UK Quakers will not profit from the occupation of Palestine

November 20, 2018

British Friends become first church in UK to pull invest­ments in com­pa­nies prof­it­ing from the occu­pa­tion of Pales­tine. From record­ing clerk Paul Parker:

As Quak­ers, we seek to live out our faith through every­day actions, includ­ing the choic­es we make about where to put our mon­ey. We believe strong­ly in the pow­er of legit­i­mate, non­vi­o­lent, demo­c­ra­t­ic tools such as moral­ly respon­si­ble invest­ment to realise pos­i­tive change in the world. We want to make sure our mon­ey and ener­gies are instead put into places which sup­port our com­mit­ments to peace, equal­i­ty and justice. 

As you’d might expect, there’s been back­lash. The Board of Deputies of British Jews has con­demned Britain Year­ly Meet­ing’s deci­sion as a “biased and petu­lant act.”.

Blueprint for a Mess, the planning behind the U.S. occupation

November 3, 2003

For those asleep for the past two years, the _New York Times Magazine_ has a long arti­cle by David Rieff, “Blue­print for a Mess”:www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02iraq.html, that looks at ongo­ing prob­lems with the U.S. occu­pa­tion of iraq:
bq. His­tor­i­cal­ly, it is rare that a warm wel­come is extend­ed to an occu­py­ing mil­i­tary force for very long, unless, that is, the post­war goes very smooth­ly. And in iraq, the post­war occu­pa­tion has not gone smoothly.
The arti­cle looks at the ide­o­log­i­cal roots of the post-war plan of occu­pa­tion. A num­ber of key deci­sions were made in the Pen­tagon’s war room with lit­tle input from the State Depart­ment. Much of the plan­ning revolved around Ahmad Cha­l­abi, the two-bit, self-proclaimed iraqi oppo­si­tion par­ty leader dur­ing the last decade of Sad­dam Hus­sein’s reign. Cha­l­abi spent most of the 90s in Lon­don and Wash­ing­ton, where he became the dar­ling of the Repub­li­can pol­i­cy hawks who were also side­lined from polit­i­cal pow­er. Togeth­er Cha­l­abi and Wash­ing­ton fig­ures like Don­ald Rums­feld spent the 90s hatch­ing up war plans if they ever took pow­er again. Unfor­tu­nate­ly Rums­feld’s plans did­n’t have the wide­spread sup­port of the U.S. diplo­mat­ic and mil­i­tary estab­lish­ment and Cha­l­abi has had vir­tu­al­ly no sup­port inside iraq. But the con­ver­sa­tions and deci­sions between the token iraqi oppo­si­tion and the out-of-power Repub­li­can hawks has dri­ven the occupation:
bq. The lack of secu­ri­ty and order on the ground in iraq today is in large mea­sure a result of deci­sions made and not made in Wash­ing­ton before the war start­ed, and of the spe­cif­ic approach­es toward cop­ing with post­war iraq under­tak­en by Amer­i­can civil­ian offi­cials and mil­i­tary com­man­ders in the imme­di­ate after­math of the war.
Rieff is pes­simistic but he backs up his claims. The arti­cle is long but it’s a must-read. The post­war occu­pa­tions of iraq and Afghanistan will almost cer­tain­ly be the defin­ing for­eign pol­i­cy issue of this gen­er­a­tion, and paci­fists must look beyond ide­ol­o­gy and rhetoric to under­stand what’s hap­pen­ing in iraq.

Attacks a sign of our success

October 28, 2003

I could­n’t believe it when a friend told me the news. In the wake of four coor­di­nat­ed sui­cide attacks in iraq that killed 30 and injured 200, Pres­i­dent George Bush claimed that the “attacks were mere­ly a mark of how suc­cess­ful­ly the U.S. Occu­pa­tion is going”:www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/10/27/sprj.irq.main/index.html :
bq. “There are ter­ror­ists in iraq who are will­ing to kill any­body in order to stop our progress. The more suc­cess we have on the ground, the more these killers will react — and our job is to find them and bring them to justice.”
This is real­ly his way of explain­ing away all oppo­si­tion to the U.S.: peo­ple must be jeal­ous of all we have and all we do. But maybe iraqis con­tin­ue to be angry that we invad­ed their coun­try; maybe they’re angry that we’ve only rein­stalled many of their gen­er­als and many of Sad­dam’s hench­men. Maybe they’re wait­ing for a democratically-elected coun­cil. I’m sure many iraqi’s con­demn yes­ter­day’s bomb­ings. But it’s still way too ear­ly to declare vic­to­ry in the war of iraqi pub­lic opinion.

“Not that stupid piece of garbage”

July 10, 2003

“My thought was, how did that get into the speech?“This choice quote comes from Greg Thiel­mann, an intel­li­gence expert in the US State Depart­ment (now retired). In today’s papers this Bush Admin­is­tra­tion insid­er has come right out and said that the White House “lied about Sad­dam threat”.
    Mean­while the happy-go-lucky Don­ald Rums­feld has said the occu­pa­tion is cost­ing the US $3.9 bil­lion per month (see side­bar) and Gen­er­al Tom­my Franks pre­dicts high troop lev­els will be need­ed “for the fore­see­able future.”