DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ? HOW ABOUT IN

AMERICA?

Mr. B. keeps insisting that there's an incipient
democracy trying to grow in Iraq, and that if he
can keep watering that plant with enough Iraqi
and American blood, it will flower into something
lasting and beautiful that will be worth the cost.
It's a fantasy, of course. There's nothing in Arab
history or culture to support this dream. They
don't even have a word for "democracy."

The case isn't hopeless in the long term, however.
Islam is both egalitarian and authoritarian. So far,
the authoritarian part has always ruled. That's
because Muhammed founded a theocracy based
on holy Scripture and religious law. Modern Muslims
who want to imitate the Prophet's pattern of
governance (Islamists) are numerous and their
number is growing. They include Mr. al-Maliki and
most of his fellow Shia in Iraq. That's the majority
of Iraqis. The U. S. has no logical, legal, or moral
basis for blocking their popular will.

Whatever it is we are selling there, they aren't buying.
That should be clear by now. It's not going to happen!
You can't have democracy without a social contract.
Our founding fathers studied the political history of
Greece, Rome, and England, and then crafted a social
contract spelled out in the Constitution. To be widely
accepted and followed by the people, such a contract
must be seen as fair (equitable) and workable. In it,
people must agree to give up violence as a means of
changing the law or the government. That, in fact, is
the heart and core of a social contract.

We don't have anything like that consensus in Iraq.
And an army can't bring it about by force. That's what
several of our generals have meant by "there's no military
solution possible." What part of that doesn't Mr. B.
understand?

The only Arab country that has ever come close to a
democracy is Lebanon. It once had a large Christian
population that lived harmoniously with Sunnis, Shia,
Druze and Jews. They have a parliamentry govt. But
the social contract there has repeatedly broken down
over sectarian quarrels sometimes resulting in civil
war. They are now the uneasy (and unwilling) home
of Hezbollah, the Iran (and Syria) backed Shia group
fighting Israel.

I said above that Islam is eqalitarian. That fact, plus
its strong emphasis on social justice, constitutes the
potential for democracy to develop down the road,
if Muslims are ever willing to reject authoritarianism.
That movement is abroad in many Muslim countries,
just as we are moving in the opposite direction! We
have an out-of-control president in total control of our
armed forces waging a hopelessly stalled war that is
totally opposed by a large majority of his people!
That's not democracy either! But we can't find
politicians with enough balls to stop it!

jgoodwin004@centurytel.net

HILLARY STRADDLES AND GEORGE ADDLES

"You can't be against the war and for the surge."
(John Edwards on Hillary's pandering to VFW)

"Hillary Clinton said the surge was 'working' and gave
a helping hand to Bush's spin machine." (Sen. Gravel)

Edwards put his finger on Mrs. Clinton's ambivilence
about the war. She supported it in the early days
when the American public did, and changed slowly, as
they changed in their support. Now there's an uptick
in popular support for the surge, and Hil says: "it's
working!" For proof of success, she cites Anbar,
where there has been no surge, but a quieting of
violence due to local initiatives and joint operations
among the tribal leaders and U. S. forces. That's good,
but was happening before the surge, which is
concentrated in Baghdad. The most violent forces
pushed out of Anbar have simply surfaced elsewhere
and continued the violence.

Combat soldiers report from Iraq (in a gut-wrenching
op-ed in The New York Times (8/19/07): "Viewed
from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment,
the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. . .
A few nights ago, for example, we witnessed the death
of one American soldier and the critical wounding of
two others when a lethal armor-piercing explosive was
detonated between an Iraqi Army checkpoint and a
police one. Local Iraqis readily testified to American
investigators that Iraqi police and Army officers
escorted the triggermen and helped plant the bomb.
These civilians highlighted their own predicment: had
they informed the Americans of the bomb before the
incident, the Iraqi Army, the police or the local Shiite
militia would have killed their families."

These six soldiers, non-coms with the 82nd Airborne,
are dismissive of politicians' claims of success in Iraq:
"To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that
long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a
recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsur-
gency is far fetched. . . we are skeptical of recent press
coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly
manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting
civil, political and social unrest we see every day."

They go on to explain: "Counterinsurgency is, by
definition, a competition between insurgents and
counterinsurgents for the control and support of the
population. . . the most important front in the counter-
insurgency, improving basic social and economic
conditions, is the one on which we have failed most
miserably. Two million Iraqis are in refugee camps
in bordering countries. Close to two million more are
internally displaced and now fill many urban slums.
Cities lack regular electricity, telephone services and
sanitation. 'Lucky' Iraqis live in gated communities
barricaded with concrete blast walls that provide them
with a sense of communal claustrophobia rather than
any sense of security we would consider normal. . .
Four years into our occupation, we have failed every
promise, while we have substituted Baath Party
tyranny with a tyranny of Islamist, militia and
criminal violence. When the primary preoccupation
of average Iraqis is when and how they are likely to
be killed, we can hardly feel smug as we hand out care
packages. . ."

I hope all of you will track down this full article in the
Times. It is a most helpful counter-weight to the
flood of happy talk emanating from the spin factories!

jgoodwin004@centurytel.net

NUMBER BENDING: LIPSTICK ON THE PIG?

The purpose of the "surge" was to reduce violence by
increasing it (escalation.) That seldom works for long
in counterinsurgency, and it's not working in Iraq.
That fact belies the fantasy that we are seeing "success"
there. Before the end of July we were seeing reports
that "only" 74 U. S. troops had been killed that month
by Iraqi insurgents. (The actual KIA tally for all of
July when final numbers were in was 80.) But this was
hailed by cheer-leaders for the surge like The New York
Times and Gen. Odierno (in Iraq) as a sign the surge
was working. (KIA numbers have been 100+ each
month so far this year, until July.)

It's important to understand this, as both Bush and his
war are enjoying their own surge in support, based on
this spurious claim. What the media aren't reporting:
it is hotter than hell in Iraq right now. Guerillas don't
like to handle heavy exposives when it's 120+ in the
shade, and all activities slow down then. Last July, only
43 G. I.s were killed. In July, 2005, 54 killed. July,
2004, 54 killed. July, 2003, 48 killed. 80 killed this
year is an improvement? For whom? The insurgents?

Civilian casualties in Iraq are also up, and misunderstood.
According to icasualties.org, the Iraqi civilian and military
death toll from political violence in July 2007 was 1,690,
a 25% increase over the July 2006 toll of 1,280. So where's
the progress?

Typical nonsense abroad in the media: "On CNN's "This
Week at War" for July 28, Michael O'Hanlon of the
Brookings Institution said of Iraq, "I think we have
reduced the amount of violence overall, but not to the
point where the psychology has fundamentally changed,
and Iraqi political leaders are not helping much yet in
this process." Well, duh, the psychology hasn't changed
because the facts clearly show not reduced, but increased
violence, and the news is being spun to provide a mis-
leading picture. The public is being fooled again into
supporting a fundamentally flawed and failing policy.
What else is new?

jgoodwin004@centurytel.net

ENDURING ISRAELI "PEACE" CHARADES

"The Middle East peace process may well be the
most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic
history." So writes Henry Siegman in a valuable,
well documented essay in the London Review of
Books (8/16/07), entitled: "The Great Middle
East Peace Process Scam." He shows how it has
always been a shell game for the Israelis, and how
they have benefited (with our backing) from stalling.
The more time that passes without a final and
definitive agreement, the harder it becomes to
get one. "Since the failed Camp David summit of
2000, and actually well before it," writes Siegman,
"Israel's interest in a peace process -- other than
for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and
international acceptance of the status quo -- has
been a fiction that has served primarily to provide
cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian
land and an occupation whose goal, according to
the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon, is 'to
sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians
that they are a defeated people'. . . Anyone familiar
with Israel's relentless confiscations of Palestinian
territory -- based on a plan devised, overseen and
implemented by Ariel Sharon -- knows that the
objective of its settlement enterprise in the West
Bank has been largely achieved. Gaza, the
evacuation of whose settlements was so naively
hailed by the international community as the
heroic achievement of a man newly committed
to an honorable peace with the Palestinians, was
intended to serve as the first in a series of
Palestinian Bantustans. Gaza's situation shows
us what these Bantustans will look like if their
residents do not behave as Israel wants." (It's
an open-air prison, entirely fenced, with armed
guards at the few gates.)

"Israel's disingenuous commitment to a peace
process and a two-state solution is precisely what
has made possible its open-ended occupation
and dismemberment of Palestinian territory.
And the Quartet -- with the EU, the UN and
Russia obediently following Washington's lead --
has collaborated with and provided cover for this
deception by accepting Israel's claim that it has
been unable to find a deserving Palestinian
peace partner."

I'll plan to return to this long story of deception
at a later date. But I urge you to look up the
whole article for yourself. It covers a lot of
ground with extremely important facts.

jgoodwin004@centurytel.net

JEWISH EXPERIENCE (Cont.)

My August 2 blog quoted extensively from an
article by Kim Chernin entitled "Seven Pillars of
Jewish Denial," found in Vol. 17, No. 5, of Tikkun,
a magazine of and for the Israeli peace movement.
Here is my remaining quotation from that article:

Obstacle 7
Ideology vs. Living People?

"At one extreme, the decision to further occupy the
West Bank is guided by a sense of Jewish destiny and
by an ideology that claims Judea and Samaria as Jewish
sacred ground. These claims are based on archaic
conversations with God. The Orthodox families moving
to the settlements will set themselves down among a
hostile population, will be trained to shoot, and will
paticipate in the further partition of Palestinian lands.
They will take up a great deal of water when there is
already not enough water for their neighbors, many of
whom go for days without being able to wash or even
drink. In service to an archaic idea these people will
see their Arab neighbors, not as a humbled, battered,
impoverished, hopeless people, but as a potent enemy
living illegitimately on ancient Jewish land. In the grip
of ideology some things get neglected. Living people,
the present, the sanctity of civilian life become less
important than what, exactly? An idea? The idea of
the Jewish people as chosen by God, living out a
covenant with Him?

When I first went to Israel in 1971 I was on my way to
a new kibbutz in the Golan Heights. It was a bleak, grim,
heavily armed place with living conditions as rough as
those faced by the early pioneers. There were no trees
on this kibbutz, no gardens, no fields, no grazing animals.
It was an armed camp made up of mud, reserve fences,
and young Israelis who were there to hold the newly
acquired land. I was convinced I belonged with them,
although I was not invited to stay. Today I want to ask
that younger self: What can it mean to be God's people
if this election does not come with a concern for all
living peoples? Would it mean that the God who once
spoke to our people has nothing new to say?"

These have only been excerpts from a powerful,
insightful article that I hope you all will track down
and read. For my part, this is a continuing quest to
understand the Israelis and their attitudes and
actions toward Palestinians. I remain baffled by the
Israeli lobby (AIPAC) and there 100% support for
the ruthless oppression and suppression of the
Palestinians that so outrages and alienates the
Muslim world, and is a major cause of Muslim
terrorism.

jgoodwin004@centurytel.net

IRAQ: TWO STONE WALLS

Mr. Bush is immovable, unshakable in his determination
that democracy is on the rise everywhere, and by God
Iraq will be no exception. He says democracy is a rising
tide that lifts all boats. I hate to tell him, but a rising
tide doesn't lift all boats: it sinks the ones with defective
bottoms! (Remember the Titanic?)

Mr. Bush (and his supporters) should read the
chapter in Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom
entitled: "The Islamic Exception." There Fareed explains
why democracy has little or no appeal to much of the
Muslim world: ". . . for the fundamentalists, Islam is
considered a template for all life, including politics."
Muhammed established a theocracy governed by
religious law. "If it's good enough for Muhammed,
it's more than good enough for us," reason many, if
not most, Muslims. While Islam stresses justice and
equality, classical Islam developed in the 7th and 8th
centuries, lacks many of the other ideas we associate
with democracy today. To quote Elie Kedouri
(Democracy and Arab Political Culture): "The idea
of representation, of elections, of popular suffrage,
of political institutions being regulated by laws laid
down by a parliamentary assembly, of these laws
being guarded and upheld by an independent
judiciary, the ideas of the secularity of the state . . .
all these are profoundly alien to the Muslim political
tradition."

As I have mentioned in the past, there are 22 Arab
countries, and none is or ever has been, a working
liberal democracy. There must be some reason for
that. And there is. There is no Arabic word for
"democracy." If God gave us a perfect law in the
Quran, why would we need (or even consider) man-
made laws? And what need is there for legislature
(or parliament), if there's no need to make laws?
What would they do?

Someone needs to explain Islam to Mr. Bush, and
that the incoming tide over there is the fundamentalist
brand of Islam. That is exemplified very well by
Mr. al-Maliki, a devout Shia, who is the other stone-
wall we are dealing with (besides Mr. B.). Mr. M.
wants very much an Islamic government in Iraq,
somewhat similar to the one in Iran (with which he
is in close touch.) He refuses to let the violent Sunni
minority shoot and bomb its way into political
legitimacy, and is increasingly upset with Mr. B
not only for allowing it, but now beginning to rearm
those same Sunnis. This is hardly just an academic
discussion: our soldiers are dying daily to prolong
this impasse! Stone walls don't move much.

jgoodwin004@centurytel.net

ISRAEL AND THE JEWISH EXPERIENCE

A local book club (all white, middle class gentiles), is
reading Jimmy Carter's insightful and informative
Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, which inevitably deals
with long time and serious and somewhat baffling
abuse of Palestinians by Israelis. (It goes both ways,
but Israelis are militarily dominant, and in charge.)
I came home from a discussion of this, and turned to
an article entitled "Seven Pillars of Jewish Denial,"
found in Vol. 17, No. 5, of Tikkun, a magazine where
"you get an emancipatory spirituality, a progressive
Jewish voice, the most in-depth perspective on the
Israeli peace movement, and a politics of meaning,"
according to Michael Lerner, the editor. It's an excellent
magazine, and delivers all that and more.

The author of this article is Kim Chernin. She writes
(in part): "I am thinking about American Jews,
wondering why so many of us have trouble being
critical of Israel. I faced the difficulty myself when I
first went to Israel in 1971. I was an ardent Zionist,
intending to spend my life on a kibbutz in the Galilee
and to become an Israeli citizen. Back home, before
leaving, I argued almost daily with my mother, an
extreme left wing radical, about the Jews' right to a
homeland in our historical and therefore inalienable
setting. However, once established on my kibbutz on
the Lebanese border, I began to notice things that
disrupted my complacency.

We used to ride down to our orchards on kibbutz
trucks with Arab workers from the neighboring
villages and were occasionally invited to visit. We
liked sitting on a rug on a dirt floor, eating food
cooked over an open fire, drinking water from the
village well. Above all we loved the kerosene lamps
that were lit and set in a half circle around us as it
grew dark. But walking home it occurred to me that
our kibbutz had running water, electricity, modern
stoves. Our neighbors were gracious, generous, and
friendly, although I had learned by then that the land
the kibbutz occupied had once belonged to them. We
were living on land that was theirs, under material
conditions they could not hope to equal. I found this
troubling.

The path from this troubled awareness to my later
ability to be critical of Israel has been long and complex.
Over the years I have spoken with other Jews who have
traveled this same path, and to many more who haven't.
In each of us I have detected mental obstacles that make
it hard, sometimes impossible, for us to see what is there
before our eyes. Our inability to engage in critical thought
about our troubled homeland is entangled by crucial
questions about Jewish identity. Why do American Jews
find it difficult to be critical of Israel? Here, set out in
linear form, are seven obstacles to a Jew's ability to be
critical of Israel.

Seven Obstacles

1. A conviction that Jews are always in danger, always have
been, and therefore are in danger now.
Which leads to:
2. The insistence that a criticism is an attack and will lead
to our destruction.
Which is rooted in:
3. The supposition that any negativity towards Jews (or
Israel) is a sign of anti-Semitism and will (again,
inevitably) lead to our destruction.
Which is enhanced by:
4. Survivor's guilt.
Which contains within itself:
5. A hidden belief that we can change the past.
Which holds:
6. An even more hidden belief that a significant
amount of suffering confers the right of violence.
Which finally brings us to:
7. The conviction that our beliefs, our ideology,
(or theology), matter more than the lives of other
human beings."

Ms. Chernin spends a couple of pages explaining
and enlarging on these "obstacles." If yo have an
interest in that, I encourage you to track down the
article and read it in its entirety. Suffice it for my
purposes here to skip along to the author's further
comments on Obstacle 6. Suffering, Violence:
"The Israeli army that defends our homeland behaves
brutally, uses torture, fires upon innocent civilians.
What justifies the behaviour of this army? We call it
self defense but this is, I suggest, only the surface
justification. Further down, tucked carefully away in
our collective psyche, we find a sense of entitlement
about our violence. Our historic suffering as a people
entitles us to the violence of our current behaviour.
Our violence is not horrendous and cruel like the
violence of other people, but is a justified, sacred
violence, a holy war. Of course we would not want to
know this about ourselves -- it would make us too
much like the perceived enemy whose violence
against us we are deploring. When the suicide
bomber blows up a hotel full of Passover celebrants,
we see clearly that this is an instance of hateful,
unjustifiable violence. (And it is, it is.) When we
destroy a refugee camp of impoverished Palestinians,
this, in our eyes, is a violence purified by our history
of persecution. (And it is not, it is not.) We are
puzzled that much of the world doesn't see our
situation in the same way."

The writer goes on to say: "I think many of us hold this
view of purified Jewish violence without being aware of
it. Though we rarely admit it, the Torah is full of ancient
stories marked by tribal violence done in the name of
Jehovah." After talking about Elijah, and his slaying of
the prophets of Baal, she writes: "In a similar vein: We
celebrate the military victories of Joshua. But do we
really take in what they involved? 'Joshua, and all Israel
with him, went on up from Elon to Hebron. They
attacked it, took it and struck it with the edge of the
sword, with its king, all the places belonging to it and
every living creature in it (my italics, Josh. 10:37).' I have
yet to hear a rabbi help us imagine this event in which
women and children, the very young and the very old, are
put to the sword. . . I can't count the number of times I
read the story of Joshua as a tale of our people coming
into their rightful possession of their promised land
without stopping to say to myself, 'but this is a history
of rape, plunder, slaughter, invasion and destruction of
other peoples.' As such, it bears an uncomfortably close
resemblance to the behaviour of Israeli settlers and the
Israeli army of today, a behviour we also cannot see for
what it is."

I will plan to return this topic at a later date with:
Obstacle 7. Ideology vs. Living People. It's a long one
that merits its own space.

jgoodwin004@centurytel.net

A CURIOUS OMISSION

Here is a letter I wrote to the editor of The Oregonian:

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished historian. As
expected, he has written well (Oregonian, 7/30/07)
on the history of our dealings in the Middle East. But
there is a puzzling omission in his recounting of the
story: there is no mention of the Israel/Palestine
conflict, and our own considerable part in it. (It's an
omission, by the way, found also in the speeches and
debates by the many presidential candidates. Isn't
that strange?) Both King Abdullah of Jordan, and
Pres. Musharraf of Pakistan, have said this is the core
issue that causes the most hostility toward the West
in the Muslim world, and the cause of most of the
terrorism in and from the Middle East.

So it's strange that Prof. Hanson (and others) ignore it.
It's like a history of the Nixon years that doesn't mention
Watergate! There would be no Hezbollah or Hamas
without the U. S.-backed Israeli invasion and occupation
of Lebanon and the West Bank. We have refused for
years to speak to Iran or Syria because they support
Hamas and Hezbollah. The latter are "terrorists"
because they are fighting an enemy invader occupying
their homeland. (Like the French Resistence did in WW II).
Well, they are terrorists, because they attack unarmed
and unprotected civilians, and that is evil and wrong! For
sure! But the Israelis do the same thing, over and over.
They killed 30,000 people in Lebanon during and after
their invasion there in 1982. And they are still at it, using
U. S.-supplied weapons and munitions. There is no moral
difference between suicide bombers and bombs falling from
planes. The recipients are equally dead in either case.
So we are supporting terrorists too! To the tune of $118
billion in the case of Israel. Funny that no one mentions that.
Think what that money could do for our decaying, long
neglected infra-structure, or failing education system, or
tragically under-financed and under-performing health system!
Maybe we would have less bridges falling down, and less people
in desperate need of preventative and remedial care.

A fair and just settlement of the Palestine issue along
the lines advocated by the Saudis, the Arab League,
and Jimmy Carter (and the U. N.) would, in one stroke,
do away with Iran's threats against Israel (designed to
win friends and support in the Muslim world), as well
as wipe out any support (or reason) for Hamas and
Hezbollah. They would be gone, as would most of the
support for Osama bin Laden. It would also secure
cooperation from the Muslim neighbors of Iraq for
achieving stability there. In fact, it's the sine qua non
for such an achievement. And speaking of bin Laden,
we would do well to remember his promise: "There will
be no peace for the West until there is peace for Palestine."
Think about it.

jgoodwin004@centurytel.net