Jason Ditz - Antiwar.com Blog

Coming From Georgia, Living in Russia

The Independent has a really fascinating talk with Tina Kandelaki, a well known television personality in Russia who is originally from Georgia, and several other Georgians living in Moscow.

As President Saakashvili called Georgians who live in Russia “traitors,” its unsurprising that they don’t view him with an awful lot of sympathy (Ms. Kandelaki calls him “Mikheil the Destroyer”). But it also tells the story of several of Moscow’s less famous Georgians and the discrimination they’ve experienced since last month’s war.

I’d really recommend giving it a look.

Dueling Realities

I’m not sure how many of you read the article I wrote this morning about the Pentagon’s “troop cut freeze” in Iraq. I’m not just mentioning it here because I’m hoping to get my readership up (though if that’s a side effect, I sure won’t complain), rather I write this because of an article on the exact same topic that CNN.com put up around the same time.

While my story is based on the reports already out there publicly, CNN sites all sorts of “sources”. Both articles say much the same thing, but what strikes me is the dramatically different tone.

On 9/11/07, General Petraeus predicted the troop level would be down to 130,000 by this summer. In April of this year, the AP said the pause would leave over 100,000 troops in Iraq by the time President Bush leaves office. The reality is that 146,000 troops are still there, and the Pentagon is urging the President to keep them there until he is out of office. Then, and only then, they suggest that 7,500 troops could be pulled out of Iraq, and most of them would end up in Afghanistan. These are the facts as I presented then this morning. Here is what CNN said:

The top U.S. general in Iraq is recommending nearly 8,000 troop cuts in Iraq because of the improving situation there, a source close to the process has told CNN.

Nowhere is it mentioned that what they’re actually proposing is a several-month-long further delay of already planned troop cuts. And what is the deal with “because of the improving situation there” featuring so prominently in the opening paragraph? What sense does that make? The situation has improved so much that a year later we still can’t reduce troops to the pre-surge level the General in charge predicted a year ago when he said the surge had accomplished all its goals? Can someone explain that to me?

The Icing on the Yellowcake

It was brought to my attention this morning that some people have recently been using last month’s Iraqi government sale of Yellowcake uranium to a Canadian company as vindication for starting everyone’s favorite Middle East quagmire that’s totally going less awful now that most of the integrated neighborhoods in Iraq have been violently purged of one group or another.

But lets not get ahead of ourselves here… lets have a look at this story when the AP first ran it. For those who don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s the important part:

Tuwaitha and an adjacent research facility were well known for decades as the centerpiece of Saddam’s nuclear efforts.

Israeli warplanes bombed a reactor project at the site in 1981. Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.

Anti-Terrorist Raids

Any given day in Iraq includes a distressingly long list of casualties, but what about the stories behind those incidents? Here’s one from today which I thought warranted some expounding on:

Under the headline Terrorist hideout destroyed, a military press release touts the raid of a suspected “terrorist hideout”, the killing of a “terrorist” and the capture of 15 men.

How do we know it’s a terrorist hideout? Surveillance determined that the building contained “stockpiled food”, 12 bedrolls, and perhaps most damning of all, “men’s clothing”. How do we know the slain man was a terrorist? Well he was “near the target building” and made an unspecified sudden movement before being killed. Oh, and those 15 men who were captured? Well 3 of them were actually “wanted” for some crime or another. That would imply the other 12 were “unwanted”, wouldn’t it?

Here’s something conspicuously absent: weapons. Nowhere in the report is it alleged that this vitally important terrorist hideout, the destruction of which would, according to the story, “further degrade al-Qaeda’s terror network”, contained any IEDs, or explosive components, or the dreaded Iranian EFPs. Not one of these hardened al-Qaeda members was reported to be armed, and the story contains not one mention of a weapons cache, or even a single round of ammunition being present in the house: just food, and clothing.

And that “threatening” man somewhere near the building, the one so ably gunned down by Coalition forces? There is nothing in the story to suggest that he had a gun, or a suicide belt, or even a really pointy-looking stick. Just a guy, standing somewhere in Mosul, who made a sudden movement after being accosted by an unknown number of foreign troops. Now and forever though, he is a “killed terrorist”.

Says MNF Spokesman Major Hall â€œOur pursuit of these terrorists will continue to disrupt their ability to hinder the security, stability, and growth that Iraqi citizens are entitled to” Yet one must wonder how 15 unarmed guys in a building containing food and clothing posed such a dire threat to the citizenry of Iraq.

In Defense of Non-Violence

I’m writing this in response to an article in last week’s Haaretz entitled ‘Palestinians’ doomsday weapon, non-violence, fails test’. It’s a better article than the title might lead one to believe and accepts an important underlying premise: that non-violence from the Gaza Strip would be a serious blow to the Israeli government. However, the article does make a couple of significant errors which I hope to correct now:

The article wrongly suggests that the increased rocket fire out of Gaza last week was in response to the non-violent protest at the border. In fact Israel’s General Yadlin has pointed out that rather it was a direct result of assassinations of several key Hamas military experts
The theme of the article is that we have no clue what the Israeli military strategy to counter non-violence is, and that they probably don’t even have one

It is this later claim that I wish to discuss, because it is this later claim which misinterprets the entire strategy of non-violence and leads to the article’s false conclusion that non-violence has simply failed of its own accord.

Rather, we know precisely what strategy the Israeli military employs in response to non-violence, because it is the only strategy available to it. Indeed it is the only strategy militaries ever employ in response to non-violence, and we saw it clearly this weekend.

Escalation.

Seeing the path of non-violence to its necessary conclusion is not easy for precisely this reason: that every act of non-violence defiance is met with an act of increasingly disproportionate violence in the hopes of realizing a violent response and vindicating the claim that the posture of non-violence is an insincere one.

Today, Israeli ground forces begin their pullout from the Gaza Strip. The mainstream press treats this as a response to international condemnation for the large civilian death toll. Hamas sees it as vindication of their violent resistance and claims ‘victory’. But both of these are mistaken. Israeli troops are leaving the Gaza strip because they achieved their goal: they provoked a response.

It takes a very special brand of determination to see non-violence through in the face of attacks on soccer-playing children and troops marching through suburbs killing civilians. Yet it is precisely this determination which must follow, if those deaths are not to be in vain.

The people of the Gaza Strip must hold firm in their resolve for non-violence. They must make it clear to the Israeli military that they will not be swayed, nor will they respond violently. They must leave the Israeli government with only two choices: acquiescence or committing genocide. And despite what Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister or anyone else may say, they must remain confident that Israel cannot choose the latter.

This weekend may have been a setback for non-violence, but it is nothing resembling failure. Non-violence remains not just an option for the Palestinians in the face of occupation, but at the end of the day, the only one.

You Can’t Hug Your Dictators With Nuclear Arms

The New York Times is reporting that the Bush Administration has spent almost $100 million helping Pakistan’s on-again, off-again dictator Pervez Musharraf secure the country’s weapons of mass destruction.

This is the same Bush Administration that has spent hundreds of billions of dollars chasing after Iraq’s fictional WMDs, and is gearing up to spend God-only-knows how much on a missile defense systm to defend against Iran’s hypothetical future nukes.

Sort of sad when $100 million wasted in the last 6 years (which would buy you a pretty good free agent in most professional sports) trying in vain to get a nuclear training center built in Pakistan seems like an economical option.