notes from "good muslim, bad muslim" by mahmood mamdani (part V)

(159): As the turf war culminated in a seesaw battle for Kabul, the civil war turned vicious. When it became obvious that Hikmatyar's forces were losing ground, the Pakistani army shifted its backing to the Taliban, a group mainly comprising students it had trained since 1980 in madrassahs in the North-West Frontier Province. The ISI saw the Taliban as amenable to tight control and thus a preferable substitute for the now discredited Islamist coalition led by Hikmatyar.
(161): An old man in a mosque in Kandahar...confided about the Taliban to Eqbal Ahmed, "They have grown in darkness amidst death. They are angry and ignorant, and hate all things that bring joy to life."
(172): The shift in Hizbullah's ideological and political orientation toward a secular notion of the state was the result of a leadership struggle that followed two major changes in the region. The first was the end of Israeli occupation in Lebanon and, following it, the end of the civil war (1985-1989) between Hizbullah and Amal, two organizations vying for political leadership of the Shi'a community in Lebanon. The second was the leadership change in Iran after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, which led to a less-ideological political orientation.
(172): The Hizbullah case reinforces the lesson of the contemporary civil war in Algeria: that reform is better engineered from within than imposed from without.
(175): One can conclude, therefore, that political Islam is a modern political phenomenon, not a leftover of traditional culture. To be sure, one can trace several practices in political Islam--opium production, madrasah education, and the very notion of jihad--to the era before modern colonization. In fact, opium, madrassah education, and al-jihad al-akbar were all reshaped and remade within modern institutions as they were put in the service of a global American campaign against the "evil empire."
(181): On September 22, 1980, when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran with enthusiastic US support, he initiated a war that saw the first use of chemical weapons since the US invasion of Vietnam. Nicholas D. Kristof of the NYT reported that "the United States shipped seven strains of anthrax to Iraq from 1978 to 1988." Training in the use of chemical and biological agents had been provided to Iraqi military officers as early as the 1960s. An official army letter published int he late 1960s noted that "the US army trained 19 Iraqi military officers in the United States in offensive and defensive chemical, biological, and radiological warfare from 1957 to 1967.
(183): [on Iran-Iraq] The sentiment behind it was brazenly articulated by Kissinger in the middle of the Iraq-Iran War, perhaps because he was already out of office: "We hope they kill one another."
(183): Hussein became an example of the price that must be paid by any regime that violates the terms of its alliance with the United States. The 1991 Gulf War was literally a punishment. It was the first time the United States applied the military doctrine it had forged in Laos during the long war from 1964 to 1974: "to compensate for the absence of ground forces by an aerial bombardment of unprecedented intensity, without regard to the 'collateral damage.'"... Former attorney general Ramsey Clark charged that the administration used "all kinds of weapons in violation of international law," from explosives to depleted uranium to cluster bombs. As Iraq's infrastructure was comprehensively targeted, little thought was given to civilian casualties... Eric Hoskins, a Canadian doctor... reported that the bombardment of 1991 had "effectively terminated everything vital to human survival in Iraq--electricity, water, sewage systems, agriculture, industry, and health care."
(184): But George H.W. Bush hesitated to replace Saddam... [He] faced a double dilemma. On the one hand, the Kurdish minority was the group best organized... to take advantage of Saddam's overthrow, but its objective was a Kurdish state that would also include parts of Turkey, a close U.S. ally... On the other hand, there was also the possibility that Iraq's majority Shi'a population, which had religious and cultural ties to Iran, would assert itself, surely dimming America's hopes of isolating Iran. So Bush feared bringing even a semblance of democracy to Iraq. The alternative was to continue punishing Iraq in peacetime, so as to keep the regime from arming effectively against anyone but its own population.
(185): By the time the second war against Iraq started in 2003, the peacetime bombing of Iraq had lasted longer (since 1990) than had the US invasion of Vietnam or the war in Laos. In October 1998, US officials told the WSJ they would soon run out of targets: "We're down to the last outhouse." That was two months before President Clinton... decided to unleash a round-the-clock bombing of Iraq. Round-the-clock bombing began on December 16,1998, and ended on December 19. The mission was called Operation Desert Fox...
(185-186): The UN adopted economic sanctions as part of its 1945 charter, as a way of maintaining global order. Since then, sanctions have been used 14 times, 12 of those since the collapse of the USSR. But Iraq represents the first time a country has been comprehensively sanctioned since the Second World War, meaning that virtually every aspect of its exports and imports was controlled by the UN and subject to a US veto.
(186-187): As the concomitant humanitarian crisis deepened, Iraq and the UN finally came to an agreement on an oil-for-food program.... Iraq was allowed to sell a net amount of oil over six months (initially $1.2 billion net, later $3 billion net). The revenues went directly into a UN account. The United States and Brtain required that nearly one third of this (30 percent from 1996 to 2000, 25% thereafter) be diverted into a compensation fund to pay outsiders for losses allegedly incurred because of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Another 10 percent went to pay for UN operating expenses in Iraq. The remainder was controlled solely by the UN controller who disbursed funds to contractors and suppliers of foodstuffs and basic medicines approved by the sanctions committee. But as a working paper prepared for the UN Sub-Comission on the... noted, "Of the revenue from sale, only about half ended up going towards the purchase of humanitarian goods, the majority of the rest going towards reparations and administrative costs..."
(187-188): The effect of comprehensive sanctions was deadly. Because they followed on the heels of a war that had targeted and destroyed Iraq's physical infrastructure, there was a veritable social and demographic disaster. Yet public knowledge... was slow in coming. Part of the reason lay in the fact that the UN human-rights rapporteur... was limited to identifying human-rights violations by the government of Iraq; the rapporteur was prohibited by mandate from looking at human-rights violations as a result of the sanctions.
(189): Even in this age of mass murder, the gravity of these figures should not escape our attention... By 2000, there was a consensus in both the UN and the human-rights community about the excess child deaths directly linked to sanctions: the June 2000 report to the UN Sub-Comission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights acknowledged that the total deaths "directly attributed to the sanctions" ranged "from half a million to a million and a half, with the majority of the dead being children." Even the minimum estimate was three times the number of Japanese killed during the US atomic bomb attacks.
(190): How and by whom was such a death toll justified for so long?... The simple fact is that the United States consistently used its veto on the Security Council 661 Committee... to minimize the humanitarian goods entering the country... [T]he reason it gave most often was concern over dual use... [A]s of September 2001, the United States had blocked "nearly 200 humanitarian contracts." The most notorious were those needed to repair the damaged water and sanitation systems, given that most excess child deaths were "a direct or indirect result of contaminated water."
(191-192): Forced to take reponsibility for a policy they could neither defend nor influence, many of those in charge of implementing Iraq policy at the UN opted to resign, one after another. The first to resign was Dennis Halliday..., declaring: "We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and as terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral."
(194): Although the use of napalm was banned by the United Nations in 1980, the United States never signed the agreement.
(199): Hersh noted a February 2003 poll showing that 72 percent of Americans believed it was likely that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks.
(204-205): It was when Boutros-Ghali began to assert his independence in practice that Washington's patience ran out. He criticized Washington's preoccupation with Bosnia--"a war of the rich"--and its neglect of Somalia, where "one third of the population was likely to die of hunger," and Rwanda, where he accused the United States of "standing idly by"... In the end, Washington successfully replaced Boutros-Ghali with another African, Kofi Annan... Whereas Boutros-Ghali had been unwilling to follow the NATO command and approve American demands for aerial bombing of the Serbs on a scale more than symbolic, Kofi Annan readily obliged when he stood in for Boutros-Ghali.
(210): The United States supported the call for an international tribunal to try Khmer Rouge leaders for war crimes. When it came to drafting the terms of the tribunal, Washington demanded that the mandate of the court be restricted to the period from 1975 to 1979. Had the years before or after been included, the United States would have run the risk of itself being charged with war crimes. Any scrutiny of the pre-1975 period would have directed the court's attention to the year's of US carpet bombing in Indochina, just as an investigation of the post-1979 period would have brought to light the political cover the United States provided the Khmer Rouge, both at the UN and internationally, against the Vietnamese, who invaded Cambodia in 1978.
(215): In a recent interview with the Israeli historian Benny Morris, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak spoke of Palestinians in words that few American racists would dare utter in print: "They are products of a culture... in which to tell a lie creates no dissonance. They don't suffer from the problem of telling lies that exists in Judeo-Christian culture. Truth is seen as an irrelevant category. There is only that which serves your purpose and that which doesn't."
(217): Unlike crime, political acts make sense only when linked to collective greivances. Whether we define them as acts of terror or of resistance, we need to recognize a feature common to political acts: they appeal for popular support and are difficult to sustain in the absence of it. If there is a logic behind the practice of collective punishment, it is the acknowledgement that collective punishment can only be a response to political acts, not criminal deeds.
(222): We need to recognize the suicide bomber, first and foremost, as a category of soldier. Does not the suicide bomber join both aspects of our humanity, particularly as it has been fashioned by political modernity, in that we are willing to subordinate life--both our own and that of others--to objectives we consider higher than life? Suicide bombing needs to be understood as a feature of modern political violence rather than stigmatized as a mark of barbarism.