So It Goes

Another View on Misguided Diplomacy

BEYOND MANY OF THE EDITORIAL PAGES OF MAJOR WESTERN NEWSPAPERS, most of the public criticism of former President Jimmy Carter's meetings this past week with Hamas leadership came from largely from Israelis and most of Israel's Jewish supporters around the world. That's not to say that the criticism was any less valid. But I worry that, when Israelis and the Jews are once again fighting a battle like this on their own, many others around the world tend to discount their views as the same old intransigence.

So rather than rehearse many of the same arguments that other Jewish supporters for Israel are making about President Carter's misguided diplomacy, I thought it would be refreshing to look at a different source and see what his views are on the subject. In this case, I've chosen someone who has been in a good position to evaluate the role of violent extremism among Arab groups in the Middle East, someone who is not motivated necessarily by his embrace of Israel.

I'm referring to Farid Ghadry, a Syrian-born businessman who now lives in the United States and who founded and currently heads a group called the Reform Party of Syria.

RPS describes itself as a "Syrian opposition party to the Assad regime that has emerged as a result of September 11.  The party is governed by secular, peace committed American-Syrians, Euro-Syrians, and native Syrians who are determined to see that a 'New Syria' is reborn that embraces real democratic and economic reforms." And, with his frequent and vigorous speeches, testimonies in Congress, regular blog entries and various other public utterances, Ghadry provides anyone who will listen regular reminders to pay attention to the misdeeds of the Assad regime and to the courageous efforts of those who oppose it.

With that in mind and knowing of his longtime criticism of extremists (particularly those with strong ties to Assad), it's not entirely surprising that Ghadry would be critical of President Carter's meetings with Hamas. But, as with Jewish and Israeli responses to President Carter's meeting, Ghadry's  perspective still gives his arguments as much power as any.

In a blog posting yesterday, Ghadry wrote:

The direct and indirect effect of President Jimmy Carter's visit to Gaza, Egypt, and Damascus to meet with members of Hamas sends chills down the spine of every Arab and Muslim working for reforms in the Middle East because it legitimizes terror and violence and dilutes all the efforts that peaceful Arab reformers have committed themselves to. One such reformer told me: "Why are we working so hard for peace if the Americans prefer to deal with terror?.'" I could not utter but words of encouragement knowing deep inside that he is right.

He goes on:

Under the auspices of “seeking peace”, President Carter is reversing years of hard work by many Palestinians and Israelis who see the road to co-existence paved by true peaceful acts. For President Carter to meet with individuals with blood on their hands not only legitimizes terror but it also encourages it in two ways: It sends the signal to Hamas that its violence pays off but also inspires those who vacillate between violence and peace to surrender to violence.

Ghadry's most valuable message, then, is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is, despite that terminology, not strictly between Israelis and Palestinians. Rather, it is between the forces of moderation and the forces of extremism on both sides of the conflict. My belief (and more knowledgeable people than I would probably agree) is that there are a large number of Israelis and Arabs, who if they had their way, could pretty quickly come close to resolving many of the issues that have divided them for so many years. The main obstacle, however, are those who see any such co-existence and cooperation between the two peoples as a threat and who will do anything to derail peace.

Ghadry is not saying (nor am I) that the forces of good should do nothing at all to deal with groups like Hamas and extremist regimes like Iran and Syria. As he writes:

Part of the blame for Carter’s trip falls on this administration as well. The policy of “no policy” towards Syria and Iran has fostered this sense of mid-air suspension that inevitably encourages people like president Carter to apply the laws of physics. Had the US foreign policy been more forceful than simply attempt to isolate Hamas and Syria, the US may had seen faster pace to peace than what the molasses isolationist policy can deliver.

I'm not completely sure what Ghadry means when he says "more forceful." I hope he means it in the diplomatic sense and not through military action against these groups. That's my preference, and one only needs to look at the mess in Iraq to understand why.

But we need diplomacy that's more careful and evenhanded than what President Carter, who has vilely compared Israel to the South African Apartheid governments of years past, has to offer. Ghadry's right that someone with the stature of Jimmy Carter -- a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and tireless advocate for peace and human rights -- frustrates the careful (and probably not-so-careful) efforts of those on both sides of the Israeli-Arab divide who are trying to solve this problem of extremism. It allows the good guys to look like the obstructionists to peace and the bad guys look like great statesmen willing to compromise without really having to compromise.

If you have any doubt that Hamas really doesn't want to compromise, by the way, just read what Mahmoud al-Zahar, Hamas's "foreign minister," wrote in an Op-Ed in the Washington Post three days ago:

A "peace process" with Palestinians cannot take even its first tiny step until Israel first withdraws to the borders of 1967; dismantles all settlements; removes all soldiers from Gaza and the West Bank; repudiates its illegal annexation of Jerusalem; releases all prisoners; and ends its blockade of our international borders, our coastline and our airspace permanently. This would provide the starting point for just negotiations and would lay the groundwork for the return of millions of refugees. Given what we have lost, it is the only basis by which we can start to be whole again.

This is not compromise, especially when you know that Hamas has repeatedly called for the destruction of Israel. Rather, it is like one boxer telling another to tie his hands behind his back so the first boxer can finish the other off -- with knives and bullets.

And these are the guys to whom President Carter decides to lend his prestige? Does President Carter have any prestige left to give?

Jeff

An Anniversary to Remember and Learn From

AMERICAN MEDIA LOVE ANNIVERSARIES, especially if they come in nice, clean multiples of five. But most media missed marking a major milestone a little more than a week ago: the 60 anniversary of the signing of the Foreign Assistance Act, the legislation that set the Marshall Plan into motion.

Maybe that’s because the Act itself, signed by President Harry S Truman on April 3, 1948, followed by nearly a year the famous June 1947 speech — given by none other than Secretary of State George C. Marshall at Harvard commencement ceremonies — that was arguably the galvanizing impetus to the creation of the Marshall Plan.

But the Foreign Assistance Act was the culmination of an intense discourse that led to a national consensus around the idea of using American material resources (backed by military assets) to strengthen allies and, as it would turn out, shape them in the image of American capitalism and democracy.

As Diane Kunz wrote in a June 1997 edition of Foreign Affairs Magazine on the 50th anniversary of Marshall’s speech (okay, so I guess that’s the milestone most point to first): “The Marshall Plan was a limited investment that paid incalculable dividends. A situation favorable to American interests was established in Europe. The aid program raised Western Europe from its knees, launched the American challenge to the Soviet Union, and bolstered the American economy.... When the vital interests of the United States seem to be at stake, the expenditure of American dollars for foreign aid can be amply justified. That was true at the time of the Marshall Plan, and it is still true today.”

Unfortunately, not enough Americans seem to recognize the wisdom of Kunz’s last words, “it is still true today.” Nor has our current administration, which has been all too willing to settle disputes and assert American interests using mostly military power, embraced these words. Unlike America in 1947 and ’48, our current national discourse seems to miss the lesson of the Marshall Plan: that such assistance to others around the world can be an effective way to strengthen ties — cultural, economic and political –- with current and future allies. 

Luckily, there are some smart and influential people who understand how that lesson applies to America’s currently sorry standing in the world. Notably, the Center for Strategic and International Studies over the last year convened a Commission on Smart Power, a collection of major policy makers and statespeople. They looked at ways in which the U.S. might strengthen its image among and ties with the other nations of the world by, as the Commission put it, “providing things that people and governments in all quarters of the world want but cannot attain in the absence of American leadership.”

The “smart power” approach is not a carbon copy of the Marshall Plan, which gave out a total of $12.5 billion to several war-battered Western European countries between April 3, 1948, and June 30, 1951. As the Commission’s November 2007 final report describes, “smart power” tools include:

• “Alliances, partnerships, and institutions: Rebuilding the foundation to deal with global challenges;
• “Global development: Developing a unified approach, starting with public health;
• “Public diplomacy: Improving access to international knowledge and learning;
• “Economic integration: Increasing the benefits of trade for all people;
• “Technology and innovation: Addressing climate change and energy insecurity.”

Some of these approaches involve cash outlays, not necessarily only from the U.S. Treasury but also from private American sources. Some call for a different way of facing the rest of the world (such as engagement through alliances, as well as public diplomacy) and even changing how most Americans carry on our lives (e.g. climate change).

The “smart power” approach (the new-and-improved iteration of the term “soft power,” coined by Joseph S. Nye, Jr., the Harvard government professor who co-chairs the Commission) does not argue that it can or should replace “hard power” — U.S. military might — in world affairs.

Rather, it aims to complement hard power and to “attract people to our side without coercion,” as the Commission’s report puts it. “Legitimacy is central to soft power. If a people or nation believes American objectives to be legitimate, we are more likely to persuade them to follow our lead without using threats and bribes. Legitimacy can also reduce opposition to — and the costs of — using hard power when the situation demands. Appealing to others’ values, interests, and preferences can, in certain circumstances, replace the dependence on carrots and sticks….

“….Militaries are well suited to defeating states,” the report adds, “but they are often poor instruments to fight ideas. Today, victory depends on attracting foreign populations to our side and helping them to build capable, democratic states. Soft power is essential to winning the peace.”

The trouble is that it’s difficult to spread this gospel within the current landscape. Many Members of Congress can speak of the fervor with which many of their constituents castigate them for voting for foreign aid, arguing that all those dollars we send abroad (which usually represent a fraction of a percent of the federal budget) instead of being applied to domestic priorities.

“[I]n general,” the U.S. Agency for International Development states on its Web site, "Americans have never strongly supported economic aid to other countries. For example, three surveys conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations since the end of the Cold War have found that the U.S. public is divided on whether to give economic aid to other countries. In the most recent survey, in line with the previous two, only 13 percent of Americans favored increasing federal spending on foreign economic aid-while 48 percent favored reducing it.”

If anything, the U.S. military has resources that vastly outweigh those that USAID gets. For that reason, in many places around the world our military has in recent years increasingly been the entity that’s put in charge of delivering the kind of assistance that USAID is supposed to. It has to send a bit of a mixed message for even the most compassionate soldier, with an M-16 slung over his shoulder, to represent America as a giving and benevolent country.

Many who espouse the policy of “smart power” will admit that it’s too late and highly unlikely for our current administration to put the approach in place in any effective way. Their hope is that our next president will get a fresh opportunity to use this set of tools in a way that could begin to undo the mess our current administration has made of America’s standing in the world.

But they need a strong public consensus – like the one that emerged around the Marshall Plan 60 years ago — to give them the political cover to deploy what can be a powerful weapon in our foreign policy arsenal.

We shall see.

Jeff

Pictured with President Truman in the photo above (which you can click to enlarge and which comes from the Averell Harriman Papers in the Library of Congress's Manuscript Division) of the signing of the Foreign Assistance Act, are (l to r): Senator Arthur Vandenberg (R—Mich.), Treasury Secretary John Snyder, Representative Charles Eaton (R—N.J.), Senator Tom Connally (D—Tex.), Secretary of the Interior Julius A. Krug, Representative Joseph Martin (R—Mass.), Representative Sol Bloom (D—N.Y.),and Attorney General Tom Clark.

What Makes a President "Good for Israel"?

OVER THE PAST COUPLE OF MONTHS, I’ve heard a number of Jewish friends say in private and other Jewish voices say in public that they worry that Barack Obama will be “bad for Israel.”

What’s most intriguing about these observations is that, while Obama is maddeningly vague and unspecific on practically every issue (which is mostly why I voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary), these American Jews somehow seem to know for certain where he stands on Israel.

Much of the present whisper campaign against Obama seems curiously to have emanated from Jewish Republicans. For example Marc Zell, who identifies himself as Co-Chairman of Republicans Abroad in Israel (boy, there’s an organization for everything), went after Obama in a Jerusalem Post piece recently. So did the Republican Jewish Coalition, which regularly and shamelessly plays a more-pro-Israel-than-thou act, accusing Jewish Democrats of selling out the Jewish State. Strangely enough, for example, the RJC gladly quoted Ralph Nader recently, for saying that Sen. Obama was "pro-Palestinian when he was in Illinois before he ran for the state Senate" and "during the state Senate." All of the sudden, Nader’s a credible source for the RJC.

But, to be fair the attacks on Obama don’t appear to be only the work of a Republican smear campaign. I’ve heard nervousness about Obama, too, in the voices of many committed Democrats who are Jewish.

Of course, everyone (even his supporters) is reading Obama's tea leaves.  He offered a little more substance (but not a lot) to his thinking about the Israeli-Arab conflict and about how he finds Louis Farrakhan unsavory, in some recent public utterances on the subject, meant to disarm the charges against him. I personally find what he said fairly unobjectionable, though his past statements such as, "Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people" are troubling in their ignorance.

Obama’s Jewish critics are focusing less on what he has said (or not said) than on the advisors who surround him –- “guilt by association,” he calls it.

Frankly, I think assessing any candidate by the company he keeps is fair game, especially in Obama’s case. While he may not himself know or want to articulate in detail what he will do on any of the wide range of policy challenges he would face as President, I have to believe –- or, better yet, I sincerely hope –- he will have the good judgment to bring in good people who know about specific issues. So it’s not unreasonable to look at the credentials and views of the people on his campaign foreign policy team.

On that criterion, Obama’s candidacy turns out to be a mixed bag, at least as far as some people are concerned. Some of his advisors (some of which are truly advising him, he says, and some are pretty much in name only) have reputations as solidly “good for Israel,” and a few –- really only a few –- have records that have for understandably concerned some in the pro-Israel community.

Even Martin Peretz, the Editor-in-Chief of The New Republic, and a full-throated supporter of Obama, conceded recently that a “charge, circulating on the Internet, has not yet been sufficiently refuted. This is that he has advisers on the Middle East who despise Israel.”

Interestingly, however, Peretz, is a hawkish supporter of Israel, which might surprise many who are responsible for or influenced by the anti-Obama whisper campaign.  “Barack Obama's views on Israel and the possibilities of peace between it and the Palestinians are both tough-minded and deeply comprehending,” Peretz wrote. “I don't at all think that I'd be disappointed with an Obama presidency, and certainly not with his attitude towards the Jewish State."

I really don't think Obama will be hostile to Israel. But the truth is, we never really know what someone’s position on Israel (or any other major policy issue) will be until he’s faced with real and difficult decisions as President of the United States. 

Most of the pro-Israel hardliners’ money in 2000 said that George W. Bush would be “good on Israel,” and in 2004, I heard that sentiment again, even from some Jewish Democrats who were concerned that John Kerry would not be sympathetic enough (based on seemingly no good evidence).

But who among those hardliners would have believed that George W. Bush would endorse –- as President! –- the idea of a fully autonomous Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel? Who would have thought that his administration would use up all-too-little political capital on resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for most his presidency –- at least not until a few months ago in Annapolis when most of that political capital had waned? If pro-Israel supporters of candidate Bush had known that’s how President Bush’s term would have turned, I have to believe they would have roundly criticized him in 2000, and opposed him again in 2004, too.

And one has to wonder whether the invasion of Iraq, President Bush’s biggest foreign policy initiative -– and the perhaps the biggest foreign policy disaster in the history of the republic -– was ultimately good for Israel. I know a lot of pro-Israel people thought it would be (which is not to say, as some vile critics of Israel and Jews have, that the Jewish community somehow duped our nation’s leaders into this war). But in retrospect these pro-Israel supporters of the U.S. invasion of Iraq have to admit that things didn’t turn out the way they had hoped. Arguably, Israel’s neighborhood is even more dangerous and unstable now than it was before March 2003. Still think George W. Bush was “good for Israel”?

All of this, of course, prompts the question: what makes a U.S. President good for Israel? I’d love to hear everyone else’s thoughts, but here are a few from me (not necessarily an exhaustive list). He or she recognizes and acts on the principle that:

• Israel is an ally that shares the values of the U.S., and it is a critical fulcrum of economic and political progress in the Middle East.
• Israel is not to blame for all the calamities of the Middle East.
• The conflict in the Middle East is ostensibly between Israel and its Arab adversaries, but really between moderates (Arabs, Muslims, Jews and many others in the region), who would be happy living side-by-side, and extremists, who only want to create chaos.
• Israel has been forced to fight a frontline battle against extremism that is aimed not just at the Jewish state but at many other countries. For this reason, those countries should be respectful and sympathetic to Israel, which is fighting their war for them, not critical of its every action.
• Israel’s military actions are, at their root, defensive, borne of the necessity to protect its citizens and, indeed, its existence against those who threaten them.
• Israel is faced with a choice between two bad options: taking military action, which brings about resentment, rage and criticism from the international community, and not defending its citizens against terrorist attacks, an unconscionable path for any sovereign nation.
• A U.S. President must expend some energy and political capital to help move Israel and the Palestinians in the direction of reconciliation.
• There cannot be any progress unless there is an ironclad guarantee that any agreement will make Israelis secure and put Palestinians on a path to prosperity and peace for themselves.
• This is unlikely to materialize so long as there are parties, such as Hezbollah and Hamas, that are out to destroy Israel.
• Israelis truly want peace and deserve it.
• Palestinians, too, deserve what every human being deserves: peace, prosperity and happiness.

Enough for now. I’d like to hear others chime in.

Jeff

Stop Making Sense

YESTERDAY, I HEARD SOMEONE REFER TO THE HORRIFIC SHOOTING SPREE at Mercaz HaRav in Jerusalem on March 6 as something "we need to make sense of."

That's a familiar phrase we hear in the wake of such evil events as this, or mass killings at a school or another public place here in the U.S., or other terrorist attacks across the world. Media tell us of grieved survivors who are just 'trying to make some sense of this tragic loss.'

I seriously don't mean any disrespect to those who use this phrase. I think what they are really trying to say is that the survivors and others touched by the tragedies are "trying to cope." I'm sure they mean well and are just grasping at some words to express outrage and grief.

But, in this language, there is an embedded idea that somehow we can figure out what went on here, find meaning in the losses, even as there was no meaningful reason for them, and (another phrase that mystifies me) attain "closure."

The idea seems to be that we can make sense out of an act that has no good purpose and is nonsensical on its face. I don't want to make sense of these acts because it would treat them as more rational than they truly are. It would make explicable the inexplicable. To me that's a little too close to making them excusable.

Perhaps we can stop using this 'making sense' phrase in these situations.

Jeff

"What is the Matter With You People?"

Yesterday's Sunday comics section included a Doonesbury strip that I think says a lot about the relationship between the Islamic world and the West.

The strip (which is a "Flashback," meaning it ran once before, I think in 2007) shows two soldiers -- one of them American, the other Iraqi -- in an armored vehicle patrolling through a tough neighborhood in Iraq. Their dialogue begins:

American soldier: "Ready to do this, partner?"
Iraqi soldier: "ZZZ."
AS: "Great!... Okay, that's the safe house -- the big white building at the end of the street."
IS: "I know this house. The owner is Sunni scum."
AS: "Oh, yeah?... Well, intel wants us to capture the guy alive."
IS: "This will not be possible. I am sworn to vengeance!"
AS: "Why? What'd he ever do to you?"
IS: "A member of his family killed a member of mine."
AS: "What? When did this happen?"
IS: "1387"
AS: "What is the matter with you people?"

Whether or not this exchange reflects reality, Garry Trudeau is saying, within only a few frames and with only few words, that cultural differences between the Islamic world and the West are immense. Trudeau reflects not a "clash of civilizations," as so many of us want to believe exists, but rather the first-time encounter of two people who don't really know or understand one another.

The American in the strip views Muslims as one big, backward and dysfunctional family that is trapped in the past and unprepared for the present. He finds the Iraqi's talk of sectarian revenge -- based, no less, on something that happened more than 600 years ago -- incomprehensible. The Iraqi does not understand the cultural vocabulary of the American or fully grasp the reality of the moment. He sleeps through his patrol and is willing to ignore what sounds like a reasonable command, possible triggering a dangerous showdown.

For his part, the Iraqi embraces history as something truly meaningful and relevant today, even if it means ignoring the realities of the present. Americans tend not to look back too much on the past, or to understand why it stands for so much to other cultures.

I'm not knowledgeable enough to say how fair these characterizations are generally of people on both sides Muslim/Western divide. But I'm glad that Trudeau gets us thinking at least about what we all don't know. That's precisely what Akbar Ahmed, a professor of Islamic studies at American University, does, though he can fill in the gaps for us. Ahmed (about whom I have written before and for whom I have done some p.r. work) is foremost a translator between people who do not know each other and who literally and cultural speak completely different languages.

In other words, he occupies a critical role at a time when Islam and the West needs people like him the most. Through his many books, documentaries, lectures, diplomacy (he was Pakistan's High Commissioner to the U.K.) and plays, he has been a prime interpreter of Islam to the West, helping us get past the misguided shorthands we have about Muslims. At the same time, he interprets the West to the Islamic world, which swirls with myths and downright bizarre assumptions about Westerners.

If there is one message that Westerners would do well to take from Ahmed, it is that Islam is more complex than we truly comprehend. In his recent book, "Journey Into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization," which was the product of anthropological visits to eight or nine Islamic countries in the Arab Middle East, South Asia and East Asia, Ahmed leaves no doubt that Islam expresses itself in countless ways, often within a single country or region and even within a single family.

Moreover, he argues that the very encounter with the West -- lately through the fast-moving, border-busting phenomenon of "globalization" -- has brought about many different challenges and responses in many parts of the Islamic world that were previously mostly insulated from the outside.

Islamic reactions to that encounter with the outside world are mixed, Ahmed shows, describing them using three broad typologies. "Islam's response to the forces of globalization... takes at least least three distinct forms: mystics reach out to other faiths, traditionalists want to preserve the purity of Islam, and modernists attempt to synthesize society with other non-Muslim systems" he writes in "Journey Into Islam." "Because most people in the West do not understand the complexity of Muslim society through models such as [these], they reduce understanding of U.S. relations with the Muslim world to good versus evil, and divide Muslims crudely into moderate versus extreme."

These three models "have been in play for the last two centuries," Ahmed  told an audience at the Brookings Institution last June when discussing his book. "This is an ongoing dynamic, an ongoing dialectic within Muslim society. Since the first impact with Western colonization in the middle of the 19th Century, and you are seeing, in a sense, the drama being played out right now. 9/11 was a catalyst. It escalates the drama, but it does not create the drama."

America's and the West's failure to understand the complexities of the Islamic world, Ahmed writes in the book, has led to much of the miscalculation and disaster that is the Iraq war. The U.S., he says, "needs to quickly appreciate the nuances of these societies. Muslims widely complain of the lack of justice, widespread corruption and collapse of law and order. Too frequently, the United States backs strong military intervention, unaware of how this support encourages turmoil and how negatively this support is seen within a country."

At the Brookings event about "Journey Into Islam," scholar Stephen P. Cohen seconded Ahmed's analysis by pointing out that a "wonderful euphemism that is circulating around Washington is kinetic solution, that is, beating up somebody or shooting them. Kinetic solutions don’t work. If you have to use a kinetic solution, that is, shoot them, you have already lost the war especially the war of ideas."

"America’s great strength," Cohen continued, "its practical approach to problem-solving, has really become a weakness of ours. We don’t take the time to listen, to understand, if not to respect, at least to understand other cultures and civilizations. The policy implications here are really get out and talk, meet with people, reestablish the libraries around the world. We used to be culture centers for many countries. I know in Pakistan when I first went there I think there were eight different American centers. There are zero now. In Pakistan and other countries, the American center, the American library was often the cultural and intellectual center point of local and national dialogue about their states as well as relations with the U.S. These kinds of institutions have disappeared around the world. They are still relevant. They are still powerful. We really need to rebuild them to be able to compete in the world."

Ahmed's criticisms of the Muslim world are the mirror image of those he has of the West.

• "Muslims need to recognize that the most effective 'weapons' for addressing their grievances are knowledge and reason, rather than brute force...."
• "Muslim leaders must [also] strive to live up to their own vision of the ideal society. Too many Arab rulers use the crutch of Israel directly or indirectly to avoid working toward democracy until that 'problem' is solved."
• If Muslims had reacted to the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq with restraint rather than violence, it "would have impressed people in the West and created sympathy for Muslim causes. As it happened, the beheadings, the suicide bombings, and the hyperbolic rtheroric of violence... confirmed already existing steteotypes of Muslims. Very soon, people in the West began to equate violence and terrorism with Islam itself... and see all Muslims as inherently bloodthirsty...."

So, to paraphrase the American soldier's question in the Doonesbury strip: What is the matter with all these people? "Ignorance of other cultures leads to serious policy mistakes, whether conducting warfare of peace negotiations," Ahmed answers.

The real task, then, is to accelerate the pace with which we eliminate that ignorance among as many people on both sides of the divide as possible.

Jeff

Polish-U.S. Relations: Have We Pushed an Ally Too Far?

ON WEDNESDAY, RADEK SIKORSKI, a member of the Polish Parliament and former Polish Secretary of Defense, wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post under the rather plaintive-sounding headline "Don't Take Poland For Granted."

Most immediately, Sikorski complains about "the U.S. proposal to place radar and interceptor sites for a new missile defense system in Central Europe -- respectively, in the Czech Republic and Poland." The U.S., he notes, is pretty much expecting that these countries will comply without a fuss and with hardly anything in return to the two Central European countries. "If the Bush administration expects Poles and Czechs to jump for joy and agree to whatever is proposed, it's going to face a mighty crash with reality," Sikorski writes.

There are probably many reasons for this. Sikorski points out that Poland is finding it harder to be at the cutting edge of America's conflict with the Russia. Poland has its own problems with Russia, particularly with Putin's tendency lately to use fuel as a weapon against its neighbors. It doesn't need to pick fights on America's behalf.

More importantly, perhaps, Sikorski points out that in, yet another place, President Bush's (or, shall we say, Mr. Cheney's?) handling of the war and the diplomacy around it have serious hurt America's reputation in the world.

"....[T]he war in Iraq has dented Central European trust. The spectacle of the U.S. secretary of state at the U.N. Security Council solemnly presenting intelligence that proved unreliable shook our faith. Our old-fashioned expectation that the United States would show gratitude for our participation in Iraq also proved misplaced. Public perceptions of America are plummeting, while opposition to U.S.-led military operations, and above all to the proposed missile site, grows. We have decided that the United States is a foreign country after all."

But something else is happening. Poland is no longer the poor cousin. To be sure, it is not yet an economic or political powerhouse of the world or even of Europe. But it has been 18 years since Poland emerged from communism. Since then, it has joined NATO and the EU. And, even among the handful of other post-communist countries that broke from the Soviet grip at that time, it has always been one of a couple or three that has been a cut above the rest -- more strategic with its economic reforms, more enlightened in its embrace of democratic government, more willing to face -- and thus cast off -- the ghosts of its communist and pre-war years.

In many ways, Poland is picking up where it was so abruptly and savagely interrupted in 1939 by the Nazi invasion and occupation. Not that it was such a paradise for everyone there, especially for Jews during the interwar years, when anti-Semitism surged. But Poland then was very much what Poland is becoming again today -- cosmopolitan, Western, enlightened and independent in spirit. The double blow of the Nazi occupation and subsequent decades of communist dictatorship obscured this fact, drove that all underground.

One of the real tragedies in that story is how the Allies -- principally the British and the U.S. -- effectively looked the other way when the Polish Underground mounted a guerilla offensive against the Nazis in Warsaw in August 1944. Stalin made it clear (through his diplomatic body language) to Churchill and Roosevelt) that he would not allow them to help the Poles. Uncle Joe had his eyes on Poland, and he got it. That concession to the Soviets was something that stung the Poles badly, as they worked hard to help the Allies with the war effort. But they were abandoned in return. As many in the West celebrated on VE Day, Poles and others in Central and Eastern Europe viewed the "end" of the war as a great defeat and a descent into a lifetime of captivity.

Much as the Poles have wanted to be (and have been) good partners with countries like the U.S., they realize now it cannot be one way. Now, after 18 years of independence, their impulse of enlightenment and openness is breathing and thriving. That's not to say that Poles deserve to thumb their noses at the U.S. for everything. But it's hard to argue that they should jump whenever we say so. I'm embarrassed to hear that our representatives are taking such an attitude with any country, much less one that has been as strong an ally as we've had in the last few years.

The U.S. may be the only global superpower (at least for now), and it may, for that matter, be true that other countries have to go out of their way to keep us happy. As an American, I guess I can be grateful for that up to a point. The question is, are we Americans and the people who represent us in government deluding ourselves to think we can expect anything from our allies? How long can we keep going to that same well?

Jeff

The Real Survivor

THE REALITY SHOW "SURVIVOR" APPARENTLY HAS NOTHING on the drama unfolding in Havana right now, and I only took note myself because of the (surely unintentional) humorous headline that showed up in this morning's New York Times: "Though Frail, Castro Denies He's Dead."

"Now that our enemies have prematurely declared me dying or dead," Castro said in a short video clip, which showed him walking, talking on the telephone and reading yesterday's newspaper, according to a Reuters dispatch, "I am happy to send my compatriots and friends around the world this short film material. Now let's see what they say. They will have to resurrect me."

There's nothing more virile and powerful in appearance, of course, than a man talking on the telephone and reading the newspaper, which is why I spend my days doing just the same things. Why do you think Schwarzenegger went into politics?

Ah, the burdens of dictatorship. Not only do short vacations give grist to the rumor mill that a coup could be in the offing and that you could be keeping you're eye off of the store, you're not even allowed to get sick and convalesce in peace.

And dying is definitely out of the question.

Jeff

Why Saving Darfur Matters

THE MOST EMOTIONALLY SHATTERING MOMENT for me in the movie “Hotel Rwanda” came not when the mass bloodshed began. It was just before that, when the door closed on the bus of foreigners who were shipping out of the country as it was ready to explode.

When the bus pulled away from the hotel along with the U.N. peacekeepers, the camera showed the terrified faces of the mostly Tutsi Rwandans who were left behind. They knew they were trapped, cut off from the outside world like castaways on a distant island inhabited by monsters. And, just as important, it sent a clear message to the monsters that they could carry out their work without any worry of inteference.

That sense of abandonment must have been similar to one many eventual victims of the Holocaust felt in the late 1930s when most of the rest of the world turn its back on them. In addition to all those who physically did the Nazis’ violent bidding on the many killing fields across Europe, the other great act of complicity of that time occurred from a greater distance and even before Hitler’s mass murder machine was fully erected. Many countries –- notably the United States -– refused to take in additional refugees (and they took in precious few to begin with) from Europe, even as it became clearer by the day that the Nazis were stripping them of their rights and had something much more evil in mind for them.

The peak moment of complicity came in July 1938, when the dehumanization was beyond tolerable and the great nations of the world chose to hold a conference in the resort town of Evian, France, to sort out the refugee problem. It didn’t take long to see, though, that the conference had been engineered to fail. The U.S. sent a low-level representative, and most countries prevaricated about how they could not take more people. In the end, only the Dominican Republic agreed to accept additional refugees above its current quotas.

The message was clear not only to the doomed themselves but to those who would soon be carrying out their genocide. The German newspaper Völkischer Beobachter reacted to Evian by gloating, “Nobody wants them [the Jews]. It is a shameful spectacle to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish people, but remains hard hearted and obdurate when it comes to helping them….” Hitler had the green light he needed to proceed with his Final Solution (Kristallnacht, the government-sponsored night of arrests, beatings, destruction of hundreds of synagogues and Jewish businesses, took place only a few months later) and with his plan to invade more of Europe.

What’s at stake, then, in Darfur, the region of the Sudan where a genocide for the last two years has claimed more than 200,000 lives, is not just lives, though that is the first order of business. It is also about the signals we send to despots and about whether they feel they can continue to the next level of terror before anyone notices or makes an effort to to stop them. (Pictured left: A man who was shot in the back of his arm by a government soldier upon returning to his village. He did not know that his village had been attacked because he had been out farming during the time of the attack.)

The New York Times ran an editorial yesterday that I think sums up this thought. Entitled “The Age of Impunity,” it argues that we -– the part of the world community that seeks peace and freedom -– cannot stand by as Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir figuratively holds his middle finger up and tells us it’s none of our business if he arms janjaweed militia to the teeth to kill and rape defenseless Darfuris. (And, as George Packer wrote in The New Yorker recently, at the U.N. General Assembly in New York in September Bashir called “reports of massacres to be ‘fictions’ perpetrated by greedy humanitarian groups and Zionist Jews.”) By the same token, the editorial points out, we must respond when North Korea rattles the saber of a nuclear bomb, when Iran threatens to wipe another country off the map (with its own nuclear device and the bands of terrorist groups it sponsors), and so on. The brazenness of these nations’ defiance is breathtaking. Perhaps, as the Times editorial suggests, because this is the age of impunity.

In the case of Darfur, there have been (particularly in the U.S. and Europe) numerous high-profile demonstrations in capitals around the globe; massive media coverage; statements by celebrities and great religious leaders; stirring ads for newspapers, magazines, Web sites and TV (Note: a sister ad agency to my firm has been responsible for the round of ads that have flooded the media recently on behalf of the Save Darfur Coalition, and you’re likely to see more them and other public actions in the coming weeks and months); U.N. resolutions and even a peace-keeping force of 7,000 soldiers from the African Union, which everyone agrees is ill-equipped to stop the janjaweed. Next step: send in a U.N. peacekeeping force with a mandate to truly disarm, not just to observe the death and destruction as they did in the Balkans and in Rwanda. (Bashir says he will not let them.) There has even been talk of sending NATO troops, but, so far, only talk.

Most of those who know more about this tragedy than I will say that the U.S. has acted fairly responsibly and responsively so far, though it has not yet exhausted all its options. The trouble is that the U.S. government’s clout is weaker than it used to be because it has expended so much of its political and military capital on the war on terror and because the its failures have caused many of the despots to ignore its threats. That means we’ll need the help of others. (Pictured above: Fifteen animals were stolen from the Janjaweed, so in return, the Janjaweed burned 15 villages. This is one of those villages.)

If, for example, the international community decides that military action against the Sudanese government is not feasible (either because of a fear of a “Blackhawk Down” scenario or because we are unable to assemble a force with sufficient teeth to really do anything), then perhaps there is the option of economic sanctions.

Sudan has an oil industry, which has been an important source of revenue for the government to carry out its terror. There are calls to freeze the assets of Sudan's leders. China, which reportedly has a 40 percent interest in Sudan’s oil industry, could be activated to take a stand and apply pressure. The trouble there is that China has, perhaps because it has a such a large commercial stake in Sudan, has not pressed. Indeed, some believe it has stood in the way of international intervention.

Russia, too, which could be a leader in this (and many other international crises), has been largely mute, and leaders from the Muslim and Arab lands have been less visible and vocal on Darfur than their counterparts in North America and Europe.

“No one can guarantee what will work with a regime as tough-minded and inscrutable as Sudan’s, but patient diplomacy and trust in Khartoum’s good faith has been a patent failure,” the International Crisis Group concluded in a report it released just yesterday about the crisis in Darfur. “The international community has accepted the responsibility to protect civilians from atrocity crimes when their own government is unable or unwilling to do so. This now requires tough new measures to concentrate minds and change policies in Khartoum.” (Pictured above: Refugees in Menawashi, Darfur. Approximately 7,000 came to Menawashi in just a few days.)

For those of us who watch this tragedy unfold, it is hard to know precisely how to respond individually to such strong recommendations. We wring our hands and ask, "What can we do?" I recommend clicking the “Take Action” area of the Save Darfur Coalition’s Web site and following its lead. The Coalition, which coordinates a vast assemblage of groups to keep the pressure on our own government and others, is a great source for up-to-date information about what’s going on and what you can do to help.

Unless we do help, we risk the sort of abandonment scenario we've seen in other places and at other times that have only emboldened the evildoers. This is why saving Darfuris matters and why it's important to find some way –- and there are no pat answers –- to tell Bashir he does not have a green light to kill. It may just stop him and his killers in their tracks, and it may just preempt the next great genocidal maniacs from trying the same thing.

Jeff

Photos posted here were taken by Brian Steidle, and are made available via the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Dealing with Iran

I'M GUESSING IT WAS MOSTLY COINCIDENCE that David Ignatius and Charles Krauthammer’s columns addressing how the U.S. and the West should deal with the ominous threat of Iran appeared on the same Washington Op-Ed page on Friday, September 15. They presented a shorthand of the two primary arguments in a debate about a difficult issue. My own preference –- and hope –- is for the way outlined in Ignatius’s column.

Ignatius, who has reported extensively across the Middle East, including Iran, from which he had just returned from a long visit, based his column on an interview earlier in the week with President Bush. The interview showed that, even when pressed, the President eschewed a military resolution to the Iranian nuclear threat, though he endorsed some of the carrot-and-stick solutions (such as processing plutonium outside Iran) that have been recommended to keep Iran from using nuclear technology to threaten others.

“I came away with a sense that Bush is serious about finding a peaceful solution to the nuclear crisis, and that he is looking hard for ways to make connections between America and Iran,” Ignatius wrote.

Ignatius also asked Bush why he approved the controversial 12-day tour to the United States by former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami.

“The Khatami visit ‘said that the United States is willing to listen to voices,’ Bush explained. ‘And I hope that sends a message to the Iranian people that we're an open society, and that we respect the people of Iran.’ Clearly, the White House wants to reach out to segments of Iranian opinion beyond the hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“I asked Bush what next steps he would favor in opening dialogue with Iran. ‘I would like to see more cultural exchanges,’ he said. ‘I would like to see university exchanges. I would like to see more people-to-people exchanges.’"

Compared to the inflexible, get-tough tone we heard in the run up to the military attack on Iraq in March 2003, it’s an understatement to say this signals a conversion for this administration. As I wrote in an earlier posting, what a difference a war makes. And it’s a welcome change, as far as I’m concerned, not to lead with the tip of a sword. But that’s not to say a military option would never be necessary. It just seems to be an unimaginable option to exercise, especially given what it has wrought on Iran’s Western border. 

Indeed, in his column, Krauthammer doesn’t dismiss that the costs of military strike to eliminate Iran’s nuclear threat would be pretty horrendous. Iran’s military proxies (terrorists) will be deployed to do their dirty business all over the world against Western targets. Oil prices, he says, could go up to $150 a barrel. If the U.S. were to carry out the strike, it will take an enormous diplomatic hit even from its allies in the West and certainly from the Muslim world.

“These are the costs. There is no denying them. However, equally undeniable is the cost of doing nothing…. Every city in the civilized world will live under the specter of instant annihilation delivered either by missile or by terrorist. This from a country that has an official Death to America Day and has declared since Ayatollah Khomeini's ascension that Israel must be wiped off the map…. Is the West prepared to wager its cities with their millions of inhabitants on that feeble gamble? These are the questions. These are the calculations. The decision is no more than a year away.”

I’ll leave it up to the arms and Iran experts to argue with Krauthammer about the whether the threat is “no more than a year away,” but I will not discount that it is serious.

But I think Krauthammer presents a false choice. Choosing not to bomb the Iran – even if you could figure where is the most effective place to bomb (he can’t be talking about a ground invasion, can he?) isn’t “doing nothing.” I’m not sure our current administration has the diplomatic capital right now to build the kind of trust and good will that President Bush seems to be referring to in his interview with Ignatius. But isn’t that – combined with some other incentives and penalties through the international community – doing something?

Yes, if intelligence tells us that the clock is ticking, that missiles are about to be launched, then the calculus may be different. (Or if, as was the case this summer with Hezbollah, an actual provocation occurs, some action should be taken.)

I realize that ‘building bridges of understanding’ can sound soft and mushy, and to those who just want to kill the rest of us, that sort of stuff means nothing. But we’ve learned that we can’t eliminate that small group of extremists without building alliances with the great majority of the rest who would like, just like us, to put the extremists out of business. I know, I know, we’ve been talking for years about working with the moderates in Iran and in other places, and look what it’s gotten us.

We should be ready with a military option but it should be only remotely deployed. Something tells me that dropping a few bombs to erase the threat, even if it could hit the right targets (a big if), could actually make the threat lot bigger and more terrifying than it is now.

Jeff

"I’m not sure what part you don’t understand here.”

NOW THAT I’VE GONE OFF ON the inflexibility of liberal ideologues, it’s only fair that I devote equal time to conservative ideologues, who do the same from the opposite end of the spectrum (though this won’t be the first time in my blog musings).

And who better to use as Exhibit A than Vice President Richard Cheney, who appeared this morning on NBC’s “Meet the Press?” It is he, more than any, who has turned the current administration (and the Congress that has rubber-stamped virtually everything it asks for) into an echo chamber of extremist conservative ideology. And don’t just take my word for it. There are others within the conservative establishment who have said that same thing.

This morning, under the punishing questioning of Tim Russert, the Vice President showed one of the central tenets of an ideologue: don’t let the facts get in the way of your point of view. The other is that rest of us are idiots, and we should just leave it up to Cheney and his people, who know what they’re doing (and the V.P. lets his arrogance slip for a second when he says below “Tim… I’m not sure what part you don’t understand here.”). Let’s go to the videotape:

MR. RUSSERT: All right. Now the president has been asked, “What did Iraq have to do with the attack on the World Trade Center?” and he said “nothing.” Do you agree with that?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: I do. So it’s not...
MR. RUSSERT: So it’s case, case closed.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We’ve never been able to confirm any connection between Iraq and 9/11.
….MR. RUSSERT: Then why, in the lead-up to the war, was there the constant linkage between Iraq and al-Qaeda?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: That’s a different issue. Now, there’s a question of whether or not al-Qaeda, or whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11. There’s a separate—apart from that’s the issue of whether or not there was a historic relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The basis for that is probably best captured in George Tenet’s testimony before the Senate Intel Commission, an open session, where he said specifically that there was a pattern of relationship that went back at least a decade between Iraq and al-Qaeda.
MR. RUSSERT: But the president said they were working in concert, giving the strong suggestion to the American people that they were involved in September 11th.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. There are, there are two totally different propositions here, and people have consistently tried to confuse them. And it’s important, I think—there’s a third proposition, as well, too, and that is Iraq’s traditional position as a strong sponsor of terror.
So you’ve got Iraq and 9/11, no evidence that there’s a connection. You’ve got Iraq and al-Qaeda, testimony from the director of CIA that there was indeed a relationship, Zarqawi in Baghdad, etc. Then the third...
MR. RUSSERT: The committee said that there was no relationship. In fact...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I haven’t seen the report; I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but the fact is...
MR. RUSSERT: But Mr. Vice President, the bottom line is...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We know, we know that Zarqawi, running a terrorist camp in Afghanistan prior to 9/11, after we went in to 9/11, then fled and went to Baghdad and set up operations in Baghdad in the spring of ‘02 and was there from then, basically, until basically the time we launched into Iraq.
MR. RUSSERT: The bottom line is, the rationale given the American people was that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and he could give those weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda and we could have another September 11. And now we read that there is no evidence, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, of that relationship. You’ve said there’s no involvement. The president says there’s no involvement.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: No, Tim, no involvement in what respect?
MR. RUSSERT: In September 11, OK. The CIA said, leading up to the war, that the possibility of Saddam using weapons of mass destruction was “low.” It appears that there was a deliberate attempt made by the administration to link al-Qaeda in Iraq in the minds of the American people and use it as a rationale to go into Iraq.
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Tim, I guess—I don’t—I’m not sure what part you don’t understand here. In September—or in 1990, the State Department designated Iraq as a state sponsor of terror. Abu Nidal, famous terrorist, had sanctuary in, in Baghdad for years. Zarqawi was in Baghdad after we took Afghanistan and before we went into Iraq. You had the facility up at Kermal, poisons facility, ran by Ansar Islam, an affiliate of al-Qaeda. You had the fact that Saddam Hussein, for example, provided payments to the families of suicide bombers of $25,000 on a regular basis. This was a state sponsor of terror.  He had a relationship with terror groups. No question about it. Nobody denies that.
….Now this was the place where, probably, there was a greater prospect of a connection between terrorists on the one hand and a terrorist-sponsoring state and weapons of mass destruction than any place else. You talk about Iran, North Korea, they’re problems, too, but they hadn’t been through 12 years of sanctions and resolutions by the U.N. Security Council and ignored them with impunity.”

Now, I’m no expert on this, but I seem to understand that Iran had been one of the most egregious sponsors of terrorist groups, especially Hezbollah. North Korea had long been a scourge because of it had exported missile technology to other states for years. But seemed not big rush to invade either Iran or North Korea, which is a relief.

I’m not saying that Iraq was the Great Humanitarian of the bunch. But from everything we’ve heard about even the pre-9/11 rumblings within the Bush Administration, there was a curious and disproportionate fixation on Iraq that, again, no facts were going to dislodge.

Also, there seemed to be a sense that military intervention was the only way to challenge the growing threat of Iraq. Now, let us stipulate that we should never rule out military options when trying to deal with rogue nations (like, say, Israel’s recent attempts to eliminate Hezbollah’s missile capabilities in Lebanon), though I would hope they would be rare acts. And let us also agree that economic sanctions are, as they say, “blunt instruments” that often do not have the effects we intend.

But I need not rehearse for the world that the Bush administration seemed to have little patience for anything but a military option –- also a blunt and bloody instrument that can (indeed, has) backfire. It is an extreme option, and it says something about the character of a government that used it (in Iraq) almost as a first resort. 

There could have been many other ways of protecting the U.S., as Russert suggests. Back to the videotape:

MR. RUSSERT: Three hundred billion dollars spent so far. The Congressional Budget Office says if we stay in Iraq through the end of 2009, it’ll be a half trillion dollars. In all candor, could that $300 billion we’ve spent so far in Iraq not have been better spent securing Afghanistan, improving airline security, having technology for gels and liquids so people can get on without being nervous? Our cargo in our ports. Could that $300 billion have not been better spent securing our nation against terrorists rather than in Iraq?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, Tim, I think we’ve done a pretty good job of securing the nation against terrorists. You know, we’re here on the fifth anniversary, and there has not been another attack on the United States. And that’s not an accident, because we’ve done a hell of a job here at home, in terms of homeland security, in terms of the terrorist surveillance program we’ve put in place, in terms of the financial tracking program we put in place, and because of our detainee policy, where we, in fact, were able to interrogate captured terrorists to get the kind of intelligence that has allowed us to disrupt...
MR. RUSSERT: But could it have been better spent?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well, I’m not sure that it could have been. I don’t know how much better you can do than no, no attacks for the last five years.
MR. RUSSERT: But the Commission on 9/11 says that we get D’s and F’s.
People with...
VICE PRES. CHENEY: Well...
MR. RUSSERT: People with radios in police departments can’t—in D.C. cannot talk to Alexandria. Four-fifths of the mayors say they can’t communicate with their localities. People can’t carry toothpaste and shampoo on planes. The administration cut $6 million—or tried to—out of funding to screen those kind of things...

The prepondence of death, destruction and failure, as well as the sagging poll numbers, seem to have rendered the Vice President a bit more demur than we've seen him in the past. But he's still not about to admit that if he had to do it over, knowing what he knows now, he would do it any differently. He says he won't, of course. That's just the usual political bravado, which we can expect from either party. But it's also the sort of ideological stubbornness that has gotten this country, and many others, into a terrible mess.

And now, in retrospect, Mr. Cheney's only options are to rationalize all the bad decisions he made in the past and say that everything's just fine. That's another attribute of an ideologue: self-delusion.

Jeff