Issandr El Amrani
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Egypt has unexpectedly rescinded its support for a lawsuit filed by the US against the European Union...

For Mamdouh, the music that comes out of his creaky radio is one of the few respites from the dense, noisy Cairo traffic...

Demonstrators riot and try to close the U.S. Embassy in a country where protest has been mostly banned for 20 years...

The word "ebullient" seems barely adequate to describe the atmosphere in the austere Cairo courtroom...

Officials at the Arab League's Cairo HQ - an unassuming building in the city's central square that blends modernist and Islamic architecture - wear long faces these days.

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Shelved

Berlusconi toasted by ADL

As if we needed any more confirmation of the moral vacuum in the American Jewish right, the Anti-Defamation League — an organization that poses as a defender of human rights and dignity but mostly seems to serve as an attack dog against those critical of Israel — has awarded Sylvio Berlusconi its Òdistinguished statesman award this week. The Forward reports:

The ceremony for the fast-talking prime minister, just weeks after he made comments sympathetic toward World War II fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, has generated a roiling debate about whether the ADL is compromising its self-proclaimed role as the “nation’s premier civil rights/human rights agency” in deference to the interests of the United States and Israel.

Berlusconi uttered his controversial remarks just three weeks before the ADL dinner. Defending the regime of Mussolini against comparisons to Saddam Hussein, Berlusconi said Mussolini — Adolf Hitler’s chief ally and ideological mentor — had been a “benign” dictator. “Mussolini never killed anyone. Mussolini sent people on holiday in internal exile.”

The “holiday” that he sent people to included places such as Auschwitz. Perhaps the most famous Italian to survive Auschwitz is Primo Levi, who wrote some of the most moving literature and poetry on the Holocaust. In addition to Jews and political prisoners that were sent to death camps, many were imprisoned and tortured during his reign.

But ADL head Abraham Foxman (one of the most shameless men I’ve had the displeasure of interviewing) defended his toasting of Berlusconi with these sickening words:

In a conversation with the Forward, Foxman accused Berlusconi’s and the ADL’s critics as using the scandal as an opportunity to grind their political axes: “The criticism is political. There are a lot of people who have the luxury to be political. I respect their political views. That has nothing to do with my decision or our decision. Everybody’s got an agenda. My agenda is America.”

His and the ADL’s agenda is tarnishing the reputation of anyone who is critical of Israel or of US foreign policy in thhe Middle East as anti-semitic. This is the kind of people who go apoplexic when Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean suggests that US policy in the region should be more “even-handed.” Organizations like this are corrupting the political fabric of the country through slander and intimidation. But when it’s convenient for them, they have so problems celebrating one of the most corrupt and racist politicians in Europe. I simply don’t understand why so many American Jews let these opportunists speak in their name.

21:00 | / politics | link

Edward Said, 1935-2003

Edward Said, the Palestinian-American academic and campaigner for Palestinian rights, died this morning in New York after a long fight with pancreatic cancer. He was 67.

I had only seen Said in person a few times and although I frequently didn’t agree with him I admired the resolve he had in defense of a one-state solution for Israel and Palestine. I remember him giving a lecture at Oxford where a women got up and said that by advocating peace with Israelis he was giving up their historical homeland. He was furious and raged against warmongers, saying that the two people had no alternative but to learn how to live together, because the alternative was unthinkable.

It’s an enormous loss for the Palestinian cause, which has few defenders of Said’s stature, as well to the academic world. People who want to read his prolific writing or listen to one of his lectures should turn to The Edward Said Archive.

20:32 | / palestine | link

Chalabi vs. neo-cons?

The New York Times can be quite an educating read. If you just count Monday and Tuesday’s issues, you get three Op-Eds on why the answer to the problems in Iraq is not more troops but more power to the Iraqis.

Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, that bastion of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism (all things neo, really) writes:

Making the transition to an Iraqi security force is an imperative for the liberation of the country. But it should not be done cavalierly. Washington’s willingness to grab former Baathists and Saddam Hussein’s security thugs and press them back into service is an enormous mistake, as is the selection of a new “interior minister,” Nouri Badran, whose background consists of defending Saddam Hussein’s military. (The Iraqi National Accord, the minister’s original political home, is made up of former Baathists and military nostalgists.)

Clearly, the job in Iraq is not done. But sending in more troops is not the answer. With the number of ground engagements down and the recruitment of Iraqi players up, the solution lies in thinking about the transition from postwar triumph over Saddam Hussein to the empowerment of Iraqis.

Note the denunciation of the Iraqi National Accord, the main opposition group other than Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. Now remember that according to most of the historiography of the war and Iraqi opposition movements, the INA was favored by the Dept. of State and the CIA while the Dept. of Defense preferred the INC. The AIE, of course, is close to the Defense crowd such as Perle, Wolfowitz and company.

Then you have Noah Feldman, the one-time writer of Iraq’s new constitution (before they decided that Iraqis should be seen as being the authors of their own constitution), who argues that Iraqi peace-keeping institutions should quickly be formed but that more time should be given for self-rule:

Still, the answer to this threat isn’t bringing in foreign troops or putting more Americans on the ground, but creating an effective Iraqi security force — fast. Only Iraqi police officers and soldiers, knowledgeable about local conditions and populations, and with access to high-quality local intelligence, stand a chance of breaking Sunni resistance cells and identifying foreign agents. The call by Democrats (and, lately, many Republicans) to internationalize the coalition forces is well taken in terms of saving money and patching up diplomatic relations. But Indian and French troops would have no better luck combating terrorists than the Americans.

As for French and German suggestions that we speed up the transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi interim government, it would be just as unlikely to aid security. The violence is not coming from people who would be sympathetic to any such interim government. Worse, unless the police and military have been truly reconstituted, an interim body would be a travesty of a sovereign government. Actual control is the indispensable hallmark of sovereignty. Nothing could be worse for the future of democracy in Iraq than the creation of a puppet government unable to keep the peace.

Then the NYT’s own David Brooks — a conservative columnist who is also an editor at the neo-con magazine The Weekly Standard — adds his own two cents about why all the debate taking place at the UN and in Washington is irrelevant:

It’s time to acknowledge that the reconstruction of Iraq is too important to be left to the foreign policy types, who are trained to think too abstractly to grapple with the problems that matter.

Ah, those foreign policy types! Isn’t it outrageous that decision-making about foreign policy is left to foreign policy professionals!? I tell you, I don’t know where the world is coming to these days…

But luckily, Brooks knows what we really need:

Over the long term, we need to create an apolitical reservist force, made up of of businesspeople, administrators and police officers who have concrete experience in moving societies from dictatorship to democracy. In the meantime, we need to focus on serving the Iraqis first, second and last. We don’t need to get caught up in a distracting round of lofty debates among the world’s Walter Mitty Metternichs, who treat the Iraqi people as pawns in their great game-power struggles.ÊÊ

What’s interesting here is that is these three opinions — which exclude the view among some traditional conservatives, many centrists and some of the left that a stronger military presence is needed to control the violence — is that while they go in the general direction of what Chalabi and his INC allies want, they don’t go quite fast enough.

Here’s what the NYT’s UN correspondents report about the new Chalabi:

Ahmad Chalabi, the president of Iraq’s interim government, is in New York this week to press alternatives to the Bush administration’s occupation policy in postwar Iraq, he and his aides say. In the process, he may complete a personal transformation from protégé of Pentagon conservatives to Iraqi nationalist with a loud, independent voice.

In an interview today in New York, Mr. Chalabi professed gratitude to the Bush administration for toppling Saddam Hussein’s government, but his specific proposals were directly at odds with the policies Washington is pursuing in Baghdad and at the United Nations. He demanded that the Iraqi Governing Council be given at least partial control of the powerful finance and security ministries, and rejected the idea of more foreign troops coming to Iraq.

Mr. Chalabi’s strategy, he says, is to get from the United Nations General Assembly sovereign status for the unelected 25-member Governing Council. This move to lobby other nations for a swift transfer of some sovereignty is going down poorly in Washington, according to the Iraqi leader’s aides.

And then at the end of the piece:

“We don’t want to come out in the open and pick a fight with Bremer,” [an aide to Chalabi] said, “but the sovereignty issue is coming to a head, and it is pretty clear that a breach is coming pretty soon between the Governing Council and Bremer.”

Another aide was more blunt: “We are going to find a place where we can pick a fight.”

Is Chalabi getting impatient? It would seem logical that, considering his greatest asset is the support of key administration figures, a transition to self-rule sooner than later would benefit him the most. Parties with a stronger local anchor — whether Sunni, Shia or Kurdish — have more potential in the long-term. But while he and his patrons seem to agree on the general plan — no more troops, more devolvement to the Iraqis, strengthening the Iraqis’ own police and military capability (remember the INC has its own militia) and bringing in the corporate world “to the rescue” — they disagree on the timetable. Watch Chalabi morph from Washington’s man into nationalist-populist hero in the next few months.

13:08 | / iraq | link

Iraq investment law reconsidered

A quick update on Iraq’s new investment laws: the Governing Council has said that the new minister of finance’s comments last Sunday were “unnoficial” and that only the council’s president could officially announce policy.

A statement issued by the US-installed council distanced it from a key part of a sweeping economic package presented by interim Finance Minister Kamel al-Kilani at the International Monetary Fund meeting in Dubai on Sunday.

The text said only the council president could announce policy, “and the statements attributed to the finance minister about the law of investment cannot be considered official.”

It’s worth remembering that Kilani is a member of the Iraqi National Congress, and therefore an ally of Ahmad Chalabi, the current president of the congress. (By the way, wasn’t it awfully handy that Chalabi got the month-long rotating presidency just when the UN was going to hold its first general assembly since the way — enabling him to sit in as the official representative of Iraq? Just sayin’…)

12:25 | / iraq | link

For the record

Nothing very new here, but this interesting transcript of a press conference by Colin Powell and Egypt’s then foreign minister (and current head of the Arab League) Amr Moussa in February 2001 revealed quite a different stance towards Iraq’s WMDs. Colin sez:

We had a good discussion, the Foreign Minister and I and the President and I, had a good discussion about the nature of the sanctions — the fact that the sanctions exist — not for the purpose of hurting the Iraqi people, but for the purpose of keeping in check Saddam Hussein’s ambitions toward developing weapons of mass destruction. We should constantly be reviewing our policies, constantly be looking at those sanctions to make sure that they are directed toward that purpose. That purpose is every bit as important now as it was ten years ago when we began it. And frankly they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors. So in effect, our policies have strengthened the security of the neighbors of Iraq, and these are policies that we are going to keep in place, but we are always willing to review them to make sure that they are being carried out in a way that does not affect the Iraqi people but does affect the Iraqi regime’s ambitions and the ability to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and we had a good conversation on this issue.

I can understand, after 9/11, the worry that Saddam might pass on WMDs to Osama — even if in practice it all seemed so extremely unlikely that the two would cooperate. But if Powell thought that there was no significant WMD program and that containment had worked (at the time the big issues were dealing with the humanitarian problems caused by the sanctions and illegal oil trade through new “smart sanctions”), why the war?

12:05 | / iraq | link

Pirates of the Red Sea

The movie industry is getting worried about online downloads:

Also, as early as next month the industry will begin promoting a “stealing is bad” message in schools, teaming up with Junior Achievement on an hourlong class for fifth through ninth graders on the history of copyright law and the evils of online file sharing. The effort includes games like Starving Artist, in which students pretend to be musicians whose work is downloaded free from the Internet, and a crossword puzzle called Surfing for Trouble.

Why are these corporations allowed to spread their advertising into schools? Are these students (or their schools) getting paid to listen to this? Shouldn’t they be studying maths or geography rather than learn how to become better consumers?

I’m not defending internet piracy, but I have to say there are good sides to it too. When Egypt’s censors banned Matrix Reloaded, for instance, within a day I had several friends who had acquired a pirated copy on the internet. Once they were done watching it, these ordinary middle class Egyptians couldn’t really see what the problem was. In countries were the flow of information is controlled, getting information of any kind is difficult. The internet is making controlling that information more and more difficult, which in my book is a good thing, even if you get downsides like piracy and child pornography along with it.

11:50 | / technology | link

That Iraq place again

I’m am back from the Western end of the Arab world to its supposed center. In the former, a courageous press (and a few imprisoned journalists) , a timid reform movement that just hopes to hang on against government pressure and those unhelpful Islamists. In the latter, continuing aimlessness under the yoke of a lingering mediocracy. In other words, boring stories about slow changes, small regressions, petty oppression, routinized corruption and technocratic malpractice. Only 100 million people are concerned, so let’s get back to that exciting eye-rack place further East.

Since Sunday, the big story is “the sale of Iraq” — the announcement of new rules that will allow unfettered foreign ownership of Iraq’s non-oil state companies. That means the ability for foreign companies to bid for up to 100% of all the state-owned companies that are going to be put on the privatization block, with the ability of repatriating 100% of the profit they make and both personal and corporate taxes fixed at 15%. Imports, for their part, will only face a tariff duty of 5%. I don’t think an economic set-up like this exists in any country in the world. It’s a neo-liberal economist’s wet dream — except that it’s bound to cause all kinds of problems, is not adapted to the needs of a ravaged country (or even its indiginous business class) and even theoretically, it’s absolutely useless in a world where no one operates this. Anyone remember last week’s Cancun WTO talks?

The Guardian says:

The last big socialist, centralised economy that opted for such sudden and drastic shock therapy was Russia in 1992. The result was economic devastation, rampant corruption and the rise of a powerful class of businessmen, the oligarchs

…

In adopting a neoliberal economic orthodoxy, the US falls into the trap of believing that the state has only to be removed from the sphere of the economy to see a vibrant free market appear. History suggests this process has to be managed by a stable, home-grown government.

I believe in the US we called this the New Deal, and I seem to remember that it got us out of a lot of trouble.

The LA Times gets some local reactions:

“It’s the wrong approach,” said Sam Kubba, who heads the American Iraqi Chamber of Commerce in Washington. “It’s a recipe for disaster because it gives the impression that they’re trying to sell off all the Iraqi resources. They should go about it much more slowly. Start by getting a democracy in place first and letting the people elect a government.”

Juan Cole notes that it’s probably illegal under the Geneva Convention, which the US is bound to as an occupying power:

The US occupying forces blatantly contravened the Fourth Geneva Convention on Monday, announcing that they were opening the Iraqi economy to foreign investment and setting low trade tariffs. The economy has been plagued by massive unemployment (estimated by many observers at 60%) since the fall of the Baath regime, which had channeled oil money to employees through state industries and patronage. US civil administrator Paul Bremer, a fanatical devotee of the “Washington Consensus” on the absolute benefits of “free trade,” has managed to get the Interim Governing Council to sign off on a wideranging set of new economic regulations.

Iraq Democracy Watch has a series of posts and tons of links on this and related subjects. It’s probably the most comprehensive source if you bother to read them all and see what they add up to. All this reading made him make this interesting point:

Comparing the British and American papers’ coverage of the new economic liberalization laws in Iraq should be a lesson for anyone who thinks that the media is unbiased.Ê The Guardian, Independent, and even the conservative UK Telegraph all had headlines variously proclaiming, “Iraq for Sale.”Ê

The American headlines, in contrast, used phrasing like, “A Free Iraq Economy…” ( LA Times ), or “Economic Overhaul” (Washington Post ).

Also, do dig up his excellent overview of “America’s conflicting interests with Iraqi agriculture” from an older post, which points out that the man currently in charge of the US Department of Agriculture effort in Iraq, Dan Amstutz, is a former executive at one of the biggest agro-business companies in the world, Cargill:

Dan Amstutz had at one time worked for Cargill, a US agribusiness giant — the largest privately-owned corporation in the world and the third largest food processor on the globe, and also a company that controls a sizable portion of US grain exports, according to an article by Emad Mekay from Inter Press News Service and written for the Global Policy Forum.

In a press conference this year, Mr. Amstutz insisted that he no longer had any relationship with Cargill, but an article in The Holland Sentinel from June 22nd, 2003, as late as “ late-October 2000, Amstutz was named chairman of the board of directors of a new company established by ADM, Cargill, Cenex Harvest States, DuPont and Louis Dreyfuss.”

Mr. Amstutz isn’t just drawing the wrath of NGOs and international agriculture ministers. Jeffrey St. Claire, in his article, “The Rat in the Grain, Dan Amstutz and the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture,” reprinted in various news media, quotes George Naylor, president of the National Family Farm Coalition as saying,

Daniel Amstutz, an ex-Cargill executive, is there to push the agribusiness agenda, not a democratic agenda…He will excel in telling the world that his policy is good for farmers, consumers and the environment when just the opposite is true.

Says Mr. St. Claire,

The small farmers of the grain belt of the Midwest have a particular loathing for Amstutz. During his stint in the first Bush administration, Amstutz devised the notorious Freedom to Farm Bill, which eliminated tariffs and slashed federal farm price supports. As a result, thousands of American farmers lost their farms and monopolists like Cargill reaped the benefits.

Doesn’t sound good, does it? And why again did those Cancun talks fail?

The Arms and the Man — the definitive blog on “who’s making a killing on killing in Iraq” — notes that big capital is getting ready for all these juicy prospects, for instance by hosting $1500-a-head conferences on “Exploring Business Prospects in Iraq.” In the meantime, Richard “Prince of Darkness” Perle himself goes on teevee and counters claims of war profiteering by one of those pesky human rights activists. She (Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange) says:

The resentment will only grow unless the U.S. turns this over to a legitimate authority, which is the United Nations, which will have a quick time line for Iraqi self rule and that the money that is pledged by the U.S. and the international community — and let’s remember the international community will not pledge money unless it is in the hands of the United Nations — and that money should go directly to Iraqis and not to companies like Halliburton and Bechtel that are profiteering from this war.

Perle replies:

What you just heard is a tirade against American companies in the left-wing tradition that she represents.

Those America-bashing left-wing liberals. Why do they hate us?

For a local perspective, if you read anything read this post on Baghdad Burning, which has a few concrete examples of why unfettered foreign investment is bad and how it can lead to serious economic and moral abuse. Here’s the first ‘graf, to set the tone:

For Sale: A fertile, wealthy country with a population of around 25 million… plus around 150,000 foreign troops, and a handful of puppets. Conditions of sale: should be either an American or British corporation (forget it if you’re French)… preferably affiliated with Halliburton. Please contact one of the members of the Governing Council in Baghdad, Iraq for more information.

Read it all.

11:43 | / iraq | link