It seems that Hurricane Gustave may be even more powerful than Katrina, and it's following more or less the same path toward New Orleans. New Orleans has been doing a much better job this time of evacuating the population, though it is still always sobering to see the disproportionate number of African-Americans among those who require publicly provided buses and trains to get out.
Gustav has already delivered battering punches to Jamaica, Haiti, Cuba, and some other Caribbean nations. It killed more than 80 people in Jamaica, DR, and Haiti. No deaths reported from Cuba, despite the heft of the storm as itn hit the western end of the island. Cuba's well-prepared emergency services evacuated 250,000 residents of vulnerable areas.
In New Orleans, Mayor Ray Nagin is reported to have a much stronger National Guard contingent this year than he did back in 2005, to try to keep order in the deserted streets after residents finish evacuating this afternoon. During any humanitarian emergency, whether 'natural' or arising from conflict and war, the maintenance or restoration of public security is an essential public good.
During Katrina, public security broke down in much of New Orleans; the evacuation plans and other preparations were completely inadequate; and there weren't nearly enough National Guard troops to do what was required.
I hope that as the people of our country's Gulf Coast area deal with this storm, Americans can become more aware that all our neighbors in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean-- including Cuba's people-- are also being hard hit by it, and that we share strong bonds of common interest and common humanity with them. Over the years ahead it is likely that anthropogenic climate change is going to make these damaging kinds of weather events more intense, and more frequent. We could all do so much better as Caribbean/ Gulf coast nations if we could pull together to share equipment and best practices in our responses to these emergencies... And also, of course, if we pulled together to rein in and eventually reverse the known drivers of worldwide climate change.
CO-2 emissions from the use of hydrocarbon fuels are a major culprit in that... Bloomberg is now reporting that the many oil-drilling platforms in the Gulf may be hit even harder by Gustav than they were by Katrina.
Katrina's shock effects on the US oil supply sent gas prices spiking nationwide for several weeks thereafter. Gustav might have the same effect.
Here's hoping that as Gustav progresses the worst of the possible calamities-- major oil installation destruction, levees around New Orleans giving way again, etc.-- can all be avoided.
This post is dedicated to the memory of all those who have lost their lives from Gustav so far, and to everyone working in all the affected countries to save lives threatened by the storm.
... That's $5 billion-worth. Probably nowhere near enough if you recall it's been 65 years since the Italians were booted out by the British Army. (If Italy had compensated Libya in 1943 and the Libyan government had simply put the money into safe investments at, say, 5% then Italy could have gotten away with paying only $250 million, back then.)
But better than nothing. Berlusconi, visiting Banghazi, also handed back the head of a Roman-era statue that Italian soldiers had looted from Cyrene, in Libya, back in 1913.
Wow, Asia and the rest of Africa: When will the rest of you get your compensation from the foreign colonial powers?
And the Palestinians???
And the natives of America, north and south?
Berlusconi is an interesting character. Truly a maverick for such a rightwinger. He's also been one of the most firmly anti-confrontation figures in Europe in the present to-do over Russia.
I've been thinking more about the recent announcements of massive new Chinese investments in both Afghanistan and Iraq. These announcements really do signal the beginning of a completely new phase in international affairs: the phase in which China, cautiously, steps in to start cleaning up the mess created in these crucial world areas by the reckless policy of the late-phase American empire, and thereby becomes a significant power in its own right in both Central Asia and the Persian Gulf.
From one perspective, these two large Chinese investments-- $3.5 billion to develop Afghanistan's Aynak copper field and $3 billion to help develop a new oil-field in Iraq-- might be seen as driven simply by China's need for increased access to the resources in question. But nothing is that simple. Oil and copper resources can be developed in many places around the world.
By making these massive investments in these two countries China is also quietly signaling that when the international community becomes involved-- as certainly, sooner or later, it must-- in the search for a broad and effective resolution of the thorny challenges they pose, Beijing will be occupying a substantial seat at that table.
I've been trying to get some figures to indicate what proportion of the new external investment in each of these two countries, these Chinese deals represent. It's been really hard, because there really hasn't been much external investment on any similar scale, in either of them, at all.
Regarding Afghanistan, in this March 2008 study (PDF) Oxfam's Matt Waldman wrote (p.3) that since 2001, "Just $15 billion in aid has so far been spent, of which it is estimated a staggering 40% has returned to donor countries in corporate profits and consultant salaries." So over seven years, about $9 billion in external non-military aid of all kinds-- relief, reconstruction, and 'development'-- has ended up being disbursed inside the country. That's about $1.29 billion per year.
Interestingly, the table on p.27 of that PDF indicates that China has disbursed $41 million of official development aid in that period, and has pledged to disburse a further $84.15 million by February 2011. Compared with all those figures, for China to sink $3.5 billion into development of the copper field-- and the associated power plant and rail line-- will be HUGE.
How much of the $3.5 billion will go into paying and training Afghan workers, and buying goods from Afghan sub-contractors-- and thereby, help to stimulate the Afghan economy directly, long before the first copper ingot is pressed? This is a crucial question, that I hope the Chinese get right. (In many places where China does development projects, they do them on a turnkey basis that by all accounts is incredibly impressive and efficient, but that does almost nothing to provide livelihoods and training to indigenes of the countries concerned.)
... In Iraq, the general picture-- and the associated concerns about the design and local economic effects of the project-- are broadly similar. (Though, since Iraq already has a massive labor-pool of highly trained oil technicians, engineers, and administrators, the training needs will be completely different, though the livelihood-provision needs are equally important.)
I looked for information about external investments of all kinds in non-military projects in Iraq, and that was hard to find and quantify, too. However, this website for the "International Reconstruction Fund Facility for Iraq" proudly (or not) notes that "So far 25 donors have committed about $1.84 billion to the Facility." IRFFI, as it is known, is a collaboration between the World Bank, the UN, and the Government of Iraq.
In the cancer-like proliferation of different agencies, "facilities", and the like that have grown up around the US-led project to "reconstruct" (or deconstruct) Iraq, there is also something called the "International Compact for Iraq", run by the Swedish government but including, I think many of the same people who contribute to IRFFI. (Do they get double credit for their "donations", I wonder?)
China is not recorded as a donor on this IRFFI list of (small-bucks) donors.
If you want to see how mind-bogglingly bureaucratic, goobledy-gookish, and colonialist the ICI seems to be, look at pages like this (PDF) one on their website. Your eyes will glaze over, guaranteed.
Okay, back to China. Evidently these two new investments are a huge deal for the two countries being invested in. And certainly not solely at the economic level.
Think about the challenges the Chinese engineers will face in Afghanistan. Not just the technical (and environmental-protection) challenges, which are huge enough. But also the political and security challenges. Some of these are described in the well-reported Eurasianet article by Ron Synovitz linked to above.
This article by Times Online's Jeremy Page is also informative. He writes, intriguingly,
Aynak is a valley that, according to my Google map is, located a lot closer to Kandahar than to Kabul (which was what Page had written.... On the other hand, he was writing from there, so I guess he must know?) If the Chinese really are also going to build a rail line that comes from western China, through Tajikstan, down through Afghanistan (including Aynak,) and through Pakistan to Karachi, then that is extremely significant.
I think the China-Tajikstan connector is already underway...
But the whole project, when completed, will have huge benefits:
* for Tajikstan and the other landlocked former-Soviet Stans, who have pretty good Soviet-era railway systems-- but so far, most of them connect to the outside world only through Russia. This new connector would give them new outlets, to both China and the Arabian Sea.
* for Pakistan, which gets access to a whole new hinterland and trading bloc there in Stanistan, and finally--
* for Afghanistan, which gets its first ever long distance rail line-- and one that connects, moreover, to such a lot of other interesting and potentially lucrative places. It also thereby gets a way to start exporting not just the massive amounts of copper said to exist in Aynak but all the rest of its currently barely scratched-at wealth of mineral resources.
But -- and this is a huge but-- how can the security of the people who work on these projects in Afghanistan be assured? All the more pressing of a question since the Aynak-Karachi segment of the line will have to pass through some prime Taleban heartland.
Worth noting that China has always had considerable influence in Pakistan. If (or as) it goes ahead with the whole Aynak project, the task of steering the Pakistani state off its current path toward implosion will be very important indeed.
Anyway, security. That has been the biggest problem for all the (admittedly much smaller scale) "development" projects that the US and its allies have tried to launch during the lengthy and crushingly unsuccessful years of occupation -- in Afghanistan, as in Iraq.
Obviously, the Chinese must be discussing this exact question with the Afghan government. It is probably a huge advantage to the Chinese that they are not Americans, and not associated with NATO. On the other hand, Beijing does have its own considerable problems with hard-line Islamists among its citizens, who almost certainly have some connections with counterparts in Afghan movements, including the Taleban. So the Chinese security experts will have to work closely with the Afghan authorities to craft a plan that avoids arousing the opposition of the Taleban-- or perhaps, that even cuts them into the deal in some way?
Karzai has been known in the past to have favored using some form of 'big-tent' approach to reaching out to the Taleban, though until now, his suggestions to that end have all been firmly squashed by the Americans.
Maybe now, with this Chinese deal in hand, he can have more ability to stand up to the Americans and do what he thinks is best for his country?
One thing seems certain, though. The Chinese will most likely be very wary indeed of having the US Special Forces "terrorist killers" (or baby-killers, depending who you believe) operating anywhere near their worksites. So Karzai will have to start constricting the Special Forces' areas of operations considerably, once the project gets underway. (Or, boot 'em out of the country completely. Probably the best solution all round.)
NATO? Well, perhaps the Chinese and Afghan security people could hire them to provide some security services. (!) Who knows?
... Similar socio-political and security considerations may well come into play with regard to China's new investment in southern Iraq. More on that, later.
But for now, suffice it to say that while most Americans have been looking at the minutiae of the "game" of US presidential politics, the world outside our borders has been undergoing rapid shifts. And not just (indeed, not even mainly) in Georgia.
No, the biggest shifts have been those announced not with the rumbling of Georgian and Russian tanks but with the quiet signatures of Chinese business executives, bankers, and government officials on these massive contracts with two governments that the US itself created, from scratch, and put into power by force.
If these deals go ahead as Beijing plans (and hard to see what can stop them now?) then vroom, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf: things will be changing fast in both strategic regions, over the five years that lie ahead!
... And the air will also thereby be let out of the over-inflated balloon of America's global control-system. We Americans can return to being a normal-- hopefully friendly-- nation among nations rather than trying to control and dominate everyone else around the world. And here's the most important point: This transformation has a good chance of being achieved through the efforts of contract lawyers, civil engineers, oil, mining, and rail technicians, and solid police work (to assure security)-- not through military power and violence.
Now that's what I call good news.
McCain's VP pick Sarah Palin has left almost no record at all of having said or thought anything about foreign affairs. However, Matt Yglesias found this audio record of her saying, just a couple of weeks ago, that what the US seeks in Iraq is "resolution." H'mm. Could actually mean any number of things.
She also says that, since her oldest son, a 19-year-old, is due to ship out to Iraq on Sept. 11, that she doesn't know what the plan is, "to end the war that we're engaged in... Let's make sure we have a plan here... Respecting Senator McCain's position on that." (Biden's son, a much more mature member of the Delaware National Guard, is due to ship out sometime soon. Actually, Biden's son is about the same age as Sarah Palin and has a lot more government experience than she does.)
Her uncertainty that Bush has a plan for Iraq is expressed loud and clear!
But what is this "resolution" she seeks there? On its own it's a totally non-specific term.
Could it mean, "To demonstrate the US's resolution, and power?" I doubt it. Been there, done the shock and awe. Shocked a lot of people and was truly awful. But mainly, it ended up demonstrating (and increasing) the US's weakness, not its strength.
Could it mean, "To find some kind of a resolution of the intra-Iraqi and US-Iraqi differences, as as to allow a graceful exit?" Maybe. But, um, Sarah, Bush has been trying to do that for five years now, and hasn't succeeded.
Could it mean, "To get out fairly fast and find 'resolution' that way?" In the context of her mentioning her own son, it certainly sounds as though it could mean that, too.
But what it doesn't really seem to bear any plausible relation to is McCain's plan to stay in Iraq "as long as it takes." I guess the old guy will be educating her pretty fast on the campaign's poarty line.
I can't wait to see her and Biden debating.
In the opinion piece I had in the CSM on August 22, I described the Olympic opening ceremony held in Beijing on August 8 as China's "stunning coming-out party as a world power." On that very same day, though in a very different way, Russia was also "coming out"-- almost literally-- or "coming back" as a world power."
Of course, if you take a long, Chinese-style view of history then China was also coming "back" to the status of major world power.
It is important to note the very different ways these two powers have been emerging (or re-emerging) in recent years. Russia has done so primarily by wielding instruments of hard power-- military strength, and "hard" economic power in the form of control over oil spigots. China has done so primarily with instruments of soft power, including a strong commitment to the "rules" of international politics, a generally strong preference for negotiation over military force, and the building of broad webs of relationships and influence through the "softer" economic levers of trade and financial dealings, culture (of various forms), and the smart enrollment of the broad global diaspora of Chinese ethnics.
Some differences between the approaches used by these two powers have been on show during this week's meetings in Dushanbe, Tajikstan of the "Shanghai Cooperation Organization," which unites the two of them, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikstan, and Uzbekistan. (Of the Central Asian Stans, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan are not members. But Pakistan, India, Mongolia, and Iran all have observer status. And yesterday it was extremely significant to see that Afghanistan's Prresident Hamid Karzai had slipped his NATO leash for long enough to attend the SCO as a visitor.)
The Russian leaders had evidently tried somewhat hard-- not clear how hard-- to get the SCO to express corporate backing for their recent moves in the breakaway Georgian regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. But they failed-- and the reasons for their failure are probably instructive.
Nabi Abdullaev of The Moscow Times wrote
... The hope of winning significant support from the membership of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization... vanished with a joint statement at a meeting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, calling for the respect of all countries' territorial integrity and denouncing the use of force in local conflicts.
Russia has steadfastly rejected the territorial-integrity argument in Georgia, saying Tbilisi lost such a right by attempting to establish control of South Ossetia by force...
It was unrealistic for President Dmitry Medvedev to expect the organization, in which China plays a leading role, to support Moscow's position on South Ossetian and Abkhaz independence, given Beijing's own concerns over its own separatist Tibet and Xinjiang provinces, said Masha Lipman, a political analyst with the Moscow Carnegie Center.
"Medvedev might have had some chance to win support from some individual Central Asian states after bilateral talks but never in the format of the whole alliance, which acts by consensus and where most members view China as the major partner," Lipman said.
The IISS's Oksana Antonenko has a nuanced description of the decidedly ambivalent feelings that the citizens of these four Stans-- many of whom are ethnic Russians-- have toward their former overlords in Moscow, here. I have noted elsewhere that the roads and rail links that link these landlocked Stans to the world economy have nearly all, until now, run through Russia. The Chinese have been working hard to complete a couple of nodal new rail connections to key Stans. But already, Masha Lipman is telling us, most of them view China as more powerful than Russia. Interesting.
There is probably also another reason, in addition to the one given by Lipman, why China (and also, probably, many of the other SCO members) might be wary of supporting Moscow's position on Ossetia and Abkhazia. Yes, as mentioned by Lipman, the whole idea of opening up a "national independence" option for national minorities is an absolute can of worms for Beijing. But in addition, Moscow's in-your-face policies toward the US and NATO threaten to inflame global tensions and tear up the fabric of international economic cooperation that the Chinese have benefited so strongly from in recent decades. So we might expect-- and certainly hope-- that they will use their influence with Russia and other actors to work hard to de-escalate the tensions that have been arising between Russia and the west.
I cannot emphasize this new role that China can m(and imho should) play in international relations strongly enough. Certainly, China's very existence as a third significant big-power actor in world affairs-- alongside Russia and the US-- makes the present era of world politics very different from the decades of the overwhelmingly bipolar Cold War.
But China doesn't play only the "balancing" role that any third big power might play. It plays an even more special kind of potentially leadership role, because of the way it has emerged as a big power over recent decades and the values it has pursued along that path.
China has not emerged through military conquest and arms-racing. It has emerged overwhelmingly through a focused pursuit of national consolidation (in many different ways, good and bad... none of them very different from the ways other nations have been consolidated elsewhere), smart diplomacy, and integration into the US-led world political and economic order.
Yes, there were military confrontations with western forces and pro-western proxies in Korea and Vietnam. But even those confrontations were far from being as violative of the international order as they were portrayed to be in the west. But then, by the design of both Beijing and Nixon's Washington, the ending of the war in Vietnam coincided with Beijing's full reintegration into the (still firmly US-led) international order. And since then, Beijing's rulers have been careful not to use military force beyond their own borders. Since 1974, they have pursued even what they see as their remaining goals in the field of national consolidation-- in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan-- through diplomatic means... That, while during the last decade of the Cold War the arms of Washington and Moscow and their proxies continued to battle each other openly throughout much the "Third World."
China's rulers are the ultimate "softly softly, catchee monkey" players in the international game. They are patient. They play by the existing international rules. They slowly stack up the chips of goodwill that they acquire through their growing economic might and their growing webs of international relations. They don't waste huge amounts of money investing in large-scale military goods as a way of out-performing the US's massively bloated arms production industry. Instead, they are probably quietly happy, at some level, when the US makes ill-considered military moves like the ones into Afghanistan or Iraq that lead to, effectively, the self-destruction of its own massive military might. Ultimate in ju-jitsu! Eat your heart out, Putin!
The Chinese wait, and wait, and then--
The size of the bid -- almost double the expected amount -- surprised other potential foreign investors.
By some estimates, the 28-square-kilometer copper field in Logar Province could contain up to $88 billion worth of ore. But there is no power plant in the area that can generate enough electricity for the mining and extraction operations. And Afghanistan has never had the kind of railroad needed to haul away the tons of copper that could be extracted.
That is why a large part of the Chinese bid includes the cost of building a 400-megawatt, coal-fired power plant and a freight railroad passing from western China through Tajikistan and Afghanistan to Pakistan.
And then, August 28, 2008, China and Iraq sign,
The 20-year agreement calls for the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. to begin producing 25,000 barrels of oil a day and gradually increase the output to 125,000 a day, said Asim Jihad, a spokesman for the Iraqi Oil Ministry...
Western oil companies came close this summer to reaching agreements with the ministry to return to Iraq. Those smaller technical service contracts involved giving advice on how to boost production. The China deal is a service contract, which is more lucrative and involves large-scale development of the field.
What, in fact, is it we're seeing? Is China stepping in to prop up the US role in these two countries, or to replace it? Can China avoid being seen by the war-battered and fairly distrustful peoples of these countries as "just more foreign exploiters"?
These are both high-stakes ventures for Beijing's rulers to engage in. Particularly, perhaps, the one in Afghanistan, some of whose people have a lot in common with the often restive, Uighur people of Xinjiang.
What arrangements will be made-- in either Iraq or Afghanistan-- for assuring the security of the massive new Chinese economic ventures. Can they be, simply, "economic" ventures without also having a broad social, political, and security impact? (No, they can't.)
So maybe China's real coming-out party as a new kind of world power was not the one that was held August 8. Maybe instead it has been a two-act party, with the first act held June 3, and the second held earlier this week.
Or maybe there are further acts of similar impact, to follow? Stay tuned.
This past couple of weeks, I've felt a little disembodied. All this really interesting stuff has been happening at the level of the US presidential election-- but here I have been, at JWN and in most of my reading and thinking, focused overwhelmingly on the big shifts underway in world politics.
So maybe some JWN readers would have liked more posts here on US politics. However, honestly I don't think that's my comparative advantage. I think Josh Marshall and his colleagues at TPM, and the folks at Think Progress, including Matt Yglesias, have been doing some excellent blogging on the election. So if you want that depth of thoughtful coverage, that's where I'd advise you to go.
Here, fwiw, are some of my quick notes on where the election is right now:
1. I think the Democrats' convention in Denver has been brilliantly organized in all the aspects of it that I've seen. That includes the stage management (including at two very different venues there), the handling of the 'roll-call' vote issue, the choice of speakers, and the content of just about all of their speeches. Standouts from what I saw included Michelle Obama's speech, Hillary Clinton's, Bill Clinton's, the 'vox-pop' people they had speaking last night, and the array of retired generals. The excellent organization of this very complex public event indicates that the Obama people have some real organizational and administrative talent, as well as good discipline. A good augur for the way they would govern.
2. I thought Obama's speech last night was not-- by his extremely high oratorical standards-- a standout, as such. But that was possibly by design: to counter McCain's charges that he is nothing more than a 'rock star.' In general, it was a better-than-workmanline speech that contained a lot of policy specifics. Look, I have to confess I fell asleep at one point while watching it on t.v. That says something about me being tired-- but also something about the speech not being super-great.
3. On foreign policy, he was trying, obviously, to counter allegations that he is "not ready" to be commander-in-chief. To a degree that worried me somewhat he tried to do that by "talking tough", which I am certain is what all his campaign advisers have been urging him to do. But he did also speak forthrightly about several ways in which his foreign policy would be different from that of Pres. Bush and John McCain.
4. This morning, McCain just announced the relatively youthful Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running-mate. In choosing a woman he seems to be making a clear bid to pick up anyone, from any party, who was a strong Hillary supporter and still resents the fact that Obama beat her. But Palin is also reported to be strongly anti-abortion, which probably limits her ability to attract the 'pissed-off-Hillarites'. Also, if McCain's supporters have been trying to raise concerns that Obama is not 'ready' to govern, then what about this woman, who is young and completely untested in national or international politics? Given McCain's age, the readiness of his running-mate to take over has to be a real concern. Palin looks like a female version of the youthful and untested Dan Quayle, who was picked by George H.W. Bush in 1992 to try to meet concerns about him being old and out of it... Quayle was a total disaster for the ticket.
... Anyway, I need to get back to writing about the global power balance in which Pres. Obama will -- I hope!-- be operating come January 20th.
At the Pentagon yesterday, the Commandant of the US Marine Corps established an unequivocal link in a meeting with journalists between the need to draw down quickly in (at least some parts of) Iraq and the manpower needs of the US military in Afghanistan.
Here's how the WaPo's Ann Scott Tyson reported it:
... While pointing to security gains in Iraq, Conway voiced concern over increased violence in Afghanistan, where he said insurgent attacks and U.S. troop casualties have increased since 2004.
"The Taliban are growing bolder in their tactics and clearly doing their best to exploit security gaps where they exist," he said...
Conway made a strong pitch to send thousands of additional Marines or other U.S. troops to Afghanistan, voicing agreement with U.S. commanders there who have said for years that they have too small a force and have called for as many as 10,000 more troops. "The economy of force is not necessarily working," Conway said.
To be sure, Conway is not saying flat-out, as Dannatt did, that the US-led western coalition forces can't win in Iraq... But he was saying very clearly that US military resources need to be significantly shifted from Iraq to Afghanistan.
For some time now, I have been arguing that that is the main dynamic behind the shifting balance between the US and Iraqi leaderships in Iraq. The Iraqis still have an internal political system marked by a lot of incoherence and internal disagreement. But they are all (except the Kurds) fairly strongly united around a fundamentally Iraqi-nationalist and anti-occupation stand, and since-- ahem, did anyone in Washington notice this?-- it is actually the Iraqis' country there, their willpower to fight for it and the cost they are prepared to pay to regain control over it is far, far higher than the willpower of the US to maintain its control, and the cost the US citizenry is prepared to pay to do that.
So the US drawdown/exit from Iraq is not (yet) on the order of the humiliating rush of the last US people off the roof of the Saigon Embassy... but it is sliding some distance toward that. For their part, many Iraqis-- even among those strongly opposed to the US-- might continue for quite some time yet to be content to allow the US's drawdown/exit to be non-humiliating... And I am sure that right through November 4, the Bush administration will continue to be happy to pay out large amounts of money to a wide variety of different forces in Iraq to ensure that no big humiliation of the US occurs before that day.
Of course, a formal negotiation of the exit would be far preferable to this approach of sort of slithering out while claiming that everything's going really well there... as Gen. Conway was. And at a certain point in the slithering out, negotiating the remainder of the process with all relevant parties inside and outside Iraq will become absolutely necessary if the whole Gulf region is not to go up in flames.
Baker-Hamilton report, anyone?
Meanwhile, it is evident that the situation in Afghanistan has been deteriorating very seriously indeed in recent weeks and months. Key dimensions of the governance crisis there, nearly seven years after the US invaded and started occupying the country, are that
(2) large portions of the country, including portions very close to the capital, Kabul, and major portions of the country's national highway system, are quite hospitable to the Taliban and other anti-US forces;
(3) the US is has continued to strive to single-handedly dominate all important aspects of Afghanistan's domestic and foreign policies, and has refused to allow Karzai to pursue his preferences in either internal political reconciliation policies or anti-drug policies;
(4) US and NATO forces are trapped in Afghanistan at the end of extremely vulnerable supply lines that run through either Russia or Pakistan;
(5) the US and NATO forces are so understaffed and overstretched there that they often feel they have no alternative but to use airpower to try to control complex situations on the ground-- and as a result, casualties among Afghan civilians have been rising horrendously; and
(6) the Afghan crisis has seeped seriously over the border into Pakistan since the get-go; but right now Pakistan is in its own, quite paralyzing crisis of governance, which poses a serious threat to the US/NATO position in Afghanistan.
Back in early August I wrote a column in the The Christian Science Monitor arguing that, to win a decent outcome in both Iraq and Afghanistan, the US would need to involve the UN Security Council, at the highest levels, in the decisionmaking and thorny peace diplomacy both countries require. So far, the Bush administration has shown few signs of doing that. Conway and some others in the decisionmaking echelons may have started to favor a troop-drawdown in Iraq, but regarding Afghanistan, just about everyone in the policy elite in Washington still continues to act as though simply throwing more US troops into the mix there will do the trick.
In good part, that point of view is buttressed by the argument that it was the "surge" in troop numbers that "succeeded" in Iraq, so therefore a similar approach should be used in Afghanistan. But in Iraq, the surge in US troop numbers made only a small contribution (if any) to the reduction in violence witnessed over recent months. It has been political developments among the Iraqis themselves, and the cautious, wily policy pursued by big neighbor Iran that have made the bigger difference.
A "surge" in the numbers of US and NATO troops is even less likely to do any good in Afghanistan. Indeed, if the additional troops sent there continue to act in the same gung-ho, shoot-from-the-air way the existing troops have acted, then the situation can only be expected to become a lot worse.
Nevertheless, the increasing recognition among US policymakers that in Iraq, at least, more US troops are not going to solve the problem is a good first step.
The WaPo's Amit Paley has just reported that the Iraqi government has signed a $3 billion oil deal with the state-owned China National Petroleum Corp. that's described as "much more lucrative"-- I'm assuming for China?-- than the "technical contracts" it has been negotiating with western countries for a long time, but thus far unsuccessfully.
Paley quoted Asim Jihad, a spokesman for the Iraqi Oil Ministry as saying that the deal with the Chinese oil company was concluded before the other deals both because it built on a slightly different kind of contract that Iraq had been negotiating with CNPC prior to the US invasion and "to rebut concerns that the U.S. government was manipulating the process to benefit American corporations."
Interesting. I wonder if that means the deals with the US companies will be finalized soon? Maybe-- or maybe not. Let's wait and see.
But either way, China's entry into this economic relationship with Iraq-- which parallels its recent conclusion of a large mining agreement with Afghanistan-- indicates that some significant things are happening in the balance among the world's big powers.
I mean, really. Given that China holds, now, more than $500 billion worth of US T-bills, if Beijing decides it wants access to oil in Iraq or other mineral resources in Afghanistan, do you think the US is in much position to keep them locked out?
Paley adds that the deal with China "still requires the approval of the Iraqi cabinet, which the Oil Ministry hopes will come as early as next week."
Time was, the US economy dominated the world economy to such a degree that economists would quip that if the US economy sneezed the rest of the world would catch a cold.
Things have changed.
While the US is still a huge player in the world economy, its total (ppp*) GDP is now less than that of the European Union. This great chart, that compares the GDP's of the EU and its constituent states with those of the US and its constituent states, tells us that in 2006, the ppp GDP of the EU was $13.3 trillion, while that of the US was $13.1 trn. And this PDF chart from the World Bank tells us that in 2007 the ppp GDP of the US was $13.8 trn (21.2% of the world total of $65.2 trn) while that of China was $7.1 trn (10.9% of the world total.)
Recently, the veteran international economist Fred Bergsten has started talking about the "reverse coupling" of the economies of the US and of the rest of the world. At last January's Davos World Economic Forum he defined that as occurring "when the others will help keep the US from falling too far."
On July 1, Bergsten published a Financial Times op-ed titled Trade has saved America from recession. In it, he argued that "reverse coupling" had already started to occur.
He wrote,
In this piece of reporting from Washington (HT: Nazia Vasi of 2point6billion), Xinhua's Liu Hong quotes Jim O'Neill, the chief economist at Goldman Sachs, as noting that China "is now contributing more to global demand than the United States."
Liu cites IMF data showing that China "has accounted for about one-quarter of global growth over the past five years. Altogether "the BRICs"-- that is, Brazil, Russia, India, and China-- "have accounted for almost half of global growth and all the emerging and developing economies together for about two-thirds, compared with about half in the 1970s."
Liu also quotes Bergsten as saying, ""China now plays a decisive role in the world economy as indicated by its dominant role in global economic growth."
Well, evidently, China-- whose population is four times that of the US-- will still have to grow about sevenfold for its per-capita GDP to reach that of the US's citizens. (If we're committed to the equality of all human persons, we would want to see that happen-- or to see the US doing some quite plausible "leveling down." But if we're committed to the survival of humanity on this fragile planet of ours, we need to work fast and hard to find ways for this to happen without carbon-emitting us all into overheated oblivion.) But for Americans who have long taken pride in their (our) country's role as the motor for world economic growth it is important and interesting to recognize that right now, our economic world wellbeing is dependent on the economic performance of others around the world, not just on our own.
This gives us a lot of new ways to think about economic globalization. I completely understand the concerns of those in the US who worry about job-losses in our country when their functions are shifted to lower-paid workers elsewhere. And I am also very concerned about the horrendously destructive effects that the strongly pro-free-trade policies pursued by the "Washington consensus" over the past 20 years have had on entire societies and nations that are much more vulnerable than we are-- in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, or Asia. The heartless, greedy way that economic globalization has been pursued in the past 20 years has inflicted huge damage on hundreds of millions of the world's most vulnerable people.
But it has also had some benefits for world humanity. Crucially, the degree of economic entwinement that has been built up among the world's major power blocs has made open warfare among them less likely-- certainly a huge benefit to us all.
Also, there are many measures that can be taken even within the context of the world's current, strongly pro-trade economic structure that can (a) straighten out the extremely unfair "tilts" in the world economic playing field that the rich nations have maintained in it-- to their own clear advantage-- for many years now, and (b) start to build into the world economic order the kinds of social protections for the world's most vulnerable that nation-states have nearly always had for their own most poor and vulnerable.
Why not? If we all plan together and pull together on this, it is enitirely doable. To put it bluntly, there is actually quite enough basic material "stuff" (including food) to go around in the world today, and to offer all the world's people the hope of a decent, meaningful life and the development of their capabilities... Provided we can start to really see each other-- all around the world-- as worthy of our care and concern.
(I note that when modern-day academic economics was launched by John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, and others in the British empiricist school, it was pursued as a sub-branch of "moral philosophy," that is, of philosophical ethics. We certainly need to honor and return to those roots as we ponder the challenges the world economy faces today.)
As I blogged here earlier this week, the present era is one of the "return of geography" to many dimensions of the world order that some people-- neoliberals and others-- have long assumed could be kept effortlessly "global." And yes, the rise in fuel prices will undoubtedly change some aspects of what happens in the world economy. But this is far from signaling a retreat to isolationism and autarky in international economics. Russia, China, the EU, the US, and other international actors all strongly need each other, at the economic level, if their own economies are to survive and prosper.
And right now, we here in the US should just be very glad that the world trade system our country has dominated for the past 63 years has now grown strong enough to help cushion or support our own economy from effects of its gross mismanagement of recent years. Thank you, world!
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* "Ppp" is a unit called "Purchasing power parity dollars" that allows international comparisons of things like GDP among countries with different price structures. It's not perfect but I think it gives a better picture than raw $ figures for GDP.
Yesterday, the Russian government recognized the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In today's FT, Russian president Dmitry Medvedev explained why. (The two main house organs of British capitalism are so much more open-minded and coolly realistic than their spluttering Wall Street counterpart. Can you imagine the WSJ opening its opinion page to Medvedev at this time?)
His bottom line on the events of the past 2.5 weeks:
Only a madman could have taken such a gamble. Did he believe Russia would stand idly by as he launched an all-out assault on the sleeping city of Tskhinvali, murdering hundreds of peaceful civilians, most of them Russian citizens? ...Russia had no option but to crush the attack to save lives. This was not a war of our choice. We have no designs on Georgian territory. Our troops entered Georgia to destroy bases from which the attack was launched and then left. We restored the peace but could not calm the fears and aspirations of the South Ossetian and Abkhazian peoples – not when Mr Saakashvili continued (with the complicity and encouragement of the US and some other Nato members) to talk of rearming his forces and reclaiming “Georgian territory”. The presidents of the two republics appealed to Russia to recognise their independence.
A heavy decision weighed on my shoulders. Taking into account the freely expressed views of the Ossetian and Abkhazian peoples, and based on the principles of the United Nations charter and other documents of international law, I signed a decree on the Russian Federation’s recognition of the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. I sincerely hope that the Georgian people, to whom we feel historic friendship and sympathy, will one day have leaders they deserve, who care about their country and who develop mutually respectful relations with all the peoples in the Caucasus. Russia is ready to support the achievement of such a goal.
And "Russia had no option but to crush the attack to save lives. This was not a war of our choice." This is the rhetoric of just about every political leader who launches a war or any other form of radical escalation of violence.
The response among the vast majority of western politicians has been a degree of verbal apoplexy fueled to a significant degree by their frustration over realizing that, actually, the "west" had no plausible military options in the Osssetian War and that their darling, Saakashvili, had recklessly overplayed his hand.
So the past inability to act led to much current spluttering. But where might the current western spluttering lead if wiser heads are not to brought into the global equation? I worry about that. Back on August 16, I asked "Where in the world is Ban Ki-Moon?" He is still notably MIA. But where are the others who could also act like wiser heads?
Two small glimmers of light. While Barack Obama himself said the US should "further isolate Russia" because of its support for the two breakaway regions, two of his top national security advisers, former Defense Secretary Bill Perry and former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, called for more engagement. Good for them.
For his part, John McCain is still doing what he can to revive the embers of anti-Russianism. I wish Obama wouldn't continue trying to sing from the same inflammatory songsheet, but would describe a realistic and constructive way forward that could de-escalate the tensions with Russia rather than further stoke them.
Another glimmer of good news comes from this FT report, which notes the following:
Russia also shows signs of wanting to calibrate its approach to the west.
Although it scaled back contacts with Nato yesterday, Russia’s move did not include a ban on Nato’s use of Russian land to supply non-military equipment to its forces in Afghanistan.
Medvedev, meanwhile, has gone off to Dushanbe, capital of Tajikstan, to make his debut at the annual summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, a body that since 2001 has established a lot of coordination among its members: China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Also in Dushanbe will be Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose application for full membership is still outstanding. Iran, Mongolia, Pakistan, and India all have observer status at the SCO.... I am sure the SCO summiteers will all have lots to talk about.
This analysis of the SCO by Stephen Blank of the US Army War College indicates there is considerable tension between Russia and China within it, with each of them seeking to push it in a different direction. Anyway, it is notably not, as NATO is, a defense-pact grouping that requires an external enemy for its own justification.
This evening, I was watching the BBC's distinctly overwrought diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall as she sought to confront Pres. Medvedev in an interview. At one point she huffed and puffed about Russia having to work a lot harder to "restore its relations with the outside world." I was struck by that latter phrase. As though Russia were currently in some kind of tightly enclosed situation, and the people in "the outside world"-- that is, the west-- would be able to control the degree to which Russia could have contact with this "outside world."
Sort of like Israel and Gaza.
Except that in the case of Israel and Gaza, that's exactly how it is. Israel is the jailer and Gaza is the completely encircled jail. (And even then, the Gazans haven't given in to their jailers' demands.)
Russia, I submit, is not Gaza. There is plenty of "outside world" to which Russia has good access. Including, some of the world that lies to its west. And even more of it that lies to its east and its south.
Editorial note from HC: In the piece I had in the CSM last Friday about the current, Georgia-revealed shifts in global power balances, I argued that the many economic interdependencies among the world's major power centers will act as a powerful brake on their going to war against each other. Afterwards, I received an intriguing critique of this position from none other than Branko Milanovic, an economist on global inequality whose work I admire a lot. (Indeed, I used this recent book of his quite a bit in my Re-engage! book.)
So although Milanovic's conclusions are very different from mine-- or rather, precisely because they are so different from mine-- I am very happy to publish the short argument he has composed on this subject, so we can have a good exploration of these issues.
From Global Trade to Global War
by Branko Milanovic, August 26, 2008
Openness to trade and globalization lead to interdependence and cooperation and hence to global peace. There is a venerable school of thought, beginning with Montesquieu and Kant, that argues more or less exactly this. Less famously, the same point was made in Norman Angell bestseller that had the misfortune of being published just a few years before the vaunted cooperation and interdependence transmuted into the worst carnage the world had ever seen up to that date (1914). But there is another school of school to whom the carnage of the Great War did not come unexpected. It belongs to the Marxist and semi-Marxist tradition, starting from Hobson and continuing with Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg. It viewed the war as inevitable as capitalists from different countries clashed when dividing up the globe, and then manipulated the public and used their nations’ armies to further own interests.
And indeed the unease with the standard (“peaceful globalization”) version of events is evident even today. In one of globalization cheerleading bestsellers Martin Wolf (“Why globalization works?”) shows a singular difficulty explaining how apparently benign global capitalist competition resulted in the disaster of 1914. His explanation is to lay blame on “German militarism”. But German militarism was only special because it was a late-comer’s militarism: once most of Asia and Africa was divided (not always without conflict; witness Fashoda) between the French and British capitalists, the up and coming German capitalists wanted a slice of the pie too. So, it is the very nature of global capitalism, not some unique “German militarism,” that is to blame.
Why does it matter today, exactly 100 years from the run-up to World War I (the Tangier crisis which almost led to a direct clash between the French and the Germans) and just short of the World War I centennial? Because the same forces are at work again. Consider the following. The three most important countries, US, China and Russia have a nicely balanced division of assets among them: US has capital and technology, China labor, and Russia land and natural resources. But to make more money, US capital needs control of as many natural resources as possible. A glance at the map shows that the sparsely populated and natural resource-rich Siberia and Central Asia are the prime candidates for their lucrative control. After the break up of the Soviet Union, it seemed, all too briefly, that the US and Western capitalists had all this wealth within their reach. The Yeltsin regime was engaged in a fire sale where multi-billion plants and oil-fields were being sold for a song. But already by the time the second Yeltsin administration, the rules of the game started changing. In the swindle that has since become known as “loans for shares”, Russian big capitalists (known as the “oligarchs”) figured out that they did not need to share all these riches with foreigners. Instead, why not keep them for themselves?
This trend accelerated under the two Putin terms. The division of spoils was limited to a restricted circle of cronies and secret agents who suddenly developed an acumen for business deals. The agreements with foreign capitalists were rescinded or revised (most famously, the British Petroleum Tyumen oil field deal). Oligarchs who did not accept the new rules of the game, and who wanted to build pipelines with foreigners (Khodorovsky) were stripped of their assets and sent to jail.
Thus today the struggle between the West and Russia that threatens the world with not only another cold, but rather hot, war is between the two bands of greedy men, and it involves the riches of the Eurasian heartland (“the world island”) east of the Urals. It is an implacable fight because it is a zero-sum game. In contrast, the nature of the Sino-US rivalry is different because of complementarily which exists between capital and labor. Both are needed to produce toys and micro chips. But when it comes to natural resources, it is either you or I who control it.
No less an admirer of global capitalism than Keynes saw its Achilles’ heel in greed that at times becomes so irrational that it works against person’s own interests. Lenin agreed: he thought that a capitalist would sell the rope with which he would be hanged. They might still be right. Halliburtons and Gazproms of this world, rather than ushering an era of universal peace, may bring us World War III.
Some of the commentary on the whole Russia-Georgia affair has talked about the "return" of history, in somewhat post-Fukuyaman terms. (Though Fukyama himself has denied that what is underway now is a simple return to the older Cold War dynamics.)
But it strikes me what is happening these days is much more a "return" of geography to world affairs than a return of history.
Not that the hard facts of geography ever went away, any more than the ongoing dynamic of history. But Tom Friedman was only one of many western-bubble commentators who saw the world as a sort of endlessly level playing field in which the factor of distance (whether physical or cultural) had lost most of its salience.
In a geography-free world, it might have seemed quite "natural" that just one set of values and global priorities, which oh, by a remarkable coincidence happened to be those of the US-dominated west, would always prevail and indeed would necessarily be desired and recognized as superior by all the world's (increasingly homogenous) people. In a geography-free world it seemed natural-- or indeed, actively laudable-- that a handful of western-educated lawyers in a courtroom in the wealthy and well-ordered city of The Hague would "know what is best" for millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa reeling from the blows of IMF-imposed pauperization, the widespread destruction of their lives and livelihoods, and the existential disorder of the civil wars that were thereby fueled.
In a geography-free world, it must have seemed just as doable and justifiable to many Americans to engage in military forms of "regime change" in distant Asia as it has long seemed to be in Central America.
But now, geography is back. It has come back most noticeably, perhaps, in the form of huge increases in fuel prices in recent months. But even without those fuel price hikes Americans would already, by this point, have been starting seriously to notice the cost of continuing to sustain the country's massive military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
For the US to maintain a military unit of any particular size in Iraq is, it turns out, considerably more expensive than maintaining a unit of the same size in Guatemala. (Who knew?) It is even more expensive than it is for Russia to maintain a unit of that size in Georgia, which is right next door.
Back in January 2003, when I went with a bunch of fellow peace activists here in Charlottesville, Virginia, to persuade the city council to declare our town a "city of peace", I made a fairly short argument about how-- based on my 30 years of experience as a student of Middle East strategic affairs-- I saw that the imminent invasion of Iraq was most likely not going to be the promised cakewalk; that the US troops would likely find themselves bogged down in distant Iraq for several years; and that the sheer cost of sustaining this deployment would reverberate down through every sector of the US economy, including to the level of budgets for the states and cities.
I pointed out too-- there, and in some of my writings at the time-- that after Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, within three years the cost of sustaining the post-invasion occupation had sent inflation in Israel sky-rocketing and brought Israel's economy to its knees. And Iraq, I pointed out, was considerably further away from the US homeland than Lebanon was from Israel... Therefore, the longterm cost of sustaining the post-invasion occupation would likely be even higher.
Well, for various other reasons, we haven't had Israeli-style hyper-inflation here (yet.) But the costs of the post-invasion occupation have proven to be just as damaging to the longterm health of our economy as I feared.
It's largely about geography, you see.
And if you think the geography of maintaining a military presence in Iraq is high, well, just think about doing the same in the landlocked massifs of Afghanistan... There, even the Soviets-- some of whom lived right next door-- couldn't afford to maintain the level of occupation force that would have been needed to quell the anti-Moscow insurgency of the 1980s.
The "return of geography" will have a number of deep ramifications in all the different dimensions of world affairs: strategic, socio-political, economic, and cultural. Most likely, geography-based "spheres of influence" will make a comeback. (Of those, of course, the US's own Monroe Doctrine, which covers the whole of North and South America, is by far the longest established.) The specificities of human geography will be strengthened, too, as against the claims put forward by bubble-dwelling values universalists who made the ill-founded claim that their universalism was quite "culture-neutral."
Does this mean we are doomed to revert to the formation of competing blocs, international arms races, and war? I say no. Just because there will be spheres of influence and a re-emergence of "cultural difference" doesn't mean that all conversation is suddenly ended. Indeed, the existence-- and more importantly, the recognition-- of difference can and should be seen as an invitation to globe-circling conversations about these matters. That, it seems to me, is the biggest difference between today and the 19th century. Today, citizens of just about all the world's countries have the ability to engage in unmediated, level-playing-field conversations across national borders, about all the matters that concern us. That has never happened before.
If we can open ourselves up to having these conversations, in a respectful and egalitarian spirit, there is so much we can learn about the world, about each other, and therefore about ourselves! (That's one of the things I love about the blogosphere, and the main reason I keep coming back here.)
We can also start to understand the dubious nature of some of the claims made by our own governments.
For example, if the US has a "Monroe Doctrine", why should Russia not have something similar of its own? Why should what's sauce for the goose not also be sauce for the gander?
... Just one final point here. Many Americans have a very scant understanding (or appreciation) for the discipline of geography. In the UK, when I grew up and today, young people undertook several years of study of geography in high school and many of them then went on to study geography, as such, at university. Here in the United States there is almost no such systematic study of the subject. It exists in the K-12 curriculum only as small portions within the broader subject known as "Social Studies," most of which is focused on history and civics. And only a handful of US universities offer undergraduate or graduate degrees in geography.
This always surprised me. Here's the US-- a country with, by British standards, huge amounts of geography and not very much history-- and the students were supposed to spend endless amounts of time parsing the minutiae of what one "Founding Father" or another thought about something 230 years ago while ignoring the many opportunities they have, right here, in this extensive and beautiful country, to gain a rich and multi-layered understanding of geography.
Well, guys, geography is back. And nowadays, it's decidedly global. Let's figure out how to deal with that.
Alert readers of JWN will have noticed that I haven't posted much recently. A number of reasons for that, among them the desire to sit around with the spouse watching the Olympics many evenings. But also, heck, I so much called it on the US's waning ability to impose its terms on Iraq in the all-important 'security' sphere-- ever since back in early June, and most recently here-- that the subsequent development of the story kind of lost its interest for me.
Apart from the still-horrendous living conditions being endured by Iraq's remarkably hardy people. Suicide bomber story here. Nearly 3,000 cases of measles story here. Nearly a billion litres of raw sewage still-- 65 months after the US invasion-- being pumped into Iraq's waterways: lengthy and well reported story here.
That degree of human misery is only to be expected in a river-system country in which the central mechanisms of regulation and public order have broken down-- or, as in Iraq's case, been wilfully destroyed by a foreign occupying power. In this respect, Iraq is very different from a mountain-dominated country like, say, Lebanon or Georgia. In those countries, people can get along more or less okay without a functioning central government, since they have many more of the inputs for basic self-sufficiency and are not reliant on orderly administration of vulnerable central water systems.
Anyway, in Iraq, it looks as if the national population is already adjusting itself to a very imminent (or, actually, already underway) retraction of US power.
Which, as I've noted elsewhere, is being fueled primarily by Washington's own very urgent force-planning considerations.
I've been trying to ponder why it is has proved to be the case in Iraq that the standard kinds of US blandishments and bribes seem not to have "worked" by persuading PM Maliki and his coterie of close advisers to sign off on the US-proposed security agreements. I've come up with a number of possible hypotheses. One is that the stand blandishments and bribes-- such as promises of large amounts of money deposited in foreign banks, sweetheart business deals for close relatives, or "scholarships" for numerous children and relatives at nice US universities-- may somehow not have the appeal for these people that they would have for, say, an Ahmed Chalabi or a Mohamed Dahlan. Another might be that the Iranians could actually outbid the Americans in terms of blandishments and bribes that would actually be valued by Maliki and his circle. Another might be that these men are true Iraqi patriots. These three explanations are not mutually exclusive, at all.
Also, though I've written about "bribes and blandishments", obviously these are part of a broader spectrum of activities that outside powers might engage in, which could be broadly described as "structuring the incentives" for these men. That would include threats as well as bribes. The US, at an earlier point in the negotiations was "threatening" to hold onto a large chunk of Iraq's oil revenue unless it could get the security agreement it wanted out of Maliki. But even that threat appeared not to work.
An interesting world we live in.
Yesterday, the news from Baghdad was that the visiting Condi Rice was very close to nailing the longer-term security agreement with the 'government' of Iraq that the Bush administration has been aiming for for a long while now. But the longer term news looks much more like that of mounting disagreements between the governments in Washington and Baghdad, than increasing levels of agreement.
Disagreement is clear over two key issues: the status of the negotiations over the US-Iraqi security pact, and government policy toward the mainly-Sunni 'Awakening' councils that have been a main pillar of the US political strategy since early fall 2006.
Regarding the security pact negotiations, the transcript of the press conference Rice held with Iraq 'Foreign Minister' Hoshyar Zebari yesterday shows that, while neither Rice nor Zebari claimed that they had finished the negotiations, Rice was actually more guarded than Zebari in claiming they were getting close to finalization.
Regarding the content of what they were discussing, Rice made clear that she was still talking only about timetables-- in the plural-- for troop withdrawal that were both conditions-based, and "aspirational."
For his part, Zebari could not even bring himself to say the word "timetable." (Perhaps the prospect gives his ardently Kurdish heart some palpitations?) All he managed to talk about was "time horizon."
That is so much last month's meme-of-choice.
Today, the evidence of disagreement over the security 'agreement' continued. AFP reported that Mohammed al-Haj Mahmoud, described as "the top official in the Iraqi [SOFA-negotiating] team, told them that negotiators had, "finalised a deal which will see the complete withdrawal of US troops from Iraq by 2011, ending an eight-year occupation..."
So he was claiming the negotiation had been finished. But even he made clear that what was being referred to was a considerably less-than-total withdrawal, since he specified it would only be from the cities.
AFP also added that White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe "said the deal was yet to be finalised.... 'It's not done until it's done.'"
It strikes me there is an air of unreality to this whole story of "negotiations" over the terms of a longterm bilateral security pact. Urgent troop planning considerations that have nothing to do with the situation in Iraq are going to be forcing the Pentagon to implement a pretty deep and rapid drawdown of the US troop presence from there over the next 12 months, regardless of whether there is a "SOFA", an "oil agreement", "provincial elections", or any of those other things the US has set as its current political goals in Iraq. The "best" scenario they can hope to achieve at this point is something far more modest than any of those ambitious political goals. It is a drawdown/pullout of US troops that is less rather then more chaotic for the troops involved and that leaves the country and the region in a less rather than more unstable state.
A cynic might ask, "What do the Bush administration folks care about whether the region goes up in flames behind them as they leave?" My answer is that if the region is going up in flames it is certainly not good for the US-- either for the oil companies or the citizenry. Plus, this conflagration would not happening only "behind" the departing troops but might also, with a high degree of probability, catch many of the departing troops in its fires, too... As I've argued for many years now, the possibility of implementing an "orderly"-- i.e. not fired-upon-- troop withdrawal is directly linked to ensuring in some way that the Iraqis have a decent chance of reaching their own internal entente as the US troops pull out.
And right now, things don't seem to be heading in that direction (to say the very least.) The US-installed and -supported Iraqi "government" seems to be seriously feeling its oats these days, doing a number of things that Washington isn't happy about at all. Notable among these is the campaign it is now mounting directly against the US-incubated "Awakening Councils"
Patrick Cockburn reports from Baghdad today that,
Washington's Iraq policy looks poised on the brink of a serious disaster. The Bushites will doubtless do everything they can to prevent it going over the cliff before the U.S. election, November 4. But if Barack Obama wins the election, there may be some in the outgoing administration who wouldn't be too concerned about the prospect of a disaster occurring in Iraq, say, some time after next January.
I just hope we can rely on Defense Secretary Gates and the leaders of Centcom to act with wisdom and statesmanship during those crucial transition weeks...
... First of all, they're incredibly long. That makes sustaining the troops in the field there incredibly expensive. Another way of looking at that, in the present hyper-privatized era of US public life, could be: Lots of nice fat contracts and opportunities for fraud, payoffs, and payroll padding for the logistics companies! Yum, yum, yum! (For them.)
But here, basically, are the options. (A thought: Maybe we should call the present era that of the Return of Geography, rather than-- or in addition to-- the Return of History?):
2. Through Russia and its former satellite-states.
3. Through Iran.
4. Through China.
So that leaves Pakistan-- currently in a state of continuing or perhaps even escalating political turmoil... And Russia.
Oops. Our "friend" Saakashvili put a bit of a spanner in the works on that, didn't he? Well, maybe yes, and maybe no. But evidently, as the western nations and Russia proceed with their negotiations over a more durable settlement for Georgia, NATO's non-trivial reliance on Russia's cooperation for the ISAF mission in Afghanistan will be another big factor in the talks, along with the reliance of Germany and much of the rest of Europe on hydrocarbons from Russia.
The NATO-Russia Council has been in existence since 2002. On this handy info page that they publish you can learn what it is they do. (Or, what it is they don't mind you knowing about they do.) Just last March the two sides established the basis for "facilitating transit though the Russian territory of non military freight from NATO, NATO members and non-NATO ISAF contributors in support of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, in accordance with UNSCR 1386."
I guess that's what the Russian ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin was referring to when he told Reuters yesterday,
Rogozin expressed some (perhaps understandable?) confidence that the present, Georgia-related tensions in the NATO-Russia relationship would not last very long...
Areas that could be affected were military naval exercises in the Far East, the Mediterranean and the Baltic region, he added. "We don't need to ruin this cooperation now."
Bernhard over at Moon of Alabama has been doing some great blogging about the tough logistical challenges NATO/ISAF faces in Afghanistan. See e.g. here.
Peter Marton of the [My] State Failure Blog gave some important background as to why NATO felt the need to reach out to Russia for the supply line agreement back in March. Basically, the Taliban had just torched a convoy of 100 ISAF-bound fuel tankers as they waited at the border-crossing between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Between 40 and 50 of the tankers were reported destroyed and several people killed. He adds:
... Right now, the UN Security Council is starting to see some preliminary diplomacy developing around the project to reach agreement on a durable political settlement of the Georgia-Russia crisis. Basically, two drafts are circulating. Russia submitted Sarkozy's ceasefire plan of last week-- which has been signed by both sides-- to win the SC's imprimatur of support for it. A draft resolution that France submitted yesterday, that apparently has US support, expresses support for the existing ceasefire but also calls for immediate Russian withdrawal and the "return of Georgia's forces to their bases."
As I noted in my CSM piece, now up on the web already though it's dated tomorrow, if there is to be an un-vetoed resolution, then it will have to represent a negotiated consensus that all the Permanent Members can support. In these negotiations, Russia is not without its own leverage in the realms of both hard and (as Kishore Mahbubani noted) soft power. Let's see how the negotiations proceed.
I worked pretty intensively on this earlier this week. It's here.
Longtime JWN readers will know that I'm quite a fan of Kishore Mahbubani, an extremely smart strategic thinker who was Singapore's ambassador to the UN until a couple of years ago. Yesterday, he had a great piece of commentary in the Financial Times on "the meaning of the Georgian war." (HT to Bernhard of MoA.)
Mahbubani writes:
The post cold-war era began on a note of western triumphalism, symbolised by Francis Fukuyama’s book, The End of History. The title was audacious but it captured the western zeitgeist. History had ended with the triumph of western civilisation. The rest of the world had no choice but to capitulate to the advance of the west.
In Georgia, Russia has loudly declared that it will no longer capitulate to the west. After two decades of humiliation Russia has decided to snap back. Before long, other forces will do the same. As a result of its overwhelming power, the west has intruded into the geopolitical spaces of other dormant countries. They are no longer dormant, especially in Asia.
Indeed, most of the world is bemused by western moralising on Georgia. America would not tolerate Russia intruding into its geopolitical sphere in Latin America. Hence Latin Americans see American double standards clearly. So do all the Muslim commentaries that note that the US invaded Iraq illegally, too. Neither India nor China is moved to protest against Russia. It shows how isolated is the western view on Georgia: that the world should support the underdog, Georgia, against Russia. In reality, most support Russia against the bullying west. The gap between the western narrative and the rest of the world could not be greater.
It is therefore critical for the west to learn the right lessons from Georgia. It needs to think strategically about the limited options it has...
Especially given that one of our bedrock values in the world is that of the equality of all human persons.... Well, it still is, isn't it?
Mahbubani has a lot more there, too. Including this:
Western thinkers must decide where the real long-term challenge is.* If it is the Islamic world, the US should stop intruding into Russia’s geopolitical space and work out a long-term engagement with China. If it is China, the US must win over Russia and the Islamic world and resolve the Israel-Palestine issue. This will enable Islamic governments to work more closely with the west in the battle against al-Qaeda.
The biggest paradox facing the west is that it is at last possible to create a safer world order. The number of countries wanting to become “responsible stakeholders” has never been higher. Most, including China and India, want to work with the US and the west. But the absence of a long-term coherent western strategy towards the world and the inability to make geopolitical compromises are the biggest obstacles to a stable world order. Western leaders say the world is becoming a more dangerous place, yet few admit that their flawed thinking is bringing this about. Georgia illustrates the results of a lack of strategic thinking.
But here's the deeper problem: he is still in the mindset at that point of arguing that the "west" needs to identify a main enemy-- or as he says, a "real long-term challenge"-- that is another state or bloc of states. But then, in the last paragraph he goes against that thinking-- certainly, with respect to China-- when he underlines that China, like India, wants to work with the US and west. And here's an addendum to that: so do most governments in "the Islamic world", and so, indeed do most Muslims... provided this cooperation with the US and the west is on a basis of mutual respect and fair cooperation.
Neither China nor the vast majority of members of "the Islamic world" want to overthrow any western governments and dominate their countries, which is what, for a period of time, the Soviet Union aspired to do.
So where is the real "long-term challenge" that the west faces? I believe it is the challenge, for Americans, of starting to see themselves (ourselves) as co-equal members of the world community rather than standard-bearers in some kind of existential, life-or-death contest with enemy states that requires us to bear the huge costs of maintaining our bloated military and using it to "keep order" right around the world: 360 degrees, 24/7.
And then, oh yes, there are plenty of other, very serious long-term challenges that we and the rest of the world community all face together. Challenges like dealing with:
Kishore Mahbubani was quite right there, in his last paragraph, when he wrote that few western leaders were prepared to admit that their own flawed thinking has been making the world a more dangerous place. But I think the greatest flaw in the thinking of most westerners has been this need to organize the world, and mobilize one's own resources and activities, around the definition of a state or bloc of states as our enemies, to be faced down or toppled with our military power. It is that tendency that has made the world more dangerous for everyone-- ourselves, along with many, many others. Now, we need to adopt the much more realistic stance of aligning ourselves at the side of the world's other six billion people, facing the challenges that confront all of us, together.
AP tells us that at a joint appearance with Iraqi "Foreign Minister" Hoshyar Zebari in Baghdad today, Condi Rice agreed that, regarding a troop withdrawal plan,
A linguistic note: An "aspirational timetable" is still not the same as a fixed timetable. But I would say it signals something noticeably more definitive than the "aspirational time horizon" that was the administration's previous position on this. (With a horizon, the more you try to get close to it the more fades further away from you... )
The statement issued by the NATO foreign ministers' meeting yesterday was considerably more sensible than the belligerent, jingoistic rantings that make up much (though thankfully, a decreasing amount) of the commentary in the US MSM. At several points it goes to lengths not to express any strongly anti-Russian judgments. For example, "We deplore all loss of life, civilian casualties, and damage to civilian infrastructure that has resulted from the conflict." It notably does not make any promise of either immediate or more delayed military aid to Georgia, saying only that NATO has agreed to measures "intended to assist Georgia, a valued and long-standing Partner of NATO, to assess the damage caused by the military action and to help restore critical services necessary for normal public life and economic activity."
And finally, it seems to go quite a long way toward respecting the leadership in negotiating the political tasks that lie ahead regarding the Georgia crisis to... none other than "the Chairman-in-Office of the OSCE, Finnish Minister of Foreign Affairs Mr. Alexander Stubb."
This strikes me as extremely realistic, sensible, and helpful. The more they do that, the better. (You can read more on OSCE here.)
The NATO people well understand that the US- and Israeli-trained Georgian armed forces got trounced in the recent fighting. (The US had been training the Georgians mainly to do checkpoint duty in Iraq... And one of the Israeli private companies training the Georgians was headed by Gen. Gal Hirsh, drummed out of the IDF after the troops he'd trained showed in 2006 that they couldn't do anything effective other than checkpoint duty in the West Bank. H'mmm.)
AP's Matti Friedman had this account of some interviews he did with US trainers in Tbilisi, who were fairly disparaging about the skills of their trainees. Interestingly, Friedman interviewed these trainers last weekend while they were "on standby at the Sheraton Hotel, unarmed and in civilian clothes."
From the beginning of the Georgia-Russia conflict, the US military took great pains to keep its own troops far away from any situation in which they might be seen as being involved in the fighting. I also saw a report that, though the US flew the 2,000 Georgians who had been in Iraq back to their country, they disarmed them before they did so, so as not to be accused by the Russians of pumping any more arms into the country during the war.
Despite its sometimes accusatory rhetoric, the actual actions on the ground taken by the Bush administration have been prudent and wise, and I am happy to give them credit for this.
It strikes me there is a huge contrast between the prudence displayed in those actions and the belligerence expressed so many times by McCain.
Journalists and others should ask McCain: "What, actually, would you have done differently? Would you have put US troops into this fight? How would you have supported them there?"
It strikes me that McCain's rhetoric-- including his repeated expressions of strong and completely uncritical support for Pres. Saakashvili-- have been irresponsible and incendiary.
Why is Barack Obama not calling him on this?
Why is Obama not putting forward a strong and compelling alternative to the belligerent and dangerous approach espoused by McCain? Surely he can see that the US public doesn't want another war? (Especially one that it has zero hope of winning.)
I just want to come back, for a moment, to the question of what it is that NATO used to do, back when it still it had a rationale. What it did was deter the Russians from sending their massive ground troops into the industrial heartlands of Western Europe.
NATO succeeded precisely because it succeeded at deterring. It didn't succeed at fighting, because thanks to the success of the deterrence it never had to fight.
Georgia is not an industrial heartland of Europe. On August 8, Georgia was not a member of NATO. If it had been, NATO's crisis would have been even sharper and more immediate-- because even if it had been a "member" of NATO, very few NATO members would have come to its aid.
But member of NATO or not, the war in Georgia has shown that the old western doctrine of "deterrence" failed on that occasion.
One caveat, though: This was deterrence still at the strictly sub-nuclear level. (And that in itself is also significant. What utility at all do nuclear weapons have today?)
Deterrence, it strikes me, is closely linked to a desire (or, a readiness) to achieve significant strategic goals through "shock and awe." Yet the whole world has now seen that even "shock and awe" didn't bring Bush a strategic victory in Iraq, just as it didn't bring Olmert one in Lebanon.
Military power just ain't as useful in "foreign" encounters as it used to be. (To be discussed later, not now: the extent to which Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Georgia are actually "foreign" for Russia. Military power did prove "useful" for Russia there; and lack of a working, indigenous national-defense strategy proved disastrous for Saakashvili...)
As of now, Georgia's military forces have been just about stripped of all their capabilities. I'm sure the Russians have been fascinated to look at all the computers, drone-control systems, naval electronics, and other military hardware and software they've been carting home from all the Georgian military bases they've over-run in the past ten days.
A question: How many sensitive US or NATO systems have been compromised as a result?
Another, more important question: What will be the outcome of the negotiations that will doubtless occur over the Georgians' ability to rebuild their military, given that it would be starting, as of now, from somewhere around ground zero?
... Okay, I realize this is a slightly rambly post, but I'm too tired to divide it up better or do any other form of high-level editing on it. I just want to note here, finally, that The National Interest, the uber-Realist mag published by the Nixon Center, has a couple of very good pieces on Georgia/Russia on its website today.
This one is a very well-informed 'Realist' take on the whole Russia question, by Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett.
They write:
Two key excerpts from that:
A: He probably had hopes of receiving some kind of external support. Someone must have lied to him to give him these false hopes—whether it was from the West, South, or North is uncertain. Someone was deceiving him.
Also, Saakashvili had real delusions of grandeur, and saw himself as the Napoleon of Asia, which is a psychological disorder for an individual and a tragedy for Georgia.
Third, he wanted to speed up the entry of Georgia into NATO, but this is a mistake: the issue of the Abkhazia region would still remain unresolved.
Fourth, he’s committed crimes against democracy—he established a one-party dictatorship in Georgia in all the elections held in Georgia during his reign (local, presidential, parliamentary), closed the free flow of information, seized TV companies and dozens of innocents died.
A: Russia and Georgia are fated to live peacefully together. Russia should recognize Georgian territorial integrity, and Georgia shouldn’t conduct a strident anti-Russia policy.
Georgia is a very small country located at the very center of Eurasia. Its geographical location is supposed to make it the unifying point of the Western and Eastern, Northern and Southern civilizations. That is the function of Georgia—it can solve its problems and those of the rest of the world as well.
... Hint: It isn't just the organization's massively long over-reach in Afghanistan, as revealed in the ever-mounting casualties among western forces and the continuing, dire crises of insecurity and pauperization through which the Afghan people are living (or not), now, nearly seven whole years after the US invaded their country...
It's also the whole range of questions raised about NATO's purpose and usefulness by the whole Georgia crisis.
Many militarists here in the US have been arguing vociferously (a) that the existing NATO members should now 'fast-track' Georgia's entry into the alliance and (b) that Russia would have been completely deterred from the counter-attack it launched against Georgia if Georgia had already been a member of NATO.
Excuse me?
Imagine if Georgia had already been in NATO on August 7. That was the day Pres. Saakashvili broke an existing ceasefire when he launched a rocket attack against targets in South Ossetia who included Russian peacekeepers serving there under the auspices of OSCE.
Russia's military response to that can certainly be described as disproportionate (though not nearly as much so as, say, Israel's assault against Lebanon in 2006.) But it was not completely unjustified... One could also describe it, in the circumstances that prevailed in the region over preceding weeks, as predictable with quite a high level of certitude.
So if Georgia was already a NATO member, would NATO as a whole have come to Saak's rescue once the Russians counter-attacked? Or failing NATO-as-a-whole, would individual NATO members have sent in enough troops to push the Russians back out and "punish" them?
(NATO's ground-rules of "all for one and one for all" would indicate that it should be NATO as a whole that responds... But we could look at the other option, too.)
In a word, no.
And that's the real crisis of NATO. It doesn't actually seem to have any point any more. And that is probably what has gotten "front-line" states like Poland and the Czech Republic into such a tizzy right now.
A good part of the reason that NATO wouldn't have come to Saak's aid even if Georgia were already in it is that it couldn't have done so effectively because of the deep bleeding of its lifeblood and capabilities over Iraq and Afghanistan. The US military is the absolutely necessary backbone of NATO. But now, US ground forces are stretched to break-point. US military airlift, sealift, global recon capabilities, and long-distance attack platforms are all just about fully tied up trying to keep the Iraq and Afghanistan missions going.
And no, no-one in the US-- as far as I know-- was about to launch a nuclear first strike against Russia over Ossetia.
Nor should we forget that the political infrastructure of NATO-- the web of relationships among its members-- was rent in two by Bush's decision to invade Iraq and remains in very bad shape because of the demands placed by Bush regarding Afghanistan...
So the Bush administration's decisions to (a) invade Iraq and (b) frog-march as many NATO members as possible into the mission in Afghanistan have caused NATO's crisis to manifest itself with particular sharpness right now.
But there are deeper problems, too... Mainly those connected with the phenomena of mission creep and/or mission dissolution. (Often linked phenomena in troubled organizations, I note.)
NATO was founded in 1949. Its founding goal-- as its first Secretary-General, Lord Ismay, once famously said-- was "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." (I got the attribution on that great quote from Wikipedia, whose entry on NATO is pretty good.)
So what do you do, if you're a western leader, in 1991-93, when first the Warsaw Pact and then the Soviet Union itself collapses?
Do you hold a victory party, dissolve NATO, and then work with Russia and all the former WP/Soviet states to build a new, much better set of relationships among all these countries? (You might call that the Abraham Lincoln approach.)
You could have used OSCE as the main framework for this, given its significant history and its broad, trans-Eurasian and even transatlantic reach.
Or there were those, back in the early 1990s, who proposed inviting Russia (and presumably all the other formerly -Soviet countries) to join NATO.
Andrew Meier reminds us that that idea aroused significant interest from Boris Yeltsin, who in 1991 described it as his "long-term political aim." Also, that even Vladimir Putin, during his first few days in office in March 2000, still expressed support for that aim.
But Presidents GHW Bush, Clinton, and GW Bush have never been able to get their heads around that idea of Russian integration into the transatlantic system on the "equal" basis that both Yeltsin and Putin insisted on. Indeed, they and the vast majority of the US political elite seem, even after the fall of the Soviet Union, to have stuck rigidly to the idea that the idea of NATO is "to keep the Russians out" of the system.
But given that the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union had both collapsed, there then arose the tricky political problem of how do you "sell" NATO, and the non-trivial costs involved in keeping the old war-horse going, to its sometimes skeptical non-US members? The watchword in some US circles at the time was that NATO had to either go "out of area"-- that is, take on tasks outside its traditional Central European (counter-Russian) area-- or it would have to go "out of business."
As we can see from a glance at the map, Afghanistan is massively "out of area"!
So that's one of the big differences between NATO and OSCE. NATO's goal was to keep Russia out while OSCE's goal, since the very beginning, has been to keep the Russians and their allies well integrated within the transatlantic/Eurasian part of the world system.
The other difference-- which is huge, and fundamental-- is that NATO is overwhelmingly a military alliance. Military action is its entire raison d'etre. (Hence, the need for 'enemies', and the shock with which most NATO leaders view any suspicion that Russia might be included in the membership... After all, if Russia is not an 'enemy', what is NATO for? Ah, good question.)
OSCE, by contrast, seeks to use numerous networks of relationships in the non-military sphere to try to keep its 56 member nations together, to build up support for common norms and for the institutions that embody and further them. One key one being the norm of finding nonviolent ways to resolve thorny political problems..
Hence, the role that OSCE's been playing for the past 17 years-- including inside Georgia-- in midwifing and monitoring ceasefire and demilitarization agreements among and sometimes within its member states.
So here's my proposal. Let's declare the Cold War over? Let's disband NATO. And rather than looking at ways to further encircle, 'contain', or push back Russia, let's work hard at strengthening the norm of nonviolent conflict resolution across the board, including by seeking stronger roles for the UN, at the global level, and for OSCE, in the areas that it covers.
One good first step: OSCE's announcement yesterday that it will be increasing the number of unarmed military monitoring officers it has inside Georgia by "up to 100." Twenty of these monitors should be deployed "immediately."
In this blog post last Thursday I wrote a bit about the prospects of a "Finland-like" outcome for Georgia-- and several of us then had a pretty good quick discussion of the question on the comments board there.
I just want to expand on a reference I made there to the neutral-but-engaged status of Finland having positioned it to be the host of "important east-west gatherings like the 1974 Helsinki Conference."
The Helsinki Conference gave rise to the very important Helsinki Treaty, which enshrined human rights as a topic of completely legitimate concern in east-west diplomacy in Europe and the whole of the then-Soviet Union. (Which thereby set the stage for the rise of the numerous nonviolent social movements that played such a transformative role in the politics of heartland Europe.)
The Helsinki Treaty also mandated the establishment of a continuing body for oversight and coordination, known as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE.)
Since its founding OSCE has frequently played a crucial role-- midwifing the emergence of new democracies and mediating many of the conflicts that emerged during that process. Sadly it was not able to prevent the eruption of large-scale fighting in former Yugoslavia, but in many of the other, mainly ethnic, conflicts that emerged during the Soviet implosion, OSCE was there with technical help and principles-based mediation services, able to play a role in reducing tensions across the whole of the landmass covered by NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the former Soviet Union.
Including during the Russia-Georgia tensions that arose in the early 1990s-- after which OSCE ceasefire monitors continued to be deployed right up to and through the outbreak of the present crisis.. Which is why OSCE is poised right now to play a major role in implementing, and probably also helping to negotiate, the longer term settlement that's required between Russia and Georgia, once the existing ceasefire is being adequately observed.
That longer term settlement may (or may not) include provisions for demilitarization and foreign-affairs neutrality in Georgia that put it into something very like the situation vis-a-vis Russia that in the post-WW2 decades Finland was in with regard to the old Soviet Union. We're already hearing dire warnings among warmongers in the west against the dangers of "Finlandization."
But as I tried to argue Thursday, Finlandization really is not the worst option, at all, for Georgia's people. It ended up working out fairly well for most Finns, in a world that is certainly far short of an ideal one.
And it worked out pretty well for the rest of the world, too.
Watch for the role that OSCE will be playing in the weeks ahead.
The Georgian-Russian war is the most significant watershed in world politics since George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in March 2003. As I noted last Sunday, it signals clearly for all the world to see that (1) The global power-projection capabilities of the highly over-militarized 'west' are currently stretched ways beyond what can be sustained, and (2) Russia, which was largely absent as a significant actor on the world stage since 1991 (or before), is now most certainly 'back' in the role of a substantial big power.
At such a watershed point, we should be more relieved than ever that over the past 63 years the world's governments have created and sustained an entire network of globe-circling institutions, led by the United Nations, that are primed and ready to help ease all the tensions that a shift like the present one represents-- and to do so in a sustainable, rights-strengthening way that radically decreases the possibility of further, possibly much more serious, war.
So where the heck has UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon been over the past eight days?
He should have been at the forefront of all the international diplomatic efforts aimed at ending the Russia-Georgia conflict and crafting a longterm settlement in that region that can also strengthen the UN's essential norms of nonviolence, human equality, and the support of human flourishing and human security.
Where has he been?
Ireland's RTE News tells us this morning-- eight days into the crisis-- that Ban "will interrupt his holiday to hold private talks with the ambassadors of the US, Russia and Georgia on how to formalise the ceasefire deal."
So until now, he's just been continuing his holiday?
On Thursday, the UN issued a press release assuring us that Ban (presumably speaking from his vacation hideaway) "has expressed deep concern at the humanitarian impact of recent fighting on the civilian population in Georgia."
Not good enough. Anyone and everyone has issued a bland, humanitariany statement like that. But the UN is about a whole lot more than "humanitarian aid" and "humanitarian concern."
Yesterday (Friday), Reuters reported that Ban,
Ban has spoken to Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who called him on Thursday.
Or possibly not, huh? Can't cut that holiday too short, after all...
Here's why this is important. For the past 15 years, the US has come increasingly to act like the "power of last resort" and the delegated enforcer for all portions of the earth's surface except for some those limited portions of the global landmass that lie inside the national borders of Russia and China. No international body ever delegated these powers to the United States, whose citizens comprise under five percent of the world's people. It just came to assume them, helped in many instances by a never-stable, ever-evolving cast of "allies," like those roped in for occupation duty in Iraq (a group that dwindled significantly over time), or in Afghanistan (mainly, a subset of members of a strictly-military alliance that was formed for very different purposes 60 years ago.)
Now, the US-led "west" is hopelessly over-extended, with grave consequences for the peoples of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. The military-based, "US leadership" model of global governance that it represents cannot be sustained. We all need to take a few very deep breaths, reflect deeply on the consequences of war-waging and militarism wherever they have been practiced, and start a new worldwide conversation on how to do things a whole lot better going forward.
That's where the United Nations comes in.
Yes, it's imperfect. But we really don't have time to start a wholly new organization from the ground up. And meanwhile, the UN has a number of very important attributes:
2. Its founding principles of anti-militarism and human equality,
3. The many instruments it has developed to help bring about the nonviolent resolution of even thorny conflicts among nations, and
4. The wide expertise its network of specialized agencies has acquired in all aspects of building the human foundations of security in today's highly interdependent, irreversibly globalized era.
But all this past week, Ban Ki-Moon has been Missing in Action.
Ban, we need you! Come home!
Instead of seeing him leading the immediate diplomacy, what have we seen? More of the same, of "western" leaders just stepping in as if it is entirely their right to dominate all international diplomacy, on every issue, in every part of the world.
Excuse me? Who gave them that right?
Why should it be Condoleezza Rice who positions herself as "final arbiter" in the dispute between Georgia and Russia? Why would she or anyone imagine that-- after all the considerable aid the Bush administration has given to Georgia in recent years-- Washington has the neutrality that would be required for anyone credibly and effectively to play that role?
(Oh, maybe the whole sorry history of US domination of the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking over the past 20 years got Americans into the idea that being deeply partisan is not incompatible with being a neutral peacemaker? Well, it hasn't worked too well there, either, has it?)
In the present crisis, the two US allies Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel played a significant role as Condi's scouts and wingmen in the diplomacy...
And between them, they have secured something of a ceasefire on paper at this date, which is a valuable first step.
But a more durable, longer term settlement between the Russians and Georgians is certainly still required. Personally, I hope it would be based on a wide and credibly monitored demilitarization of the two 'contested territories' within Georgia, and also of wide swathes of 'inner Georgia' itself, as well as of areas of Russian territory that border Georgia.
But whatever the content of the longer term settlement, to arrive at it will require strong and clear UN leadership of the diplomacy. Hard to see how Bush or either of his successors would have either the international credibility or the means to do that.
It will take tough talking-- with the leaders of both Georgia and Russia. And it will take promulgation of a paradigm of what "peacemaking" is about that is very different from the US paradigm of "arm this side, then arm that side, then if they fight each other get in there with our own armies to rack up the violence level even higher..."
The west can't sustain that approach any more. We are in desperate need of a new, much more cooperative and human-based approach to peacemaking, too. Help us out here, Ban Ki-Moon. Please?
But where the heck are you today?
Moscow Times today gives us a fascinating article by Simon Saradzhyan analyzing the Russian military's performance in Georgia in some detail.
Of note there, that among the 171 Russian troops wounded was the general who was leading the entire Russian operation in Georgia, Lieut.-Gen.Anatoly Khrulev, commander of the 58th Army. Saradzhyan reports that 70 Russian troops were killed.
Saradzhyan and the Moscow-based experts whom he quotes give generally high marks to the Georgians for their high level of training and the success they had had integrating hi-tech western systems like drones (UAVs) into their operations. Saradzhyan writes bluntly that
The technical sophistication of the Russian forces turned out to be inferior in comparison with the Georgian military.
Saradzhyan describes the original Georgian offensive and the response of the Russian forces thus:
The blitzkrieg plan, however, faltered despite the personnel and technical superiority of Georgian troops, highlighting errors in the Georgians' political and military planning.
... The Kremlin timed its response perfectly, because sending troops earlier would have drawn immediate accusations of a disproportionate response, while stalling further could have allowed the Georgian troops to seize Tskhinvali and the rest of South Ossetia, said [Konstantin Makiyenko, the deputy director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies.] The Russian troops established control over much of South Ossetia by Aug. 10 and then started to make inroads into Georgia proper, destroying military facilities.
Saradzhyan writes:
Another reason the Georgians lost was because the Russian military used knowledge gleaned from past conflicts, including the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia and its own reconquest of Chechnya. "Russia has learned the lessons taught by NATO in Yugoslavia, immediately initiating a bombing campaign against Georgia's air bases and other military facilities," Tsyganok said.
In the account of the war so far that Saradzhyan provides, the Russian ground forces and elite and commando forces performed well, but serious deficiencies were revealed in the performance of both the air force and military intelligence.
He writes:
The Air Force's losses, including a long-range Tu-22, and helplessness in the face of air strikes by Georgian Su-25 attack planes and artillery fire on Tskhinvali as late as Monday should set off alarm bells in Russia, Makiyenko said. "The failure to quickly suppress the Georgian air defense despite rather rudimentary capabilities or to achieve air supremacy despite a lack of fighter planes in the Georgian air force shows the poor condition of the Russian Air Force," he said.
The loss of Russian planes might have come because of the poor training of pilots, who log only a fraction of the hundreds of flight hours that their NATO counterparts do annually, Netkachev wrote in Nezavisimaya Gazeta on Monday.
Russian intelligence bears responsibility too for failing to provide up-to-date information on the capabilities of the Georgian air defense and air force, Netkachev said. As recently as three years ago, Georgia had no pilots capable of flying the Israeli-upgraded Su-25 planes, he said, adding that Russian commanders should have known that Ukraine had supplied Buk and Osa air-defense systems to Georgia and might have trained its operators.
"One general lesson that the Russian side should learn is that it is possible to build a capable, well-trained force in just three to four years, as Saakashvili did," Makiyenko said.
Saradzhyan writes:
The lack of modern, quality equipment became evident when several tanks and armored personnel carriers broke down as army reinforcements moved from Russia to South Ossetia, Makiyenko said. Overall, however, the Ground Forces operated better than the Air Force, accomplishing their mission of routing the Georgian units, he said.
"The main lesson that Russia should draw from this conflict is that we need to urgently upgrade our Air Force, with a comprehensive general reform to follow," he said.
But anyway, from what Saradzhyan writes, it seems pretty clear that the Georgian war will have given a boost to the military-industrial complex's lobbying power in Moscow-- just as it almost certainly has done in Washington.
We do still have time to stop this new arms race in the field of hi-tech "conventional" weapons before it gets any further underway... But we need to start the worldwide campaign to do this now, rather than just letting all these arms manufacturers and their hired hands drive the agenda while the rest of us aren't looking.
There are many better ways to resolve thorny conflicts than through war and killing. Let's all try to be smart enough to understand that, and to start a huge global shift toward outlawing war and strengthening the nonviolent means of conflict resolution.
... of me discussing the MSM's coverage of the Georgian crisis, over at FAIR's 'Counterspin' radio yesterday.
Think Progress and Matt Yglesias's blog, now also over at the Center for American Progress, are emerging as two of the most thought-provoking blogs on foreign policy decisionmaking in Washington.
Today, Yglesias absolutely nails the irresponsible and dangerously escalatory nature of John McCain's rhetoric over the Georgia crisis.
He notes that McCain has described the Georgia-Russia war the “first serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War” and joins with those (including Think Progress's Satyam) who have pointed out that, erm, just a few other crises much graver than that in Georgia have occurred since 1991.
Matt adds:
I particularly liked the "pathological" there, though perhaps "pathogenic" would also be a good description. Because this "gadfly" quality of McCain's, that apparently does prevent him from setting clear priorities in global affairs, would cause considerable harm to Americans and the other 95% of the world's people if he got elected President... Especially when allied to his longstanding tendency to see enormous threats wherever he looks. (We could call this latter condition "phobiaphilia." Of course, the entire military-industrial-'contractor' complex depends on it.)
The NYT was able to use its people's good relations with the Georgian government to get hold of the text of the ceasefire agreement that Sarkozy got the Russians to agree to at 2 a.m. Wednesday. Here it is, in PDF, with the French original bearing handwritten notes representing the Georgian side's requests for further revisions, which according to this accompanying story by Andrew Kramer Russia had not accepted..
According to Kramer, when Sarkozy made his first stop in Tbilisi earlier this week he and the Georgians agreed to the first four four of the six points listed there. He then went to Moscow, where Putin (and Medvedev?) insisted on adding the last two points. So the six-point version without the phrases added in parentheses is what Moscow agreed to. And then, during Wednesday, yesterday, the Russians used the provision in Point 5 that says, "While awaiting an international mechanism, Russian peacekeeping forces will implement additional security measures" to advance further into Georgia, go into the military bases the Georgian forces had abandoned there, to confiscate all the weapons etc.
In the interest of assuring "security", of course.
Since some of these bases had been built to strict NATO specifications, I imagine the Russians were also extremely interested in many of the things they found there, including computers, security systems, and so on.
But this provision about being able to implement "additional security measures" seems to give them very wide latitude to rush around wherever they please inside Georgia and to suppress any forces there that might oppose them.
(The Russians take as given that all the troops they have in Georgia are "peacekeeping forces." Just another really horrible example-- like the west's much favored "humanitarian intervention", or the idea of US troops as "liberators" in Iraq-- of the misuse of eirenic language to euphemize what are obviously extremely coercive actions backed up by brute force.)
My reading of Moscow's decisionmakers is that they most likely won't, in fact, use the permission that Point Five might, by some readings, appear to give them to take over Tbilisi or other parts of Georgia. But they almost certainly will use their presence inside Georgia to extract the very best political terms they can from Tbilisi.
Charles Krauthammer, in his belligerent column today, warned against the "Finlandization" that he identified as being Russia's goal in Georgia.
"Finlandization" is the term to describe the arrangement that tiny Finland worked out with Stalin's Russia in 1947. It gave the Finns broad autonomy (or, a form of bounded "sovereignty") over its conduct of the entire gamut of domestic affairs, while the Finns agreed that Moscow could exercise a virtual veto over its conduct of foreign affairs.
Wikipedia tells us that,
Within Finland itself, the period of Finlandization is viewed with considerably more nuance than in the US. I'd like to suggest that in Georgia, some arrangement like the one that gave Finns such broad rights of local self-governance-- under which they kept their country out of both the Warsaw Pact and NATO, used the revenues that they saved by not having to maintain large armies to make considerable advances in their socioeconomic and educational status, and used their neutral diplomatic status to host important east-west gatherings like the 1974 Helsinki Conference-- might be considerably better for the country's people(s) than a descent into further war?
... Anyway, the diplomacy over these issues has still only barely started. First, let's hope the ceasefire holds.
Another great post from Bernhard of Moon of Alabama on the Georgian crisis, today.
What Bernhard really "gets" about this crisis is the degree to which it reveals the extreme constraints on Washington's ability to exercise freedom of action-- including military action-- in parts of the world where, until recently, it felt quite confident of acting freely. The constraints being, as I've noted previously, both logistical and political (in terms of the balance of power in world politics, not-- at this point-- the balance within the US.)
From this perspective, the serried ranks of rightwing commentators who are published so widely in the US MSM suddenly look like (possibly quaint) dinosaurs as they bark out their calls for more "robust" US action against the Russian bear... Max Boot, Richard Holbrooke, and of course-- Charles Krauthammer.
I was going to write a quick post here about Krauthammer's NYT column today. But Bernhard's commentary on it is even better than what I was going to write. Krauthammer had suggested some "stern", but still only diplomatic, actions that Washington should take in an attempt to "punish" Moscow. Bernhard pointed out that Moscow has many more potent means of "punishing" the west, should it choose to use them. (Which I highly doubt it does.)
Then, Krauthammer's "zinger" is a suggestion that Bush send Putin a copy of the movie "Charlie Wilson's War"-- "to remind Vlad of our capacity to make Russia bleed."
But as Bernhard writes:
... But the main aim in all this should certainly not be to urge consideration or use of further risky and escalatory measures. Heck, Saakashvili's performace last week should stand as a powerful object-lesson against anyone doing that! The aim should be to point once again-- since it does still seem needed-- to the interdependence of all the world's peoples, including of all the world's "big powers," in the current era.
That's a lesson that many citizens of the US need to understand a lot more clearly.
Actually, probably most of them do have a fairly strong understanding of it. But they are certainly not helped in their understanding by the wide dissemination given to the views of all those US-uber-alles dinosaurs who still dominate most of the country's public discourse.
I think we need to underline a few distinctive lessons and principles:
2. Thorny international political differences cannot be resolved through force-- whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Georgia, or elsewhere. And the world's governments should certainly refrain from attempting to do this, since any use of force anywhere simply perpetuates the idea that using it is an acceptable way to behave while it also, importantly, diverts attention and resources away from the much-needed means of political engagement to the massively expensive means of military combat..
3. We do, luckily, have many international institutions and mechanisms that can help resolve such problems using nonviolent means and reference to neutral, long-agreed standards of behavior. Those mechanisms should be used and further strengthened, rather than derided or overlooked completely.
4. The US should be, along with the world's other governments according to their capacities, part of that effort to restore the UN and the world's other institutions of multi-lateral problem-solving. But unlike in 1945, the US is currently not in a position to dominate it. (Thanks, George W. Bush!)
I've just been invited to a talk next week at the New America Foundation titled "Does Nation-Building Have a Future? Lessons from Afghanistan." The presenter is James Dobbins, who seems to have a pretty "realist" and well-informed view of such matters.
But it got me to thinking about this whole concept of "nation-building", as it is used by so many earnest western policy people with regard to disordered countries in the Third World.
Can a nation, as such, actually be built? Even more important: Can it ever be "built" by outsiders?
I'm dubious in the extreme.
A "nation", as such, can surely only ever come into being through the actions-- more or less voluntary-- of its citizens.
Does South Africa constitute a single discernible "nation"? Does Spain? Does Catalunya? Does Belgium?
All fascinating questions. Equally fascinating, the whole history of what the old Arab nationalists would have called "qita'iya" (sectionalism) within the Arab world... That is, the emergence over time of a distinctively "Jordanian", or "Lebanese", or "Qatari" view of national self-identification.
It strikes me that what outsiders can and do have an effect on in many of these cases is the establishment of state structures, with identified geographic boundaries between them... and then, if these states succeed at delivering basic services to their people, they acquire or increase their level of endogenous legitimacy, and thereby, something like a "national sensitivity" starts to take root.
Among the citizens concerned... which is the important point here.
In other words, contrary to the way many westerners talk about these matters, the state in many important ways predates and incubates the "nation". Benedict Anderson argued much this same point in his work on "Imagined Communities."
And actually the state's capabilities, including its efficiency in delivering basic services (including crucially, public security) and its ability to provide predictable regulation for economic life, are often much more important to the wellbeing-- and even survival-- of its citizens than any sense of "nationalism", which operates at a much more abstract level of human experience. But states never are and never can be, culturally neutral. They always have a cultural content, as manifested in the languages accepted as "official", the calendar of work- and rest-days, and so on. This cultural content can be either "ethno-national" in content (as with language policies), or religious (as with most work-day calendars), or, more usually, both.
So religion can often be as important a determinant of the cultural content of a country as ethnicity. States are not necessarily defined in ethnic (or "national") terms... Though as we have seen in the cases of Israel and Pakistan, where a state is formed on explicitly religious lines, that religion acquires within that state much of the character of a "nationality." Here again, we see that the state predates the "nation."
So back to the question posed by Dobbins. Shouldn't outsiders be looking at the question of our countries' support for effective state-building in Afghanistan or other disordered countries, rather than "nation"-building?
I guess another reason I feel uneasy with the concept of nation-building is that it seems such an extremely socially and psychologically intrusive thing to do. Outsiders would essentially be messing with the way people self-identify and feel. That's no business of outsiders! But for the people(s) of Afghanistan-- okay, definitely more than one "people" there-- establishing a basically effective system of country-wide governance is certainly a strong and common interest. I'd call that state-building rather than nation-building.
And if the help of outsiders is indeed needed (as it seems probably to be), there is no reason to think the US of A-- whose "national culture" contains a strong strain of disdain for the idea of government as such-- is particularly well qualified to lead this effort...
Today, the two candidates for Virginia's 5th Congressional District had their first sustained public exchange of views. I made a point of going along to the forum, which was held in the large, nicely funded Senior Center just north of Charlottesville. And I was confirmed in my judgment that our Republican incumbent, Virgil Goode, is a dangerous, mean-spirited man who needs to be defeated. But I also came away with some questions about the approach being followed by the Democratic challenger, 34-year-old Tom Perriello.
Here are the main things I noted at the 90-minute forum:
But for his part, Perriello wasn't trying to position himself as running against the Bush legacy, either. I would have thought that in most of the Fifth District, which stretches from Charlottesville a long way south to the state line with North Carolina, and which includes numerous very economically depressed communities, running against the Bush legacy would have been an attractive thing to do... As would be noting that Goode has voted almost in lockstep with Bush on virtually every issue... As would noting the truly massive amounts of taxpayers' money that Bush has shoveled into the horrendously wrong-headed invasion and occupation of Iraq. But Perriello made almost no mention of any of these things. And get this: where he did refer to the failed legacy of Bush, he nearly always twinned this by referring to an equally failed legacy of Pres. Clinton, as well.
I found that stunning. I do, certainly, have many criticisms of what Clinton did during his eight years in office. But to put those failures on a par with Bush's failures, as Tom did? That boggles both logic and the imagination.
Thus, for example, he said nothing about the fact that Clinton had balanced the budget and was poised to start bringing down the national debt-- until Bush came along and with his completely unfunded wars plunged the country back into deep deficits again.
I found that critique outrageous. There was nothing there about the value of the civil rights movement-- no mention of the civil rights movement, at all! That, here in Central Virginia, remember. Nothing about Medicare and Social Security-- even though there in the Senior Center you had a clear majority of attendees at the forum who were the lucky beneficiaries of Medicare. Nothing about Head Start or any of the other great social programs of the 1960s, the era of belief in the possibility of a "Great Society."
And then, he said, along came his generation, which did not believe that government could solve all the country's problems but instead sought to make a difference through private entrepreneurship and work in non-profit organizations. (I'd bet that most of Tom's income since he graduated Yale Law School in 2001 has come from inter-governmental or governmental funds, one way or another?)
He never did explain to my satisfaction how it was he made the transition from not believing that government has a significant role in solving social problems to thinking that he, personally, should run for political office. But evidently, that transition got made.
Tom's positioning of himself as "post-partisan" in the way that he did made me distinctly uneasy. Not only because he really seemed not to have thought very deeply about many of those issues there, but also because I'd be very worried if Barack Obama shared this particular version of post-partisanship.
How can a person just blow off the whole experience of the Great Society-- and also, by implication, the New Deal before that-- and expect to have something useful to propose regarding the mounting social and economic difficulties this country faces? Does Tom Perriello think they can all be addressed through the work of private entrepreneurs and non-profit organizations? That would be a very dangerous position to hold, indeed.
Tom's version of post-partisanship also seemed, at some points, to be related to a slightly vacuous self-referentiality. Especially in his opening comments, which were all about him and his place in his "three generation" scheme. Yes, he did make a passing reference there to having "a seven-point plan" for dealing with the country's woes-- but he never once told us what those seven points were! Ah, maybe he should have sent us to this page, on his campaign website.
Well, in the lengthy Q&A session, he was a lot better, and he generally gave answers that were sensible and thoughtful.... though he did get a little bellicose in talking about the need to "win America's wars."
Also of note in the forum: Both candidates made a number of references to the need to achieve "energy independence", and to the dangers of "borrowing from the Chinese." Two misleading memes there? Both also indicated some opposition to NAFTA.
Goode positioned himself as extremely anti-taxation (as well as anti-immigrant). At one point, right at the end, he made the outrageous claim that Obama "wants to send $845 billion" of US revenues to low-income countries.
Excuse me?
But Goode also, intriguingly, seemed to be predicting (or threatening?) that Obama would win the presidential race, when he used the argument that Virginians would benefit from having a strong Republican representation in congress to keep Obama in check.
I found the whole forum fascinating, though a little bit depressing. (Goode's diatribes against immigrants got a disturbing amount of applause from the crowd. This, despite our city's reputation as being a huge blob of liberals stuck at one end of a socially conservative district.) Still, there is something really important about having a constituency-based electoral system, where the people who represent you in the legislature have to come back to their districts each time there's an election and stand face-to-face with their constituents. The political "representation" involved just seems so much more direct in this system than in a broad, nationwide p.r. system.
Anyway, if Tom Perriello reads this, I hope he (you) takes my remarks as an invitation to further discussion on some of these issues. I know that back in October, I also criticized some aspects of Tom's "post-partisanship". After that, I had a good, 40-minute discussion with him in the home of a neighbor. But I'm still concerned about his eagerness to criticize the work of earlier "generations" of Democrats.
Here's a suggestion. Wouldn't a stronger and more principled way to be "post-partisan" be to express appreciation of the work of some prominent members of the other party-- as Obama has, with Chuck Hagel and even with some of his references to Ronald Reagan-- rather than to feel you have to beat up on earlier "generations" of people from your own party?
Actually, I think that's one key difference between Perriello's version of post-partisanship and Barack Obama's. That, and the fact that Obama seems to have a much more textured, informed, and realistic view of the role of (good) government in society. That view perhaps derived in large part from the direct, hands-on experience Obama gained working as a community organizer for low-income and other marginalized communities in Chicago, in his 20s.
Perriello has had only a little experience of doing work comparable to that-- and most of that was in the distinctly "bwana-ish" situation of working in western-dominated institutions in West Africa and Afghanistan. But even in those situations, does he honestly think the dire social ills he witnessed could be solved just by private entrepreneurs and non-profits-- and without the peoples of those countries finding a way to resolve their countries' very deep-seated problems of governance? So far, he hasn't given us any indication he has thought deeply about those issues, at all...
If the situation in Georgia weren't so tragic, it would be pretty amusing to see George W. Bush now posing as the guardian and gatekeeper of international legitimacy. In his statement in the Rose Garden today, he prissily lectured the Russians that,
As it is, given the extreme constraints at both the logistical and the political levels on the Bush administration's ability to respond militarily to Russia's undoubted excesses in Georgia, all Washington is able to do is organize some airlifts of humanitarian supplies into Georgia.
As for Georgia's intemperate president, Mikheil Saakashvili, he briefly claimed today that this airlift meant that the US would be taking over his country's ports and airports. Yesterday, he had told CNN that the Russians were about to encircle his his capital. He said (once again) that the whole fate of world democracy was imperiled in his country, while he also blamed "the west" for letting his countrymen down.
Perhaps all those attempts at moral blackmail were intended to cover up for his own extreme lack of forethought in having provoked the Russian response with his military assault on South Ossetia last week?
In the event, little of Saak's blackmail worked. The Pentagon was quick to "shoot down" the suggestion its forces were about to take over Georgia's ports and airports. The the airlift to Tbilisi is being described as "continuous and robust"-- but it will also apparently be strictly limited to humanitarian supplies. (I note that many items useful in humanitarian relief ops are also dual-use as basic military items; but at a certain level of military materiel, including all forms of weaponry and ammunition, these items have no reasonable "humanitarian" purpose.)
And while we're looking at people seeking to use the present crisis for purposes of political grandstanding, top of that list must be Sen. John McCain, who is reportedly despatching two of his key advisers, Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, to Georgia.
I find this outrageous. The foreign policy of the country is supposed to be run by the President, and it can only considerably complicate the delicate task Bush faces in doing this if either of the candidates seems to be running his own foreign policy separate from that of the president.
Bush should rein in McCain and his Senatorial wingmen, in no uncertain terms.
(Imagine the uproar if Obama announced that her was sending his own personal envoys to Georgia to deal with the situation there!)
It is also, of course, extremely relevant that McCain's key foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunman was until very recently a paid lobbyist for the Georgian president.
Another question: Though Lieberman and Graham are working as high-level advisers to the McCain campaign, they are also members of the US Senate in their own right. So if they do travel to Georgia in the days ahead, will they do so as Senators or as McCain campaign people?
It is all so very murky that they would do a lot better just not to go.
When I blogged about the Ossetia crisis Sunday, I wrote that one thing it clearly showed was that "The 'west' is hopelessly over-stretched, what with all its current commitments of troops in Iraq, a crisis-ridden Afghanistan, and (still) in the Balkans..."
Today, McClatchy's dogged reporter Jonathan Landay gives us more details of that over-stretch. (HT: Dan Froomkin.) Landay quoted one US official as saying that the US military authorities had not really understood the seriousness of the preparations the Russian military had recently made along the Georgian border-- because US spy satellites and other means of technical espionage were "pretty well consumed by Iraq, Afghanistan and now Pakistan."
That, you could describe as logistical over-stretch. But there has also been political over-stretch. You'll recall that back last year, shortly after the Bush administration announced that portions of its new "ballistic missile defense system" would be placed in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia announced that it would withdraw from the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE). Few people paid much heed at the time, or thought thaqt Moscow's exit from that older treaty was very important. But one of the key provisions of the CFE Treaty was that signatories were committed to engaging in regular exchanges of information about troop movements and submitting to challenge inspections from other treaty participants.
Guess what. After Russia withdrew from the CFE, they no longer had to do that.
And guess what else. It truly seems that no-one in the Pentagon was on duty last week as Russia's troop build-up gained momentum.
All that, despite Condi Rice's long-vaunted reputation as a go-to "expert" on Russian military affairs...
Landay quoted the unnamed US official as saying,
Now, the United States is left with few options for countering what it calls Russia's "disproportionate" response to Georgia...
Ouch. Did anyone say "over-stretch"?
... So what does it all mean?
It means that this conceit that members of the US political elite of both parties have nearly all entertained for the past 15 years: that the dominance of the US military over just about the entire globe is really, kind of the natural order of things... and that yes, of course, our country has "vital" interests in very distant parts of the world that yes, of course, we need to be able to protect-- on our own, if necessary... now, that entire conceit is no longer going to be sustainable.
We are, after all, less than five percent of humanity. Sure, there are still a few countries we can bludgeon in one way or another into supporting this or that military adventure. Like the way Tony Blair and Georgia's Mikheil Saakashvili agreed-- for their own reasons-- to contribute their support and a limited amount of their own manpower to the US project in Iraq. Like the way that some (but not all) NATO countries got strong-armed into acting as if Afghanistan were really right their in their own "North Atlantic" backyard. But these contributions from the increasingly resentful allies never added up to anything that would solve either the intense manpower problems, or the intense legitimacy-deficit problems, or the horrendously mounting funding problems suffered by these imperial-style US projects in distant countries.
So we need a radically different model of how the world's countries can act in response to the security challenges that just about all of our countries face.
As it happens, this model exists. It is one that the US itself created, back in 1945. It is one based on the unassailable foundations of a commitment to finding nonviolent ways to resolve thorny international conflicts, and a deep respect for the equality of all human persons and all nations. It's called the United Nations.
It also happens that just last week I wrote a piece in the CSM arguing strongly that the US should seek UN leadership of the peace-restoration efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan...
Just imagine if, over the past seven years, the US government had put its energies into using, building up, and reforming the UN and its associated principles, instead of going full-bore for unabashedly US-led military action in Afghanistan and Iraq!
Imagine how much stronger the mechanisms of nonviolent conflict resolution available to the world's leaders would be today.
Imagine how different the politics of Russia's relations with its neighbors and with the world's other big powers would be.
Imagine how different Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Palestine, and that whole part of the world would look today.
Imagine the resources that, instead of being thrown into equipping very expensive, hi-tech military units and sending them halfway round the world to kill and die, could instead have been spent on rebuilding flourishing communities in Africa.
Imagine the lives that would have been spared. Imagine the families that would still be whole, instead of having to live with their current pain of bereavement or displacement...
Well, regarding the past seven years, we can only sit here and imagine that alternative universe.
But regarding the coming seven or 20 years, there are many things that we who are US citizens can and need to do, to turn our country away from the dead-end of unilateralism and militarism.
What's happened this past week in Georgia has been a tragedy of serious proportions. But we also need to look at it as a lesson of what happens when one country, that represents only five percent of the world's people, tries to run the whole world-- and then finds itself hopelessly over-stretched.
There is a better way.
It's called shared leadership, and the rebuilding of sturdy institutions of all-nation cooperation and action. Let's pursue it.
Back on August 1, I wrote this post about the new report the International Crisis Group has on the situation of Iraq's refugees. I wish at the time I had thought to check in with the great blog that Faiza Arji, proud Iraqi citizen, writes from Amman, Jordan, where she has spent most of the past three years trying to provide front-line help to some of the very distressed Iraqi refugees in the city.
Because she's been so busy doing that, in recent months she hasn't been blogging very much-- but that's no excuse for me.
Today I went, and found this extremely heartfelt post that she put up there in English on June 24.
It is a classic piece of reportage from within one of the most vexing humanitarian crises of our day. (A crisis, I should note, that occurred as a result of Pres. Bush's decision to invade Iraq and his administration's complete failure to exercise its responsibility as occupying power to assure public security within the country.)
Faiza describes the key demand being raised by the refugees themselves. It is for return home in a situation of general security and assured basic services:
And how can the government ask the Iraqis in Jordan, Syria and Egypt to return to Iraq, while it hasn’t solved the problem of the internally displaced?
How can we believe that the situation has improved?
If those displaced inside Iraq returned to their towns and their conditions settled, now that would be a positive indication to the government's credibility, and the Iraqis living in the neighboring countries will return when they see positive encouraging results on the ground… but now, even with all the suffering and the anguish, we do not think of going back; a least here there is security, water, and electricity…
When I sit with them, every person and every family, in separate meetings, no one knows about the other, but there is one common theme pulsing in their hearts, as if they have all agreed upon it among them…
Praise to God… Muslim, Christian, Baptist or Yazeedi, they all say the same words, complain about the same wound… Praise to God who united us on the land of Iraq, to the love of Iraq, and the grief about what happened to it…
And this amazing mixture of people lived together for thousands of years, they had an old, deep, common civilization since the dawn of history………. Many religions and various cultures lived on the land of Iraq, forming this beautiful mixture of people, who got accustomed to living together through the sweet and the bitter… wars, sanction, hunger, poverty and deprivation, until the last war came in 2003; which dedicated the ripping and tearing of this social, cultural and religious fabric, a fabric that survived for thousands of years in a tight solidity from the roots…
Iraq is going now through one of the worst experience in Iraq's life; a big dilemma that will either break it completely, or, Iraq might emerge from it strong, like the phoenix of the mythology, that will rise from the ashes every time; strong, soaring, like it is created all anew. And that is exactly what I hope will happen one day….
... Especially when you consider the tragic under-side of what she sees among the Iraqis she works with:
What is happening to the world? Are we passing a phase of losing noble values and an absence of conscience? Where did this hard-heartedness and indifference come from?
I do not know…
Sometimes I imagine the world is closing down on me, and my chest tightens…. I wish I can find a forest or an island in a far-off ocean to live in, and forget about these tiring creatures called- humans; I no longer have common points with them…. But my sorrow for the poor and the needy prevents me from running away, forcing me into the commitment to remain and help them; knocking on all doors, not to abandon them…
... There is a number of Iraqi women who are alone without families; whose husbands or families were killed and they remained alone, waiting to be re-settled. They face improper advances and molestation by this and that, looking towards a life more dignified and more settled, in some spot in this world.
At work, I daily receive women who were beaten and treated cruelly by their husbands. Poverty is the reason in most cases; or the frustration that befalls the man because of poverty and unemployment; they turn him into a wild, cruel, and aggressive creature. This is what happens to some Iraqi families here; the conditions of displacement, poverty, estrangement and degradation all put pressure on the men and the women and increase the rate of family violence…
Some women also come to complain about their husband's bad manners, being alcoholics, beating wives and children, or molesting their daughters. God help us; He is our aid, and He is enough…
Are these the signs for the end of time, of the dooms day? That the world has lost its mind, its ethics, its mercy, justice, and all its beautiful features?
I, personally, am tired, but I didn't lose hope that some people still exist in this world who form a beautiful face to it…
One thing I've noticed over the years is that the people who do front-line humanitarian aid work, who have by far the richest and most direct understanding of the humanity and needs of those in distress, often don't have any time or mental energy left over to get their voice out into the public sphere. As a result, on sorts of issues that directly impact the lives and wellbeing of some of the world's most vulnerable people, the global "public discussion" ends up being dominated by people like law professors or pundits who have sadly little direct experience of what they're talking about. (Hence, for example, the easy readiness with which such people view the prospect of the civil war in Northern Uganda being prolonged for several additional years while they, the lawyers and law professors, seek to "prove" some abstract point about the theory of "international justice" in an air-conditioned courtroom in The Hague... )
That's one of the many things that makes Faiza's voice so special. She is personally living the Iraqi refugee crisis. And she's personally deeply engaged in responding to it. And then, in addition, from time to time she makes sure she gets her voice out into the global public sphere about these issues that are of such existential concern to her.
Thank you, Faiza.
She doesn't give any information on her blog about how to donate to support her projects. I suggest that any readers willing and able to give money to good humanitarian-aid projects directed at Iraqi refugees in Jordan or Syria (where their numbers are even greater) can do so through the US-based organization Mercy Corps International.
Spain's highest court, the Audiencia Nacional, has issued arrest warrants on charges of war crimes against six Israelis who were high-ranking military officials at the time of the IDF's bombing of an apartment building in Gaza City in 2002 which killed 15 civilians.
The six include current Infrastructure Minister Binyamin ('Fouad') Ben-Eliezer, who was defense minister at the time of the incident; Moshe Yaalon, who was IDF chief of staff; and Dan Halutz, then chief of the air force and later IDF chief of staff. The others are Doron Almog, Giora Eiland, and 'Mike' Herzog.
(Does anyone have the text of the arrest warrant? I'd love to see that.)
The 2002 incident was part of a longstanding policy of the Israeli government of undertaking extrajudicial killings (EJKs) of its opponents. EJKs, also known as assassinations or in Israel's somewhat euphemized parlance "targeted killings", are precisely what they sound like: completely extra-judicial, that is, outside the rule of law. That is, there is no duly constituted court that considers in an impartial and open manner the evidence against the "accused", listens to his defense, and judges the case on its merits. Instead, Israel's military authorities get to be prosecutor, judge, jury, and executioner all wrapped into one, though they have made various attempts to describe their efforts as "humane", "restrained" and, of course, completely "justified."
For one such attempt see this piece of sympathetic hasbara reporting from the WaPo's Laura Blumenfeld back in August 20096. In it, Bluemnfeld describes the "anguish" experienced by several Israeli commanders-- including, crucially, arraigned-in-Spain Moshe Yaalon-- as they recalled their calculations regarding whether to undertake any particular EJK
Actually, though Blumenfeld's reporting was extremely sympathetic to Israel's high-ranking assassins, it contains many revealing details that could be useful in any court case against Yaalon and his co-defendants. (And also, against present Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, a leader of some of Israel's earlier EJK ops.)
Reflecting on her conversations with Yaalon about the period 2000-2003, Blumenfeld wrote,
"I called it 'cutting weeds.' I knew their names by heart," Yaalon said. How many did he kill? "Oh, hundreds, hundreds. I knew them. I had all the details with their pictures, maps, intelligence, on the table... "
Blumenfeld's piece makes eery reading. But it also provides a vivid example of two important points:
2. How extremely slippery the slope of the justification of violence "for self-defense", "pre-emption", "prevention", and "deterrence" can become. The Israeli decisionmakers were justifying their use of EJKs since 2000 mainly in terms of "deterrence," that is, sending a powerful message "to discourage others from trying the same thing." It worked in terms of raw violence, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of those "targeted"-- along with additional hundreds of bystanders. But at the crucial level of politics, it didn't work. Hamas kept on generating new cohorts of leaders, while retaining intact both its core political ideology and its ability to hit Israel with new kinds of weapons, primarily the fence-hopping rockets. Only recently did the Israeli government try another approach to the challenge posed by Hamas: the Egypt-mediated negotiations which resulted in the conclusion of a ceasefire (tahdi'eh) back in June. The ceasefire has not been totally successful, since a handful of very small, non-Hamas groups remain uncommitted to it. But by and large it has worked. The number of rockets falling inside Israel has been drastically reduced. And yesterday, even Ehud Barak-- who was previously a strong skeptic of the ceasefire approach-- announced that he now thinks it is the best way forward!
Among those who escaped the airborne assassins that day were Hamas's paraplegic founder and historic leader Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, whom the Israelis did succeed in killing a year later, and Ismail Haniyyeh, who ran in the Palestinian parliamentary elections of January 2006 and emerged as Prime Minister of the Palestinian government elected that month. Haniyyeh and his colleagues in the Gaza portion of Hamas's leadership have been essential participants in the Egypt-mediated negotiations for the June ceasefire.
It is almost certain that if Israel had indeed "succeeded" in assassinating Haniyyeh and others in the present Hamas leadership, then it would have been far harder, or perhaps impossible, for the Egyptians and Israelis to find any Palestinian leaders with the political charisma, clout, and legitimacy that have been required to negotiate and implement the ceasefire from the Palestinian side. (It would be kinda nice if Barak could admit that publicly, and also apologize to Haniyyeh for his past attempts to assassinate him?? Dream on, Helena.)
As part of the tahdi'eh, Israel undertook to stop its EJK attempts against the Hamas leaders, which is valuable first step towards the further de-escalation of tensions (and positive peacemaking!) that is so desperately needed.
B'tselem has some good updates about the state of the EJK policy as of the end of 2007 in its 2007 annual report (PDF here.) It includes this:
As for the Spanish arrest warrants against Ben-Eliezer and the others, the Israeli government is reportedly "battling hard to overturn [the] Spanish court's decision."
My view-- with this case in Spain, as with the earlier attempts to indict Ariel Sharon through the Belgian courts-- is that though these court cases play an important role in helping to sensitize wwestern opinion to the nature of some of the actions involved, and though they hold out the important hope that "international criminal justice" can be brought to bear impartially, including against offenders who are not members of groups marginalized within the present, "west"-dominated international system, still, the pursuit of these cases is not the path that will lead to finding and implementing a durable end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it is that path of conflict termination that is the one that must most urgently be pursued.
Back in the early 2000s, when the Belgian court made a (notably halfhearted and short-lived) attempt to go after Ariel Sharon for war crimes committed against Palestinians in 1982, he was still the Prime Minister of Israel. And though seeing him in the dock may have given some satisfaction to some Palestinians, still, what they most needed from him at that time was his serious engagement in serious peace negotiations... and inasmuch as the Belgian court case distracted attention or commitment from that path, it might actually have been harmful.
And similarly with the present Spanish court cases. Of course, the actions on which the defendants stand arraigned were heinous ones: the assassination of political opponents on a wide scale, and with far too little heed to the effects of those actions on bystanders. And the past actions and decisions of many of the Hamas leaders were equally heinous in their disregard for the laws of war, including the absolute injunction to avoid civilian casualties. But the priority-- with regard to the misdeeds of both sides-- must still remain on the search for a durable political outcome to the conflict.
Is such an outcome in sight? Perhaps not as far distant as many westerners seem to think. I think the new interest that some leaders in the secular portion of the Palestinian nationalist movement are expressing in the longheld goal of a single, binational state in all the area of Mandate Palestine is a heartening development.
Since 1967, the Israelis have had numerous chances to achieve a two-state solution, which could keep essentially intact their goal of having a state in existence that would be strong, secure, intentionally Jewish, and at peace with all of its neighbors. That would involve a return to something at or very close to the lines of June 4, 1967.
But repeatedly over the years they avoided making that choice. Instead, every time, they voted with their concrete mixers, pouring vast volumes of concrete into the project to build Jews-only colonial settlements throughout the West Bank (and Golan) and to connect them with their own, beyond-apartheid grid of Jews-only roads. As a result of that, and of the implantation of 450,000 Jewish settlers into those settlements, it is now almost impossible to imagine how the West Bank could be separated from Israel proper. The small chunks of land there that might be left to a Palestinian Bantustan would be quite incapable of supporting a viable Palestinian state.
Time to return to the older dream of humane Zionists like Martin Buber or Judah Magnes, who held up the goal of a unitary, binational state...
Some of the best running commentary on the War of South Ossetia has been that produced by Bernhard at Moon of Alabama over recent days. Including this post today. What I find particularly useful about Bernhard's blogging is his ability both to keep up with diverse news sources and to reveal to "western" readers the biases that are often deeply embedded in our MSM's coverage of the events. For the latter, see some of what he wrote here.
Today, the NYT's James Traub had a lengthy piece on the Ossetian war. It provided a lot of deep background about the decades-old disputes between Georgia and Russia (but actually, not a whole lot more than you can get in Wikipedia); and it noted, quite rightly, the relationship between Russia's support for the self-rule of the South Ossetians (and Abkhazians) and the recognition that many western nations recently gave to the "independence" of Kosovo.
There are a large number of structural parallels between these cases, as well as a causal relationship. (Parallels, too, with the campaigns many westerners have supported for the breakaway of Iraqi Kurdistan and Darfur from the countries of which they are currently part.)
Traub's piece is, however, plagued by being confined within the same occidocentric bubble that Bernhard does such a good job of identifying and puncturing. For example, Traub repeatedly refers to westerners "getting it" when they come to share his own judgment that Putin's Russia is aggressive and hostile. (So much for "objectivity"!) And in his last graf, he writes this:
Well, perhaps inside the NYT bubble things look like that. ("Harsh Russian aggressors! Poor, long-suffering Georgian victims!") But in the rest of the world-- and almost certainly within Russia itself -- they probably look very different, or perhaps even the reverse of that. There have certainly been civilian victims of Georgian military power within South Ossetia, and Georgian civilian victims of Russian military power within Georgia. But you can bet that in the Russian media, only the former have been given the spotlight; just as in the NYT's reporting today there were three prominent photos of Georgian victims surveying the results of Russian bombing (one of them on the front page), and only one photo of Ossetian victims of Georgian bombing. This, though the wire-service reporting seems to indicate that there have been much greater numbers of victims in S. Ossetia than in Georgia.
Well, it is hard at this point to know the precise numbers of victims on either side. But it's not hard to conclude that Traub's judgment about the relevant distribution of hard power and soft is quite misleading.
It's interesting, too, to see that Haaretz reported today that,
"Israel should be proud of its military which trained Georgian soldiers," Yakobashvili told Army Radio in Hebrew, referring to a private Israeli group Georgia had hired.
... Yakobashvili said that a small group of Georgian soldiers had able to wipe out an entire Russian military division due to this training.
Well, despite Yakobashvili's crowing, it seems the Georgian government took enough of a drubbing from its massive northern neighbor that it is now eager to sue for peace.
The final outcome on the ground from this nasty and damaging little war are still far from clear. But some of the broader implications for world politics of what has been happening are already emerging:
2. Russia is coming back as a force to be reckoned with in world politics. This is no longer the 1990s-- which for Russians was an era of economic mega-crisis, dismemberment, and rampantly atrocious (mis-)governance. The Russia of the years ahead will not have the great weight in world politics of the Soviet era. But neither will it be the confused, resource-starved pygmy of the Yeltsin era.
3. Westerners who thought they could easily redraw international boundaries as they pleased, without consequence for their own interests, will have to rethink the wisdom of that tactic. The national boundaries drawn up and laid down in, basically, the post-1945 era, are in many places highly imperfect. (Especially throughout Africa!) But the system of boundaries and sovereignty that they represent acquired its own logic, however imperfect. Tinker with one, and the whole system threatens to unravel. I tried to argue that point-- among others-- back in February, when I expressed my criticism of the move that many western nations made toward recognizing (and even encouraging) the Kosovars' declaration of independence. Lots of food for thought there for the Iraqi Kurds, too...
That would be equivalent, in Kosovo, to Serbia sending in its armed forces to seize control of Kosovo from the western-dominated peacekeeping force that's currently in control there.
(Worth reading about present-day Kosovo, by the way, is this depressing piece of reporting by Jeremy Harding in the LRB. He writes, "No one would have imagined that a UN protectorate in Europe, stuffed with NGOs and awash with donor receipts, could perform so badly. Kosovo has low growth, no inflation, and few signs of an emerging economy... In Kosovo every scam and indignity, from the protection of ex-KLA war criminals down, is common knowledge..." Under its new banner of "independence", Kosovo doesn't quite seem to have become the land of milk and honey that some people predicted?)
But back to Saakashvili. He seems to have miscalculated, rather badly. The west that was so ready and eager to take on the Russians over Kosovo back in March 1999 is not nearly as ready-- or able-- to take them on over Georgia, nine years later.
On Friday, Reuters' William Schomberg quoted James Nixey, an analyst at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, as saying that,
That was shown when he used force last year to quash anti-government protesters and again now in the conflict in South Ossetia, [Nixey] said...
"If he is going to start a war, he is going to lose the support of a lot of friends in the West."
... Analysts said Saakashvili's gamble in launching military action against the rebels could trigger a David-and-Goliath war between his country and the its powerful neighbour Russia, and it was far from certain that the West would come to his rescue.
"He has had plenty of warnings from the West that it won't pull any chestnuts out of the fire for him so I don't think he can count on the cavalry riding in," said Fraser Cameron of the EU-Russia centre in Brussels.
I have no doubt at all that Russia's media are at this very moment displaying all kinds of images of suffering Ossetian civilians and describing Russia's actions in Ossetia as as an intensely "humanitarian intervention."
And similarly (mutatis mutandis) in Georgia.
This should give us all pause.
Back in 1999, I was one of the few liberal commentators in the western MSM who argued consistently against the idea that a western military campaign against Serbia could ever be described as a "humanitarian intervention", or otherwise justified.
Please, let's now take this opportunity to bury this idea, once and for all, that wars can ever be described as "humanitarian."
Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari still insists on a "clear timeline" for the withdrawal of US troops from his country, according to this report from AP's Robert Reid.
Reid writes that Zebari also said that the Iraqi and US negotiators are "very close" to reaching a longterm security agreement, but stressed that Baghdad won't consider an agreement that doesn't specify the timeline.
He adds this:
The last American support troops would leave about three years later, the Iraqis said.
As I've written here before, I think the Bushites lost the "Battle of Baghdad"-- that is, their campaign to lock in security agreements with Baghdad that would allow a longterm US troop presence in Iraq-- some time ago.
It was of course Clausewitz who wrote the important truth that "War is an extension of politics by other means." All wars start and end in politics. Back in late 2002, I remember my pro-invasion Iraqi-Kurdish friend Siyamend Othman talking about the need to win "the Battle of Washington"-- that is, the battle to win Washington's support for the invasion project. Well, he and his Iraqi allies (who of course included Zebari, Ahmed Chalabi, Barham Saleh, etc) won that one. But now, their US allies have lost the Battle of Baghdad.
The reason I haven't been posting much here this past week is that I've been at the Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. As nearly always seems to happen when I come here, I start off by thinking I'll manage to get plenty of time to blog, but end up not able to do much. Partly it's because the internet connection is slow. But partly, too, it's because I go into a different mental zone when I'm here.
I wish I had the energy to tell you some of the interesting, uplifting, and thought-provoking things that have happened here. But I'm afraid I don't even have the energy to do that.
Ommmm.
John Woolman, 1763: "Love is the first motion." Yes, indeed.
Are Uganda's talented people about to unlock the riddle of "peace versus justice" that has confounded so many other peoples around the world in recent times?
As long-time JWN readers are aware, I have a longstanding interest in the complex intersection between working for peace and working for 'justice', however the latter might be defined. (Hint: In my view, it is not co-terminous with "the orderly working of a western-style criminal court," shocking as that thought might seem to some readers.)
Two years ago, I spent a little time in Uganda, trying to learn about the complex interaction there between the workings of the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC), which then had five arrest warrants outstanding against Ugandan citizens who were in the leadership of the long-standing Lord's Resistance Army movement, and the peace process the Government of Uganda had been pursuing with-- yes-- exactly that same leadership of the LRA.
The ICC's actions had caused the peace process to freeze in place, since LRA Joseph Kony and his colleagues feared that if they left "the bush", that is, the inaccessible areas of northeastern DRC where they and their remaining fighters were hiding out, and came forward to complete the negotiation, then they would be arrested and whisked off to The Hague.
I did some interviews with members of the ethnic group most affected by the continuing insurgency, the Acholi. The vast majority of their numbers had by then been shut by the government into vast sprawling encampments described by the government and the "international community" as "IDP camps", but which could more accurately be described as strategic hamlets or concentration camps. You can read some of my reporting from that trip, and from the interviews I had done immediately beforehand with ICC chief prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo, here.
Bottom line: The vast majority of the Acholi people seemed clearly to want to have the peace settlement with the LRA concluded, including by getting Kony "out of the bush" and bringing him back to be reintegrated in some way into civilian society.
That was two years ago. Moreno-Ocampo had a number of ways he could have withdrawn or suspended his indictments, but he chose not to pursue those paths. Of course, he was not living in a concentration camp for all that time.
Fast forward to today. Numerous Acholi community leaders have been working hard, along with representatives of both the government of Uganda and the LRA leadership to try to find a way to integrate into the country's national legal system provisions of the Acholi traditional conflict-resolution mechanisms that would allow the reintegration of the vast majority of LRA people into their home communities in the context of the Final Peace Agreement, the return of the IDP/concentraion camp residents to their ancestral homes and lands, and the submission of Kony and his high-level colleagues to some form of national-level judicial process. This would get Ocampo and the ICC off all their backs, since the ICC is supposed to be subsidiary to national-level justice efforts.
In May, the excellent, Kampala-based Justice and Reconciliation Project held a very important workshop in Kampala, with high-level representatives of both the government and the LRA taking part, at which the questions around how exactly these accountability and reconciliation processes might be designed to work together in the interests of allowing the peace to proceed. The good people at the JRP recently put the Final Report of that workshop up onto their website. I found it a little hard to get the link to the actual report. But if you go to their website's front-page, you can currently click there on the link that says "On Accountability: Agreement III, Juba Peace Talks," and that will take you to it.
I regret I don't have time right now to write out most of the comments I have on the report, which I read about a week ago. Suffice it to say, for now, that I think the JRP did a great job in convening the workshop, which looks as if it resolved numerous really important questions, including about the the relationship between the newly formed "Special Division" of the Ugandan judiciary and the ICC. (There will be none.)
I hope I can write some more about this later. But since the Uganda case is so very important in the whole, rather sad history of the ICC to date, I wanted to make sure this report gets the attention it deserves. Maybe some of you who have more time available than I do, or who have knowledge of the whole issue that's more up-to-date than mine, can chime in here with some comments and move the discussion along a bit further.
August 6 is the anniversary of the first ever use of the atomic bomb against "enemy" targets. This action was committed, as we know, by the United States government in 1945, as World War 2 was drawing towards an end. Atomic bombs have only ever been deployed twice against enemy targets. The other time was three days later, when the US dropped a bomb of a different design over Nagasaki.
The Wikipedia entry on the effects of the Hiroshima bomb reads as follows:
Among the casualties in Hiroshima there were also large numbers of indentured or virtually enslaved Koreans who had been brought to work in in war industries there by Japan's military-governmental authorities and many thousands of civilians, including women, children, retirees, and workers in civilian industries.
It is worth remembering the US's status as the only nation that has ever used an atomic bomb in war-- and which did so against two densely populated cities-- as we listen to the bellicose rhetoric that has been coming from Washington in response to Iraq's pursuit of its nuclear technology program (about which no-one has produced evidence on ongoing attempts to weaponize it.)
Last week I was fortunate to have a short conversation with Prof. Chieko Kitagawa Otsuru, a professor of political science at Kansai University, near Osaka, Japan and a native of Hiroshima, who has been here in Washington studying the US government's decisionmaking system in matters of war-making. She talked quite a bit about the whole system of peace education that grew up in Hiroshima and elsewhere in Japan in response to the events of the 1930s and 1940s, including the US atomic bombings and fire-bombings of many Japanese cities. She reviewed how in Hiroshima, the concern for the victims of the bombing has been broadened over time to include the Korean (and the Japanese "buraku", or "untouchable") victims of the bombing, as well as the more powerful "mainstream" (i.e. non-buraku) Japanese victims.
I was familiar with some of those issues from 2000, when I visited Hiroshima. At that point, the local authorities had just moved into the main Peace Park that lies at the heart of the bomb-affected area the memorial to the Korean victims of the bombing, which previously had been kept outside the park.
Prof. Otsuru talked a little about how the victims and survivors from Nagasaki often get short shrift in remembrances of the bombings. And she talked about the pressures that have been building up in Japanese government circles to move even further away from the strictly "self-defense" aspects of the country's military forces that are mandated under its post-1945 constitution. These pressures have also, I note, come from the US, which has been eager to have the Japanese "Self-Defense" Forces play a bigger role in supporting the US deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Prof. Otsuru also put me in touch with Dr. Hiroko Takahashi, an assistant professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, who recently published a book (in Japanese) that charts the way the US occupation authorities in Japan used the population of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as, in effect, guinea pigs from which they could learn more about the physiological and biological consequences of detonating the bomb.
(I recall from my own visit to the Hiroshima Peace Museum, that they showed that the whole bombing had been planned to be, to some extent, a "human trial" experiment from the get-go, since shortly before they detonated the bomb they dropped a number of passive sensors over the city whose only function was to record the radiological events that would follow.)
Anyway, Dr. Takahashi has kindly allowed me to re-publish here on Just World News a short article she has prepared in English that summarizes the main findings of her book. She writes that most of her book was based on US government documents covering not only the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also subsequent US nuclear activities including "Operation Crossroads", a series of two atomic-bomb tests conducted on Bikini Atoll in 1946.
Here, with my thanks to her, is her article. (I have very lightly edited it. All the emphases in the text are my own. ~HC.)
By Hiroko Takahashi
In February 2008 I published a book entitled Fuin sareta Hiroshima/Nagasaki [Classified Hiroshima and Nagasaki: The U.S. Nuclear Test and Civil Defense Program] (Gaifusha, 2008).
This book reflects the research I have carried out in Hiroshima since my appointment at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, and the doctoral dissertation which was submitted to Doshisha University in 2003. For this book I drew mainly upon U.S. government Documents collected at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland U.S.
Drawing upon Manhattan Project records and contemporary newspaper articles, Chapter 1 examined the activities of the U.S. government and military regarding the collection of medical information in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and public announcements about the impact of the A-bomb during the period of the occupation of Japan.
As part of the Manhattan Project, in 1943 the U.S. government set up the “Radioactive Poisons Subcommittee,” and conducted a study on the military use of radioactive materials. A report of the subcommittee explained “the factors involved in employing radio-active materials effectively” are “Highly persistent and can contaminate an area for many months. Immediate decontamination could take place only at the sacrifice of personnel.”
Following the dropping of the A-bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese government claimed that the A-bomb was a more brutal weapon than poison gas which had been prohibited by international law.
On September 5 1945, following the start of the occupation, Wilfred Burchett’s report published in the British Daily Express stated that, "People are still dying mysteriously and horribly－people who were uninjured in the cataclysm--from an unknown something which I can describe as the atomic plague.” On the other hand, Brigadier General Thomas F. Farrell, deputy to the Head of Pacific Command Major General L.R. Groves, “denied categorically that it produced a dangerous lingering radioactivity in the ruins of the town or caused a form of poison gas at the moment of explosion.” (New York Times September 13, 1945). That is to say, he denied the existence of residual radiation which occurred one minute after the detonation of the A-bomb.
The purposes of the U.S. government in making such a statement which underestimated the influence of the A-bomb were to reject the Japanese government’s claims that the use of the A-bomb was against international law, and to make practicable the landing of occupation troops in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the other hand, the U.S. Military Joint Commission for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan and the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey collected, brought to the U.S. and classified many Atomic Bomb materials.
Chapter 2 focused on the U.S. government’s declassification policy of the A-bomb issue through the use of documents from the Manhattan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission. Before the commencement of Operation Crossroads, the U.S. nuclear test held in the Pacific in the summer of 1946, Groves recommended the publication of the Manhattan Engineer District Report, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Report, and a report written by the British Mission to Japan. However, at the same time he stated that “No authoritative statement on radiation and its effects can be made by anyone until the completion of the analysis of the available data by the Joint Medical Commission.”
After the first two Operation Crossroads tests were conducted, due to the serious contamination caused by the second test, a further test was canceled. It was recommended that “if it was desirable from a Naval standpoint to do so, that all pictures and written material be censored and edited by someone familiar with security and the technical information involved.” U.S. Navy personnel cleaned the contaminated battleships used for the test, but it was nevertheless admitted that “Immediate decontamination could take place only at the sacrifice of personnel.”
Chapter 3 discussed the Civil Defense Program of the early 1950s. The U.S. government explained how people could survive a nuclear attack by means of a “Duck and Cover” approach and ignored the issue of the impact of residual radiation.
Chapter 4 discussed the 1954 Bikini Atoll nuclear test and the subsequent Civil Defense Program, drawing upon documents from the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) and Atomic Energy Committee (AEC). Following the exposure of the Lucky Dragon crew members to fallout from a nuclear test, the dangers of fallout began to be widely understood. In 1955 the FCDA and AEC claimed that “You can survive” even the dangers from fallout through inviting civilians to a nuclear test conducted in Nevada. At the time, the AEC was still denying the existence of fallout (residual radiation) in the cases of Hiroshima and Nagasaki due to the fact that the detonation of the A-bombs had taken place at high altitude.
Chapters 1 to 4 reveal that the U.S. government consistently underestimated the influence of the radiation caused by the A-bomb and based on such public statements, constructed the Civil Defense Program.
Following the submission of this dissertation in March 2003, newspapers reported about citizens filing A-bomb disease certification class-action lawsuits against the Japanese government. I was very surprised to learn that the so-called “science” which had basically been produced by the U. S. government was still being applied in the Japanese government’s certification of A-bomb disease, which ignores the influence of residual radiation. The standards and logic produced by the “perpetrator” were still being actually applied to the “victims.”
It is clear that “data” collected from Hibakusha [the survivors of the two bombings in Japan] were being collected for the purpose of preparing for future nuclear war. On the other hand, these people's appeals were ignored in the name of “science” which did not recognize the existence of residual radiation. Sixty-three years have already passed since the dropping of the Atomic Bomb. Now it is time to “judge” this event for the sake of human beings and not for militaristic purposes. I hope that this book will contribute towards this “judgment” and eventually assist in the procurement of justice.
The more I think about this, the more outrageously-- and tragically-- improbable this appears.
Let's review the reasons:
2. NATO is the military club of the "North Atlantic"-- that is, West and Central European and non-Hispanic North American-- powers that comprise, roughly speaking, the dominant grouping within the construct of "the West". Afghanistan is far distant from the North Atlantic, geographically, culturally, politically. Just look at the length of the supply lines! Just look at the length of the cultural misinterpration possibilities!
3. NATO's Afghanistan mandate was only won from the UN as a result of a particular conjunction of circumstances in late 2001. As NATO's failure to resolve Afghanistan's escalating crisis of governance becomes ever more evident, the Security Council and whatever legitimacy-seeking portions of Afghanistan's national government remain will have to look for a new instrument of de-escalation and peacebuilding in Afghanistan. NATO, meanwhile, might lie in ruins. (Remind me, anyway, what exactly is its rationale for still being existence 17 years after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact?)
Those casualties counted there, remember, include only those that (a) were the direct result of the physical violence of armed clashes, and (b) were reported in ways that reached the national news media and/or the NGO networks. So they don't include either those killed by direct physical violence that was not reported or, even more significantly, those who died because of the indirect results of the conflict that continues in the country, including people who:
For example, this recent AFP report led with the news that "Bomb blasts killed five NATO soldiers in Afghanistan on Friday..." But it relegated to the second graf the news that "Five Afghan policemen were also killed in an overnight bomb attack... " And it left till the fourth paragraph the news that four of the killed NATO soldiers were-- oh, by the way-- also accompanied by a civilian interpreter who was also killed in the attack...
Why did they not write the lead thus: "Five NATO soldiers, five Afghan policemen, and a civilian interpreter were killed in bomb attacks Friday"? Or better still: "Six Afghans working with the security forces and five NATO soldiers were killed in bomb attacks Friday""? Anyone who is a NATO soldier has, after all, quite voluntarily taken the oath of military service under which he or she recognizes that s/he can indeed be killed in the line of duty (while s/he also has the right, under certain circumstances, to kill others while undertaking those same duties.)
Civilians have never taken such an oath. Their deaths in combat therefore have a far graver ethical weight.
Bigger point: The western media have not been giving anything like adequate coverage to the crisis of governance that's been escalating in Afghanistan under NATO's "rule" there, and to the extensive human suffering this has caused.
... Last week, the US Institute of Peace hosted a presentation by Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai, an adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai who since 2005 has served as vice chair of Afghanistan's Demobilization and Reintegration Commission. I was unable to attend that, but frequent JWN commenter Bob Spencer did get there. He filed this short report of the event.
He writes:
By the way, Stanekzai published a pretty interesting report on the dysfunctions of the present western effort in Afghanistan, back in June.
And if you want to listen to the MP3 audio of his most recent presentation, you can do so here.
The ever-diligent Badger has been reading Al Sabah, which he describes as "the Green Zone newspaper", and gives his translation (scroll down) of what today's edition says about the progress of the negotiations over the terms of a SOFA and MOU, including its assessment that this could be signed "in the coming [unspecified] period of time."
Badger does great work, digging around in the Arabic-language primary sources for all of our benefits. Just one critique, though, He describes the present Iraqi government as "the Green Zone leadership". I think this is too reductive a view of what's been going on in Baghdad. Georgraphically-- and yes, also politically-- the Maliki government has a non-trivial presence outside the Green Zone, as well as inside it.
For example, when Maliki and Talabani hosted Pres. Ahmadinejad in Baghdad, this was done not inside the GZ but, as I recall, in the substantial compound that Talabani maintains outside it. In other words, the current Iraqi political leadership is not completely under the thumb of the US military, though it may still depend on it in several important ways.
I see what's been going on in Iraq in recent months very much as a "struggle for the soul of the Maliki (et al) government", with the non- and anti-US actors in that struggle having tipped the balance in their favor.
I've been reading Tim Weiner's excellent book "Legacy of Ashes" recently. It's a very well-sourced and intensely depressing history of the CIA. It reminds us that in earlier decades, in Syria, Iran, South Vietnam, Latin America, and elsewhere, the US government would frequently overthrow other governments, including those that had been quite duly or even democratically constituted.
In Iraq, thus far, it has not done this to Maliki's government, even though Maliki has been straying further and further off the US-defined reservation. (Maintaining those lovey-dovey relations with Iran, for example.)
It is worth reflecting a little on this fact and what it says about the US's currently grossly over-stretched role in the world... Also, what it says about the nature of national power in the present world, and the fact that the "legitimacy" of international actors has become a lot more important in the current century than it was back in the 1950s, '60s, and '70s.
Here it is in today's paper. (It's also archived here.)
The headline is good (if not terribly snappy... but then, who needs snappy?): The U.N. can end these wars: It alone has enough clout to bring about peace in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the body of the piece I write:
• Is sustainably able to deliver public security and other basic services to citizens throughout the whole country, and
• Has the tools to resolve in nonviolent ways the still-unresolved and yet-to-emerge conflicts among its citizens.
Only one body can provide the leadership that's needed to defeat the insurgencies in both Iraq and – over a longer time frame – Afghanistan. That is the United Nations. Though it's far from a perfect institution, only the UN has the vital quality of worldwide legitimacy that allows it to mobilize global resources and expertise and make the tough decisions required in these two countries.
Regarding Iraq, we need to ask the UN to urgently convene two negotiating forums. One would sort out the thorny political dilemmas that remain inside the country. The other would bring together Iraq, all its neighbors, the US, and perhaps also the Arab League to agree on a plan for the drawdown – or total withdrawal – of US forces in a way that will not result in Iraq's neighbors moving in to exploit the resulting vacuum.
Americans have a similar need for a greatly increased UN leadership in Afghanistan...
Yesterday, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates issued a 'National Defense Strategy' document (PDF of the text here), that provides what Gates describes as in the Foreword as a "blueprint to succeed in the years to come."
This blueprint is based very centrally on Donald Rumsfeld's view of the US being engaged in a "Long War."
Short version: Rejoice, ye defense contractors far and near! Your gravy train continues!
The nature of the "Long War" as spelled out on pages 7-9 of the 29-page document (pp.12-14 of the PDF). It relies totally on the administration's currently favored (and operationally and ideologically quite empty) concept that our opponents can be categorized simply as "violent extremists." Here's how this "Long War:" section of the document starts:
We face a global struggle...
Noteworthy in Gates's description of the LW, however, are the following features:
1. He nowhere claims that this LW is explicitly one to be waged against Islamist extremists. This is excellent. Likewise, though he likens the LW to the US's earlier global campaigns against fascism and communism and refers to the"totalitarian ideological message of terrorist groups," nowhere does he use the terrible, hate-propagating term "Islamofascism." In general, his refusal to name the "violent extremists" as being explicitly "Islamist extremists" is a welcome move... There is, however, a sort of nudge-nudge "we all really know who we're talking about" aspect to this section. Especially when he says that the VE's are "presently led by al-Qaeda and its associates."
But if the term really is a neutral, scientific one-- that is, that the members of the VE category includes everyone who is both "violent" and "extremist" (whatever the latter term actually means)-- then should we not include in it other, non-Islamist actors like, for example, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka; the Ethiopian government that wilfully and with full US support invaded Somalia in 2006 and has maintained a brutal occupation there ever since; or those ideologically motivated Jewish settlers in the West Bank area who most certainly fit into the category of VEs? From many perspectives, could we not also include in the category the US government itself, which has certainly, over the past seven years, used the greatest amount of violence used by any actor in the international system and has done so in the name of an ideology that the majority of people around the world might well describe as "extremist"?
"Extremist" is, at the end of the day, essentially either a category chock-full of everybody you happen to disagree with, or an empty and quite meaningless category. One thing's for certain, it is nearly always a highly subjective category.
Perhaps one possible, non-subjective meaning that could be ascribed to it is that an "extremist" is an actor who refuses to sit down and negotiate his political differences with others, preferring instead to use violence. That is the only even vaguely helpful and objective definition I can think of for this term. (In which case, the qualifier "violent" becomes more or less redundant. Okay, well maybe the VEs are the ones who not only prefer to use violence over negotiation but who also do use it.
So where does that leave the US, an actor that in late 2001 and again in early 2003 wilfully and knowingly turned away from the many nonviolent means of conflict resolution available to it and instead used massive violence against its opponents?
H'mmm.
2. Gates is also, in this document, explicitly asserting the US's intention to be the world's completely dominant globo-cop, that is, to roam around the world waging "counter-insurgency" on a truly global scale.
This is how he introduces the concept of the US's "global responsibilities", right at the beginning of the document:
Answer: Never.
Back in January 2007, I wrote a few things on JWN and elsewhere about the conceptual (and also practical) difficulties of the military of a democratic nation mounting counter-insurgency -- COIN, in the jargon-- campaigns "on behalf of" the governments of other countries elsewhere. You can find some of that writing here and here.
One of the main points I was making there was that, "For a foreign power to use forceful means to affect the political outcome within any given country/society causes a direct clash with the principles of democracy, of sovereignty, and of a respect for basic human rights..."
How much greater is this clash when the intervening country proposes to do its globo-copping on a truly global scale?
After reading Gates's document I was interested in finding out how "global" the US military has already become. So I looked through my copy of the IISS's Military Balance 2008 and found out the following:
b. Just in the A's, the US has forces in eleven nation-states, from Albania to Azerbaijan.
c. In the Middle East, the US has military personnel in the following countries-- in addition to those in Iraq:
e. In 2006, the US's defense spending was $535.9 billion, easily the largest amount of any country in the world. China, with four times the US's population, spent "only" $121.9 billion on military spending in 2006 (calculated using PPP$.) Worldwide defense spending was listed as $1,297.8 billion. So our country bore ("shouldered", as per Gates?) 41.3 percent of global defense expenditures.
What is the point of all this wasteful-- and quite frequently, also actively counter-productive-- defense spending we're doing?
Now we learn! We're doing it so we can be Globo-cop!
But guess what? The other six billion of the people never once elected us to this position...
Yesterday, I went to a thought-provoking discussion at the Carnegie Endowment in which the International Crisis Group's Joost Hiltermann presented and discussed ICG's recent report on the continuing crisis of Iraq's refugees and IDPs.
Joost is a serious analyst, with considerable experience of documenting and analyzing developments in Iraq. In the presentation, he described the crisis in stark terms, noting that there are now signs of malnutrition emerging among Iraqi refugees in Syria. "We have also seen the evaporation of the Iraqi middle class," he said, "especially the civil service."
I imagine Carnegie will be posting the audio record of the event on their website sometime soon. If so, you'll be able to find it here. It isn't there yet.
Hiltermann described the political situation inside Iraq as still "very fragile." He noted, crucially, that "You cannot have any serious advance at the political level inside the country until there is a serious engagement [by the US] with Iran." He warned that if the US exits Iraq without getting internal political reconciliation in the country, the result could well be a new wave of refugees out of the country-- "But this time those seeking to flee may well be stopped at the borders [by the countries they're trying to flee to], and you would see big tent encampments emerging there at the borders."
After he spoke, Michel Gabaudan, who's the UNHCR's regional representative for the United States and the Caribbean, made a few remarks. He said that from UNHCR's perspective the treatment that the Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan have received from those host governments has improved over the past 18 months, with the numbers of detentions and deportations of refugees going down markedly in both places. "Those who should be noted for their deportations should be the European countries," he said. He added that those deported by EU countries had often been sent back to Iraq, but finding themselves unable to return to their homes they would end up as IDPs elsewhere in the country.
Gabaudan also, later, noted that some western countries-- and he singled out Germany-- had been discriminating against the Muslims among the refugees and giving preferential treatment to the Christians. He described that as a very worrying practice that could further stoke sectarian sensitivities and tensions among Iraqis.
Earlier, Joost Hiltermann had spelled out the fact that in Syria, there was a noticeable lack of sectarian tensions and sensitivities among the Iraqi refugees, though they include Iraqis from all the country's different religious groups. (In Jordan, the government has worked very hard to keep out Iraqi Shiites, though a number of them have managed to take up residence there.)
Actually, as the report itself spells out, calculating the true numbers of refugees in the countries of refuge-- especially Jordan-- has proven frustratingly difficult.
Here's what the report says about the size and duration of the problem (pp.3, 4):
Statistical variations and uncertainties aside, the number clearly is huge and represents one of the world’s largest conflict-induced displacements of people. The most significant outflow occurred after the February 2006 bombing of the al-Askari shrine in Samarra, which plunged Iraq further into a bloody blend of sectarian conflict, insurgency warfare and criminality. From then on, the number of Iraqis fleeing insecurity, violence and persecution skyrocketed. As of November 2007, over 70 per cent of the Iraqis in Syria had been there for less than a year; in Jordan, 77 per cent of Iraqis arrived between 2003 and 2007, with most coming after 2006.
That is, nowhere do they actually spell out the specific responsibility under international law of the occupying and/or UN mandatory power in Iraq for assuring conditions of public security throughout the whole country, a responsibility that the US-- which is indeed the power in question-- has quite notably and thoroughly failed to live up to. Instead, the report treats the US as, more or less, just another member of "the international community." Washington's record on dealing with the refugee crisis (though notably not its record on having caused or occasioned it) is dealt with in Chapter VII of the report, at which point the report implicitly contrasts the relative "generosity" of the US financial contribution to refugee aid with the relative parsimony of the EU and Arab countries.
The report does state, very blandly (p.32) that "Most donor countries believe the U.S. should shoulder the lion’s share of the financial burden." But it does not give the reasons that other governments adduce for this judgment-- and far less does it align the ICG in any way with that judgment.
But if US policy failings have indeed been responsible, in one way or another, for the collapse of public security in Iraq that has motivated the flight of so many millions of Iraqis from their home communities, then how can the displacement crisis be addressed unless US policies-- and indeed, the whole US role-- inside Iraq are radically changed?
Why does the ICG report say nothing about this question? Why do they spend just about all of their pages criticizing the governments of Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon, and the US-installed "government" of Iraq, without anywhere addressing the responsibility of the occupying/mandatory power?
In introducing Hiltermann, Carnegie President Jessica Mathews described the report as an exemplary piece of analysis of the complex intersection of humanitarian and political concerns. Actually, I don't think it addressed the crucial political dimension of the crisis nearly sufficiently.
Toward the end of the Q&A portion of yesterday's discussion, Joost voiced the decidedly depressing expectation that "We probably won't see any significant returns of the refugees to their homeplaces within the next ten years."
Afterwards, I went up and chatted with him a bit, and got him to confirm that that meant he did not see any significant breakthrough in the intra-Iraqi peacemaking within that time period.
I was horrified. "But Joost!" I protested, "of course there are ways to get a good, durable settlement inside Iraq in a much shorter amount of time than ten years! Look at all the work all of us have been doing providing guidelines for how that could be done. Yes, I realize it would also require a fair peacemaking process in which all of Iraq's neighbors could be involved, including Iran, and Syria, and Saudi Arabia, but that is possible too."
"Yes," he said. "Maybe we could see how it could be done. But I don't see the political will to do it."
Well, maybe it's true that we don't yet have the political will-- primarily, here in the US, but also elsewhere-- to do what needs to be done to allow for real reconciliation and conflict termination within and around Iraq. But I think we should still all work really hard for that outcome. Political currents can change, and can change fairly rapidly in the present era.
Maybe I'm just an optimist by nature. But I do strongly sense that the tide here in the US has been turning pretty rapidly toward significantly decreasing the amount of control our country seeks to hang onto in Iraq. This is a great shift in the right direction. So let's try to push it as far and as fast as it will go. Ten more years of chaos and fratricidal conflict inside Iraq, and ten more years of the massive displacement of so many millions of Iraqis from their homes, is a situation quite too horrible to contemplate.