (which he seems to be less than well-versed in himself, the truth be told):

Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.

One debilitating defect of the liberal interventionism is that it ignores the political implications of what it calls for. ...

...[A]n intervention, however good it may be for the Darfuris, may be terrible for the rest of the world.

Reeves criticizes Rieff for mistakenly attributing secessionist ambitions to the Darfuri rebels, not discussion the spread of the genocide into Chad, irresponsibly casting doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and generally being ignorant on Darfuri politics.

In fact, we must wonder what "agency" a nine-year-old girl has when she is brutally gang-raped by the Janjaweed, or what "agency" a five-year-old boy has as he is thrown screaming into a bonfire along with his brothers, or indeed what "agency" a one-year-old boy has when the Janjaweed slice off his penis and he bleeds to death. "Political interests" here is an abstraction that can have meaning for very few besides David Rieff. There are real political issues in Darfur, including competition over natural resources and power in governance, as well as competing visions of equitable distribution of land and wealth. Rieff captures none of this in his account.

If the Abuja accord does fail, if violence then inevitably rapidly escalates in Darfur and Chad, it will be too late for hundreds of thousands of lives. We have simply waited too long, with too many sufficiently encouraged by specious arguments of the sort so abundant in Rieff's account. In this sense it is perhaps useful to have Rieff articulate his factitious "realism," to invoke so glibly the difficult "politics" of Darfur, to pretend that Iraq has somehow changed the imperative of responding to massive genocidal destruction.

Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in her TMPCafe piece, Rethinking Darfur that after reading Kuperman and Rieff, she's having second thoughts. She doesn't go into any specifics, but the gist of her piece is that maybe we shouldn't intervene, because the situation is complicated:

I want to help the victims of the Janjaweed as much as anyone. But the Europeans have been arguing for some time that the situation is far more complicated than a simple morality tale would make it out to be. And surely if Iraq has taught us anything, it is to think very hard about what happens AFTER we go in and stop the initial killing. It may well be that even if an AU solution is slower and less effective up front, it will be more effective over the long term, whereas if the U.S. or NATO go in, we will find ourselves again "in charge" of a situation we barely understand and cannot control, ultimately visiting yet more chaos and death on the very people we seek to help.

To my mind, this is similar to seeing a woman getting raped and murdered on the street and hesitating to do anything about it because the situation is likely to be complicated. What will other people in the neighbourhood think if I intervene? What did that woman do to make those men decide to rape and murder her?

Of course the situation is complicated, as are most conflicts. We don't live in a world of black and white, and we never have. Just because the sitauation surrounding a genocide is complex does not mean that there is any less of a moral imperative to stop it. The politics of Darfur are complex, as were the politics of Rwanda in 1994. What is not complex is that genocide is being committed, and either one believes that genocide carries the weight of a moral imperative or it doesn't. Finally, Slaughter seems more interested in wringing her hands and hoping against all odds for the best. Rieff at least calls a spade a spade when he asks brings up the idea that even if intervention is better for Darfuris, maybe it would be bad for the rest of the world.

This is an interesting question that smacks of utilitarianism. But before answering it, we should ask ourselves two questions: First, given the number of dead incurred during World War II, should the international community have given up Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria and the Jews in those countries in order to avoid the tens of millions of deaths that were a result of direct military confrontation between Axis and Allied powers? And second, are we sure that there will not be more death and conflict as a result of allowing a genocide to happen?

The first question is of a moral nature and can be difficult in some instances, if not in this one. The second one is about history and its consequences. Would the Congo be such a hellhole if we had not let the Rwandan genocide come to pass? In the case of Darfur, it is important to look at what this genocide means for Chad, and by consequence, the Central African Republic and Cameroon. If Khartoum is emboldened and allowed to topple Deby's (distasteful) regime in Chad, the bloody and ongoing history of the Congo might repeat itself.

I would like to comment on Alan Kuperman's polemical piece in the New York Times yesterday (31 May), "Strategic Victimhood in Sudan." In this particular article, Kuperman tells us that the regime in Khartoum responded to Darfuri rebel insurgency with genocide, and that "[b]ecause of the Save Darfur movement ... the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure," which has in turn led the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) movement and Nur's part of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) to reject the recent peace treaty signed at Abuja.

Kuperman's analysis of events is not specific to his take on Sudanese politics; rather it is but further evidence of his larger hypothesis. Generally speaking, the crux of his argument can be found in the first sentence of an article he wrote on the Rwandan genocide, "Provoking genocide: A revised history of the Rwandan Patriotic Front": "In most cases of mass killing since World War II­­ -- unlike the Holocaust -- the victim group has triggered its own demise by violently challenging the authority of the state."

Although he emphasizes that his theory is "not intended to excuse of justify the genocide in any way, but merely to understand more fully its causes," Kuperman's argument seems to come dangerously close to blaming the victims. While he would surely protest that he is blaming rebel groups and not the victims of the genocide (a polemical claim in and of itself), this is not at all clear when he says, "the victim group has triggered its own demise." (To be fair, with the exception of the opening sentence, the article focuses mostly on the RPF, not Tutsis in general.)

But I'll save the more general moral debate about whether or not a genocidal regime's culpability can be shared with a rebel group that has purportedly "provoked" genocide for another time. What I would like to focus on here is the specifics of Darfur.

I don't pretend to be an expert on Sudanese or Darfuri politics, and I agree with Kuperman when he says that the situation in Darfur is complex. However, it seems strange that after stressing that the situation there is not the "simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations," he would himself make claims like these:

The region's blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago -- denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. ... [The rebels] took up arms not to stop genocide -- which erupted only after they rebelled -- but to gain tribal domination.

To paint the situation during the maja al-gatila (the famine that kills) in Darfur in 1984-5 as one in which "blacks ... were the oppressors" is terribly simplistic in more than one way. Without lingering on the complexities of ethnicity in Darfur and the difficulty in categorizing Darfuris as either "black" or "Arab," the facile claim that "blacks" were oppressing "Arabs" seems to overlook the fact that the nearly 100,000 deaths during the famine were largely due to apathy or incompetence on the part of Khartoum. According to Prunier,

Everyone knew that this catastrophe would have been perfectly preventable with a little bit of planning, money and, especially, political will. Everyone knew that the mass deaths [hécatombe] were the result of Khartoum's negligence. But the consequences happened to be unequally distributed [translation mine].

The drought and famine forced the nomads to prematurely go south in search of grazing areas, which just so happened to be the meager and not-yet-harvested fields of the farmers. Alex de Waal, who has studied the famine in depth, describes the delicate balance that was violently disturbed in 1985 as the "moral geography" of Darfur.

Kuperman's other claim, that the rebels "picked up arms ... to gain tribal dominance," also seems to be woefully ill-informed. According to Julie Flint and de Waal, the roots of JEM go back to 1993, when the original aim was to reform the National Islamic Front (NIF) from within. Dissidents like Nur compiled evidence illustrating the economic and political marginalization of Darfur into a document they called "The Black Book." JEM purports to combat Darfur's status as an outlying periphery dominated by the center of Sudanese economic and political life. Nur explains the situation in Darfur thusly:

There was too much suffering. I travelled 60 kilometers to go to primary school, in Kornoi, when I was 7; 350 kilometers to go to intermediate school, in Geneina; 400 kilometers to go to secondary school, in Fasher; and 1,000 kilometers to go to university, in Khartoum. It was forbidden to speak the Zaghawa language in school. In primary school, the teacher gave us a blue ticket to pass to any boy who spoke Zaghawa. At the end of the day, anyone who had the ticket was whipped. The whole of Kutun province, with a population of more than 551,000, had one general doctor and no specialists. Women walked more than eight hours daily to get less than 60 liters of water. We were excluded from all key posts and had no way of communicating with the international community to ask for help.

JEM's five-point manifesto calls for a national solution to the Sudan's problems. It calls for a unified country, justice and equality rather than political repression, "radical and comprehensive constitutional reform," basic services for all Sudanese and human development in all the regions of Sudan.

The SLM/A, on the other hand, has its roots in Darfuri irregular militias that were created in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s when conflict was already rife in the region. In 1999 already, over 100,000 Masalit had fled to Chad.

The fact of the matter is that the events leading up to the genocide in Darfur are many and varied, involving the famine, the political situation in Chad, Libyan involvement and sometimes de facto ruling of Darfur, Islamic movements (both domestic and imported from Tripoli or Cairo) and a politics of systematic neglect of the periphery by the center in Khartoum. To say that the rebels provoked genocide by vying for tribal domination is either disingenuous or uninformed.

This is not to say that the Darfuri rebel movements are saints; we know that they are not. But that's not the point. Whether the rebel movements have "provoked" Khartoum is neither here nor there in the long run. The rebels, despite their claims to represent all of Darfur, are not the ethnic groups as a whole, just as the RPF is not synonymous with the Tutsis in Rwanda.

De Waal sums up the situation quite succinctly in his piece in the London Review of Books, "Counter-insurgency on the cheap":

The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers' claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.

And this brings me to Kuperman's advice not to intervene: ...we should let Sudan's army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes." It's hard to believe that such a naïve statement could be penned by anyone who has read much about the regime in Khartoum. We're talking about "routine cruelty" and "genocide by force of habit." What Kuperman doesn't see is that the Sudanese regime is "handling" the rebels in the same way it dealt with the South and the Nuba Mountains.

To lay the blame for such acts at the feet of the rebels (rather than at the feet of the regime committing genocide), or even worse, the "victim group," is morally irresponsible. The Fur and Zaghawa and other "black" tribes in Darfur are no more responsible for the organized campaign to destroy them than the Armenians were for their forced march into the sands of Syria.

If Alan Kuperman is content to take Khartoum at its word and trust that it will "eschew" the "war crimes" that it denies committing in the first place, allowing the regime to "handle" the rebels and "defend its sovereignty" in the meantime, I, for one, am not.

Kuperman advises the United States to announce a policy of non-intervention. This is confusing to me, because after all, isn't that the policy that Samantha Powers describes so well in her book, "A Problem from Hell"? Isn't that the policy that has been silently announced throughout the twentieth century to Armenians, Rwandans, Iraqi Kurds, Cambodians and now the Sudanese?

Here are a few interesting links that I've come across in the last few days:

A story from ABC about Chinese Muslims wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo and then finally released after 4.5 years. They couldn't be sent to China since the government there persecutes Uighurs, and despite being found innocent of any charges (NLEC, or No Longer Enemy Combattant, in Guantanamo Bay terminology - Mr Kafka could not have made this up if he had tried), being put away by the Americans for 4.5 years is enough to garner a bad reputation. So apparently, no country would take them, the US included, with the single and solitary exception of Albania:

We are very pleased that the Albanian government and the Albanian people opened their hearts and welcomed us. Despite the fact that all the strong, powerful, democratic countries are able and capable of accepting us, they did not do that. We are having some problems ... there are no Uighurs in Albania, and we don't speak the Albanian language. ...

Were hoping that the United States government would recognize the mistake that it has done and accept, allow us to enter the United States. U.S. government captured us, U.S. government incarcerated us, locked us up in prison, and U.S. government said that we were not a threat and should be released.

Uighur-Americans came forward, made an offer to the United States government to accept us into Uighur-American society and community. They even went into the courts and contacted the lawyers and wrote a letter to the U.S. government officials asking them to consider releasing us into the United States. Unfortunately, it did not happen, a rather disappointing decision.

Otherwise, the Post ran a really interesting first person piece about Iraq, the Republic of Fear, which makes one fearful that Baghdad is slowly but surely turning into Beirut, circa 1980:

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis. ...

Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed neighborhoods are "purified." In Amriya, dead bodies are being found on the main street at a rate of three or five or seven a day. People are afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, for fear that they, too, will be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya and other once-diverse neighborhoods, Shiites are being forced to leave. In Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are being targeted.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

This made me remember reading a piece in Harper's that said that maybe the best thing for Iraq would be for the US to withdraw and let them have their full-fledged civil war. (It was by Edward Luttwak and was adapted from a piece in Foreign Policy, which can be found here) The version in Harper's ends like this:

...American forces continue to suffer casualties in combat against factions that should be confronting one another instead. Perhaps what the new Iraqi state needs in order to achieve stability is precisely a certain amount of civil war. Preventing it may impede a natural and perhaps very desirable political evolution. Americans would not today be happier if European Great Powers, horrified by the carnage of our own Civil War, had enforced an armistice between North and South that might endure still between two feeble states. ...

It's hard for me to know what to make of this idea. I'm not convinced that an all-out civil war would result in anything but a division of Iraq, or even worse, a regional war that would involve Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and probably Turkey as well. The latter is obviously a horrible idea, but I haven't decided how I feel about the former.

Finally, the atrocities in Haditha make me think that maybe Luttuk and Rosen are right and the US should just get out as soon as possible.

I can't get over this. I know that similar things happened in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and I know that we're talking about kids who have been put in an extremely dangerous and stressful situation, and that sometimes people just crack. But I just don't understand how someone can shoot a one-legged man in a wheelchair nine times. Or how someone can shoot a 1-year old baby. Say that again: a 1-year old baby. I just don't understand.

At some point on Nov. 19, Marines in an armored convoy arrived at Haditha's hospital. They placed the bodies of the victims in the garden of the hospital and left without explanation, said Mohammed al-Hadithi, one of the hospital officials who helped carry the bodies inside. By some accounts, some of the corpses were burnt.

The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs' Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. "Democracy assassinated the family that was here," graffiti on one of the houses declared.

I just came across a piece by the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times entitled, If Iraq was wrong, is Darfur right?

The New Republic has recently come out with an issue on Darfur (only some of which is available to non-subscribers), and they come out as a whole for American intervention in Darfur. Kaplan's piece, however, brings up the question of Iraq and asks why it is all right to intervene in Darfur but not in Iraq:

As their criticism of the particulars of the Iraq war has hardened into a broader indictment of U.S. foreign policy, the mostly progressive voices calling for action in Darfur have become caught in a bind of their own devising. Even as they demand intervention in Sudan, they excoriate Washington for employing U.S. military power without due respect to the opinion of the international community and against nations that pose no imminent threat to our own -- which is to say, precisely the terms under which U.S. power would have to be employed in the name of saving Darfur.

He then goes on to argue that neither the African Union nor the UN will intervene or is capable of intervening, leaving the US as the only capable, if not willing, power equipped to intervene.

To my mind, the main reason why I am for intervention in Darfur but was against it in Iraq can be summed up in a single word: genocide. It's happening in Darfur but wasn't happening in Iraq. Now had the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s been continuing, I would have been for intervention in Iraq. This is not to say that genocide should be the threshold for international intervention, but it would at least be a good start. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) responds similarly to Kaplan's jab against him:

Once President Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word "genocide" to describe the carnage in Darfur, the United States and every other civilized nation had a moral imperative to act. Those who find it painful to explain the deception and misinformation preceding our invasion of Iraq should not hide behind the victims in Darfur.

As for whether or not the AU or UN could or would stop the genocide, the AU is already there but lacks a proper and muscular mandate that would allow their forces to protect civilians. As it is, they can only protect themselves. Likewise, when and if a UN force intervenes, it would be important for them to have a good mandate and be properly funded, because we know what happens to underfunded blue helmets without a real mandate. As it stands, there are 7,000 AU troops already in Darfur, which could be folded into a UN force; France has at least 1,000 troops in Chad already; and if the UK could be convinced to provide the 5,000 troops that they offered in 2004, then that would make a force of 13,000. Other nations like South Africa and Ghana could also donate more troops, and the US could help shoulder the financial and logistics costs of such an intervention.

While writing this, I've come across an interesting (and much more detailed) plan by the International Crisis Group To Save Darfur, which is similar to my idea:

Crisis Group has long contended that because AMIS has reached the outer limits of its competence, and a UN mission authorised today would not be fully ready to take over from it for some six months, a distinct and separate multinational force should be sent to Darfur to bridge that gap and help stabilise the immediate situation. We have argued, and continue to believe, that NATO would be best from a practical military point of view. Unfortunately, political opposition to this in Khartoum, within the AU and even perhaps within the Atlantic Alliance itself, means it is not achievable at this time.

What we now propose, therefore, is a compromise driven by the urgent need for a more robust force in Darfur. A militarily capable UN member state -- France seems most promising since it already has troops and aircraft in the area -- should offer to the Security Council to go now to Darfur, wearing blue helmets, as the lead nation in the first phase of the incoming UN mission. It could be joined from the outset by forces from one or two other militarily capable UN members (and would probably need to be if the desirable target of around 5,000 personnel for this force is to be achieved). This stabilisation force would be a self-contained, separately commanded UN mission with identified functional or geographic divisions of responsibility that would work beside AMIS and through a liaison unit at its headquarters until arrangements were in place for a 1 October transition to the full UN mission. That full mission would need to be recruited from the best AMIS elements as well as a wider circle of Asian and other member states -- no easy task at a time when several large UN peacekeeping missions in Africa and elsewhere have exhausted the capabilities of many contribution candidates.

The U.S. and other NATO states should respond generously and quickly to requests from it or AMIS to provide logistical help as well as regular access to satellite imagery, air mobility and close air support, especially to deter or react to egregious movements of men or heavy weapons in the border area.

They finish by coming up with a list of recommendations for each of the major parties involved (with the exception of the belligerent parties):

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the African Union:

1. Request the immediate deployment of a UN-mandated stabilisation force to help bolster the AMIS troops and focus on the Chad-Sudan border and the Tawila-Graida corridor.

2. Seek quick negotiation of a single, enhanced ceasefire document to remove the ambiguities of the existing overlapping agreements.

3. Begin immediately to map the location of forces in Darfur so as to manage and enforce the ceasefire better.

4. Begin immediately identifying, defining and profiling the government-allied militias.

5. Improve the reporting mechanisms and procedures for monitoring ceasefire violations and urgently revive and upgrade the compliance and sanctions mechanisms of the ceasefire.

6. Negotiate a series of humanitarian ground rules, in collaboration with the UN, to help hold the parties accountable for the protection of humanitarian operations in their respective areas.

To the United Nations Security Council:

7. Authorise a two-phase intervention in Darfur under Chapter Seven of the Charter, with the following elements:

(a) for the first phase, to be accomplished within a month, a lead nation would serve as the advance element of the full UN mission by sending the bulk of an initial 5,000 troops to Darfur, with three main stabilisation tasks:

i. interdiction of military activities across the Chad-Darfur border;

ii. protection of civilians in Darfur, primarily in the Tawilla-Graida corridor; and

iii. rapid-reaction support of AMIS forces until the transition to a full-fledged UN peace support operation in October 2006.

(b) for the second phase, immediate planning for a peace support operation of some 15,000 troops -- none of whom should be diverted from the mission of the existing UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) -- with a mandate emphasising civilian protection, ceasefire enforcement and monitoring of the Chad-Sudan border, to take over from AMIS as of 1 October 2006.

8. Strengthen the existing sanctions regime by implementing the recommendations in the 30 January 2006 report of the Panel of Experts.

9. Authorise the Secretariat's peacekeeping department (DPKO) to begin planning on an urgent basis and together with the AU both phases of this operation, with priority tasks to include:

(a) identifying areas for early cooperation in Darfur, such as immediate deployment of UN experts to help support the establishment of a functioning ceasefire commission secretariat and the deployment of human rights monitors and translators, including women, to help improve the reporting capacity of AMIS; and

(b) identifying the lead nation to deploy in the initial phase to support AMIS by performing the tasks set out in recommendation 7(a) above and serve as the advance element of the full UN mission.

To Donor Governments:

10. Convene an early pledging conference to ensure that AMIS is fully funded until the UN mission can take over in October 2006.

To the U.S., the EU and its member states and others with a strong interest in regional peace and stability:

11. Undertake major diplomatic efforts to:

(a) persuade Sudan to accept and the AU to confirm transition of AMIS into a strong UN peacekeeping mission as of 1 October 2006 and request in the interim dispatch of an advance force of some 5,000 blue-helmets to assist AMIS by performing essential stabilisation tasks;

(b) persuade the Security Council to authorise a mission of some 15,000, including the strongest AMIS elements and with a strong Chapter VII mandate focused on civilian protection; and

(c) identify the lead nation to contribute the bulk of the advance element to assist AMIS and perform essential stabilisation tasks immediately upon Security Council authorisation, and be prepared to help with all necessary material and logistical support.

12. Concurrently with efforts to strengthen international forces on the ground, pursue the other elements of a coordinated three-part strategy to resolve the Darfur conflict by:

(a) reinforcing AU efforts to negotiate an enhanced ceasefire and a political settlement at Abuja, including by naming special envoys; and

(b) seeking accountability and an end to impunity by enforcing the Security Council's sanction regime and supporting human rights monitoring mechanisms and the work of the ICC.

An article in the Post reports today that Iranian President Ahmadinejad sent a letter to President Bush in order to propose "new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation in the world." It mentions the quote put forth by the Times that Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." Since this comment was reported on, it has been used as a reason why Iran should not have nuclear weapons. I've been somewhat skeptical about the translation, and as it turns out, there is some disagreement about what was actually said. This disagreement has pitted Christopher Hitchens against Juan Cole, the latter being the only one of the two who actually speaks Farsi. A good summary of the online fight can be found here.

The actual sentence in question seems to be this: "een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad." I don't speak Farsi, but several of my colleagues are Iranian, and I've sent them the text to see what they think about it. The only word I can recognize is qods which is Farsi for al Quds, which is Jerusalem in English. Cole's translation is "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time." As it turns out, the Israeli group Memri offers a translation that is very similar to Cole's ("eliminated from the pages of history").

As it turns out, after the comments, the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki denied the remarks:

Mottaki also denied during a press conference in Brussels that Tehran wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map."

"Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," he said. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime."

Another denial came on CNN's Late Edition from Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh:

SOLTANIEH: The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has announced, more than two years, and few cases, the Western media have reflected to public of the world, that if the divine religions -- followers of the divine religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims, in that area follow a referendum, democratic referendum, and are one (ph) with homeless Palestinians, Iranian government and Iranian people would respect their decision.

Therefore, these are fabricated news that they are threatening and using this as an excuse for the military aggression or the aggressive policy. [...]

BLITZER: I have to wrap this up, but I want to get your response to this issue of Israel because it's become such a prominent issue in this whole discussion over nuclear plans that Iran may or may not have. This is what the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on October 26 at that World Without Zionism conference.

He said, "Israel must be wiped off the map of the world, and god willing, with the force of god behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionists."

You understand why people in the West, especially here in the United States, are so concerned about your program, your nuclear program, given those kinds of direct threats against Israel, which happens to be a strong ally of the United States.

SOLTANIEH: I want to very briefly remind you that the policy of Islamic Republic of Iran and according to spirit and letter of our constitution is against any sort of school of thought or regime such as apartheid, Zionism, racism, and this is a matter of principle.

Therefore, what you are talking about as apartheid was disappeared and it could not be accepted by civilized world, this Zionism and aggression of racism is also condemned. [...]

BLITZER: Does your support for the removal of Zionism mean you want to see Israel destroyed?

SOLTANIEH: I have already explained to you and reflected to you the policy echoed by our supreme leader.

It means that if in that region, the divine religion followers of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, that all three are very respectful -- and we have Jews in Iran, which are peacefully living and they are represented in our parliament, they are fully respected -- if they come with the Palestinians, homeless Palestinians, to come and through following the democratic process will decide on a government and live in peace as they were living a thousand years of coexistence of these divine religions, Iran will support because we are looking for and we support peaceful settlement of the whole issue and peaceful coexistence of these divine religions in the Middle East. Let's hope for the peace.

BLITZER: But should there be a state of Israel?

SOLTANIEH: I think I've already answered to you. If Israel is a synonym and will give the indication of Zionism mentality, no.

But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or we they have to be massacred or so, this is fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so.

So it seems that the statements by Ahmadinejad, or at the very least official Iranian policy, is much more nuanced than the Western media would have us believe. Furthermore, it is important to remember that Ahmadinejad does not control Iranian foreign policy. In an interesting article in the New York Review about Iran and the bomb, Christopher de Bellaigue has this to say:

Iran's enmity toward Israel is more nuanced than Ahmadinejad's statements suggest. The President's declarations that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and that the Holocaust is a "myth," understandably aroused fears that Iran might be considering an attack on Israel. But Iran's senior civilian and military officials have insisted that Iran will strike Israel only if Israel strikes first. More significantly, the President and supreme leader have both reiterated Iran's longstanding demand for a referendum on the status of Israel that would involve all Palestinian refugees. This official position would not seem to be consistent with an ambition to destroy Israel by force, least of all by using nuclear arms, which would endanger the very Palestinians whom the Iranians claim to be protecting. Several senior Iranian officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who heads a powerful arbitration council in Tehran, have not disguised their irritation with the President's comments. But Ahmadinejad has benefited from the furor. By raising his prestige among hard-line Islamists around the world, the President has made it harder for his domestic opponents, who include Rafsanjani, to undermine him.

I will post the English translation later this week, once my Iranian colleagues have had the chance to get back to me.

I've had my fair share of visa problems in the last year or two. I've had Libya, Sudan and now Syria all do their best to stop me from visiting. I've given up on the first two for the time being, but I'm still holding out for Syria.

So I'm in Beirut for the time being. It's difficult to work on my Arabic here, because classes are prohibitively expensive, and almost everyone speaks English or French much better than I speak Arabic. It seems like a little bubble here in Beirut. A bubble filled with beautiful women, bars and short skirts.

A few hours away, Israel has taken out several bridges, destroyed electricity transformers in Gaza, and detained a third of Hamas' cabinet and an unknown number of lawmakers. The Israelis have flown over Syrian President Assad's summer house on the coast and spoken of attacking the leader of Hamas' military wing, who lives in Damascus. On all sides of Lebanon, the tension can be felt, but here, we?re going out and drinking, watching the world cup and sipping coffee.

Brazil beat Ghana the other night; there were fireworks and dancing in the streets.

In his op-ed, A Threat That Belongs Behind Bars, professor Eric Posner informs us that the indefinite detention of "dangerous aliens," regardless of whether or not they have committed a crime, should not be opposed on general principle. While it is true that there are precedents of such action in the alien and sedition acts and the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, it is both disappointing and disconcerting that such black spots on American history are being held up as a defense of unconscionable behavior not befit of a civilized democracy. In these times, when the United States is committing torture, unlawful detentions and violent war crimes in the name of the war on terror, what our nation needs are more, not fewer, appeals to general principle.

I've just arrived in Beirut after a hectic few days of getting everything prepared for this trip. I'll be in the Middle East until September and will be trying to blog from here as much as possible - hopefully more than usual.

I never managed to get my visa for Syria, so I'll probably try my luck at the border in the next few days. Some friends want me to come to Jordan, but you have to go through Syria to get to Jordan from Lebanon, so I might not be able to make it, which would be a shame, because it would be nice to stay with a family in Amman and then maybe go visit Petra as well.

There is a certain sense of home that I feel here in Beirut. I felt it the first time I came, and I'm feeling it again, now that I'm back. There was the same sign of Ronald McDonald saying "Welcome to Lebanon" at the airport and I was able to direct the cab driver directly to my friend's place, no small feat considering how bad my sense of direction is.

I lucked out at the airport, because there was some sort of a problem with the visa stand, so they just let everyone have their visa for free. It's only $17, but it's a nice feeling all the same.

I'm going to try to post pictures from time to time also, because I think this blog needs some spicing up...

Esquire magazing has an interesting piece on John Walker Lindh, the American guy who was fighting in the ranks of the Taliban against the Northern Alliance when the US invaded in 2001. Strangely, part of his sentence is that he's not allowed to speak Arabic in prison, which means he cannot pray out loud. Talking to a friend of mine last night about the article, he reacted to it by saying that if the sentence isn't cruel, it certainly is unusual.

The article is a little long and written with an odd tone of deference or piety that I'm not sure really works, but it is very interesting and worth a read nonetheless.

An editorial in le Monde today takes the US to task for Guantanamo Bay (in French, translation mine):

Upon the discovery of the suicide of three detainees, two Saudis and one Yemeni, the reaction of the commander of the camp in Guantanamo illustrates the gulf that separates American authorities from the rest of the world on the sinister issue of the prison in Guantanamo. The collective suicide is "an act of asymmetric war waged against us," declared Rear Admiral Harry Harris on 10 June. Colleen Graffy, in charge of public diplomacy at the State Department, qualified the detainees' gesture as a "good PR move to draw attention."

Without falling into otherworldliness faced with the essential fight against international terrorism, how can we make the United States listen to reason about this black stain on the democratic world that the prison in Guantanamo has become? Because, when Admiral Harris evokes an act of war against America, he is forgetting that American blindness towards the treatment of the detainees suspected of belonging to Al-Qaida, in Guantanamo or in the secret prisons run by the CIA, exposes all western democracies to Islamic propaganda and radicalization. It is to our suburbs and our Muslim communities in Europe that the recruiters of Al-Qaida and other fundamentalist proselytizers come to fill their ranks, with arguments graciously given to them by the military leaders of the Pentagon and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

It hasn't been enough to say that Guantanamo Bay, opened in January 2002 and where 460 prisoners are still being held without trial, is legal nonsense; it hasn't been enough to say that it constitutes a flagrant violation of international law and human rights; it hasn't been enough to write that it is unworthy of a country universally admired for having established respect for the rule of law in its constitutional system; it hasn't been enough to show surprise that the Bush administration manifests, by its stubbornness, such disdain for its own Supreme Court, which told it in June 2004 to authorize the Guantanamo detainees to defend themselves before an American civil court, and for public opinion, which, after an initial indifference, has included a growing number of voices denouncing the conditions in the prison. Nor has it been enough to bring up relevant historical errors, from the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to Margaret Thatcher's vain stubbornness faced with IRA members on hunger strike in 1981.

The United States remains deaf to all these arguments. The least that European leaders can do from now on is to no longer hold high level meetings with Americans without demanding the closing of Guantanamo Bay. The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has recently served as a good example. The French should follow suit.

In addition to Kuperman's piece, David Rieff has also penned a case against intervention in Darfur in the New Republic, which Reeves hotly and thoroughly counters.

He sees the issue through the lense of Iraq in 2003 instead of, say, Rwanda in 1994 or Iraq during the genocidal al Anfal campaign to Arabize Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1908s. Rieff casts doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and says that those who call for intervention in Darfur are ignoring the politics of Darfur (which he seems to be less than well-versed in himself, the truth be told):

Were politics present in their thinking, pro-Darfuri intervention activists would not use the reductionist dichotomy of victims and abusers that has been the staple myth of humanitarian intervention. The people being killed by the Janjaweed have political interests. So do the extended families of the Janjaweed themselves, who, lest we forget, are also Darfuris. To describe the former simply as victims deprives them of any agency. To describe the latter simply as killers precludes actually understanding the conflict as anything other than an eruption of human wickedness, rather like a volcano or an earthquake.

One debilitating defect of the liberal interventionism is that it ignores the political implications of what it calls for. ...

...[A]n intervention, however good it may be for the Darfuris, may be terrible for the rest of the world.

Reeves criticizes Rieff for mistakenly attributing secessionist ambitions to the Darfuri rebels, not discussion the spread of the genocide into Chad, irresponsibly casting doubt on the reality of genocide in Darfur and generally being ignorant on Darfuri politics.

In fact, we must wonder what "agency" a nine-year-old girl has when she is brutally gang-raped by the Janjaweed, or what "agency" a five-year-old boy has as he is thrown screaming into a bonfire along with his brothers, or indeed what "agency" a one-year-old boy has when the Janjaweed slice off his penis and he bleeds to death. "Political interests" here is an abstraction that can have meaning for very few besides David Rieff. There are real political issues in Darfur, including competition over natural resources and power in governance, as well as competing visions of equitable distribution of land and wealth. Rieff captures none of this in his account.

If the Abuja accord does fail, if violence then inevitably rapidly escalates in Darfur and Chad, it will be too late for hundreds of thousands of lives. We have simply waited too long, with too many sufficiently encouraged by specious arguments of the sort so abundant in Rieff's account. In this sense it is perhaps useful to have Rieff articulate his factitious "realism," to invoke so glibly the difficult "politics" of Darfur, to pretend that Iraq has somehow changed the imperative of responding to massive genocidal destruction.

Anne-Marie Slaughter writes in her TMPCafe piece, Rethinking Darfur that after reading Kuperman and Rieff, she's having second thoughts. She doesn't go into any specifics, but the gist of her piece is that maybe we shouldn't intervene, because the situation is complicated:

I want to help the victims of the Janjaweed as much as anyone. But the Europeans have been arguing for some time that the situation is far more complicated than a simple morality tale would make it out to be. And surely if Iraq has taught us anything, it is to think very hard about what happens AFTER we go in and stop the initial killing. It may well be that even if an AU solution is slower and less effective up front, it will be more effective over the long term, whereas if the U.S. or NATO go in, we will find ourselves again "in charge" of a situation we barely understand and cannot control, ultimately visiting yet more chaos and death on the very people we seek to help.

To my mind, this is similar to seeing a woman getting raped and murdered on the street and hesitating to do anything about it because the situation is likely to be complicated. What will other people in the neighbourhood think if I intervene? What did that woman do to make those men decide to rape and murder her?

Of course the situation is complicated, as are most conflicts. We don't live in a world of black and white, and we never have. Just because the sitauation surrounding a genocide is complex does not mean that there is any less of a moral imperative to stop it. The politics of Darfur are complex, as were the politics of Rwanda in 1994. What is not complex is that genocide is being committed, and either one believes that genocide carries the weight of a moral imperative or it doesn't. Finally, Slaughter seems more interested in wringing her hands and hoping against all odds for the best. Rieff at least calls a spade a spade when he asks brings up the idea that even if intervention is better for Darfuris, maybe it would be bad for the rest of the world.

This is an interesting question that smacks of utilitarianism. But before answering it, we should ask ourselves two questions: First, given the number of dead incurred during World War II, should the international community have given up Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria and the Jews in those countries in order to avoid the tens of millions of deaths that were a result of direct military confrontation between Axis and Allied powers? And second, are we sure that there will not be more death and conflict as a result of allowing a genocide to happen?

The first question is of a moral nature and can be difficult in some instances, if not in this one. The second one is about history and its consequences. Would the Congo be such a hellhole if we had not let the Rwandan genocide come to pass? In the case of Darfur, it is important to look at what this genocide means for Chad, and by consequence, the Central African Republic and Cameroon. If Khartoum is emboldened and allowed to topple Deby's (distasteful) regime in Chad, the bloody and ongoing history of the Congo might repeat itself.

I would like to comment on Alan Kuperman's polemical piece in the New York Times yesterday (31 May), "Strategic Victimhood in Sudan." In this particular article, Kuperman tells us that the regime in Khartoum responded to Darfuri rebel insurgency with genocide, and that "[b]ecause of the Save Darfur movement ... the rebels believe that the longer they provoke genocidal retaliation, the more the West will pressure," which has in turn led the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) movement and Nur's part of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) to reject the recent peace treaty signed at Abuja.

Kuperman's analysis of events is not specific to his take on Sudanese politics; rather it is but further evidence of his larger hypothesis. Generally speaking, the crux of his argument can be found in the first sentence of an article he wrote on the Rwandan genocide, "Provoking genocide: A revised history of the Rwandan Patriotic Front": "In most cases of mass killing since World War II­­ -- unlike the Holocaust -- the victim group has triggered its own demise by violently challenging the authority of the state."

Although he emphasizes that his theory is "not intended to excuse of justify the genocide in any way, but merely to understand more fully its causes," Kuperman's argument seems to come dangerously close to blaming the victims. While he would surely protest that he is blaming rebel groups and not the victims of the genocide (a polemical claim in and of itself), this is not at all clear when he says, "the victim group has triggered its own demise." (To be fair, with the exception of the opening sentence, the article focuses mostly on the RPF, not Tutsis in general.)

But I'll save the more general moral debate about whether or not a genocidal regime's culpability can be shared with a rebel group that has purportedly "provoked" genocide for another time. What I would like to focus on here is the specifics of Darfur.

I don't pretend to be an expert on Sudanese or Darfuri politics, and I agree with Kuperman when he says that the situation in Darfur is complex. However, it seems strange that after stressing that the situation there is not the "simplistic morality tale purveyed by the news media and humanitarian organizations," he would himself make claims like these:

The region's blacks, painted as long-suffering victims, actually were the oppressors less than two decades ago -- denying Arab nomads access to grazing areas essential to their survival. ... [The rebels] took up arms not to stop genocide -- which erupted only after they rebelled -- but to gain tribal domination.

To paint the situation during the maja al-gatila (the famine that kills) in Darfur in 1984-5 as one in which "blacks ... were the oppressors" is terribly simplistic in more than one way. Without lingering on the complexities of ethnicity in Darfur and the difficulty in categorizing Darfuris as either "black" or "Arab," the facile claim that "blacks" were oppressing "Arabs" seems to overlook the fact that the nearly 100,000 deaths during the famine were largely due to apathy or incompetence on the part of Khartoum. According to Prunier,

Everyone knew that this catastrophe would have been perfectly preventable with a little bit of planning, money and, especially, political will. Everyone knew that the mass deaths [hécatombe] were the result of Khartoum's negligence. But the consequences happened to be unequally distributed [translation mine].

The drought and famine forced the nomads to prematurely go south in search of grazing areas, which just so happened to be the meager and not-yet-harvested fields of the farmers. Alex de Waal, who has studied the famine in depth, describes the delicate balance that was violently disturbed in 1985 as the "moral geography" of Darfur.

Kuperman's other claim, that the rebels "picked up arms ... to gain tribal dominance," also seems to be woefully ill-informed. According to Julie Flint and de Waal, the roots of JEM go back to 1993, when the original aim was to reform the National Islamic Front (NIF) from within. Dissidents like Nur compiled evidence illustrating the economic and political marginalization of Darfur into a document they called "The Black Book." JEM purports to combat Darfur's status as an outlying periphery dominated by the center of Sudanese economic and political life. Nur explains the situation in Darfur thusly:

There was too much suffering. I travelled 60 kilometers to go to primary school, in Kornoi, when I was 7; 350 kilometers to go to intermediate school, in Geneina; 400 kilometers to go to secondary school, in Fasher; and 1,000 kilometers to go to university, in Khartoum. It was forbidden to speak the Zaghawa language in school. In primary school, the teacher gave us a blue ticket to pass to any boy who spoke Zaghawa. At the end of the day, anyone who had the ticket was whipped. The whole of Kutun province, with a population of more than 551,000, had one general doctor and no specialists. Women walked more than eight hours daily to get less than 60 liters of water. We were excluded from all key posts and had no way of communicating with the international community to ask for help.

JEM's five-point manifesto calls for a national solution to the Sudan's problems. It calls for a unified country, justice and equality rather than political repression, "radical and comprehensive constitutional reform," basic services for all Sudanese and human development in all the regions of Sudan.

The SLM/A, on the other hand, has its roots in Darfuri irregular militias that were created in the 1980s and continued throughout the 1990s when conflict was already rife in the region. In 1999 already, over 100,000 Masalit had fled to Chad.

The fact of the matter is that the events leading up to the genocide in Darfur are many and varied, involving the famine, the political situation in Chad, Libyan involvement and sometimes de facto ruling of Darfur, Islamic movements (both domestic and imported from Tripoli or Cairo) and a politics of systematic neglect of the periphery by the center in Khartoum. To say that the rebels provoked genocide by vying for tribal domination is either disingenuous or uninformed.

This is not to say that the Darfuri rebel movements are saints; we know that they are not. But that's not the point. Whether the rebel movements have "provoked" Khartoum is neither here nor there in the long run. The rebels, despite their claims to represent all of Darfur, are not the ethnic groups as a whole, just as the RPF is not synonymous with the Tutsis in Rwanda.

De Waal sums up the situation quite succinctly in his piece in the London Review of Books, "Counter-insurgency on the cheap":

The atrocities carried out by the Janjawiid are aimed at speakers of Fur, Tunjur, Masalit and Zaghawa. They are systematic and sustained; the effect, if not the aim, is grossly disproportionate to the military threat of the rebellion. The mass rape and branding of victims speaks of the deliberate destruction of a community. In Darfur, cutting down fruit trees or destroying irrigation ditches is a way of eradicating farmers' claims to the land and ruining livelihoods. But this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.

And this brings me to Kuperman's advice not to intervene: ...we should let Sudan's army handle any recalcitrant rebels, on condition that it eschew war crimes." It's hard to believe that such a naïve statement could be penned by anyone who has read much about the regime in Khartoum. We're talking about "routine cruelty" and "genocide by force of habit." What Kuperman doesn't see is that the Sudanese regime is "handling" the rebels in the same way it dealt with the South and the Nuba Mountains.

To lay the blame for such acts at the feet of the rebels (rather than at the feet of the regime committing genocide), or even worse, the "victim group," is morally irresponsible. The Fur and Zaghawa and other "black" tribes in Darfur are no more responsible for the organized campaign to destroy them than the Armenians were for their forced march into the sands of Syria.

If Alan Kuperman is content to take Khartoum at its word and trust that it will "eschew" the "war crimes" that it denies committing in the first place, allowing the regime to "handle" the rebels and "defend its sovereignty" in the meantime, I, for one, am not.

Kuperman advises the United States to announce a policy of non-intervention. This is confusing to me, because after all, isn't that the policy that Samantha Powers describes so well in her book, "A Problem from Hell"? Isn't that the policy that has been silently announced throughout the twentieth century to Armenians, Rwandans, Iraqi Kurds, Cambodians and now the Sudanese?

Here are a few interesting links that I've come across in the last few days:

A story from ABC about Chinese Muslims wrongly imprisoned in Guantanamo and then finally released after 4.5 years. They couldn't be sent to China since the government there persecutes Uighurs, and despite being found innocent of any charges (NLEC, or No Longer Enemy Combattant, in Guantanamo Bay terminology - Mr Kafka could not have made this up if he had tried), being put away by the Americans for 4.5 years is enough to garner a bad reputation. So apparently, no country would take them, the US included, with the single and solitary exception of Albania:

We are very pleased that the Albanian government and the Albanian people opened their hearts and welcomed us. Despite the fact that all the strong, powerful, democratic countries are able and capable of accepting us, they did not do that. We are having some problems ... there are no Uighurs in Albania, and we don't speak the Albanian language. ...

Were hoping that the United States government would recognize the mistake that it has done and accept, allow us to enter the United States. U.S. government captured us, U.S. government incarcerated us, locked us up in prison, and U.S. government said that we were not a threat and should be released.

Uighur-Americans came forward, made an offer to the United States government to accept us into Uighur-American society and community. They even went into the courts and contacted the lawyers and wrote a letter to the U.S. government officials asking them to consider releasing us into the United States. Unfortunately, it did not happen, a rather disappointing decision.

Otherwise, the Post ran a really interesting first person piece about Iraq, the Republic of Fear, which makes one fearful that Baghdad is slowly but surely turning into Beirut, circa 1980:

Today, the Americans are just one more militia lost in the anarchy. They, too, are killing Iraqis. ...

Sectarian and ethnic cleansing has since continued apace, as mixed neighborhoods are "purified." In Amriya, dead bodies are being found on the main street at a rate of three or five or seven a day. People are afraid to approach the bodies, or call for an ambulance or the police, for fear that they, too, will be found dead the following day. In Abu Ghraib, Dora, Amriya and other once-diverse neighborhoods, Shiites are being forced to leave. In Maalif and Shaab, Sunnis are being targeted.

The world wonders if Iraq is on the brink of civil war, while Iraqis fear calling it one, knowing the fate such a description would portend. In truth, the civil war started long before Samarra and long before the first uprisings. It started when U.S. troops arrived in Baghdad. It began when Sunnis discovered what they had lost, and Shiites learned what they had gained. And the worst is yet to come.

This made me remember reading a piece in Harper's that said that maybe the best thing for Iraq would be for the US to withdraw and let them have their full-fledged civil war. (It was by Edward Luttwak and was adapted from a piece in Foreign Policy, which can be found here) The version in Harper's ends like this:

...American forces continue to suffer casualties in combat against factions that should be confronting one another instead. Perhaps what the new Iraqi state needs in order to achieve stability is precisely a certain amount of civil war. Preventing it may impede a natural and perhaps very desirable political evolution. Americans would not today be happier if European Great Powers, horrified by the carnage of our own Civil War, had enforced an armistice between North and South that might endure still between two feeble states. ...

It's hard for me to know what to make of this idea. I'm not convinced that an all-out civil war would result in anything but a division of Iraq, or even worse, a regional war that would involve Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and probably Turkey as well. The latter is obviously a horrible idea, but I haven't decided how I feel about the former.

Finally, the atrocities in Haditha make me think that maybe Luttuk and Rosen are right and the US should just get out as soon as possible.

I can't get over this. I know that similar things happened in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and I know that we're talking about kids who have been put in an extremely dangerous and stressful situation, and that sometimes people just crack. But I just don't understand how someone can shoot a one-legged man in a wheelchair nine times. Or how someone can shoot a 1-year old baby. Say that again: a 1-year old baby. I just don't understand.

At some point on Nov. 19, Marines in an armored convoy arrived at Haditha's hospital. They placed the bodies of the victims in the garden of the hospital and left without explanation, said Mohammed al-Hadithi, one of the hospital officials who helped carry the bodies inside. By some accounts, some of the corpses were burnt.

The remains of the 24 lie today in a cemetery called Martyrs' Graveyard. Stray dogs scrounge in the deserted homes. "Democracy assassinated the family that was here," graffiti on one of the houses declared.

I just came across a piece by the New Republic's Lawrence Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times entitled, If Iraq was wrong, is Darfur right?

The New Republic has recently come out with an issue on Darfur (only some of which is available to non-subscribers), and they come out as a whole for American intervention in Darfur. Kaplan's piece, however, brings up the question of Iraq and asks why it is all right to intervene in Darfur but not in Iraq:

As their criticism of the particulars of the Iraq war has hardened into a broader indictment of U.S. foreign policy, the mostly progressive voices calling for action in Darfur have become caught in a bind of their own devising. Even as they demand intervention in Sudan, they excoriate Washington for employing U.S. military power without due respect to the opinion of the international community and against nations that pose no imminent threat to our own -- which is to say, precisely the terms under which U.S. power would have to be employed in the name of saving Darfur.

He then goes on to argue that neither the African Union nor the UN will intervene or is capable of intervening, leaving the US as the only capable, if not willing, power equipped to intervene.

To my mind, the main reason why I am for intervention in Darfur but was against it in Iraq can be summed up in a single word: genocide. It's happening in Darfur but wasn't happening in Iraq. Now had the Anfal campaign of the late 1980s been continuing, I would have been for intervention in Iraq. This is not to say that genocide should be the threshold for international intervention, but it would at least be a good start. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) responds similarly to Kaplan's jab against him:

Once President Bush and former Secretary of State Colin Powell used the word "genocide" to describe the carnage in Darfur, the United States and every other civilized nation had a moral imperative to act. Those who find it painful to explain the deception and misinformation preceding our invasion of Iraq should not hide behind the victims in Darfur.

As for whether or not the AU or UN could or would stop the genocide, the AU is already there but lacks a proper and muscular mandate that would allow their forces to protect civilians. As it is, they can only protect themselves. Likewise, when and if a UN force intervenes, it would be important for them to have a good mandate and be properly funded, because we know what happens to underfunded blue helmets without a real mandate. As it stands, there are 7,000 AU troops already in Darfur, which could be folded into a UN force; France has at least 1,000 troops in Chad already; and if the UK could be convinced to provide the 5,000 troops that they offered in 2004, then that would make a force of 13,000. Other nations like South Africa and Ghana could also donate more troops, and the US could help shoulder the financial and logistics costs of such an intervention.

While writing this, I've come across an interesting (and much more detailed) plan by the International Crisis Group To Save Darfur, which is similar to my idea:

Crisis Group has long contended that because AMIS has reached the outer limits of its competence, and a UN mission authorised today would not be fully ready to take over from it for some six months, a distinct and separate multinational force should be sent to Darfur to bridge that gap and help stabilise the immediate situation. We have argued, and continue to believe, that NATO would be best from a practical military point of view. Unfortunately, political opposition to this in Khartoum, within the AU and even perhaps within the Atlantic Alliance itself, means it is not achievable at this time.

What we now propose, therefore, is a compromise driven by the urgent need for a more robust force in Darfur. A militarily capable UN member state -- France seems most promising since it already has troops and aircraft in the area -- should offer to the Security Council to go now to Darfur, wearing blue helmets, as the lead nation in the first phase of the incoming UN mission. It could be joined from the outset by forces from one or two other militarily capable UN members (and would probably need to be if the desirable target of around 5,000 personnel for this force is to be achieved). This stabilisation force would be a self-contained, separately commanded UN mission with identified functional or geographic divisions of responsibility that would work beside AMIS and through a liaison unit at its headquarters until arrangements were in place for a 1 October transition to the full UN mission. That full mission would need to be recruited from the best AMIS elements as well as a wider circle of Asian and other member states -- no easy task at a time when several large UN peacekeeping missions in Africa and elsewhere have exhausted the capabilities of many contribution candidates.

The U.S. and other NATO states should respond generously and quickly to requests from it or AMIS to provide logistical help as well as regular access to satellite imagery, air mobility and close air support, especially to deter or react to egregious movements of men or heavy weapons in the border area.

They finish by coming up with a list of recommendations for each of the major parties involved (with the exception of the belligerent parties):

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the African Union:

1. Request the immediate deployment of a UN-mandated stabilisation force to help bolster the AMIS troops and focus on the Chad-Sudan border and the Tawila-Graida corridor.

2. Seek quick negotiation of a single, enhanced ceasefire document to remove the ambiguities of the existing overlapping agreements.

3. Begin immediately to map the location of forces in Darfur so as to manage and enforce the ceasefire better.

4. Begin immediately identifying, defining and profiling the government-allied militias.

5. Improve the reporting mechanisms and procedures for monitoring ceasefire violations and urgently revive and upgrade the compliance and sanctions mechanisms of the ceasefire.

6. Negotiate a series of humanitarian ground rules, in collaboration with the UN, to help hold the parties accountable for the protection of humanitarian operations in their respective areas.

To the United Nations Security Council:

7. Authorise a two-phase intervention in Darfur under Chapter Seven of the Charter, with the following elements:

(a) for the first phase, to be accomplished within a month, a lead nation would serve as the advance element of the full UN mission by sending the bulk of an initial 5,000 troops to Darfur, with three main stabilisation tasks:

i. interdiction of military activities across the Chad-Darfur border;

ii. protection of civilians in Darfur, primarily in the Tawilla-Graida corridor; and

iii. rapid-reaction support of AMIS forces until the transition to a full-fledged UN peace support operation in October 2006.

(b) for the second phase, immediate planning for a peace support operation of some 15,000 troops -- none of whom should be diverted from the mission of the existing UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) -- with a mandate emphasising civilian protection, ceasefire enforcement and monitoring of the Chad-Sudan border, to take over from AMIS as of 1 October 2006.

8. Strengthen the existing sanctions regime by implementing the recommendations in the 30 January 2006 report of the Panel of Experts.

9. Authorise the Secretariat's peacekeeping department (DPKO) to begin planning on an urgent basis and together with the AU both phases of this operation, with priority tasks to include:

(a) identifying areas for early cooperation in Darfur, such as immediate deployment of UN experts to help support the establishment of a functioning ceasefire commission secretariat and the deployment of human rights monitors and translators, including women, to help improve the reporting capacity of AMIS; and

(b) identifying the lead nation to deploy in the initial phase to support AMIS by performing the tasks set out in recommendation 7(a) above and serve as the advance element of the full UN mission.

To Donor Governments:

10. Convene an early pledging conference to ensure that AMIS is fully funded until the UN mission can take over in October 2006.

To the U.S., the EU and its member states and others with a strong interest in regional peace and stability:

11. Undertake major diplomatic efforts to:

(a) persuade Sudan to accept and the AU to confirm transition of AMIS into a strong UN peacekeeping mission as of 1 October 2006 and request in the interim dispatch of an advance force of some 5,000 blue-helmets to assist AMIS by performing essential stabilisation tasks;

(b) persuade the Security Council to authorise a mission of some 15,000, including the strongest AMIS elements and with a strong Chapter VII mandate focused on civilian protection; and

(c) identify the lead nation to contribute the bulk of the advance element to assist AMIS and perform essential stabilisation tasks immediately upon Security Council authorisation, and be prepared to help with all necessary material and logistical support.

12. Concurrently with efforts to strengthen international forces on the ground, pursue the other elements of a coordinated three-part strategy to resolve the Darfur conflict by:

(a) reinforcing AU efforts to negotiate an enhanced ceasefire and a political settlement at Abuja, including by naming special envoys; and

(b) seeking accountability and an end to impunity by enforcing the Security Council's sanction regime and supporting human rights monitoring mechanisms and the work of the ICC.

An article in the Post reports today that Iranian President Ahmadinejad sent a letter to President Bush in order to propose "new solutions for getting out of international problems and the current fragile situation in the world." It mentions the quote put forth by the Times that Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be "wiped off the map." Since this comment was reported on, it has been used as a reason why Iran should not have nuclear weapons. I've been somewhat skeptical about the translation, and as it turns out, there is some disagreement about what was actually said. This disagreement has pitted Christopher Hitchens against Juan Cole, the latter being the only one of the two who actually speaks Farsi. A good summary of the online fight can be found here.

The actual sentence in question seems to be this: "een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad." I don't speak Farsi, but several of my colleagues are Iranian, and I've sent them the text to see what they think about it. The only word I can recognize is qods which is Farsi for al Quds, which is Jerusalem in English. Cole's translation is "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem must [vanish from] from the page of time." As it turns out, the Israeli group Memri offers a translation that is very similar to Cole's ("eliminated from the pages of history").

As it turns out, after the comments, the Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki denied the remarks:

Mottaki also denied during a press conference in Brussels that Tehran wanted to see Israel "wiped off the map."

"Nobody can remove a country from the map. This is a misunderstanding in Europe of what our president mentioned," he said. "How is it possible to remove a country from the map? He is talking about the regime. We do not recognize legally this regime."

Another denial came on CNN's Late Edition from Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Ali Asghar Soltanieh:

SOLTANIEH: The supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran has announced, more than two years, and few cases, the Western media have reflected to public of the world, that if the divine religions -- followers of the divine religions, Jews, Christians and Muslims, in that area follow a referendum, democratic referendum, and are one (ph) with homeless Palestinians, Iranian government and Iranian people would respect their decision.

Therefore, these are fabricated news that they are threatening and using this as an excuse for the military aggression or the aggressive policy. [...]

BLITZER: I have to wrap this up, but I want to get your response to this issue of Israel because it's become such a prominent issue in this whole discussion over nuclear plans that Iran may or may not have. This is what the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said on October 26 at that World Without Zionism conference.

He said, "Israel must be wiped off the map of the world, and god willing, with the force of god behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionists."

You understand why people in the West, especially here in the United States, are so concerned about your program, your nuclear program, given those kinds of direct threats against Israel, which happens to be a strong ally of the United States.

SOLTANIEH: I want to very briefly remind you that the policy of Islamic Republic of Iran and according to spirit and letter of our constitution is against any sort of school of thought or regime such as apartheid, Zionism, racism, and this is a matter of principle.

Therefore, what you are talking about as apartheid was disappeared and it could not be accepted by civilized world, this Zionism and aggression of racism is also condemned. [...]

BLITZER: Does your support for the removal of Zionism mean you want to see Israel destroyed?

SOLTANIEH: I have already explained to you and reflected to you the policy echoed by our supreme leader.

It means that if in that region, the divine religion followers of the Jews, Christians and Muslims, that all three are very respectful -- and we have Jews in Iran, which are peacefully living and they are represented in our parliament, they are fully respected -- if they come with the Palestinians, homeless Palestinians, to come and through following the democratic process will decide on a government and live in peace as they were living a thousand years of coexistence of these divine religions, Iran will support because we are looking for and we support peaceful settlement of the whole issue and peaceful coexistence of these divine religions in the Middle East. Let's hope for the peace.

BLITZER: But should there be a state of Israel?

SOLTANIEH: I think I've already answered to you. If Israel is a synonym and will give the indication of Zionism mentality, no.

But if you are going to conclude that we have said the people there have to be removed or we they have to be massacred or so, this is fabricated, unfortunate selective approach to what the mentality and policy of Islamic Republic of Iran is. I have to correct, and I did so.

So it seems that the statements by Ahmadinejad, or at the very least official Iranian policy, is much more nuanced than the Western media would have us believe. Furthermore, it is important to remember that Ahmadinejad does not control Iranian foreign policy. In an interesting article in the New York Review about Iran and the bomb, Christopher de Bellaigue has this to say:

Iran's enmity toward Israel is more nuanced than Ahmadinejad's statements suggest. The President's declarations that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and that the Holocaust is a "myth," understandably aroused fears that Iran might be considering an attack on Israel. But Iran's senior civilian and military officials have insisted that Iran will strike Israel only if Israel strikes first. More significantly, the President and supreme leader have both reiterated Iran's longstanding demand for a referendum on the status of Israel that would involve all Palestinian refugees. This official position would not seem to be consistent with an ambition to destroy Israel by force, least of all by using nuclear arms, which would endanger the very Palestinians whom the Iranians claim to be protecting. Several senior Iranian officials, including Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who heads a powerful arbitration council in Tehran, have not disguised their irritation with the President's comments. But Ahmadinejad has benefited from the furor. By raising his prestige among hard-line Islamists around the world, the President has made it harder for his domestic opponents, who include Rafsanjani, to undermine him.

I will post the English translation later this week, once my Iranian colleagues have had the chance to get back to me.