International Relations

There are a host of legitimate, substantive reasons to censure the recent Palestinian Authority (PA) application for statehood at the United Nations. Some observers have accused PA President Mahmoud Abbas of using the statehood bid as a cynical ploy to bolster his moribund popularity. Legal experts have asserted that the ramifications of the application could lead to a situation where diaspora Palestinians lose their internationally recognized right of return, codified in United Nations General Assembly resolution 194.

But perhaps the most trenchant criticism is the most simple: so what? Even if the Security Council voted in favor of the resolution, what change would it impact on the ground?

There is reason to laud the PA for this enterprise—without the approval or sanction of the United States—and asserting their own agency in the peace process. Although there are risible claims being regurgitated by the Israel for-right-or-for-wrong crowd that this is a “unilateral” maneuver, this is a very meaningful effort at internationalizing the conflict. In effect, the PA is attempting to move the conflict and the negotiations outside the penumbra of United States and Israeli control. Moreover, even if the Palestinians were to simply receive “observer status” through General Assembly ratification, they would have access to the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice. If anything, this could at least begin to bridge the massive differential power dyad between the Israelis and Palestinians.

The diplomatic and media brouhaha over the application demonstrates two points: 1) The two-state solution paradigm is obsolete; and 2) the United States will support nothing but a Israeli controlled and dictated Palestinian state. As I have written previously, Palestinian self-determination, following in the footsteps of their Arab brethren, will only truly be achieved through mass nonviolent civil resistance. Unfortunately, the PA is either unwilling or incapable of coordinating the already manifold efforts of nonviolent resisters. In early September, I heard a panel of PA representatives exhorting the participants of the discussion to accept and promote the statehood bid. When asked “what if it fails? What type of collaborative efforts is the PA engaged in with civil society?”, their answers were couched as though they were talking to US or Israeli officials. “We have informed demonstrators to remain within certain boundaries and not provoke,” they quickly retorted.

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As the Arab Spring has blossomed into the Arab Summer, there has been an effort among members of the conservative community to align the narrative of the Bush Doctrine and the resulting endeavors in Iraq and Afghanistan with that of the Arab Spring. While promoting his memoir, Cheney claimed that the Bush Administration and its subsequent doctrine that it prescribed in the Middle East are to thank for the eruption of empowerment and action witnessed today:

But make no mistake: neither the Administration nor the President deserve any credit for the remarkable things happening now in Northern Africa and the Middle East. The only thing that the Bush Doctrine — defined by top-down, deregulated and contracted transplantation of one-size-fits-none “democracy” — deserves credit for is the “democratic” decrepitude that is so present in the leaders and institutions of Iraq and Afghanistan today.

Afghanistan’s crooked and corrupt state can largely be attributed to its President, Hamid Karzai. Chosen as interim president in 2002 by the Bush Administration, Karzai’s alleged lure was that despite being a southern Pashtun, he had good relations with the non-Pashtun and Taliban-leaning North, and could hopefully unite the two and begin the transition down an American-guided path. Unsurprisingly, this was a myopic vision on behalf of the Bush regime, as according to Abdullah Abdullah, former Karzai foreign minister and current political opponent, Karzai has only “[distanced] the Afghan government from the Afghan people” and that “the Taliban is taking advantage of this.”

The company Karzai keeps isn’t comforting either. One of the most feared and powerful opium and heroin traders in the Kandahar region happened to be Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali. Oddly enough, Ahmed was elected as a Kandahar province representative until he was killed in July by one of his own bodyguards.

And then there was Gul Agha Sherzai, the man who, according to The Globe and Mail, received millions of dollars from the CIA and US government to get rid of the Taliban, yet after doing so proceeded to allow them to become part of the de facto government. He was also the man who admitted to receiving $1 million a week from his share of import duties and from the opium trade. Keep in mind that most Afghans live on less than a dollar a day.

Ever-so characteristic of a Bush selection, the elections in which Karzai ran were rife with chicanery and general corruption, along with ‘support’ from people like Karim Khalili, current Vice President who has also been accused of war crimes and killing thousands of people. And we thought quail hunting gone awry was bad. After being confronted about the alleged ballot stuffing and intimidation, all Karzai had to say was that “there was fraud in 2004, there is today, there will be tomorrow.”

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Albert Einstein once famously suggested that insanity was “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” With this definition in mind, what is more insane than Washington’s approach to the so-called “peace process?” Indeed, the same tired and regurgitated paradigms for negotiations remain dogma among American and Israeli officials. President Obama’s latest recommendation, no doubt influenced by the leading advocate of incrementalism Dennis Ross, is for Israelis and Palestinians to negotiate borders and security now and worry about “emotional issues” like refugees and Jerusalem at a later date.

This strategy, much like the entire peace process itself, will allow Israelis to continue to effectively annex more and more of the West Bank by continuing with the illegal settlement enterprise, furthering the “Bantustanization” of the West Bank. In February, the Obama administration vetoed a UN resolution, comprised of language directly appropriated from US policy, declaring settlement activity to be illegal. The other 14 members of the Security Council voted in favor of the resolution. Is there anything else to call this but a “cowardly failure,” to borrow from Chas Freeman, on the part of the Obama administration?

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Since September 11, 2001, America has become cogently aware of a new global threat to its stability which has been termed terrorism. The source and nature of this threat is, however, far less clear. What might drive a person to hijack and fly an airliner into a building full of civilians is something foreign to our psychology. To Americans, it is madness, and a madness which begets violence against us and demands justice.

On the one hand, Americans have realized that peace and stability in part depends upon the very reaction to this threat. On the other hand, it has become clear that seeing things in terms of an “Axis of Evil,” wherein we can clearly draw the battle lines and say “these are our enemies,” and deal with them as such is an insufficient strategy. If it were so simple then Afghanistan could be abandoned shortly after its infrastructure was crippled. The ousting of Saddam Hussein, as an act of justice, could be left at that.

The conflict itself, as a full scale “War on Terror,” never fit into the clothing of justice alone. It was necessary for it to wear the clothing of a greater cause. Quickly after the reaction to the incident which took place on September 11th, it was reinterpreted as something more than a quest for justice. It was a quest to bring democracy. It became a quest to solve the problems which had allowed this threat against the U.S. to incubate in the first place. It was seemingly decided that what had driven these men to fly a plane into a building full of civilians was, then, a lack of democracy, and the true justice might then be to depose of these enemies of democracy, which, in their lack of it, had misunderstood the nature of American society as a threat to their way of life.

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NATO, with America at the helm, is becoming increasingly involved in Libya under the guise of a humanitarian mission to protect the intentional killing of civilians opposed to the Libyan government. President Gaddafi has proven he is willing to murder his own people in order to stay in power and his removal from power may bring about a more democratic government and open society. However, what are the real reasons America and its allies have become so invested in Libya, given the unrest, uprising, and repression going on across the Middle East?

Consider the following: recent statistics place the civilian death toll in Libya at approximately 6,000. However, there are far worse scenarios in which the US did nothing and current humanitarian situations where the US continues to do nothing. In the early 1990′s, the Rwandian genocide claimed the lives of 800,000 people (20% of the countries population at the time), and yet we did nothing. It took 5 years of civil war and several years of on-the-ground reporting of massacres in Yugoslavia for NATO to act decisively. Meanwhile, regimes across the Middle East (Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Kuwait, and Yemen) have had massive protests that have ended with respective armies mowing down unarmed civilians. What has suddenly motivated the US and its allies to consider the Libyan situation worthy of active intervention?
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For a detailed list, here’s a timeline of US involvement in Iran from St. Peace:
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He had the cops buying drugs on camera. Two plainclothes officers yanked Khaled Said from an Internet café in broad daylight. They dragged him into a dingy apartment lobby and smashed his head against an iron door, the stairs, and the wall. They left him there to die and thought that was that.

Khaled Said’s fate was sadly nothing new. His was simply the most recent and graphic in a long line of Egyptian police atrocities. But then something unusual happened. The grief went viral.

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