World War III, Redux

Are you ready for World War III?

Last week, President Bush threatened as much, should Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad develop a nuclear weapon. (Yet, few have remembered to mention that this isn't his first such quip.) Add that to the Senate’s recently approved resolution urging Bush to label a faction of Iran’s standing army as a foreign terrorist organization and you’ve got some serious ramped-up talk. But is it in perspective?

World War I, deemed the “war to end all wars,” killed 10 million people, wounded 20 million more and left wounds deep enough to bring about World War II. Challenging comprehension, WWII killed 70 million and was the most deadly era in human existence. It reduced Europe to rubble and gave
birth to the atomic bomb. The current situation, however, rings more confounding because, other than Bush, there seem to be few willing combatants for WWIII.

As the president issued warnings from a podium last week, Ahmadinejad smiled, hip to hip with Russian
President Vladimir Putin. The Russian leader — who has lately developed several autocratic tendencies — declared his country’s vehement opposition to any action against Iran. Is Bush going to pick a fight with Putin, the man he still calls a friend?

And then there’s China. At first glance, China may seem to have little to do with American action in the
Middle East, but the emerging superpower’s current concerns offer a foreboding echo to Bush’s latest threat by saber-rattling over Taiwan and the Dalai Lama’s visit to Washington. China’s Communist Party congress, which meets twice a decade, assembled in Beijing last week. Their chief challenge? Managing the country’s frenetic economic growth. As China continues to loan billions to the U.S. to fund the ongoing war in Iraq, the agenda in Beijing was very telling. While China has to address growing income inequality and potential environmental disaster, World War is nowhere to be found.

So, what do you think about waging World War III? Before you decide, there’s one more puzzling development. Last Tuesday, Iraq also announced $1.1 billion in contracts for desperately needed power plants. Who is going to build them? Iran and China.

Perhaps, as the White House later suggested, Bush’s World War III remark was just “a rhetorical point.” In such tense and uncertain times, there’s a danger in rhetorical flourishes meant for effect. With the stock market in flux and other economic indicators painting a cautious picture for next year, the president should focus on reality rather than conjuring up new wars.

(Also published in Metro.)

Save the Lemmings from Islam and America: Majid's 'A Call for Heresy'

There’s a haunting television commercial in rotation these days. Thousands of nondescript people are bustling across a heavenly green meadow toward a gaping, bottomless hole where, like lemmings, they plunge into nonexistence. With their arms at their sides and their complicit legs still pumping, mass mentality, according to the ad, deprives them of a sizzling hamburger. It’s supposed to be funny.

Instead of making you laugh, though, the spot tunes into some newfound hardwiring of the American brain. For the last six years, out of the mainstream has meant you’re out of your mind.

According to a new book, at least now we have one thing in common with the Muslim world. Anouar Majid’s provocative new tome, “A Call for Heresy: Why Dissent is Vital to Islam and America,” argues that both Islam and the U.S. must look critically at history and propose serious alternatives to the injustices that globalization breeds today, the most damning and destructive of which, according to Majid, is Islamist terrorism.

“I am interested primarily in the ways [Muslims and Americans] are increasingly being subjected to religious, political and economic orthodoxies that suppress the intellectual legacies that once gave both traditions, however briefly, their greatest cultural élans,” Majid writes. At least in the U.S. today, it’s tough to argue with him — these years will prove to be anything but our finest cultural, political or spiritual era of our history.

During the Inquisition in the 13th century, heretics were burned at the stake. Today you can stand in front of the White House, call George W. Bush a war criminal (or worse, as some do), and police officers will walk right past you. When you are free to say anything, as the old adage goes, nobody listens. At the same time, remember what happened when Salman Rushdie committed what some considered blasphemy by writing a novel critical of the Prophet Muhammad? It earned Rushdie a fatwa from Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini that called for good Muslims to kill the author.

Neither the meaningless cacophony of the U.S. nor the reactionary repression by some radical Muslims ought to silence anyone, because Majid makes it clear that Islam and the U.S. have a lot more in common than we think. Both need to summon the courage, brilliance and wit to usurp the rapacious rules we’re all following, or it’s straight into the big hole we go.

(Also published in Metro. Majid will be reading Wednesday, October 10th at 7pm at Bluestockings in New York.)

United Nations Updates Mandate on Iraq, Expands Role

In the sordid history of 21st century Iraq, August 19, 2003 sticks out as a chilling turning point. The US had invaded five months earlier and since holed up their governing operation inside a secluded Green Zone on a bend in the Tigris river. Looting, unrest, and a general sense of chaos had overtaken the city, despite the rosy assurances US officials.

The UN, however, set up headquarters out among the population at the Canal Hotel, the mission led by one of the world's most respected diplomats, the Brazilian Sergio Vieira de Mello.

When the massive truck bomb exploded outside the hotel, under his window, it killed him and 21 others including staff from countries all over the world: Egypt, UK, Italy, France, US, Iraq, Philippines, Iran, Canada, Jordan and Spain.

In a sense, that day, any internationalism left for a post-Saddam Iraq, after the US's snub of the UN and its battle with France and Germany about the invasion, went up in smoke. Since, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has moved on, replaced by Ban Ki-Moon. New leaders rule France and Germany. Iraq has fallen through the hands of malfeasance into a nightmarish civil war.

Now, almost exactly four years later, the Security Council has unanimously approved an update to its mandate, UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI), broadening the UN's role in the broken country. Despite the worrying security situation, Ban is in favor.

There are currently about 50 UN staff working in the Green Zone. That number is expected to increase, and while the mission had been working on elections issues and monitoring human rights, in an expanded role, the UN will now try to promote reconciliation between warring Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds.

The thinking is that the impartiality of the UN will engender its hand at the negotiating table. Yet, without a table to sit at, that's tough to imagine, regardless if the organization may be the best qualified in the world for such a challenge.

More importantly, considering the UN's fresh wounds from Baghdad, even if Ban asks his top people to go, would they?

(Image of the Canal Hotel bombing.)

A Terrorist Fights, But Is He A Soldier? It Depends on Who You Ask.

Once you get beyond the apparent irrationality of the phrase, "laws of war," and look closely at the terms, juridical dilemmas abound. Despite the fact that George II's "War on Terror" is now half a decade old, debate over the most fundamental aspects of how that war is waged is still very much ongoing.

Today on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, retired four-star General Wesley Clark gets down and dirty with those terms of international law and asks the question, is a terrorist a soldier? In short, he argues that terrorists need to be considered more like "modern-day pirates than warriors."

At first glance, "modern-day pirate" may seem like a flilppant phrase, but it is tough to get one by Clark, considering that he not only graduated valedictorian of his class at West Point but also took a master's degree in military science from the Command and General Staff College. In fact, the term "pirate" is used with deft attention to character.

A pirate is a criminal on the high seas. The latter fall under the jurisdiction of no nation, and the former, therefore, work on behalf of no sovereign. It is an interesting parallel to draw with a roving terrorist organization like al-Qaeda.

George II's administration has chosen to treat captured terrorists as enemy combatants. Clark writes, "By treating such terrorists as combatants, however, we accord them a mark of respect and dignify their acts. And we undercut our own efforts against them in the process." The crux of his argument follows:

If we are to defeat terrorists across the globe, we must do everything possible to deny legitimacy to their aims and means, and gain legitimacy for ourselves. As a result, terrorism should be fought first with information exchanges and law enforcement, then with more effective domestic security measures. Only as a last resort should we call on the military and label such activities “war.” The formula for defeating terrorism is well known and time-proven.

As Clark goes on to posit that terrorists ought to be tried in the court system, the elephant in the room begins to snort; perhaps the bigger problem here is the waging of a war without end, as the details of such a conflict will tie down any possibility of success?

(Photo from Roger G1's flickr.)

The Laws of War | List of International Agreements Since 1856

From Wikipedia:

List of declarations, conventions, treaties and judgements and on the laws of war:^[4][5][6]

• 1856 Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law abolished privateering
• 1864 First Geneva Convention "for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field"
• 1868 St. Petersburg Declaration Renouncing the Use, in Time of War, of Explosive projectiles Under 400 Grammes Weight
• 1874 Project of an International Declaration concerning the Laws and Customs of War (Brussels Declaration).^[7] Signed in Brussels 27 August. This agreement never entered into force, but formed part of the basis for the codification of the laws of war at the 1899 Hague Peace Conference.^[8][9]
• 1880 Manual of the Laws and Customs of War at Oxford. At its session in Geneva in 1874 the Institute of International Law appointed a committee to study the Brussels Declaration of the same year and to submit to the Institute its opinion and supplementary proposals on the subject. The work of the Institute led to the adoption of the Manual in 1880 and it went on to form part of the basis for the codification of the laws of war at the 1899 Hague Peace Conference.^[9]
• 1925 Geneva protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare^[10]
• 1927-1930 Greco-German arbitration tribunal
• 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact (also known as the Pact of Paris)
• 1938 League of Nations declaration for the "Protection of Civilian Populations Against Bombing From the Air in Case of War"^[11]
• 1938 Amsterdam Draft Convention for the Protection of Civilian Populations Against New Engines of War.^[12]
• 1929 Geneva Convention, Relative to the treatment of prisoners of war
• 1930 Treaty for the Limitation and Reduction of Naval Armament (London Naval Treaty 22 April)
• 1936 Second London Naval Treaty (25 March)
• 1945 United Nations Charter (entered into force on October 24, 1945)
• 1946 Judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg
• 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
• 1949 Geneva Convention I for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field
• 1949 Geneva Convention II for the Amelioration of the Condition of Wounded, Sick and Shipwrecked Members of Armed Forces at Sea
• 1949 Geneva Convention III Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War
• 1949 Geneva Convention IV Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War
• 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict
• 1971 Zagreb Resolution of the Institute of International Law on Conditions of Application of Humanitarian Rules of Armed Conflict to Hostilities in which the United Nations Forces May be Engaged
• 1977 United Nations Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques
• 1977 Geneva Protocol I Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts
• 1977 Geneva Protocol II Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949, and Relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts
• 1978 Red Cross Fundamental Rules of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts
• 1980 United Nations Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May be Deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects (CCW)
  • 1980 Protocol I on Non-Detectable Fragments
  • 1980 Protocol II on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices
  • 1980 Protocol III on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Incendiary Weapons
  • 1995 Protocol IV on Blinding Laser Weapons
  • 1996 Amended Protocol II on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices
  • Protocol on Explosive Remnants of War (Protocol V to the 1980 Convention), 28 November 2003, entered into force on 12 November 2006^[13]
• 1994 San Remo Manual on International Law Applicable to Armed Conflicts at Sea.^[14]
• 1994 ICRC/UNGA Guidelines for Military Manuals and Instructions on the Protection of the Environment in Time of Armed Conflict^[15]
• 1994 UN Convention on the Safety of United Nations and Associated Personnel^[16]
• 1996 The International Court of Justice advisory opinion on the Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons
• 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction (Ottawa Treaty)
• 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court

(Content published under auspices of GNU Free Documentation License.)

Cairo Trilogy, Pt. II: Through Children's Eyes

by Andrew Bast

(Also published, in a slightly different form, in Metro.)

CAIRO -- Perhaps the best way to look at a city is to stare into the eyes of its children. Two weeks ago, the day I arrived, I set off exploring and walked across the Nile river, which does indeed bear an emerald sheen. I stumbled on a government complex where patches of green grass provided refuge from the dry sands of the Sahara for couples to chat and kids to play soccer. I sat down to stare, and before I knew it, a crew of young boys—probably around 10 years old—surrounded me, smiling.

What does Egypt have in store for these soon-to-be-teenagers, for these young men? It's an important question in a mostly Muslim Middle Eastern country of 80 million, and in a city that's commonly known as the cultural capital of the Arab world. In fact, Egypt is a young country. One in three here are under the age of 15. And it was fitting that we were all together in front of large government buildings; the bloated, and often corrupt, bureaucracy here employs more than 6 million. This is certainly an option: a comfortable, yet not terribly prosperous profession in the civil service.

Schooling is free through university, yet the prospects don't seem all that good. I spoke to a very intelligent young man named Ahmed who explained that his two years of university education in business only got him a sales clerk job in the souvenir shop of a decent tourist hotel. He said that even if he finished his degree, finding employment worth his education would be very difficult, if not impossible.

Interestingly, the situation for young women is different. While society here is unquestionably male-dominated—outside of my own hotel, in six days I can't remember interacting with a single woman—the veil has actually become a kind of tool for women's empowerment. Over lunch, Max Rodenbeck, the Middle East bureau chief for The Economist magazine explained that in 1980, only one in twenty girls wore a headscarf, while today, 80% of women cover their hair. Only, rather than being a tool of oppression, the trend has actually invited women into society, so to speak. What's more, it has allowed them to take on a job; wearing a headscarf actually opens up doors to a career.

Cairo is a cacophonous city. Horns, hustlers, the call to prayer, screaming from the minarets five times a day all make the city a bustling and exciting place. The boys in front of the government building shouted at me, their faces lit with curiosity. "Assalam aleikum," I said, using the little bit of Arabic I know. "Wa-lakeum salaam!" They roared back.

The boys in the concrete lot, no more than a stones throw away, continued kicking the soccer ball, some wearing a single shoe, some barefoot entirely. And then one boy in a green t-shirt stepped directly to me and asked, with perfect English in a demanding tone, "What is your name?"

"Andy," I said.

He peered at me and said, "Pleased to meet you."

(Photo by Ana M. Bast. Click image for more.)

afterthesemessages: The Propaganda Remix Project

This campaign is composed of images by Micah Ian Wright. His "remixed propaganda," which appropriates support-the-war-effort design concepts from the 1920's and 40's, has inspired much commentary and two books from Seven Stories Press.  He combines the vernacular of American military posters with modern political issues. And he sell t-shirts, coffee mugs and posters.

Wright apparently also has credibility issues; there's something to be said for truth in advertising.

(Brought to you by the Inquirer's proud partnership with our friends at afterthesemessages.com. Enjoy.)

Bridging the Muslim-Western Cultural Divide, With a Mall

by Andrew Bast

(from Metro)

World War III? A Christian crusade? A Zionist ploy? Relentless jihad? Hardly. World leaders and radical revolutionaries rattle off these inflammatory phrases to describe today’s often despicable state of world affairs, but in the vein of a bleeding-heart humanist, I hereby declare that the Muslim world and the West have much more in common than any of us ever thought possible. Yes, it’s true — apparently there’s one place to which we all journey, no matter if we’re atheist, agnostic, Muslim, Christian or Jew. When you strip us all down, where is it we all love to go? The mall.

In the holy city of Mecca, on the western coast of Saudi Arabia, there stands Masjid al-Haram, or “the Sacred Mosque,” the largest in all of Islam. It is a glorious structure that can accommodate more than 800,000 worshippers during the annual Hajj. Only, Masjid al-Haram no longer dominates the skyline, because it now sits in the shadow of latticed construction cranes and skeletal, half-finished towers. Make way for Abraj Al Bait, a brand-spanking new mall.

The Abraj Al Bait complex, currently under construction by the Saudi Binladin Group, is billed as “Mecca’s most prestigious retail address” only “steps away from the Holy Mosque.” When it is completed in 2008, its towers will reach 1,591 feet into the air, more than 100 feet taller than the Empire State Building. It will house a 600-retail-outlet mall. In comparison, the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minn., the largest mall in this country, has just 520 stores. According to Hassan Fattah’s brilliant report in The New York Times, there will also be a five-star hotel, a hospital, prayer halls, Tiffany’s, Starbucks (yes, really) and H&M.

As if anyone doubted it, there is no longer any escape from the forces of capitalism, not even the mosque in Mecca. Talking markets, Abraj Al Bait makes perfect financial sense. Travelers are captive spenders. Though, I wonder how many tens of thousands making the journey from Cairo, Jakarta or Islamabad will be able to afford four nights in five-star digs and a sterling silver souvenir keychain from Tiffany’s? I’ll venture a guess: only a privileged few.

Five times a day, the billion Muslims in the world kneel down to pray toward Mecca. And if the West pays daily homage, it’s all about the Benjamins. Have faith — we’re all growing closer every day.

(Photo of Masjid al-Haram with towers of Abraj Al Bait rising in the background from Time Light's flickr.)

News Break: Germans to try Rumsfeld et al for War Crimes? Berkeley City Council Backs Measure

According to a report by the German magazine Der Spiegel, Berlin-based lawyer Wolfgang Kaleck has filed a lawsuit against 14 people, including former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA director George Tenet and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez. It is a 384-page document (full text: part one | part two), currently in a holding pattern in Germany's federal prosecutor's office, and it says these US leaders, according to Der Spiegel, "violated both international law and the United Nations Convention Against Torture in Abu Ghraib prison and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp."

Jurisdiction in international law has long been vexing, and Kalek is apparently basing his lawsuit on the 2002 Code of Crimes Against International Law, under which, according to the Der Spiegel report, "Germany's chief prosecutor is entitled to prosecute individuals accused of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes--irrespective of the location of the defendant or plaintiff, the place where the crime was carried out or the nationality of the persons involved."

Reportedly, German authorities are not pleased with the action. In diplomatic terms, this is bad news for German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who of late has been working to improve her country's relationship with the US.

Kalek, from Ulrike Demmer's Der Spiegel report, "We're not so arrogant as to think we can put Rumsfeld behind bars on the first attempt." Kalek goes on to say, "Rumsfeld should know he will be held responsible for his acts even though he is currently on safe territory."

In the US, the Berkeley, Calif. city council last month passed a resolution in support of Kalek's lawsuit. Additionally, while some have been convicted in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal, a significant amount of work by legal scholars has traced the paper trail to the upper echelons of the administration, notably in an exhaustive tome entitled The Torture Papers.

WORLD WAR III: Remember the Golden Age, if You Can

(Originally published 8/7/06.)

What does World War feel like?

One thing’s for sure, it doesn’t feel good and it comes on fast. And if history’s any lesson, a World War comes on too fast to know it’s even happened.