Sunday April 24, 2011
Preemptive Strike: Rebels in Misurata set a tire on fire and wheel it into a room where they suspect forces loyal to Muammar el Qaddafi are holed up. Chris Hondros, who took this picture, was killed by a grenade shortly afterward. (Chris Hondros/Getty Images)
John McCain is never quite John McCain unless he's on the warpath. Intervention is his intravenous lifeblood. He doesn't necessarily have to know what he's talking about or be entirely honest to still be the occasional darling of the Sunday chat shows, as he was today. "Fresh back from Benghazi," as CNN's Candy Crowley put it.
McCain seems, after a few moments parachuting in and out of the rebel-held city, that a) the rebels in Benghazi are good guys all around. He mentions an economics professor from the University of Washington being among the rebels, as if a stint in American universities somehow bestows immediate legitimacy, though McCain might want to remember that Sayyid Qutb, one of the ideological inspirations of al-Qaeda, had his stint at the at Colorado State College of Education, too. And b) that al-Qaeda could make an entry into Libya if a stalemate is allowed to turn into a vacuum.
Al-Qaeda is the default scepter of every American politician looking to rouse up the troops, step up the bombings, take a more alarmist view of whatever policy may be in place. It's puerile and embarrassing, considering al-Qaeda's ineffectiveness and discredit across the Middle East. If it's al-Qaeda McCain fears at this point, he really knows even less than he pretends to know. Is he going to raise the al-Qaeda scepter in every Middle Eastern country that goes the way of Tunisia and Egypt from here on? If so, strap on seat belts (or wax up your ears). It's going to be a long and, from McCain's PR rifle range, a very dull ride.
There are possibilities of stalemate and power vacuums in Libya, but it's not up to the West to do more than what the United Nations Security Council resolution permitting the use of force lays out. The West can;t set Libya's future course. It can only prevent Muammar el-Qaddafi from entirely dominating the present.
That said, let me yield to a fresher voice on the matter.
Nehad Ismail has been a frequent contributor in the comment section at Middle East Issues. (His recent description of himself as "outrageously secular," in the neighborhood of a sentence referencing Voltaire to boot, ensured that no matter how much we may disagree, he had secured my respect.) He's a Britain-based writer and commentator who spent 15 years from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s in the oil servicing industry, when he began making television appearances as a commentator on oil issues and the Arab-Israeli conflict. He's written in numerous publications, and for five years, until 2010, he was a political program presenter at the Arab News Network, a satellite broadcaster from London.
He's contributed his first column to Middle East Issues, which I have the pleasure of presenting here, relevant as it is to the Libya debate. He actually goes further than McCain and almost all mainstream American commentators on what to do next in Libya: "My hope," Ismail writes, "is that NATO agrees to undertake a swift military solution, disregarding the objections of Russia and China, both of whom are not champions of democracy or freedom, both of whom don't give a toss if Qaddafi kills hundreds of thousands of Libyans. This will require the deployment of an effective force of ground troops to help the rebels topple the regime. I don't buy the Vietnam or Iraq scenarios, nor do I buy the scare-mongering rumors that Al-Qaeda is in Libya."
Here's Ismail's full commentary, "How to End the Qaddafi Nightmare in Libya: Options and Solutions."
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Saturday April 23, 2011
Muzzled: Maikel Nabil Sanad is serving a three-year sentence for speaking out.
That didn't take long. Egypt is back to its old authoritarian, thuggish habits of imprisoning those whose voices the reigning government doesn't want to hear.
Maikel Nabil Sanad is 25. His Facebook profile, illustrated by his young face, is very simple. It says he's Egyptian, liberal and secular. Last fall he refused to serve in the military. He declared himself a conscientious objector. In February, he was arrested after protesting in Tahrir Square. "The first, sexual harassment i got, was from a small officer that arrested me in downtown, he searched my Genital, but i passed this situation as a part of searching!," he wrote in his blog. "Conscripts [] were taking me from officer to other, one of them entered his hands inside my jeans and held me from my boxer!"
He was arrested again on March 28 and tried on April 7 on charges of defaming the military. He was sentenced to three years in prison on April 10.
"The methods used by the Egyptian military do not seem to have evolved since Hosni Mubarak's fall," Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Jean-François Julliard said. "They show the degree to which the military still cannot be criticized and are still a taboo subject. A civilian should not be tried by a military court. This is not the way things are done in the democratic society to which Egyptians aspire."
Julliard added: "The circumstances of this blogger's arrest and the conduct of his trial demonstrate a complete lack of consideration by the military for the most basic principles of international law. Egypt has begun a process of democratization and it should now be possible to criticize the armed forces like any other component of the state."
Sanad's case came and went. The Middle East is aflame with what seems like an innumerable number of fronts, each with its compelling stories. Maikel Nabil Sanad might have commanded more attention had Egypt still been the revolutions' center of gravity. But it no longer is, and the last thing western governments are about to do is alienate the Egyptian military, which they erroneously hold up as some sort of reliable ally. Of course they do: with shades of the old authoritarianism, and many of the old regime's old thugs, why shouldn't they? Meanwhile, Sanad, and Egypt's hopes for a true break with its bleak, Soviet-like past, languish.
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Friday April 22, 2011
Chris Hondros. (Getty Images)
I've been using his photographs since I joined About.com as the Middle East Issues guide. It was inevitable. Chris Hondros was one of Getty Images' most versatile and fearless photojournalists. He went where the wars were. So he went all over the Middle East.
There were, recently, the pictures from Tahrir Square and elsewhere during Egypt's revolution. Two years ago there was this arresting portrait of a child in Afghanistan, another of the millions lost to that country's endless wars. There were his pictures from Iraq, which managed at times to reflect the haziness, the shadiness, the smoke and mirrors of that country's fitful emergence from totalitarianism to something less obliterating but no less violent, as in this picture that perfectly depicted the dilemma American soldiers faced in Iraq: never knowing who was friend or foe. (A larger image is available here.)
There were, too, Chris Hondors's Stateside pictures, related to the Middle East as they often were, as in this demonstration of Egyptian Copts before in front of the United Nations in New York. And of course the light-beam tribute to the vanished Twin Towers in Lower Manhattan.
I've been using Chris's photographs the way I always use images from Getty Images, a subscription service available to About.com guides. I find them. Download them. Prepare them for publication. Add the credit line: Chris Hondros/Getty Images. And move on, never giving it another thought. There's a lot we take for granted. The knowledge that Getty Images will always have compelling work for us to choose from to illustrate a story often better than words can is one of those things we take for granted. Out here, behind our desks.
Chris Hondros had been covering the war in Libya lately. On Wednesday, he was with three other journalists in the besieged city of Misurata. He'd just taken pictures of rebels. The pictures appeared in the following day's New York Times, on the front page and inside. Soon after taking the pictures, Hondros was killed by enemy fire. So was Tim Hetherington, another photographer who'd directed "Restrepo," a documentary about the war in Afghanistan.
A grenade killed them. Chris spent several hours in a coma before dying. Two other journalists--Guy Martin and Christopher Brown--were wounded.
War-zone journalists are no less valuable, no less honorable, than soldiers. They risk life and limb to report stories that must be told, but that few dare report. They're often killed in obscurity, their death no more remarkable than their tiny credit lines, which few people see. Earlier this year I wrote a brief post about the Middle East's wars on reporters, highlighting the latest annual report on the killing of journalists worldwide. So far this year, 18 have been killed and 150 are in prison. Those 18 now include Chris and Tim.
Chris had been nominated for the Pulitzer prize. No surprise. He's covered most of the world's recent conflicts--including wars in Kosovo, Angola, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Kashmir, the West Bank, Iraq, Liberia, and of course Libya and Egypt. He was also a writer, finding a home at the Virginia Quarterly Review, where he wrote essays. One of those, in the Spring 2004 issue, was titled "Inside Saddam's Spider Hole," and written with the unmistakable eye of a photographer who instinctively knows the telling detail:
"Two pairs of shoes still in their boxes: a pair of clean new Hongmahwang loafers and a pair of gilded, tacky Italian slippers. The footwear of a madman caught last December hiding in a rat-filled hole almost within sight of one of his many palaces. More than the beard that made him look like a character from a Harry Potter movie, more than the irony of the squalor of his final underground hiding place, it was those shoes that stopped me in my tracks and brought home to me the basic humanity of a man described for more than a year as possessing a subhuman evil. Picking through the modest compound filled with entirely pedestrian possessions, I was unprepared for the feeling that Saddam Hussein's capture gave me."
Strange. Only last week I picked up that old issue of the Quarterly and thought it was time to get rid of it. Not anymore. It's now my most lasting memorial of Hondros.
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Sunday April 17, 2011
No tears for Iraq: Somehow, U.S. House Speaker John Boehner managed to make it through hsi trip to Baghdad without shedding tears. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
On April 8, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates had a John McCain moment while visiting Mosul in Northern Iraq. You'll recall that McCain, the U.S. Senator from Arizona and the Republican nominee for the presidency in 2008, once told an audience that staying in Iraq for 100 years would be "fine with me." Gates told soldiers of the 4th Advise and Assist Brigade pretty much the same thing when they asked how long they'd be staying in Iraq, beyond 2011.
"Well, I think that would be part of any negotiation," Gates answered, as reported in Stars and Stripes, the U.S. military's daily, "... whether it would be for a finite period of time, whether it would be negotiated that there be a further ramp down over a period of two or three years, or whether we would have a continuing advise-and-assist role that we have in a number of countries that just becomes part of a regular military-to-military relationship."
Iraq doesn't have tornadoes. But Gates might as well have triggered them. The following day, Iraq turned into tornado alley, by way of riots. Shiites took to the streets, burned American flags, burned tires, and chanted the usual death to America chants that are the soundtrack of most anti-western protests in the Middle East. The demonstrations were, in fact, scheduled before Gates channeled McCain. April 9 is a big day in Iraq. It's the anniversary of the fall of Baghdad in 2003. (It is also, incidentally, the anniversary of Saddam Hussein's murder of Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Sadr, the father-in-law of Muqatada el-Sadr, about whom more below. The Grand Ayatollah was murdered in 1980.)
But the Gates comments added fervor to the anger, which was choreographed by the reliably disruptive Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite leader who wants, one of these days, to be the king of Iraq, or something like it. Meanwhile he manages to dramatize his stage presence whenever her gets the chance while officially continuing his "studies" in Iran, so that the old criticism he sustained--that he was the son of a cleric, but no cleric himself--no longer sticks.
"The first thing we will do is escalate the military resistance activity and reactivate the Mahdi Army in a new statement which will be published later," Mr. Sadr's representative, Salah al-Obaidi, told the crowd, according to The Times. "Second is to escalate the peaceful and public resistance through sit-ins."
Meanwhile Iraq itself hasn't exactly been Shangri-La. In January and February this year, according to the Brookings Institution, which maintains a tally of Iraqi violence and other factors, 310 people were killed in "multiple-fatality bombings," most of them Shiites.
Political accomplishments have not been good. "The early 2010 impasse over the March 2010 parliamentary elections, especially the dispute over barring some 500 candidates (mostly Sunni) from running in that process," Brookings's analysts write, "has not only jeopardized Iraq's future political progress but partially reversed recent accomplishments. As such we judge that there has been backsliding on several key matters and have reduced Iraq's political benchmark score accordingly, at least for now."
Contrast all that with the following statement released today by John Boehner, the U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives:
"Just four years ago, a terrorist insurgency was killing innocent civilians and wreaking havoc across the country. Today Iraq is a different country. By taking the fight to al-Qaeda, the insurgency, and other terrorist threats, our men and women in uniform succeeded in providing greater security to the Iraqi population and giving the government the time to build capacity to more effectively meet the needs of the Iraqi people. Our members were able to see this progress firsthand."
What visiting "dignitaries" usually see first hand, when parachuting in and out of Iraq for a few hours of well-rehearsed massages, is not Iraq. It's a few secure conference rooms equipped with powerpoint presentations, generous refreshments, more generous flattery and one American PR specialist after another. The parachutists haven't really left America. They've just traveled to a different time zone. They don't go into the heart of Baghdad, they don't really see the country, talk to, let alone with, its people, they know nothing about the reality beyond the Green Zone's climate-controlled walls.
They especially don't dare announce their trip ahead of time. That alone is the single-clearest indication of the contradiction between their public optimism and private dread: they don't want to be the target of the very assassination attempts they claim Iraq has gone beyond. They'd be more believable if they set their schedule ahead of time and traveled, on foot or in an open car (much like Dwight Eisenhower once did in the throngs of Pakistan's Karachi, now a no-go zone for most Americans), for all Iraqis to see. It'll never happen of course. But let's not pretend that any kind of normalcy exists in Iraq, either. Still, the parachutists continue their expensive drops.
A drop into Iraq is a political stunt, the way George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton pull them off every once in a while whether to slather turkey on soldiers' plate or slather illusions on on public perceptions the world over, though most people know enough not to bite.
Bohener's air drop and its ensuing assessment is particularly, glaringly at odds with Iraq's reality. That's not unusual for Boehner, or congressmen in general: they don't have a 73 percent disapproval rating (or a 20 percent approval rating) by coincidence. They work hard at it, the way Boehner and the rest of his congressional delegation were working hard this weekend, burning more than 20 hours and a few thousand gallons of jet fuel, and taxpayers' dollars, just to have a headline that says: "We Did Iraq."
They did. And Iraq did them right back. Though they didn't stay long to notice.
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