CommonPrejudice

Light Blogging

There'll only be light blogging for the next week or so (ie if or when I can), as I'm in the process of a move.

Following that I hope to greatly increase the frequency of posting.

The Wall

Continuing on the wall in the West Bank...

First I want to make one thing clear. While I have many questions regarding the long term effects a wall dividing the Israelis and the Palestinians would have, I certainly believe that Israel has a right to build a wall on undisputed Israeli territory, for better or for worse.

This isn't, of course, what has happened. And I think it self-evident that cutting towns off from one another, reducing access to farmlands and resources (especially water) and creating a patchwork of communities where a viable state will never be able to sustain itself is worthy of condemnation by any international court. The question that remains is to what extent does the wall as it stands (or is planned to stand) do this. (I don't take seriously some Israeli claims that the wall, and consequently, the border, is only temporary.)

While criticizing the ICJ's ruling, first off Ami Isseroff concedes:

The fence/wall/barrier is bad because it arbitrarily divides up neighborhoods and villages, running down the main street of Abu Dis, trapping people away from their fields and livelihoods, erecting cement barriers directly in front of the houses of some of them, so they cannot get out their front doors.

And the construction currently going on is anything but peaceful and orderly. Today:

The Israeli Army today demolished 3 Palestinian homes, 26 Palestinian shops and an olive oil factory in the Occupied West Bank town of Barta (located in the northwest West Bank) in order to continue construction of its wall. The demolitions come after the International Court of Justice's July 9th ruling that Israel must immediately cease construction of the wall.

The Israeli Army demolished the homes and businesses without prior notice to Palestinian home and shop owners. According to witnesses, at approximately 6 a.m., an estimated 300 Israeli soldiers using 35 jeeps and 4 bulldozers raided the town to carry out the demolitions. The Army fired tear gas, rubber-coated metal bullets and live ammunition at Palestinian demonstrators, injuring 8 Palestinian civilians. Two Palestinian civilians remain in critical condition...

There can be little question that serious damage is being done to innocent Palestinians.

It is often stated that the fact that suicide bombings have dropped dramatically recently proves the construction just, in that it is more important to save lives than to "preserve the quality of life.". I have already argued that following this logic any infringement on the Palestinians' rights could be justified as long as the suicide bombings diminish. I find this position morally lacking and completely illogical. Further, as the map below demonstrates, it would be ludicrous to argue that the zigzagging route the wall is taking is solely designed for the security of Israel proper. And objections such as the following by Isseroff could be accommodated in a wall whose borders weren't based predominantly on the locations of the illegal settlements and natural resources.

Some believe that Israel could meet the objections of the court simply by building the barrier within the 1949 armistice line ("Green Line"). It is debatable whether or not this is true. If the barrier were built along the 1967 borders, it would mean that the Palestinians could once again close the road to Jerusalem as they did in 1948, since the Latrun monastery and other key areas that dominate the road would be in their hands. It would also mean that the Hebrew University campus on Mount Scopus, as well as the Jewish quarter of the Old city are at the mercy of suicide bombers. Does anyone believe Israel will agree to this? ...

As well, Princeton Law Professor Richard Falk contradicts Isseroff's additional claim that the ICJ ruling did not recognize the right of Israel to build a wall on territory not occupied.

Significantly, the court confirms that Israel is entitled to build a wall to defend itself from threats emanating from the Palestinian territories if it builds the barrier on its own territory. The justices based their objection to the wall on its location within occupied Palestinian territories, as well as the consequent suffering visited upon affected Palestinians.

If Israel had erected the wall on its side of the boundary of Israel prior to the 1967 war, then it would not have encroached on Palestinian legal rights. The court's logic assumes the unconditional applicability of international humanitarian law, including the Fourth Geneva Convention, to Israel's administration of the West Bank and Gaza (a principle affirmed by Judge Buergenthal). That body of law obliges Israel to respect the property rights of Palestinians without qualification, and to avoid altering the character of the territory, including by population transfer.

So I'll be clear. Here I am disputing where the wall is constructed, not whether a wall should be constructed in the first place. That is a different discussion.

The following map shows how security is not the only Israeli concern. Clearly the maximization of the number of settlements (in blue) on the Israeli side of the wall is a paramount consideration.

And then there's then Jordan Valley:

... the Jordan Valley has by far the largest share of both wells and springs. Moreover, the fact that the weather is warm throughout the year means that vegetables can be grown during winter at a time when other areas in Palestine and even in the Mediterranean region cannot. Therefore, the Jordan Valley’s environment provides highly profitable agricultural opportunities for both the local and external markets. In other words, it ensures food security for the West Bank population as well as a competitive edge in the global market. That’s why the Jordan Valley is often referred to as the ‘bread basket’ of the West Bank.

In March of 2003 Sharon announced the wall would extend to the Jordan Valley, which means the entire projected length of the wall is over 700 km, or about double that of the internationally recognized Green Line. Over 40% of occupied West Bank will be annexed. PLO Negotiations Affairs Dept gives more details:

Projected Number of Palestinians Trapped Between the Wall and the Green Line:
343,300 (14.9% of the Palestinian population). This figure includes a projected 93,000 Palestinians who will live in double-walled areas.

Projected Number of Palestinians who will be Separated from their Land by the Wall:
522,000 (22.6% of the Palestinian population)

Current:

Length of Wall: 186 km

Number of Palestinians Trapped Between the Wall and the Green Line: 13,332 living in 18 towns/villages.

Location of Wall: To date, more than 124 km of the Wall is more than 1 km east of the Green Line.

Acres of Land Confiscated for Wall Construction: approximately 8,000

Acres of Land Isolated between Wall and the Green Line: 25,153

Number of Homes Demolished or Under Threat of Demolition for Wall Construction: Approximately 75

...Number of Businesses Demolished for Wall Construction: 124

Number of Water Wells Confiscated or Behind the Wall: 50 supplying half of the water in which the Wall is located.

400,000 settlers will be on the Israel side in the exchange for a "pledge" by Sharon to relocate 7,500. And even without considering the proposed barrier in the Jordan Valley approximately 15% of the West Bank will be between the Green Line and the wall, home to over 300,000 Palestinians.

Even ex-prime minister Barak feels the manner in which the wall is being constructed is illegitimate:

The issue of settlements, Mr. Barak believes, should have been tackled when plans for the barrier were drawn up. The Ariel Sharon government's great mistake is not building the wall, but in doing so unilaterally: "It should be done as part of a coherent plan," he says.

"One: a clear long-term commitment to dismantle all the isolated Jewish settlements beyond the wall. Two: an immediate commitment to dismantle 60 to 70 settlements, move 60,000 to 70,000 people. Such action would convince people we are serious.

"Three, put on the table a proposal to the Palestinians: say that we are ready to hold negotiations with no preconditions beyond a full cessation of violence. In the absence of doing all these things together, the fence becomes simply a unilateral attempt to impose borders."

It is very obvious that the wall is being constructed around existing illegal settlements which have precious little to do with the security of Israel itself. A wall built on the green line, with necessary accommodations that directly relate to Israeli security, would have been an infinitely more defensible position in the battle over world opinion.

Bizarre quote

"I never felt it would take that much pressure to even find the head of my brother," [Wayne] Johnson said.

What's so striking about the comment of the brother of beheaded American Paul Johnson Jr., whose severed head was found in Saudi Arabia today, is that in these very dangerous, twisted times, it doesn't seem all that odd.

Only in Canada

Can you imagine the scandal in the United States if an athlete who felt he/she is more a Texan than an American and supported the independence of Texas were chosen to carry their flag at the Olympics? In Canada, Nicolas Gill was chosen for this honour. The Toronto Sun reported the following.

The Sun reported Tuesday that Gill told the newspaper in 1995 that he voted for Quebec sovereignty and feels "more like a Quebecer than I do a Canadian."

Gill, 32, will be competing in his fourth Olympics. The Montreal native is a two-time judo medallist at the Games, winning a bronze in 1992 and a silver in 2000. He has also earned three medals at the world championships….

There’s seems to be some typically light Canadian controversy over the issue, which will probably pass. In a country where the party with the third largest number of seats in Parliament and currently the holder of the balance of power in a minority Liberal government aims for the eventual separation of Quebec from the rest of Canada, this isn’t a big deal.

This isn’t to say that Gill isn’t deserving.

...with dozens of championships beneath his (black) belt, the affable Montreal native is finally receiving the acknowledgment he's due as an elite athlete, competitive stalwart and fine representative for sports in this country.

So, Now Suddenly You’re Mr. Diplomacy.

As if there were any doubt:

Sudan government documents incontrovertibly show that government officials directed recruitment, arming and other support to the ethnic militias known as the Janjaweed, Human Rights Watch said today. The government of Sudan has consistently denied recruiting and arming the Janjaweed militias...

Human Rights Watch said that Sudanese government forces and government-backed militias are responsible for crimes against humanity, war crimes and "ethnic cleansing" involving aerial and ground attacks on civilians of the same ethnicity as members of two rebel groups in Darfur. Thousands of civilians have been killed, hundreds of women and girls have been raped and more than one million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes and farms in Darfur.

We're still waiting for action.

Meanwhile, Colin Powell steps up to the plate:

The United States has drafted a UN security council resolution that is now being discussed with members of the council, calling upon the government of Sudan to immediately fulfill all of the commitments it has made to end the violence and give access to aid workers and international monitors. The resolution urges the warring parties to conclude a political agreement without delay. It commits all states to target sanctions against the Janjaweed and those who aid and abet them, as well as others who may have responsibility for this tragic situation.

In the case of Iraq, where there was no immediate threat whatsoever, it was always known that the big stick would win over whatever token diplomacy was undertaken. Now, in a critical situation where thousands have died, have been raped or tortured and in the coming months the lives of up to a million people could be at stake, Powell is suddenly talking about 'targeting sanctions.'

What a joke.

Going to jail? Don't forget your sleeping bag.

"I'm a really good camper. I can sleep on the ground."- Martha Stewart noting that she is prepared for whatever hardships prison life may bring.

No, No, No

Today at the Globe and Mail they get it wrong - horribly, stupidly wrong.

… on the other side of the Atlantic, a report last week from the U.S. Senate "did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities." A second part of the report will look into how the Bush administration handled the flawed intelligence it was given, but so far there is nothing to show that Mr. Bush or his top officials lied or distorted either. In the words of Mr. Blair, they were acting in "good faith" when they decided to go to war.

This is absolutely pitiful, a real disgrace to journalism. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has dealt with this issue a couple of times, and concisely cuts to shreds this tripe hoisted upon us by those too cowardly to admit that they were wrong on Iraq. Marshall links to a (most certainly much lamented) column by Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post two years. Hoagland says:

The "politicization" accusation suggests that those who find Iraqi links to al Qaeda are primarily interested in currying favor with the Bush White House. It comes primarily from those who won favor in the Clinton years with an analysis based on the proposition that an Arab nationalist such as Saddam Hussein would never cooperate with the Islamic fanatics of al Qaeda. They are now out in the cold in the Bush-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz era.

Their work is only one part of a monumental record of failure on Iraq by the CIA, which has at different moments sought to understand, support, co-opt and then overthrow Hussein. The agency succeeded in none. Considering the extent of that failure, it is no surprise that Bush has until now relied little on the Langley agency for his information on Iraq. There is simply no way to reconcile what the CIA has said on the record and in leaks with the positions Bush has taken on Iraq.

And Marshall on the report from last week:

Sen. Rockefeller and the rest of the Democrats on the Committee voted unanimously to approve the report that a) places all the blame for the intelligence failures on the CIA, b) specifically -- and quite improbably -- rules out administration pressure as a cause of the problem, and c) avoids any discussion of how or whether the administration manipulated or distorted intelligence community findings to build their case for war.

The very structure of the investigation, as Rockefeller noted, necessarily pushed any discussion of the administration's responsibility for or role in the debacle back until after the November election -- a veritable tour de force of political convenience...

Yet in his comments at the press conference Rockefeller seemed to say that each of these conclusions was either false or so incomplete as to be deeply misleading...

Later in the same post:

...The CIA really did believe at least that Iraq continued to maintain some stocks of chemical and biological weapons. But its reports, analyses and judgments escalated dramatically in their certainty and scope after President Bush was sworn in to office (significantly, even before 9/11). Those at the CIA with more alarmist views gained favor at the White House, while those who were more skeptical lost it.

Remember in all of this that the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which Sen. Roberts noted was the focus of the Senate report, was hastily cobbled together after the White House had spent a year making its quite alarmist case about Iraq's illicit weapons.

There is no bright line separating the administration's hyping of the threat and manipulation of the evidence and the CIA's own misreading of the evidence and its institutional decision to service the president's needs...

The CIA is guilty: of aiding and abetting.

But beyond all the evidence that the Bush White House most definitely did influence the conclusions reached by the C.I.A., what kind of moron would you have to be to believe that the Bushies were just fooled by bad intelligence? I'll tell you what kind, the Senator Pat Roberts kind

Like Mr. Bush, Mr. Roberts was a supporter of the war who has said the world and Iraq are better off with Saddam Hussein out of power.

But in an hourlong interview on Wednesday morning in his office, Mr. Roberts said he was "not too sure" that the administration would have invaded if it had known how flimsy the intelligence was on Iraq and illicit weapons. Instead, the senator said, Mr. Bush might well have advocated efforts to maintain sanctions against Iraq and to continue to try to unearth the truth through the work of United Nations inspectors. "I don't think the president would have said that military action is justified right now," Mr. Roberts said. If the administration had been given "accurate intelligence," he said, Mr. Bush "might have said, 'Saddam's a bad guy, and we've got to continue with the no-fly zones and with inspections.' "

Yeah, and maybe soon he'll come out for universal health care and marry Dick Cheney.

By the way, Roberts is the leader of the Senate Intelligence Committee...a walking oxymoron.

Dr Z. to New Zealand?

Dr. Z of S.I. is officially my favorite NFL columnist.

Exhibit A:

Note to all you concerned Americans who are unhappy about my reference to President Bush's self-glorification in the last Mailbag: If this guy gets re-elected the Redhead and I seriously considering moving to New Zealand ...

Exhibit B:

…And here, Mr. Williams, is my contribution to the genre:

In a small town the bell ringer in the church quits. The sexton advertises for a replacement. The first guy who shows up has no arms.

"But ... but ..." the sexton says, "How can you? I mean ... with your handicap?"

"Just watch," says the no-armed man. They go up to the bell tower and he runs at the bell and BANG! he slams it with his face and the bell lets out a dull bong. Then he starts to do it again, and the sexton stops him.

"Not again," he says. "I can't watch. Tell me, do you really need the job this badly?" The man assures him that he does. So the sexton hires him.

Sunday comes and it's time to ring the bell to summon the faithful to church. A breeze is blowing. Just as the bell-ringer runs at the bell, the breeze blows it sideways, and he misses it and plunges to the ground, to his death. The sexton runs outside, where a crowd is gathering. A policeman arrives.

"Do you know this man?" he asks the sexton.

"No," he says, "but his face rings a bell."

Mixing it Up With China

It’s one thing to be hopelessly incompetent and serial liars, but to be wildly reckless as well.

Quietly and with minimal coverage in the U.S. press, the Navy announced that from mid-July through August it would hold exercises dubbed Operation Summer Pulse '04 in waters off the China coast near Taiwan.

This will be the first time in U.S. naval history that seven of our 12 carrier strike groups deploy in one place at the same time. It will look like the peacetime equivalent of the Normandy landings and may well end in a disaster.

At a minimum, a single carrier strike group includes the aircraft carrier itself (usually with nine or 10 squadrons and a total of about 85 aircraft), a guided missile cruiser, two guided missile destroyers, an attack submarine and a combination ammunition, oiler and supply ship.

Normally, the United States uses only one or at the most two carrier strike groups to show the flag in a trouble spot. In a combat situation it might deploy three or four, as it did for both wars with Iraq. Seven in one place is unheard of…

Needless to say, the Chinese are not amused. They say that their naval and air forces, plus their land-based rockets, are capable of taking on one or two carrier strike groups but that combat with seven would overwhelm them. So even before a carrier reaches the Taiwan Strait, Beijing has announced it will embark on a crash project that will enable it to meet and defeat seven U.S. carrier strike groups within a decade…

Geez, these guys are really nuts, I mean really, clinically insane, and should be hospitalized.

God help us all if they get four more years.

Now

Unlike some on the left, I believe there is a time and a place for military intervention. Like now, in Darfur.

In the Darfur province of western Sudan, a slow-motion genocide has been taking place while the rest of the world either pretends not to notice or finds excuses for refusing to intervene. The uprooting and expunging of the Fur, Massaleit, and Zaghawa peoples is the deliberate, systematic doing of the National Islamic Front that rules Sudan. Government planes bomb the non-Arab villages of Darfur, and then the regime's collaborators, Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, ride in to murder and rape.
.
The Darfur atrocities have been going on for 16 months. If they are not stopped immediately, the world will witness a human calamity on the scale of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. The UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions told the UN News Center recently that the number of black Africans killed by Arab militias in the Darfur region is "bound to be staggering." There are more than a million displaced people within Darfur. At least 200,000 more have fled across the border to Chad.

… There is no way to stop the Darfur genocide other than a humanitarian military intervention. In accord with the 1948 Convention on Genocide, the UN Security Council should pass such a resolution and invite a coalition of willing life savers to enter Darfur and rescue a million fellow human beings.

- The Boston Globe