WhirledView

USAID Director Threatened; Pak Government Silent

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

When Islamist threats forced USAID director Rajiv Shah to leave a refugee encampment on the Indus last week, the Pakistani government was silent.  Evidently the Pakistani government was unable to protect Dr. Shah.  Or was the government simply unwilling to protect him?  Are the Taliban that close to control, if only indirectly, for now?

The understandable but nevertheless ignoble scamper-to-safety on the part of Dr. Shah was the splendidly-successful culmination of an Islamist fear campaign: aid workers from the international community are not welcome, the Taliban say, thus proving (as if there were any doubt, given the number of innocents who have died from Taliban suicide bombings) that the Taliban have as little concern for the Pakistani poor as the urban elite have.

If any victims of nature’s excesses need help from outsiders, it’s those displaced by the hungry waters of the Indus and its tributaries.  But help is falling short of need.  

There’s no mystery here.  When I tried to persuade some people to make a contribution, I got an outpouring of anger that focused on the disfunctionality and untrustworthiness of the Pakistani government. Evidently, all too many people are willing to let powerless people suffer for the sins of a neglectful leadership. 

Sadly, there’s not much to dispute over Pakistan’s disfunctionality.  Worse, and tragic for those suffering from an over-generous monsoon, is this: the disfunctionality is no accident.  Pakistan’s leaders, both civilian and military, have been (1) systematically corrupt and self-seeking and, the corollary, (2) perennially neglectful of the welfare of the majority of the population.  For decades, this criminal elite, civilian and military, has (3) gained and maintained power by (a) pandering to Islamists who couldn’t get elected and (b) exaggerating to the point of falsity threats from India.  At the very least, India must be undercut and bled, bled, bled, because the more India succeeds in creating a functional modern system, the worst Pakistan looks. 

Clearly the Pakistani government has been totally flumoxxed and embarrassed by India’s ability and willingness to offer $5,000,000 and helicopters to flood relief.  If ever there was evidence that the elite currently in power has no interest in public welfare, this is it.  Let them drown!  Let them starve!  Let them die of cholera.  Aid from India is unacceptable!  Fortunately the international community shamed Pakistan into accepting Indian aid—but only if it comes with a U.N. label stamped on it.  So far as I know, India hasn’t balked at the whitewashing.

If the Pakistani government cares so little for the welfare of flood victims, how fair is it to scold potential donors for being niggardly?  Already a long dormant volcano is erupting in Sumatra, with some deaths reported, and who knows when or where the next unimaginably catastrophic act of nature will require huge charitable efforts?  Might it not be better to save one’s compassionate giving for situations in which one can be confident that funds will be well used?  This, I imagine, is what many non-givers who could give are thinking.

Karachi daily Dawn reported Shah’s ungraceful departure as well as allegations that Lashkar-e-Taiba had infiltrated its operatives into the Sukkur camp, which it also claimed to control.   Lashkar-e-Taiba is the charitable-cum-terrorist organization linked to the bloody attack on Mumbai.  Pakistan has refused to extradite or even to  indite its leadership, despite India’s submission of plausible evidence that Lashkar’s operatives were responsible for planning and funding the attack.

It would appear that Lashkar operates with impunity in Pakistan, where the government in Islamabad has so far failed to apologize for being unable to protect the top USIAD official from harm.  Why?  Disinclination to call attention to general incompetence?   Contempt for Pakistan's largest aid donor in this calamity?  Fear of Lashkar?  In regard to all three, note this, as well:  the  Zadari/Gilani government has never announced, loudly and clearly, that those who threaten harm to aid workers or who actually do harm to them, will be apprehended and prosecuted. 

So who’s in control?  Lashkar?  And/or the Taliban?  Seems like.

Factions Squabble; Pakistan Drowns

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

If one needed a demonstration of how self-interested factions callously, ruthlessly vie to take advantage of human suffering, the Great Indus Flood of 2010, which increasingly seems to rival the inundation described in Genesis and Gilgamesh, provides an absolutely dandy case study. 

The Pakistani Taliban are evidently going to attack foreign aid workers because they don’t belong in Pakistan. So much for any devotion they may have to what I thought was a major selling point of Islam: Allah the Merciful.  U.N. workers say they’ll carry on.  Let’s hope they can. 

In any case, the Americans have, after an unconscionable delay, decided to divert the unmanageable billions (or gee! was it only millions?) intended to buy friends and thus stave off Islamist influence to flood relief.  Any residue, hopefully, will go to rebuilding roads, bridges, irrigation infrastructure and perhaps grain storage facilities.  Nevertheless American officials continue to vent their fears that Islamists will gain brownie points for helping people instead of killing them, thereby undercutting any good feelings the timely application of American aid might produce. A little more discretion, please!  When the flood waters recede, I expect the Pakistani people, however illiterate or allegedly brainwashed by this or that faction, will be able to figure out who’s helped from the heart  and who’s mostly tried to make hay out of flood waters.

Meanwhile, the government of Pakistan, ever unmindful of the best interests of its own people, will not be issuing visas to Israeli or Indian persons or organizations hoping to help out.  So a few more people will die, but the ideological purity of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan will have been maintained. 

As for individual Pakistani politicians, they seem to be conspicuous mainly by their absence from scenes of suffering, and Ali Sethi’s op-ed in today’s New York Times gives a vivid picture of a typical landlord-politician’s preferences: save my crops, forget the city down river.  In that case, evidently, there was also this consideration in deciding where to create strategic levee openings: save the Pak air base and the U.S. drones; to hell with the people.  That bit of infamy won’t burnish the U.S. reputation in Pakistan, where drones are already much resented for their indiscriminate killing power.

The Pakistani Army, as paranoid as ever, seems to be more interested in fighting India than in fighting the floods.  It’s no secret that Pakistan doesn’t have enough helicopters to ferry supplies to the nearly one million people marooned by the rampaging Indus and its tributaries.  After endless-seeming shilly-shallying in Islamabad, mostly having to do with sovereignty and pride, U.S. helicopters from Afghanistan were finally permitted to participate in rescue operations.  Nevertheless, there’s still a helicopter shortage, which could be alleviated, except for one little problem: the offer comes from India.  Here’s how that sad story shapes up:

The United Nations has appealed urgently for helicopters to reach tens of thousands of Pakistanis marooned by the calamitous floods while scores of choppers idle in Indian hangars in the face of Islamabad's reluctance to accept aid from New Delhi.

Amid reports that nearly 800,000 people stranded by the floods can now be reached only by air, the UN put out an SOS for choppers for a disaster that has markedly rendered Pakistan's fetish for F-16 fighter jets irrelevant. "We need at least 40 additional heavy-lift helicopters, working at full capacity, to reach the huge numbers of increasingly desperate people with life-saving relief," Marcus Prior of the World Food Program said in a statement.
   
India meantime is sitting on some 300 utility choppers spread across its air force, navy, coast guard and army without moving a muscle because of Pakistan's obvious reluctance to accept help from New Delhi. Even that acceptance came after pressure from the US and the international community that hinted that Pakistan could not expect the world to come to its assistance while it selectively spurned help from close quarters.
   
Help from the Indian military for Pakistan even amid its national disaster is a non-starter in the eyes of many because of the adversarial relationship between the two countries. Islamabad's move to accept the $5 million assistance from India has been met with scathing criticism from Pakistan's pro-military circles, with one commentator trashing the government for accepting aid under US pressure and invoking the Kashmir issue even as Pakistan is going down the tubes.

"This money has the blood of Kashmiris on it and one wonders how our Kashmiri brethren must be feeling as they face the bullets of Indian forces every day and see us taking Indian 'aid'," Shireen Mazari, editor of the Nation newspaper, who is said to be close to the Pakistan military, wrote earlier this week.

Better that their brethren in Pakistan die than be rescued by Indian helicopters?  How insulting to the people of Kashmir! 

But I do understand why Pakistanis who profit from a perpetual state of war with India might fear the long term effects of generous monetary and material aid from India.  Those who live to tell the tale of their survival or rescue may emerge from the flood with a positive, non-demonic image of India.  If that ever happens, Pakistani politics will be turned upside down.

When catastrophe happens, the hope is that all parties will unite to mitigate the suffering.  One further hopes that, in the process of assisting those who desperately need help, the antagonists will  discover that they can work harmoniously and wholeheartedly to meet the most basic human needs of sustenance and shelter and health care.  Even as the Indus continues to ravage the country, that's not the spirit of things in Pakistan. 

A Diplomat’s Progress – Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Henry Precht, A Diplomat’s Progress: Ten Tales of Diplomatic Adventure in and around the Middle East, Williams & Co: Savannah, Georgia 2005.

When I worked in the Cultural Section at the US Embassy in Moscow years ago, a colleague observed that life in that puzzle palace on Ulitsa Tschaikovskova and in the capital city of America’s then number one enemy was challenging, difficult but never boring. Henry Precht’s Ten Tales of Diplomatic Adventure in and around the Middle East suggest that his lengthy Foreign Service career brought him to a similar conclusion about his own diplomatic life.

Each tale stands alone. One - "Caviar and Kurds" - had been previously published in the Foreign Service Journal. Taken as a package, like the much earlier diplomatic adventure stories of British diplomat Lawrence Durrell, a second secretary and press attaché who wrote Stiff Upper Lip and Esprit de Corps at the end of World War II - books that initially attracted me to the diplomatic life – Precht spins his tales of diplomatic adventure, haps and mishaps with sardonic humor.

Intermingling of fact and fiction

Of course, these stories are partially autobiographical – but not entirely. I have no reason, for instance, to believe that he went through two marriages and that he is no longer happily married to his first and thus far only spouse. Yet, he could not have written them without drawing heavily upon his own experiences – and perhaps those of his friends, colleagues, acquaintances and family. Otherwise, there could have been no credibility. And these tales are credible.

They are also well written and they remain pertinent for today. In fact, each chapter not only describes conditions in countries and regions of major importance to the US – places that have likely not changed all that much since Precht toured or worked in them - but they also include observations about the career Foreign Service that new entrants and wanna-be new entrants should internalize before signing on the dotted line and taking the loyalty oath.

Red Ant Watch in Effect

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

The Homeland Security Department reports alarming new cracks in U.S. border defenses. As a result, a new enemy has gained access to vital American territory and is, even as we speak, marching on the capital. These rapidly advancing battalions of red and black army ants are equipped with skin-piercing pincers and a poison powerful enough to make a football lineman hop with pain.

People in the border states are warned to secure all key holes with masking tape and stay inside until further notice. Meanwhile, the FBI is investigating the possibility of subversion by angry entomologists denied federal funding. Chocolate-covered ants have been found in several biology department refrigerators, a clear indication that renegade scientists plan mass murder by corrupting the nation’s junk food supply.

All universities have been closed until such dens of evolutionists can be cleaned out. Ant lovers will be identified and burnt at the stake, although stoning will be allowed where deforestation is a threat or in case of local preference. Democracy must always prevail.

America’s PD Challenge: A Different America, A Different World

Part 1:  Those Cockeyed Optimists

By Patricia Lee Sharpe   

What is “soft power”?  Ultimately it’s the power of example, the power of leading by doing, the power of confidently inviting emulation, the power, where necessary, of persuasion.  It is, more briefly, the realm of public diplomacy. 

The U.S. pioneered public diplomacy, almost unconsciously, because Americans deeply believed, post World War II, that America, the savior of democracy, was also the shape of the future.  America’s story was seen as an open book, a story that could be told, warts and all, especially since the imperfections were gradually, conscientiously being removed.  America was prospering. The middle class was growing.  Racism was being attacked.  Sexism was being addressed.  Even  Latinos were learning to lift their heads with pride, thanks to Cesar Chavez.  The handicapped weren’t neglected either.  They got access to public facilities previously inaccessible.  Look and see! U.S.I.S. officers trumpeted to the world.  Come and see!   It helped, of course, that the rival Soviet political model was extremely unattractive.

Lately, the U.S. hasn’t been looking so good, and public diplomacy flounders in a conceptual morass reflecting, as much as anything, the loss of that shimmery national image.  This is a serious problem.  The present U.S. image reflects, more or less accurately, a reality that’s flawed, mundane, not tops on every chart of human achievement.  Foreign policy has been largely militarized.  Domestic politics is mired in an apparently losing fight against plutocracy.  A resurgent racism is the sub-text of the Tea Party’s clamorous nativism whose less deplorable roots tap into the dreadful realization that the economic future will be uncomfortably different from the recent past.  No one wants to run off a xerox copy of America any more.  Even cooperation is increasingly difficult to obtain.  Hence the militarization.  How do you sell damaged goods openly and honestly?  

WhirledView this week will glance back at the post World War II optimism encapsulated in the infectious musical South Pacific, which was televised live from Lincoln Center on PBS stations last Sunday.  That’s Part 1 (Oh! Those Cockeyed Optimists).  Part 2 (Take Your Babies and Run!) will consider the angry cultural backlash symbolized by the notion of  “anchor babies.”  Part 3 (Mistaking the Wrapper for the Goods) concludes the week with a look at the ugliness and perplexity that underlie President Barack Obama’s abysmal loss of popularity.

Part 1

Those Cockeyed Optimists

South Pacific is a socially-conscious drama as well as a romantic musical with  unforgettable songs.  It’s World War II.  The Japanese Navy is a major threat.  Two love stories, one tragic, one not, unroll on a nameless island populated by pert U.S. Navy nurses, sex-starved seabees, a handful of officers, French planters, Tonkinese traders and thousands of (unseen) sailors and marines. Here are the two love stories: 

A goodie two shoes from Little Rock, Arkansas, goes gaga over a widower who has sired two mixed-blood kids, half French, half Polynesian.  Miscegenation, back then, was worse than murder, for which our heroine easily forgives her paramour, while the dark-skinned kids throw her for a loop.  Hence:  “I’m gonna wash that man right out of my hair.”

A Princeton grad from the super snooty Philadelphia mainline considers marriage to a Tonkinese girl.  Lovely Liat, wed to partner number three at Cable, Cable & Cable and presiding over a big house in Ardmore, PA?  Why not?  Well, hate and fear, which, Lt. Cable declares, bitterly, “You’ve got to be carefully taught, before you are six or seven or eight,” as American kids generally were, then. (And now?)

South Pacific was first produced in 1949.  Mix-and-match romances weren’t fairy tale fluff back then.  Over half the states in the U.S. still had anti-miscegenation laws on the books.  Many of those statues forbade white/non-white unions of any sort, which means that Tonkinese and Polynesians as well as Blacks might be off limits, marriage-wise or otherwise, to Whites.  American adults’ liberty to plight a troth to whomever (of the opposite sex) they wished to marry was first curtailed in Virginia in 1661.  Color-conscious Virginia also gave us the case that closed the 300-year-long anti-miscegenation era. That’s Loving v. Virginia, decided by the Supreme Court in 1967, three years after Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act.  (For a nice summary of this history, read this.)

Anyhow, in 1964, Jim Crow was officially dead, at last, and maybe the popularity of South Pacific helped to bring about a change in attitude toward people of color. Unfortunately, the momentum for legally-rooted social reform frittered out before the job was done.  The Equal Rights Amendment never got passed, though women found back doors to relative equality, and the U.S. is hopelessly behind much many countries when it comes to gay-related issues, not only marriage, but also the right of homosexuals to serve openly in the military. But, in 1949, no one dreamed that the U.S. would ever fall behind on anything.  Optimism was in the air.  Cockeyed, bumptious, never-taking-no-for-an-answer optimism.  The Old World was giving was to the New.  Victorious America was the model for the future.  

In 1931, in his book entitled  The Epic of America, James Truslow Adams had coined the term “the American dream.”  This is how Adams defined it:

It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

South Pacific’s Bloody Mary put it this way: “If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?”   Well, America had a dream.  The American century was well under way and the American dream was being fulfilled.  Not only the idealistic part but also the part about the motor cars and everything else that went into achieving the highest standard of living ever experienced by a majority of a country’s population. 

And so, for “one brief shining moment” (to borrow a few words from a far less optimistic Camelot),  America turned itself into that all but unattainable “special island” that Bloody Mary also sings about.  Who, for the next five decades, didn’t want to come to that special island or duplicate it?  As realtors say, some properties sell themselves.      

 
 

 

Pakistan's $5,000,000 from India

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Just before posting this piece, I decided to do a status check and discovered that, even as I was writing my conclusion, the offer's acceptance had been announced, though not effusively.  Given the extraordinary delay in acceptance as well as that shockingly obvious lack of enthusiasm for India's gesture,  I decided that WhirledView readers might still find some useful tidbits in the post exactly as written.  Here it is:

Last week, evidently, India offered $5,000,000 in aid to the Pakistani government, which is struggling, unsuccessfully, to meet the needs of people driven from the flooded areas of the country.  Immediate response from Pakistan?  Silence.

To India’s credit, the spurned offer was renewed this week.  This time around Pakistan’s Foreign Minister S. M. Qureshi managed a grudging “Thank you,” but an unnamed Foreign Ministry source contributed an unbelievable elaboration: “We have not rejected the offer outright and a decision will be made soon.” 

Huh?  Everyone who knows anything about disaster relief is shouting that not nearly enough assistance has been pledged to keep more than a tiny percentage of the flood-displaced alive and healthy, let alone to rebuild thousands of washed away villages and to restore vast swathes of inundated agricultural land.  Oh, yes, and to rebuild bridges and roads.  And Pakistan isn’t sure that India’s assistance is wholeheartedly acceptable?

The Córdoba Contretemps

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been unequivocal: American citizens have the right to build houses of worship where they will.  At long last President Barack Obama has also spoken out in support of our fundamental right to freedom of religion.  Nevertheless, Republicans and some Democrats contend that rights should give way to sensitivities in the aftermath of 9/11.  To justify their politically convenient intolerance they appeal to the feelings of those whose unabatable suffering has been turned into a third rail of contemporary American politics.  Don’t question it.  Don’t even attempt to soothe it away.  You’ll die. 

More than ever I feel sorry for the survivors of 9/11 and for the families of the lost.  For ten years now they have been used as political pawns when they should be given an opportunity to heal.

Grief counselors tell us that those who are bereaved must pass through several well understood stages en route to resuming a healthy normal life.  The living 9/11 victims, it seems to me, are being manipulated in a way that denies them the right to recovery. 

Remembrance is part of being human.  Appropriately and gradually, a memorial to those who died when a bunch of fanatics hijacked commercial airliners and crashed them into the two towers in lower Manhattan is coming to fruition.  The people who died, those who thought they were starting an ordinary day’s work as well as those who struggled to minimize the loss of life, will be impressively commemorated, even though their remains will never be recovered.  Dust to dust was never more aptly put, and the land once occupied by the World Trade Center may well be considered to be hallowed ground.

Bereaved families received monetary compensation (which, in the very nature of things, can never be enough) and they were brought into the process of deciding how the Trade Center site now known (unfortunately) as Ground Zero could be developed in a way that would not only serve as a memorial to their loved ones and restore critical infrastructure, but also promote a world in which such atrocities would not be repeated.  This was a noble vision in itself.  It also allowed the bereaved to subsume their personal losses in a dream for a better future.  It allowed them to look ahead.  This is the way to mental health.  This is the way to build a better world.

Unfortunately this process has been arrested for political convenience. 

It is always hard to ask those who have suffered to get on with it, though they must, and it’s the job of clerics and psychologists to show them how, when necessary.  Even so, some people never allow themselves to recover from the death of a child or a spouse.  They feel disloyal.  Etc.  Etc.  But they must.  Otherwise they are no good to themselves or anyone else.  The best tribute to lost loved ones is–well!—living wholeheartedly: never forgetting, but not crippled by the loss.

Thus, nearly ten years later, the families of the 9/ll victims should be encouraged to accept, sadly but finally, what has happened and to move on.  Instead, once again, they are being dragged back into grief, into mourning.  They are being asked to pick the scabs of the wounds they suffered that day, never to let them heal, never to let themselves heal.   They are being confirmed in the neurotic temptation to live like wraiths, not entirely in the land of the living.  Instead of giving themselves gratefully to the healing process, they are encouraged to feel they must endlessly feed their anger and bitterness and pain.  They must, bleed, bleed. bleed.

Why must they bleed, you ask.  Because, like a Greek chorus, they are needed for this or that political script.  They are needed to justify actions that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

The latest exploitation involves mobilizing the 9/11 families to object to a Muslim cultural center in lower Manhattan.  This task requires a generous redefinition of the boundaries of Ground Zero, of course, but so much the better for the professional mourners among the families—and there are some, it seems, who appear to enjoy the implacable power they wield.  Power is seductive. Walking away from the sense of entitlement that’s somehow sprung up won't be easy.  But that’s what should happen.  Good things aren’t built on hate.  

Such insights aren’t always self-evident.  So, where are the voices of the so-called specialists in grief? Why aren’t they pleading with the politicians to allow the families to go forward instead of hugging the past?  Why don't these counselors openly prompt the bereaved to rebuild their lives instead of dictating who can build what and where in the great city of New York?  Have these counselors been intimidated?  Have they been overcome by political cowardice?  What cruel simulacrum of sensitivity prevents them from saying out loud what they must know?  There’s a herd mentality operating here.  There’s a level of political correctness that is terrifying.  But someone must say this to the survivors: forgiveness is better than bitterness, mercy is better than retribution.  Those who can’t forgive rot from the inside out.  They lose their humanity. They die.  And all too often they take innocents down with them.

Meanwhile, a collective dying is happening as politicians continue to exploit the 9/11 tragedy.  How can renouncing a bedrock American right to freedom of religion honor those who died on 9/11, which is to say, those who died from the acts of fanatics who don’t believe in religious freedom? 

State Department: Demand Release of Flotilla Pix, Please

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Eden Abergil’s pix of herself looking all pert and pretty with blindfolded Palestinian detainees as background aren’t quite as shocking as the ones that dribbled out of Abu Graib, but evidently she isn’t the only Israeli soldier who took humiliating photos of Palestinian prisoners.   More such "souvenirs" are emerging.  Poor Israel.  The image of the Israeli Defense Force is more than usually tarnished in the eyes of the outside world these days, especially since the flap over the commando raid on the Gaza aid flotilla has not by any means died down. 

The IDF, by the way, took care to release IDF-taken pictures of that raid, to prove that the commandos didn’t instigate the violence that turned deadly—as if the assault itself weren’t intrinsically violent from the moment men began slithering down ropes.

Few outsiders were happy with Israel’s  subsequent internal investigation of its interception of the Palestine aid flotilla, which is not surprising.   Even medical doctors are advised against self-diagnosis, and institutions are seldom able to muster the ruthless objectivity needed to bring unsavory facts to the fore—or even to find them.  There are two levels to the difficulty.  Not only is it painful to confess one’s errors in public, it’s close to impossible to admit them to oneself.  

Happily, then, Israel has finally acceded to a U.N.-sponsored investigatory process.  Unhappily, this fresh inquiry will be pretty cursory, thanks to the lack of pressure for a more powerful  process from the U.S.  America’s congenital indulgence continues to enable Israel’s deeply ingrained and self-destructive preference for disproportionate violence.

Trust and the Battle of the Tree

Why do I say self-destructive?  Consider how Israel’s friends have fallen away over the years since the West Bank was occupied.  I count myself as one of those lost friends.  The extent to which my gut reactions have ceased to favor Israel came home to me after last week’s battle-of-the-tree on the Israel-Lebanon border.  I immediately assumed that Israel’s version of  events was not to be trusted.

I was wrong.  It turns out that the fence runs well inside Israel.  The tree was indeed on the Lebanese side of the fence, but it was also on Israeli territory.  Israel had every right to prune it or chop it down or hang party lights on it.

Three Questions

Not that tree ownership lets Israel entirely off the hook.  Whether or not the actual border is clearly marked at all points, wisdom would have counseled Israeli officialdom to inform Lebanese counterparts of their limb-lopping plans.  This would have prevented genuinely mistaken reactions as well as ill-intended attempts to take advantage of ambiguity.  Did Israel convey such information to appropriate Lebanese figures?While we’re at it, let’s consider another aspect of this border clash.  Physical fences are easy to see, and most of us think of  fences as precise, visible markers for official boundaries. In this case, fence and border don’t coincide.  Was this complication well known to all who needed to know?  For that matter, is the actual border marked clearly enough to prevent unintended clashes?  Obviously, it should be, if clashes are not actually desired.  As pretexts for massive retaliation, for example.

Finally, to communicate, there must be a channel for communications.  Is there a readily accessed sort of hot line between Israel and Lebanon?  If not, why not?  The U.S. and the U.S.S.R., mortal enemies during the Cold War, didn’t want an accidental Hot War.  A “don’t worry” call was always possible.  It would appear that Israel and Lebanon need something similar.  Or is the mistrust between Israel and its neighbors part of a loathing so mutually repellant that even self-protective cooperation stinks like a pact with evil?  If so, too bad.  More people will die uselessly. 

Evidence Destroyed or Merely Withheld?

All in all, given the overall lack of trust and the unlikelihood of a thorough investigation of the flotilla incident, there is a gesture that Israel could make—or, in the absence of a voluntary gesture, a demand the international community could make.  When Israel took the flotilla’s participants into custody, their cameras and cell phones were confiscated. When the hostages were released, their belongings were retained by Israel.  The world deserves to see the images on those cameras and cell phones.  

The Israeli government has released some images taken by Israeli commandos during their boarding operations.  Most likely only those pix that unambiguously support the official Israeli version of events have been released.  What damning (or innocuous) material lurks undisclosed in official files?  We’ll never know, absent a conscience-stricken Israeli willing to send material to Wikileaks—which is why Wikileaks needs to survive.  Secrecy is usually defended on the grounds of national security.  But secrecy is also an indispensable instrument of control and manipulation.   

Meanwhile, since Israel has not returned the photographic equipment, there is only one plausible interpretation.  The evidence they contain(ed) was damning. 

Does anyone doubt that Israel would have acted quickly to check out the contents of captured film cassettes and flash disks to determine whether or not the images were consistent with the self-exculpatory  Israeli narrative?  Quite possibly, by now, all the images have been destroyed, one reason why the cameras and cell phones can’t be returned.  The erasures would become public knowledge.  To be caught destroying evidence would be as incriminating as being confronted publicly with the images themselves.

A Little Tough Love, Please

To my knowledge, the U.S. hasn’t demanded release or full inspection of this important evidence.  If I’m correct, that must mean that the State Department has made the same assumptions I’m making.  State Department people aren’t stupid.  They do tend to overprotect Israel.   

During the first months of the Obama administration it looked as if the U.S. would exhibit a little tough love with regard to Israel. By openly opposing new settlements, for example.  That was truly tough love.  By comparison, demanding a return of those cameras and cell phones, intact, should have been easy to pull off.  But even this little bit of pressure can’t be applied during a U.S. election year, it seems.
 
Placating Israel now may seem like a good way to generate votes for Democratic candidates in November, but our more rational leaders should know that there’s no end to placating Israel which, given an inch, grabs a mile. Worse, Israel these days is not a particularly good judge of its own best interests, which is why its old friends are getting thin on the ground.