A respectable majority

After what I suppose must be ‘a decent interval’, Israeli President Shimon Peres has finally invited Binyamin Netanyahu to try and form a government. Although Bibi’s Likud, with 28 seats, has received the explicit endorsement of Yisrael Beiteinu (15 seats) and the rest of the extreme ultra right – Shas (11), United Torah Judaism (5), Habayit Hayehudi (‘The Jewish Home’; 3), and National Union (4), sufficient to form a government with a small majority in the 120 member Knesset, he has reached out in the spirit of reconciliation to ‘the centrist Kadima Party, led by Tzipi Livni, and the center-left Labor Party, led by Ehud Barak, to join him in a unity government’, as Isabel Kershner wrote in yesterday’s NY Times, ‘He said national unity was necessary in order for Israel to contend with the formidable challenges ahead’. Kadima leader Tzipi Livni is to meet with Netanyahu tomorrow, but many in the media doubt she will buy into his ‘national unity’ proposal.

The principal division between the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ is supposed to be over the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. As Jamie points out on his Heathlander blog, Likud, Kadima, and Yisra’el Beiteinu are of one mind on the issue of loyalty oaths: ‘[Vice Premier Haim] Ramon told Ynet that 90% of Yisrael Beiteinu’s positions correlate with Kadima’s policy. “Even on the subject of loyalty and everything concerning national service – we agree,” he said.’ In a memo to Yisra’el Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman, Likud wrote, ‘We believe that all Israeli citizens, let alone the country’s selectmen, must profess their loyalty to the State of Israel’.

The point is that a Likud led coalition of ‘the right’ ‘would also set Israel on a possible collision course with the new administration in the United States, which has pledged an active and aggressive pursuit of peace’. I’m not convinced that President Obama really wants to see peace, much less justice, in Palestine. But I’m sure he’s committed to ‘the peace process’ and might even insist on the establishment of some kind of rump Palestinian state over the life of his regime. Interestingly, a coalition formed on the understanding that this will not happen could prove to be the acid test of the Walt and Mearsheimer dog wagging hypothesis. Or it might not. After all, it would be imprudent in the extreme to take a slimy character like Bibi’s word at face value. Indeed, my understanding is that Lieberman himself supports, at least as an interim measure, establishment of a Palestinian state, which would annex parts of ‘Israel proper’ with concentrations of Palestinian population in the envisaged land swap. That could mean that Netanyahu would have to relinquish his position whether he forms a coalition with Yisra’el Beiteinu or with Kadima – and even with the support of the four ultra parties, a Likud led government would have to include one or the other, except in the improbable scenario of a highly unstable Likud-Labour coalition with an even slimmer majority, which would also require some compromise on this issue in any case. On the other hand, I suspect Lieberman could content himself with annexing all of ‘Eretz Yisra’el’, provided only those swearing fealty to the ‘Jewish and democratic state’ would be entitled to the franchise.

Advocates of partition often make the point that, as Hussein Agha and Robert Malley wrote (on 17 December, before the Gaza slaughter) in the 15 January issue of the New York Review of Books, ‘Throughout the years, polls consistently showed respectable Israeli and Palestinian majorities in favor of a negotiated two-state settlement’.

In all probability, what they have in mind is responses to questions like

Q16. If the Palestinians committed to stop using violence against Israel and in fact stopped all violence for an extended period, would you favor or oppose Israel allowing the establishment of a Palestinian state outside the 1967 borders, except for some agreed-upon land swaps?

The November 2002 poll that asked that question found that 51% of the 508 Israeli Jews polled favoured allowing such a state. Not what ordinarily passes for a ‘respectable’ majority, even if such a view were respectable at all.

Needless to say, the question starts from the assumptions that the obstacle to Israel allowing a Palestinian state is Palestinian resistance and that it is up to Israel whether to allow it or not. The pollsters are asking respondents to accept these assumptions before they even consider their answer. It would not be terribly surprising if they were willing to do so. The question is more explicit than some in specifying ‘outside the 1967 borders’, even if that form of words is inherently ambiguous. It could mean all of the West Bank and Gaza, or it could just mean Nablus. But doubtless the intent was for the border to follow the Green Line more or less, squiggling to incorporate the big settlements, and I daresay that’s how respondents interpreted it.

Land swaps are part of every proposal for partition of Palestine, in recognition of the ‘facts on the ground’ that Israel has created over the last four decades with the intent of establishing a ‘matrix of control’ over the Palestinians living in the West Bank and ultimately annexing the whole area. As I’ve argued somewhere before, to countenance land swaps is to provide retrospective legitimation for the whole settlement project, sending the unambiguous message that under ‘international law’ if you hold out long enough, you can get away with anything. The point is that to answer the question in the affirmative, you need to accept that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are entitled to an absolute maximum of 22% of Mandate Palestine, regardless of their needs. Furthermore, as it is silent on the status of Jerusalem and the refugees, those favouring a Palestinian state may want to keep all of greater Jerusalem, or relinquish it, or share it. They may want the refugees to ‘return’ to the new Palestinian state, or receive compensation from The International Community, or really get to exercise their right to return ‘to their homes’. In all likelihood, most of the Israeli Jewish ‘left’ who said they favoured partition would not accept the right of return as expressed in UN General Assembly resolution 194, and few would relinquish any part of Jerusalem.

So while it may be fair to say that 51% of respondents favour a ‘negotiated two-state settlement’, few if any support one that would be acceptable even to abu Mazen. I hasten to add that when they write of a ‘negotiated two-state settlement’, there is an assumption that someone is empowered to negotiate on behalf of the Palestinians, presumably the PA, specifically, the unelected ‘moderate’ PA installed by Abbas and not the elected Hamas terrorists. In other words, the refugees would be represented by a ‘government’ that they had no role in choosing and has squat credibility even among those who did. As for the Israeli Arabs, who also have a stake in any outcome, the Israeli government would obviously represent their needs scrupulously.

In any case, if there was ever a ‘respectable majority’ of Israeli Jews who really supported a Palestinian state west of the Jordan, it seems to have vanished. A poll conducted by Maagar Mochot / Channel 2 on 2-3 February asked 1,894 Israeli adults

In light of the experience with disengagement, the Second Lebanon War and the war against Hamas in Gaza, do you support or oppose the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria?

Note that the question envisages a state that excludes Gaza. Nevertheless, only 32% said they supported such a state, with 51% opposed.

As for the Palestinians, only 42.5% of the 1,360 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip polled 18-20 September 2008 by An-Najah National University said they supported partition when asked

Do you support or reject the creation of two states on the historic land of Palestine (a Palestinian state and Israel)?

The proportion saying they rejected partition was 54.3%. Curiously, support for partition appears to be on the increase, with 39.5% supporting it and 57.6 rejecting it last May, presumably, but not explicitly, in answer to the same question.

A more recent poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR) in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip between 3 and 5 December 2008 asked 1270 adults three related questions.

When asked,

29) There is a proposal that after the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and the settlemnet of all issues in dispute, including the refugees and Jerusalem issues, there will be a mutual recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and Palestine as the state of the Palestinians people. Do you agree or disagree to this proposal?

52.5% agreed (7.4% ‘definitely’) and 45.8% disagreed (12.6% ‘definitely’). But in answer to a questions specifically about the Saudi plan,

38) According to the Saudi plan, Israel will retreat from all territories occupied in 1967 including Gaza the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, and a Palestinian state will be established. The refugees problem will be resoved through negotiation in a just and agreed upon manner and in accordance with UN resolution 194 which allows return of refugees to Israel and compensation. In return, all Arab states will recognize Israel and its right to secure borders, will sign peace treaties with her and establish normal diplomatic relations. Do you agree or disagree to this plan?

65.9% agreed (9.2% ‘certainly’) and 30.4% disagreed (7.8% ‘certainly’).

Another question outlined six elements of ‘a permanent compromise settlement’, apparently modelled on the Geneva Accord, and then asked whether respondents agreed or disagreed with each element individually, and with all six as a package.

41) When Palestinians and Israelis return to final status negotiations the following items might be presented to negotiators as the elements of a permanent compromise settlement. Tell us what you think of each item then tell us what you think of all combined as one permanent status settlement

1. An Israeli withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip and the evacuation of its settlements. But in the West Bank, Israel withdraws and evacuates settlements from most of it, with the exception of few settlement areas in less than 3% of the West Bank that would be exchanged with an equal amount of territory from Israel in accordance with the attached map {show map}.

2. An independent Palestinian state would be established in the areas from which Israel withdraws in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip; the Palestinian state will have no army, but it will have a strong security force but an international multinational force would be deployed to insure the safety and security of the state. Both sides will be committed to end all forms of violence directed against each other.

3. East Jerusalem would become the capital of the Palestinian state with Arab neighborhoods coming under Palestinian sovereignty and Jewish neighborhoods coming under Israel sovereignty. The Old City (including al Haram al Sharif) would come under Palestinian sovereignty with the exception of the Jewish Quarter and the Wailing Wall that will come under Israeli sovereignty.

4. With regard to the refugee question, both sides agree that the solution will be based on UN resolutions 194 and 242 and on the Arab peace initiative. The refugees will be given five choices for permanent residency. These are: the Palestinian state and the Israeli areas transferred to the Palestinian state in the territorial exchange mentioned above; no restrictions would be imposed on refugee return to these two areas. Residency in the other three areas (in host countries, third countries, and Israel) would be subject to the decision of the states in those areas. The number of refugees returning to Israel will be based on the average number of refugees admitted to third countries like Australia, Canada, Europe, and others. All refugees will be entitled to compensation for their "refugeehood" and loss of properties.

5. When the permanent status agreement is fully implemented, it will mean the end of the conflict and no further claims will be made by either side. The parties will recognize Palestine and Israel as the homelands of their respective peoples

6. The Palestinian state will have sovereignty over its land, water, and airspace. But Israeli will be allowed to use the Palestinian airspace for training purposes, and will maintain two early warning stations in the West Bank for 15 years. The multinational force will remain in the Palestinian state for an indefinite period of time and its responsibility will be to insure the implementation of the agreement, and to monitor territorial borders and coast of the Palestinian state including its international border crossings.

Only 41% agreed with the full package, and 57.4% disagreed, 14.7% ‘strongly’. To be honest, I find it mysterious that 52.5% agreed with Q29, 65.9% with Q38, but only 41% with Q41. Just speculating, though, Q29 explicitly demands ‘recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and Palestine as the state of the Palestinians people’, wording I would consider objectionable. I don’t know how familiar respondents would have been with the wording of The Arab Peace Initiative, but it is short on detail and may enjoy some undeserved credibility because it is the consensus of ‘the Arab world’. As for Q41, when presented with a detailed proposal for six central issues, it doesn’t look very enticing. Specifically, 58% rejected the plan for the refugees in point 4; 63.3% objected to the partition of Jerusalem in point 3; 68.5% didn’t like the ‘security’ arrangements in point 6, and 72.5% disagreed with the multinational force, etc. in point 2.

Ultimately, though, the Palestinians surveyed were not optimistic about the prospects for a Palestinian state. When asked

32) Now 40 years after the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, what in your view are the chances for the establishment of an independent Palestinian state next to the state of Israel in the next five years? Are they high, medium, low, or none [sic] existent?

34.6% said they were nonexistent, 34.9% low, 23.9% ‘medium’, and just 4.8% high. If ‘an independent Palestinian state’ means something along the lines of Barak’s 2000 ‘generous offer’, or worse, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance we’ll see such bantustans by 2013, particularly if Livni agrees to join Bibi’s coalition. But meaningful independence? Fuggeddaboudit.

A shift to the right?

With only a few thousands absentee ballots left to tally, it appears that Israel’s next prime minister is likely to be the Likud’s thuggish Binyamin Netanyahu, as expected. Recall that the reason this election was called in the first place was that Kadima leader Tzipi Livni was unable to cobble together a coalition following Ehud Olmert’s resignation in disgrace a few months ago.

At that time, when Kadima, Labour, Meretz, and Gil, the pensioners’ party held 60 seats between them, she still needed the religious Shas party to garner a majority in the Knesset, and Shas declined to join her coalition. Now, with the three parties of the so called ‘left’ scoring a total of 44 seats – Gil has not won any seats in the new Knesset – it will be impossible to form a majority government without including either Likud, Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, or Shas, even if she were to invite Hadash, or one of the Arab parties – Ta’al or Balad – which of course is unthinkable.

So I reckon the most probable outcome is that President Peres will ask Netanyahu to form the next government, although it is possible that as the leader of the party with the largest bloc in the Knesset, she will have the first go and either bite the bullet and form a coalition with a party of the ‘right’ or fail to form a coalition within the required six weeks again, in which case, I believe, the role will fall to Netanyahu, anyway.

One way or the other, a party of the ultra right will be in a position to veto any initiative by threatening to leave the coalition and bring down the government. Not that I think it’s going to make a great deal of difference. It was, after all, only late in 2005 that the unlamented Ariel Sharon split from Likud, the party he led at the time, to form Kadima, because his Likud colleagues refused to endorse his plan for unilateral ‘disengagement’ from Gaza. Kadima, like Likud, is inspired by ‘Revisionist’ Zionism. Livni is an admirer of Vladimir ‘Ze’ev’ Jabotinsky. When push comes to shove, there’s not much distance between Labour and Revisionist Zionism. They may appear to be more or less tolerant of Palestinians in the Jewish homeland, but in their heart of hearts, and often enough in their speech, they want them gone one way or another. Their difference, such as it is, is tactical.

There is one other difference. Publicly, Labour Zionists have always tried to pretend that they were settling terra nullius. I think that’s where all this ‘A land without people for a people without land’ and From time immemorial stuff comes from. Jabotinsky, at any rate, was perfectly explicit about needing to uproot the natives.

Netanyahu, left to his own devices, will not consider relinquishing any part of the West Bank or any Palestinian ‘state’ west of the Jordan. Livni, if not hamstrung by coalition partners – an unlikely scenario, would complete the wall, annex the main settlements, aquifers, and corridors, and leave the Palestinians on the West Bank in three or four little enclaves divided from each other, as well as from Gaza, and Jordan, by Israeli territory. Israel will control all borders and airspace. Basically, Barak’s famous ‘generous offer’. In short, they would find themselves in much the same situation as Gaza has been since the ‘disengagement’. True, for a couple of years there were no Israeli soldiers on the streets of Gaza, but I’m not sure encirclement and siege by a ‘hostile entity’ is much of an improvement, if any.

Furthermore, on 3 February, Livni told Globes,

I agree to concede part of the Land of Israel, but the moment I undertake this, it must be clear that Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, and a future Palestine is the full national solution for the Palestinians, wherever they are.

In other words, once she permits the Palestinians to print their own postage stamps, whether through negotiations with the quisling PA, or through unilateral ‘disengagement’, those postage stamp size ghettos will be ‘the national home’ of the Palestinians, thereby washing her hands not only of those living in the West Bank and Gaza, but the four or five million refugees. It’s not absolutely explicit, but she expressed similar sentiments a few months ago, and as I read it, that would mean the Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, too. In this, her position is indistinguishable from Lieberman’s, who campaigned on a platform of requiring Israeli Arabs to take an oath of allegiance to the Jewish state or relinquish their citizenship. As far as I know, every country requires such oaths of immigrants seeking citizenship, and none demands it of the native born, as it would render them stateless. If any other country did so, it would meet with howls of indignation, not least from those who applaud Lieberman’s initiative.

Ultimately, I don’t think it means very much to say this election evidences a shift to the right. I’ve often criticised opinion polls that ask respondents, mainly in the US, to place themselves somewhere on a continuum between ‘Liberal’ and ‘Conservative’ on the grounds that that only comprises a sliver of the political spectrum. The distance from left to right in Zionist politics is narrower still. Even Meretz was delighted to see Gaza bombed to smithereens. From my perspective, it makes no sense to call a party favouring ethnocracy, as all Zionist parties must, by definition, ‘left’. Left and right are of course relative terms, but I don’t think you can distinguish them by subtle differences over the timing or mechanism of ‘transfer’.

The greatest beneficiary

Pakistan’s new civilian president, retired General Pervez Musharraf has announced a parcel of measures to lift the state of emergency he decreed on 3 November, just in time to ensure that next month’s general election will be seen as ‘free and fair’. The five presidential orders, according to Dawn’s Nasir Iqbal, are:

Revocation of Proclamation of Emergency Order 2007, Repeal of Provisional Constitution Order, Revival of Constitutional Order, Establishment of Islamabad High Court and grant of pension benefits to judges who had either refused or had not been invited by the government to take the oath under the PCO.

Talking to media personnel at the Supreme Court, he [Musharraf] said that with the lifting of the emergency and the repeal of the PCO, all fundamental rights would stand restored and the media would be the greatest beneficiary.

What Musharraf doesn’t mention is that, as Keith Jones reports on WSWS,

On Tuesday, the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (Pemra) issued a warning to the country’s private television stations, most of which only recently resumed broadcasting, threatening them with heavy fines and their personnel, including journalists, with jail sentences of up to three years if they violate a ban on live broadcasts or violate new regulations imposed during the emergency that forbid airing “anything which defames or brings into ridicule the head of state.”…The Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists called the Pemra order “an attempt to silence the free media” and emasculate coverage of the election campaign.

With a Damoclean sword dangling precariously above them like that, Pakistani journalists will doutless derive great benefit from the sense of responsibility it imparts.

Although ‘deposed judges, including Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, would be granted pension benefits’,

“All judges of the superior courts who were not invited by the government to take oath under the PCO, or those who had declined to do so, will not be restored at all,” the attorney general said.

So there is no further danger of unruly activist judges finding that Musharraf was in fact not eligible to stand for election while in the employ of the state as the constitution provides. Under the circumstances, you can understand why

Pakistanis also do not accept Musharraf’s stated rationale for the state of emergency declaration. When given a choice between two options, 25 percent said that they thought Musharraf declared the emergency in order to better fight terrorists, while 66 percent said that it was to prevent the Supreme Court from overturning his re-election to another term as president.

Those figures come from a survey of ‘3,520 adult men and women from 223 rural and 127 urban locations in 51 districts in all four provinces of Pakistan’ conducted 19-28 November by the International Republican Institute (IRI), ‘A nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing democracy worldwide’. In reality, the IRI is the Republican Party’s branch of the US National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the US government to advance its global war on democracy. Ordinarily, I am sceptical of surveys that don’t publish the questions asked and the other metadata that make the numbers intelligible. But in this case, the report of results seems fairly explicit and more importantly, the IRI favours the Musharraf regime, so I would expect any bias they might introduce to minimise opposition to Musharraf. And yet, they also found

When asked if they supported the recent re-election of Musharraf to another term as president, voters were overwhelmingly opposed; 26 percent said they supported his reelection and 72 percent said that they did not; 61 percent said that they strongly opposed Musharraf’s re-election.

A majority of Pakistanis want Musharraf to resign from office, with 67 percent wanting his resignation and 25 percent opposed.

To recap, the reason Musharraf could be elected with 72% opposed is that in Pakistan, it is not the electorate at large, but the National and Provincial Assemblies, who elect the president. Since Musharraf scheduled the presidential election before the parliamentary elections, and since the opposition boycotted the election and Benazir Bhutto’s PPP abstained, it was his tame legislators who voted for him.

Just to make sure that everything is aboveboard, Attorney-General

Mr [Mohammad] Qayyum said former prime minister Nawaz Sharif stood disqualified for the January 8 election. Shahbaz Sharif, he added, had not appealed against the rejection of his candidature during the stipulated time, so he also stood disqualified.

Furthermore, ‘The constitutional bar on a person to become prime minister for the third time would stay, he said.’ If correct, that means that in the unlikely case that the PPP should win enough seats to form government, Benazir will not be eligible to be PM. True to form, she and Nawaz have decided not to boycott the parliamentary election, even though

74 percent of Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), the party of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, voters said they would support the boycott, as did the same percentage of Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) voters, the party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

So, while six weeks of martial law may not have succeeded in eradicating terrorism in Pakistan, it has certainly served Musharraf’s interests very well indeed. Maybe two thirds of Pakistanis were right about that.

Ding dong

Eleven long, dark years of Liberal (read Thatcherite) rule have come to an end. Today we can look forward to a bright new dawn of Australian Labor Party (read Thatcherite) government. Triumphant ALP leader, Kevin Rudd, has, after all, proclaimed himself an ‘economic conservative’. In his victory speech, Rudd asserted ‘I will be a prime minister for all Australians’. And there’s no mystery about what he means by that – his government will work for the ‘national interest’ - profitabilty of Australian business – ‘it’s the economy, stupid’, a rising tide lifts all boats, prosperity trickles down…

[AFP photo]

For the past six weeks, the Liberal Party has bombarded us with adverts proclaiming that 70% of the Rudd front bench will comprise ‘anti business’ former union officials. You’d expect the Labor Party to have countered by pointing out that 100% of the Liberal front bench comprises people not with historical links to the labour movement, but with current, active, real, material vested interests in businesses. I surmise the reason this never happened was that those union thugs themselves have business interests of their own.

When Bob Hawke led the ALP to victory in 1983, the received wisdom was that because of the links between the ALP and the union movement, organised labour would tolerate attacks by an ALP government that we would never have tolerated from the Liberals. That turned out to be correct. It was the ALP that over the following 13 years proceeded to tame the union movement through its Prices and Incomes Accord, offering the union officials the seat at the bargaining table they’d always coveted. Rank and file union activity came to a virtual standstill, while the government smashed the militant Builders’ Labourers’ Federation, privatised Qantas, the Commonwealth Bank, and many other publicly owned services. It was the Hawke and Keating Labor governments that introduced ‘enterprise bargaining’, which precluded workers organising on an industry wide basis and forced us to reach agreements from a position of weakness on a workplace by workplace basis. This smashed down the door and strew rose petals in the path of Howard’s ‘Workplace Relations’ agenda that eviscerated minimum award pay and conditions, marginalised unions, and forced many to work under inferior non union ‘certified agreements’ and individual contracts.

Almost everybody associates the atrocity of detaining refugees in remote concentration camps with the Howard government. In reality, it was ALP left winger, Gerry Hand, who as Minister of Immigration in the Keating government introduced mandatory detention in 1992.

The union officials have been running a campaign under the slogan, ‘Your rights at work – worth fighting and voting for!’ It goes without saying that the bit about fighting is just empty rhetoric. All industrial issues have been unceremoniously relegated to the back burner while they devoted their efforts to the electoral campaign. Now that the election is over, there is little cause for optimism either that a Rudd government will implement radical changes to industrial relations or that the unions will mount the kind of fight that can win such changes. With union membership at an all time low of about 20% and Australian working class militancy a dim memory, it’s still going to be up to us to act in our own interests and win back our rights at work.

But all is not gloom and doom. The silver lining is that the incumbent PM, the execrable John Howard, W’s ‘deputy sherriff’ in the Pacific, appears to have made history as the first sittiing Prime Minister to lose his own seat since Stanley Bruce in the 1929 Federal election. The latest results, with one booth left to count, show former ABC journalist Maxine McKew, held a lead of 51.84% on a two party preferred basis. The Liberal pundits on tv last night warned against writing Howard off too soon, projecting that uncounted postal votes could deliver an extra percentage point to Howard, but McKew’s lead is big enough to accommodate that, even if it eventuates.

May he enjoy a very uncomfortable retirement.,

Let sanity prevail

The 8 October marked two years since the Richter 7.6 earthquake that ravaged Pakistani occupied Kashmir and adjacent areas of Indian ‘held’ Kashmir and the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). Official estimates put the immediate death toll at over 70,000, but I have heard no less (and no more) credible estimates ranging as high as 200,000. The quake also left some 3 million to face the bitter Himalayan winter without shelter. There was an inspiring surge of individuals and small groups collecting and delivering clothing, food, blankets, tents, etc. Unfortunately, much of the clothing was inappropriate to both the climate and the cultural sensitivities of the victims and was seen strewn over the side of the road. A donors conference in Islamabad garnered about US$6 billion, most of it in the form of hard loans, the balance in ‘soft loans’. I have seen nothing indicating how much of this eventuated. Of particular note were the Turkish Red Crescent (Kızılay), which provided some 90 medical personnel, and Cuba, which sent 1400 doctors and hundreds of other health workers. Despite their generosity and that of the tent manufacturers (Pakistan is the world's foremost exporter of tents), NGOs, overseas groups, and the best efforts of the UN and the Pakistani military, many thousands spent weeks before seeing the first sign of relief. Roads into the Kaghan and adjacent valleys, subject to closure by landslides at the best of times, took a long time to clear. This MapAction map dated 22 October 2005 shows at least 15 impassable blockages on the Kaghan Valley road between Balakot and Naran.

Last week, Lt-Gen Nadeem Ahmed, deputy chairman of Erra, the Earthquake Reconstruction and Rehabilitation Authority, told Dawn 'that the reconstruction and rehabilitation programme of the earthquake-affected areas is on track', boasting that

92,000 quake-resistant houses had been completed and another 250,000 were in various stages of completion. He said every family in the affected areas would have a house in six months.

Mr Ahmed said master plans for reconstruction of four severely destroyed cities -- Muzaffarabad, Bagh and Rawalakot in the AJK and Balakot in the NWFP -- had been prepared and were in initial stages of implementation.

Two full years after the disaster, initial stages is good enough for the hundreds of thousands who couldn't manage to squeeze into those 92,000 houses. But not everyopne is as complacent as Lt-Gen Ahmed. In the very same issue of Dawn, Raja Asghar reports,

problems abounded about the reconstruction of the region’s two most devastated towns – the Azad Kashmir’s capital of Muzaffarabad and Balakot in the NWFP.

...Many people in the region blame both military and civilian authorities for their housing problems, such as delays in the disbursement of even a paltry compensation of a maximum of Rs175,000 for a totally destroyed house and complained of widespread corruption such as bribes allegedly received by officials of joint teams for approving construction of homes of approved designs.

Such complaints were more widespread in the quake-ravaged villages but were heard on Sunday also in Muzaffarabad town, where some quake sufferers spoke of bribes ranging from Rs5,000 to Rs10,000 taken by petty officials such as patwaris or other members of local overseeing joint teams to approve payment of compensation.

.. former [Muzaffarabad] mayor Chaudhry Manzoor Ahmed...said: “Corruption permeates through their blood. There is no sphere left where these is no corruption.”

Nor are the problems restricted to Muzaffarabad and Balakot. Khaleeq Kiani reports from Bagh in the Jhelum Valley

People in the urban areas of Bagh – a district of Azad Kashmir that ranked third in terms of devastation after Muzaffarabad and Balakot – are struggling to survive. The official slogan of “build, back better” seems to be a far cry in this district headquarters of Bagh, named so because its scenic beauty.

...A major portion of the town has now been declared a ‘red zone’, but in the absence of a master plan no construction could take place.

The National Engineering Services of Pakistan, which had been awarded the contract about 18 months ago to prepare the master plan, is yet to open its office in Bagh...

Bagh has been divided into four zones -- highly hazardous, hazardous, highly dangerous and moderately dangerous. No part of it falls in the low-danger or safe categories...“The situation remains as it was a year ago,” Dr Atiq [Zahid, a former medical superintendent of the district headquarters hospital] told Dawn on Sunday.

Khwaja Javed Iqbal, chairman of the Anjuman-i-Shehryan, says that residents of Bagh want President Pervez Musharraf to visit Bagh again to see for himself what happened to the promises he had made to the people on his first visit soon after the earthquake. The president had announced that he would convert this challenge into opportunity and said that a new Bagh would emerge from the ashes. “Bagh continues to be in ashes and has in fact turned into filthy debris,” says Mr Iqbal.

The president, General Pervez Musharraf, does not appear to be embarrassed about his complete failure to meet the challenge, exploit the opportunity, or provide desperately needed relief any more than he is about the poverty most of Pakistanis endure or the humiliating bombings his great benefactor, the decider, has been carrying out in Waziristan at a cost of at least 100 madrassa students. Nor is he embarrassed about his attempt to dismiss Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry, which aroused a storm of protest and was ultimately reversed by the court itself. Nor about his inability to rein in his acid wielding, DVD burning allies or his hamfisted and murderous handling of the Lal Masjid crisis. And now, after much of the parliamentary opposition had conveniently resigned, and his new mate, Benazir Bhutto's, Pakistan People's Party abstaining, he is not embarrassed to exult in his stunning electoral success.

I bow my head in front of God Almighty for having given me such a great victory.

To put it in perspective, what the media have reported by and large is that he won '252 of 257 votes cast' in the National Assembly and the Senate, seemingly an astounding 98% majority. In reality, those 252 votes comprise just 57% of the sum of 342 members of the Assembly and the 100 Senators. In total, 1,170 national and provincial legislators were entitled to vote, of whom 685, about 59%, voted for Musharraf. Some media are also reporting that he 'ended up with a total of 384 electoral college votes out of 702'. The discrepancy arises because the way the electoral system works is that each Provincial Assembly has 65 electoral votes in the the presidential election, even though only the Balochistan Assembly actually has 65 members. So a vote by a member of the Punjab Assembly, with 371 members, would only be worth about one sixth as much as Balochi member.

When I first got to Pakistan, the received wisdom as I understood it was that this was precisely what Musharraf had in mind - to have himself reelected for another five year term by legislatures controlled by his party before the looming general election, due in a few weeks' time. I confess I was dubious that even Musharraf would be quite so shameless as to resort to such a transparently underhanded subterfuge. Even Turkey's soft Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) didn't manage to pull that one off when they had the opportunity a few months back. Even after Dubya's August pronouncement that his 'focus' was on a 'free and fair election', the General is not embarrassed to claim reelection.

I have appealed to the nation towards a conciliatory approach, and I have appealed to the -- first of all, the nation, the people of Pakistan, not to join or reject any calls for strikes and agitational activity. I have appealed to the lawyers to have -- let sanity prevail. They are all educated people, and I hope, in the -- for justice and for peace, they adopt an approach of Pakistan comes first. On the media, I have asked the media to give the positives, to adopt a balanced approach. I’m the greatest supporter of their independence and give a confidence -- a feeling of confidence, a feeling of feeling good attitude to be developed, mindset to be developed, within the people of Pakistan. And I’ve also extended a conciliatory approach to all the opposition parties. This is what I’ve done. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen.

After all, it would be insane to protest a military dictator pretending to have won a presidential election, again. In the absence of sanity, however, he refuses to eschew declaring a state of emergency should the Supreme Court rule when it convenes next week that he is ineligible to stand - Article 63 of the Constitution prohibits state employees from standing for office. This is, by the way, the same President General Pervez Musharraf, the same great supporter of media independence, who issued an edict not so many months ago banning live reports of demonstrations, among other things. The same guy who had the studios of Geo TV ransacked. Credit where credit's due - the guy's got balls.

Of course, the General is not alone in his immunity to embarrassment. The only reason the election could take place at all was the deal that he reached with Bhutto. Apparently as a quid pro quo for dropping the well evidenced corruption charges against her, she had agreed that the PPP's members in the National Assembly would abstain, but attend the election session, rendering it quorate. Tariq Ali told Democracy Now! presenter Amy Goodman Wednesday

the second time she came to power, her government was incredibly corrupt, and the military then, when Musharraf came to power, charged her with corruption. The evidence is there; it’s irrefutable. And as part of the deal now, this corruption is being ignored, which is making people incredibly cynical.

Without a thought for W's August demand for a free and fair election, White House National Security Council spokesperson Gordon Johndroe sent felicitations.

"Pakistan is an important partner and ally to the United States and we congratulate them for today's election. We look forward to the electoral commission's announcement and to working with all of Pakistan's leaders on important bilateral, regional and counterterrorism issues,"

As I always say, ‘embarrassing a politician with accusations of hypocrisy is like embarrassing a dog with accusations he licks his own balls’.

Disenfranchising the minority for a change, etc.

According to yesterday’s Jerusalem Post, there are moves afoot to implement a threshold of 5% - or 6 of 120 seats - for parties to take seats in the Knesset. Although plainly a move to disenfranchise the three sitting Arab parties, or ‘factions’ as the Post is pleased to characterize them, none of which holds more than four seats, it would also eliminate the liberal Meretz party, which currently holds four seats, along with any other small parties, such as the Greens. The article doesn’t specify how the votes from failed parties are to be distributed, but in Turkey, a similar 10% threshold enables the reigning soft Islamist AKP (Justice and Development Party) to govern with a huge 66% majority even though they achieved less than 35% of the popular vote in the 2002 parliamentary elections.

Bloggers sell out!

Yesterday’s NY Times reports on a bunch of high profile bloggers accepting money from politicians. Some of them obviously don’t have very strong principles, because they sold out for a pittance. As for me, would I take money from Clinton? For 20,000 Euros a month, sure, I’d tell her anything she doesn’t want to know.

Jews sans frontiers posted a satirical piece attributed to Gabriel Ash and said to have first appeared on yellowtimes in 2003.

Soldiers should be instructed not to use the Star of David when defacing Palestinian property... the IDF could provide soldiers with defacement kits which include a sticker with the following disclaimer (in colloquial Arabic): "This humiliating act is performed by the State of Israel and has nothing to do with Jewish religion.”

Army Education Officers should be dispatched to all Palestinian villages and neighborhoods. The officers should take advantage of the long curfews which keep the population indoors in order to pass from house to house educating people about the deep historical commitment of the Jewish religion to justice and human rights, the beauty of Jewish holidays, the celebrated self-mocking Jewish humor, and the significant contributions of Jews to world culture. Officers will distribute to Palestinian families …free DVD recordings of "Annie Hall"…

Olmert said Israel will be ready to evacuate occupied lands and settlements in return for "real peace." "You have to stop violence and terror, to recognize our right to live in peace and security by your side and to give up the right of return. That's a right, natural and possible target," he said.

I guess I’m a little slow on the uptake with this one. But then, it’s not really news when an Israeli PM undertakes to ‘evacuate occupied lands and settlements’, note not ‘the occupied lands and settlements’ or ‘all occupied lands and settlements’, in exchange for the Palestinian ‘leadership’ relinquishing a right that is not theirs to negotiate. In other words, once again taking a lesson from Jacob and Esau, or perhaps Tom Sawyer, Israel is making a generous offer to return a small part of what they stole if the Palestinians will give up their birthright.

Courtesy of The Israel Project:

Iran must be stopped before it is too late.

Help us educate the press and the world – and stop Iran before it gets the nuclear bomb.

Now is the time to take action to secure Israel’s future.

Can you imagine the world without Israel? Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah can. That’s why we’re working to stop them – but we need your help.

As you know, Iran has been identified as the world’s leading state sponsor of international terrorism, funding Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and Hamas.

…educating the media costs money:

· $250 covers the cost to email fully-vetted background information to 10,000 journalists worldwide

· $600 lets us create and email a “breaking news” press release to journalists

· $1200 pays to have one journalist take a 2½ hour helicopter tour over Israel

And educating the media about the real foremost state sponsors of terrorism, which already have nukes? Priceless.

Democrats’ 'values and deepest principles'

George Lakoff had an op-ed in yesterday’s NY Times where he analyses how the slogan ‘staying the course’ provides a useful frame for Bush’s propaganda campaign:

“Stay the course” is a particularly powerful metaphor because it can activate so many of our emotions…Because achieving goals so often requires going to a particular place…we think of goals as reaching destinations.

Another widespread — and powerful — metaphor is that moral action involves staying on a prescribed path, and straying from the path is immoral...

In the context of a metaphorical war against evil, “stay the course” evoked all these emotion-laden metaphors. The phrase enabled the president to act the way he’d been acting — and to demonstrate that it was his strong character that enabled him to stay on the moral path.

In this context, he offers Bush some sound advice:

The first rule of using negatives is that negating a frame activates the frame. If you tell someone not to think of an elephant, he’ll [sic] think of an elephant…

To not stay the course evokes the same metaphors, but says you are not steadfast, not morally strong. In addition, it means not getting to your destination — that is, not achieving your original purpose. In other words, you are lacking in character and strength; you are unable to “complete the mission” and “achieve the goal.”

If the Democrats do well in next month’s election, he reckons,

…it will be because of Republican missteps and not because they’ve acted with strategic brilliance. Their “new direction” slogan offers no values and no positive vision…

This is a shame. The Democrats are giving up a golden opportunity to accurately frame their values and deepest principles (even on national security)…

I immediately sent the op-ed around to a few people thinking what a joke – Lakoff still thinks the Democrats have values, principles, and vision. Obviously the closest they come to having vision is an illusion of more of them sitting in Congress, and maybe one of them in the White House.

But then I came across this exclusive interview with former First Lady Hillary Clinton, linked from the invaluable Information Clearing House, where she articulates the Democrats’ elusive deepest principles.

In the true spirit of the Democrats’ name, Clinton reckons January’s PA elections weren’t sufficiently democratic. You might think that’s because elections, insofar as they are ever meaningful under any circumstances, are completely meaningless under military occupation. But in Clinton’s view,

…we should have made sure we did something to determine who was going to win …

On the occupation of Iraq,

I think my position differs with the administration largely with respect to the execution and implementation of the policy, which I think has been a terrible series of blunders.

Blunders like massacring 655,000 and disabling nobody can even speculate how many, not to mention the estimated 1.6 million forced into exile? Blunders like imagining that Iraqis are stupid enough to think an occupying army can impose democracy? Or that the primary US objective in invading Iraq is something other than to secure unchallenged control over the planet’s second largest known reserves of petroleum? No, actually,

…I don't know why they wouldn't put in more troops…

As for the sovereign, democratically elected Iraqi government,

We haven't told the Iraqi government, "You've got to deal with the unfinished business, and we're going to push you to do it and we're going to help you do it, but we're not going to stand by and have you ignore doing it."

Sometimes you forget that in American political discourse ‘democracy’ has nothing to do with people making their own decisions - democracy means ‘elections’, and not just any elections, but only those where ‘we’ ‘determine who was going to win’. And of course, once ‘our’ favoured candidates take ‘power’, they must stick closely to ‘our’ agenda, or risk being branded ‘a failed state’.

When asked about the ‘war on terror’, Hillary opines,

…we must do everything possible to prevent any of them – Iran, Al Qaeda and the like – from getting nuclear weapons or other types of weapons of mass destruction. That's the ballgame.

After all, it wouldn’t be fair to send ‘our boys’ and girls up against an enemy that wasn’t entirely defenseless. This is a true game of hardball, where the balls explode on contact, demolish buildings and infrastructure, and penetrate human flesh. In this ballgame, ‘we’ make the rules and the first rule is, whoever makes the rules doesn’t have to play by them.

While on the subject of the 655,000 dead, on the 19^th, I put a comment up on ICH in response to ‘The Science of Counting the Dead’, by Rebecca Goldin Ph.D:

There are actually two methodological issues with the survey that I've noticed.

One is that the authors define a household as ‘a unit that ate together, and had a separate entrance from the street or a separate apartment entrance', but do not indicate whether or how it was determined whether the group ate together, much less why this would be relevant. While this oversight is annoying, it is common to nearly all surveys conducted by national statistical agencies in peacetime and doesn't impact a great deal on estimates.

Related to this is the failure to determine who comprises the 'unit' with respect to visitors and persons temporarily absent, except that 'Deaths were recorded only if the decedent had lived in the household continuously for 3 months before the event.'

The other issue relates to the clusters. The authors have compensated in part for their implementation effectively of a 'skip' of one. That is, the forty households in each cluster were adjacent. Ordinarily, you would sample, say, every seventh dwelling in the selected block. However, instead of including EVERY next household in the sample, 'Empty houses or those that refused to participate were passed over until 40 households had been interviewed in all locations.' In principle, this distorts the sample, but it was clearly necessary to skip the refusals for the safety of the interviewing teams. Obviously data were not available from uninhabited dwellings, but by excluding them from the sample, we miss out on data that would probably directly impact on the estimates. People leave houses empty for all kinds of reasons, but in the context of Iraq, it is plausible that the dwellings were empty either because the residents were dead or had fled. So, impressionistically, this introduces bias that would result in a LOWER estimate.

The main issues remain:

- the methods deployed in this study are absolutely standard and are not controversial at all when applied outside Iraq

- they are not significantly worse than the methods used by professional, official statisticians in countries at peace

- the total population of Iraq is in doubt and this does impact on the calculation of the weights by which the actual observations are multiplied, but this is the case wherever there are not robust systems for recording births and deaths, which means most of the world, and statistics from, for example, Pakistan, are not treated as controversial

- it is important to remember that in statistics, an 'estimate' is not just a guess - it is calculated by multiplying the number of actual observations by the weights, i.e. the proportion of the population represented by the sample

- finally, the nature of the 'margin of error' is that the estimate at the centre of the range is JUST as likely to be low as to be high. It is NOT more likely that the true number of deaths is 392,979 than 942,636. In other words, there could just as easily have been nearly 1 million excess deaths as under 400,000. The probability of a toll along the lines of the Iraq Body Count of under 50,000 is vanishingly small - nearly impossible.

I actually have a little beef with ICH about this. The very first line at the top of the ICH home page proclaims: ‘Number Of Iraqi Civilians Slaughtered In America's War? At Least 655,000’ [my emphasis]

Now, Tom knows as well as I do that the Lancet report that provided the estimate of 654,965 makes no such claim. The authors are quite explicit that, ‘Separation of combatant from non-combatant deaths during interviews was not attempted, since such information would probably be concealed by household informants, and to ask about this could put interviewers at risk… some were probably combatants…’.

Second, the estimate is the midpoint of a range. The study claims that the analysis provides 95% confidence that the actual number of people who have died since the invasion who would otherwise not have died is between 392,979 and 942,636. Although as the margin of error narrows, confidence decreases, it is still probable that the actual number is near the middle of the range. As I’ve pointed out elsewhere, it is decidedly not more probable that the actual number is nearer the low end of the range than the high end. Or vice versa. Therefore, to write that the number is ‘at least 655,000’ suggests a belief that the authors are wrong to assert that it could be as low as 392,979.

Curiously, in the daily email of ICH headlines, I read, ‘Number Of Iraqi Civilians Slaughtered In America's War? As Many As 655,000’ [my emphasis], suggesting that the Lancet report’s authors are wrong to think that the actual number of excess deaths could be as high as 942,636.

I’ve written to Tom a couple of times to point out the contradiction between the two assertions, as well as that both formulations actually distort the study’s findings, but he has declined either to refute my argument to make the necessary adjustments. So I guess the time has come to go public.

Bearing in mind that the study was conducted between May and July and many more have died since then, the number of persons killed as a result of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq is probably at least 393,979 and as many as 942,636. And whatever the actual number may be, that is exactly the number more than it ought to be.