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The Baker report’s brief mention of Israel didn’t get so much attention in the West, but it got much more in the Arab world.

Talking about linking Israel into a solution in Iraq might have sounded like a good, open-minded approach from an American perspective. But it is never going to look good in Arab eyes, because any American position on Israel and Palestine will always be an thousand miles away from anything popular with Arabs. So Al-quds al-arabi complains ([English](http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.alquds.co.uk%2Findex.asp%3Ffname%3Dtoday%5C06xa28.htm%26storytitle%3Dff%25CA%25DE%25D1%25ED%25D1%2520%25C8%25ED%25DF%25D1%3A%2520%25E4%25DE%25C7%25D8%2520%25C7%25E1%25DE%25E6%25C9%2520%25E6%25C7%25E1%25D6%25DA%25DDfff%26storytitleb%3D%26storytitlec%3D))

The report focused on the need to find a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict. It criticized the American administration, which has neglected this issue in the last few years. However, it did not provide acceptable solutions taking Arab and Palestinian interests into account. It did not touch on Israeli terrorist practices and the silence of the American administration.

What the report said was about as innocuous as a US government statement on Israel could get:

>The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict and regional instability. There must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts: Lebanon, Syria, and President Bush’s June 2002 commitment to a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine. This commitment must include direct talks with, by, and between Israel, Lebanon, Palestinians (those who accept Israel’s right to exist), and Syria.

The problem is that the Iraq Study Group has its tactics all wrong: Iraqis and Americans will never agree over Israel, and talking about it only causes trouble. The best solution is to take the same approach as with Iran’s nuclear program: keep the issues separate, try to negotiate on each problem separately. If the US follows the ISG recommendations and talks about Israel and Iraq in the same breath, they’re hobbling themselves, making it politically much more difficult for any Iraqi groups to negotiate.

Also, note that [Dar al hayat](http://www.daralhayat.com/special/12-2006/Item-20061206-59a48c03-c0a8-10ed-01a4-77dfbd2a58d2/story.html) ([English](http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.daralhayat.com%2Fspecial%2F12-2006%2FItem-20061206-59a48c03-c0a8-10ed-01a4-77dfbd2a58d2%2Fstory.html)) has a much more neutral comment that the report “calls for action on the Arab-Israeli conflict andt he establishment of the Palestinian state”.

Some less negative Arab press reactions to the report [here](http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200612/s1806016.htm) and [here](http://www.juancole.com/2006/12/arab-reaction-to-isg-report-usg-open.html). And bear in mind that Israel is slightly less all-consuming within Iraq than it is for the pan-Arab media – although it is still an immensely emotive topic.

One of the breathtaking nuggets in the Iraq Study Group report is the following:

“All of our efforts in Iraq, military and civilian, are handicapped by Americans’ lack of language and cultural understanding. Our embassy of 1,000 has 33 Arabic speakers, just six of whom are at the level of fluency.”

How did that happen? One explanation is bureaucratic closed-mindedness:

The pathetic language skills at the embassy are as I understand it largely a side-effect of the security clearance process. Anyone who has spent time in an Arabic speaking country outside the framework of military or diplomatic service is generically excluded, leaving only those trained stateside at DLI and similar institutions, whose pedagogical techniques are basically back in the 60s.

This isn’t unique to the Baghdad embassy; the FBI, coincidentally, also has only 33 Arabists of its own – and again, one reason cited is that “it is easier to get a security clearance if you don’t have any interaction with foreigners”.

I can only hope that competent linguists are hired to work on a contract basis – because the idea of America’s Iraq policy being run almost entirely by people who can’t communicate with Iraqis is frightening.

[another IAG crosspost]

I realise I shouldn’t obsess over numbers, but whenever I stop reading Iraq news for a few weeks, it’s the numbers that bring home the scale of things, and how much worse they’re getting.

The annual budget for Iraq’s health ministry is $1.1 billion, according to this article, compared to just $22 million in 2002 – not to mention the sanctions back then. Yet infant mortality has risen over that time (130 deaths per thousand now, compared to 125 then). Meanwhile 7,000 doctors have left the country, at least 455 medical staff (including hospital guards) have been killed, and entire lorries of medical equipment are vanishing.

I’m not sure where all those figures are coming from (is that $22 million figure plausible?), but before the war I’d hoped this was an area that would improve just through Americans throwing money at it. Obviously I was wrong.

Also, up to 1.6 million internally displaced Iraqis (425,000 of them fleeing home since February), and about as many again living outside Iraq – so say UNHCR.

[cross-posted from IAG]

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UN agencies might not be known for their elegant prose, but when things are this bad the plain facts are more compelling than journalists’ waffle:

Iraq is haemorrhaging. The humanitarian crisis which the international community had feared in 2003 is now unfolding. The massive displacement has emerged quietly and without fanfare but the numbers affected are in excess of what many agencies had predicted in 2003.

Since the February 2006 Samarra bombings UNHCR, as Cluster Coordinator for displaced groups inside Iraq, estimates some 425,000 Iraqis to have been recently displaced. In addition, some two to three thousand Iraqis are leaving per day via neighbouring countries as the extent of the tragedy becomes obvious. UNHCR estimates that there are at least 1.6 million Iraqis internally displaced with at least another 1.6 – 1.8 million(4) in neighbouring states.

[[UNHCR](http://reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/LSGZ-6W2F7S?OpenDocument&rc=3&emid=ACOS-635P5D), via Reliefweb]

Feeling quite proud of my latest little project – making maps of which parts of the world get talked about in Parliament. The results are

here

– bizarrely enough, it seems that MPs spend a lot of time talking about Africa, compared to say, Asia or South America. They also have a bit of a Mongolia obsession, although on closer inspection that turns out to made up of lists of parking tickets, and things like Tony Benn saying that “The House of Lords is the British Outer Mongolia for retired politicians.”

OK, so the results might be a bit dubious if you look too closely – but still, I made pretty pictures

Have fun at Alt-Xmas, people: would love to be there.

[

Update

: I finally got round to adding legends to the maps]

Which countries get talked about in parliament? With data from [They Work For You](http://www.theyworkforyou.com), I’ve put together these maps of where MPs like to talk about. Here’s the number of mentions a country has had in parliament recently, adjusted for population:

Looking at this, I’m actually surprised at how globally-minded Parliament is. Sudan (pop. 34.2 million) gets 2,302 mentions; Germany (pop. 82.5 million) has only 3,695 mentions in parliament.

Far from being ignored, Africa actually gets mentioned well beyond its economic importance to the UK. South America, on the other hand, is basically ignored.

Then there’s the size bias: small countries get more mentions than big ones, once you adjust for population. Look at Mongolia: Westminster, it seems, finds Mongolians immensely more important than Chinese. The bias can partly be discounted as a problem with measurement: parliament is prone to lists of foreign relations and trade issues, for instance, which mention every country regardless of how small it is. Also, it’s possible MPs talk about areas within China or India, which I wouldn’t have picked up on.

But there’s more to it: larger countries really do get short-changed in the attention we give them. China has a population perhaps 150 times larger than than of Bolivia – but we don’t hear anything like 150 times as much news from China. We’re all biased by imagining a world made up of nations, and giving the same weight to nations of all sizes. Small islands got discussed an incredible amount – particularly places in the news, like Tuvalu and the Pitcairns, but others as well.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Since [My Society](http://www.mysociety.org/) have made data on what’s happening in parliament so easily available, I figured somebody should poke at it. [Here](http://ohuiginn.net/docs/parliamentmentions.csv) is a first shot: a table of how often each of the world’s developing countries has been mentioned in Commons and Lords debates. The plan now is to look at what gets a country mentioned in parliament – i.e. (very roughly) what foreign policy issues MPs and Lords care about. So far I’ve only looked at the GDP of the countries, which doesn’t make a great deal of difference (R²=0.45), but I’m currently trying to find data for trade with the UK, human rights, and so on. The one surprise so far is how closely the number of mentions in the Lords and in the Commons match each other (R²=0.97) – I’d expected them to get excited about different topics. The lords cared more about Burma, and less about Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, but not greatly.

Anyway, I’ll keep on tinkering with this for a while, and see what else I can find.