It was not quite Saul the tax-collector on the road to Damascus but it was almost like that. Ehud Olmert, still nominally in office as Israel's PM but leaving very soon, told Yediot Aharonot that:
2. The withdrawal would also have to include just about all of East Jerusalem, though with "special solutions" for the holy sites; and
3. Israeli threats to attack Iran represent "megalomania" and a loss of "sense of proportion" about its own power.
In Haaretz today, Aluf Benn dismisses Olmert's statement as "too little, too late." Personally, I don't think it's too little. I think on every point he showed real insight and courage. (Except perhaps when he said Syria would have to cut all its ties to Iran, Hamas, and Hizbullah as part of a peace agreement.)
But to say the things he said about Israel's "megalomania" regarding its own powers and its ability to deal with the Iranian challenge alone? That was even more significant than what he said about the peace process with the Palestinians.
Here in the US, there are numerous people in the Jewish community who are doveish on the peace process but very hawkish on Iran. I wish they could say things about Israel and Iran similar to what Olmert said.
Benn was quite right in noting that, if Olmert sincerely holds the beliefs that he now-- right at the end of a 30-month term as PM-- espouses, and if he has held them for a whole now (which is a reasonable assumption)... then why did he take so many decisions and actions while he was in power that undermined the policies he now espouses?
Especially regarding the implantation of additional tens of thousands of new Israeli settlers into the West Bank.
Benn writes:
... Anyway, it is now ways too late for Olmert to have any hope of implementing the kind of policy toward the Palestinians that he describes in the interview. His successor has already been chosen: Tzipi Livni. And Israel is in an inter-regnum period that may last some months as she works to assemble her new governing coalition.
But during the inter-regnum, Olmert does remain in power. It is significantly reassuring to me that for the few months ahead the reins of power in Israel are held by someone who looks prepared to withstand the kinds of pressures that others might put on him, to launch an Israeli military strike against Iran.
But as Aluf Benn says, it's actions not words that count. So let's hope that Olmert sticks to-- and continues to argue in public for-- the policy of restraint toward Iran that his recent words represented.
... by Bush's little address this morning. As I wrote last night, he still doesn't seem remotely as if he has a handle on the broad social, political, economic, and geostrategic issues involved in dealing with the current crisis.
We need a clear alternative view of how the country should proceed. No more pandering to big bankers! Yes to the kinds of policies I was addressing in last night's post.
I hope Obama gets on the airwaves and starts describing a vision something like this in simple and compelling terms. Otherwise, what with all the fear that the crisis (and Paulson and McCain) have generated throughout the country, we could have an upsurge of narrow jingoism and mean-spiritedness in the coming weeks.
By the way, go to this new blog "5 reasons why I'm voting for Obama-Biden", to see my five reasons.
Steve Clemons tells us that Bush will make a public pronouncement about the financial crisis at 7:45 a.m. EST Tuesday. This is not a reassuring prospect. When he made his last such pronouncement, it was decidedly not reassuring.
My strong guess is that Bush doesn't actually know enough about the way financial markets and the rest of the economy works to be able to have an opinion on what ought to be done, and that he's subcontracted the entire handling of the current crisis to Treasury Secretary Paulson. Just as he subcontracted the handling of the nation's security affairs for many years to Dick Cheney. But now Paulson's bailout plan is in deep political trouble. It needs presidential leadership. But how can the president decide what's the best thing to do if he doesn't even understand the basics of how the financial system works? How can he judge the technical aspects-- or the political aspects-- of Paulson's proposal? Who else does he talk with or listen to about these matters?
For a while now, the country's sometimes deadly serious jester-in-chief, Jon Stewart, has been gently mocking Bush's lame-duck status by referring to him as "Still-President Bush." But I think Jon has it wrong. It seems to me that Bush has barely been a participant at all in all the negotiations and deliberations over the response to Wall Street's crisis. Last Wednesday, he seemed completely out of it. I wrote the next morning, "His face was puffy, his hair a little bushy and ill-kempt, his expression that of a scared rabbit, his affect wooden... "
Paulson, Bernanke, and the Democratic leadership in Congress have been doing all the heavy lifting on trying to fashion and win support for the bailout. The politics of this have been bizarre in the extreme-- until you remember what generous donations the big financial houses have all been making over the years to the Dems' political campaigns, as well as the GOP's. There was also, of course, McCain's completely over-dramatized and unhelpful attempt to inject campaign politics into the whole decision-making process...
We should be clear that the gargantuan amounts of money the country has poured into waging the two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have been a big motor for the current crisis. Firstly, in themselves. Chalmers Johnson helpfully reminded us today that last week, the Congress passed by a huge majority a "$612 billion defense authorization bill for 2009 without a murmur of public protest or any meaningful press comment at all." He notes that though "only" $68.6 billion of this is expressly to fight the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the year's-end price tabs for those two wars will be much higher, as the administration continues its practice of winning huge "supplemental" appropriations for them during the course of the year.
These defense expenses are, of course, ones that recur annually... So each year it's like the equivalent of passing an entire Wall Street bailout plan.
Johnson describes the whole defense budget as "pure waste." I would say there are some portions of it that serve a useful purpose. But there are other, even greater portions that are either just useless or even actively counter-productive. For example, the stepped-up military actions in Afghanistan over the past year has been accompanied by a greater collapse of security there, the resurgence of the Taleban, and an apparently great increase in the number of Afghans who have been deeply angered by actions like the aerial bombardment of people accused-- often with little or no evidence-- of being "terrorists."
Also, the way Bush sought to fight these wars, from the very beginning, was in a way that imposed no immediate financial burden on the US citizenry. Every previous war the US has fought has been funded mainly through increased taxation. But Bush and Cheney didn't want to do that. They wanted US citizens to keep as much of their money as possible so they could continue spending, spending, spending-- and perhaps so they'd never even really notice that two wars were being fought in their (our) name in two distant countries.
So these wars have been financed purely through borrowing. Hence the national debt, which was on its way to being erased at the end of the Clinton presidency, is now headed up toward $10 trillion. You better believe that these two war-linked phenomena of the government being badly indebted (including to a number of foreign creditors) and the US public having been encouraged to go out and spend, spend, spend have both contributed mightily to the current financial crisis.
Bush's extremely ambitious project to remake the whole world (or important parts of it) in America's image has proved to be an expensive and damaging fiasco. It was a project that was prefigured in the earlier writings of the neocons who determined so much of his foreign policy for him. Their big project was for a "New American Century." However, in a twist of history, the very success the neocons had in storming the citadels of power and seizing important portions of the reins of government into their own hands led to the waging of these two wars and other acts of unilateralist arrogance around the world...that ended up ensuring that the "New American Century" would end 93 years early.
Personally, I strongly doubt that a whole new "American century" was ever possible... At some point over the decades ahead, the US would almost certainly, neocons or no neocons, have lost the pre-eminent "Uber-power" role it has played in global affairs since 1945. But the raw graspiness and arrogance that the neocons showed on the world stage certainly hastened the end of the NAC.
So now, as I started writing a bit last week, we need to Re-imagine a future for America that is very different from the triumphalist kind of place the neocons imagined and tried to bring into being.
I see Steve Clemons has started doing a bit of this re-imagining, too. He blogged today that, "America will have no choice but to add to its cumulative debt -- and to invest in itself, particularly national infrastructure -- as a way to keep Americans working and to stimulate important parts of the near and long term real economy." ...Which was just about exactly what I was writing last week, too.
A more modest, down-to-earth, and caring America-- and one with much better physical and social infrastructure than we have here today. Now that is a project worth working for.
And along the way, we need to shed some of the very bad habits we've picked up over past decades. Habits like these:
2. Subverting the idea of a "level playing field" in global trade by giving $250 billion annually in subsidies to US agricultural producers, primarily those associated with Big Ag.
3. Allowing a quite anti-democratic perversion of public life by allowing money to play a massive role in politics. REal campaign funding limits-- opr the public funding of political campaigns-- need to be enacted now. Otherwise actors like Big Ag, the military-industrial complex, and the truly Frankensteinian "financial services sector" will all simply continue buying legislators and hog-tieing the country's democratic processes in that way.
Virgil Goode, the hard-right GOP candidate in my own district's congressional race has come out with a television ad that literally tries to "smear" Democratic candidate Tom Perriello as being dark-complected and wearing a bushy full beard. (HT Satyam at Think Progress.)
What kind of deep-held, atavistic fears of "the negro men rising up against the whites" is Goode playing to here?
Tom Perriello as Nat Turner, anyone?
Turner was a deeply religious (Christian, Baptist) man who organized a violent uprising of Virginia's enslaved negroes in 1831. Even earlier than that, though, white Virginia slaveowner Thomas Jefferson penned numerous warnings about the possibility of the enslaved people-- who in many parts of the state decisively outnumbered the whites-- rising up against their "masters." Those fears of the autonomous, untrammelled activity of Americans of African origin may have sprung in some part from the slaveowners' guilt. But they still run deep in the psyches of some white southerners today.
For what it's worth, Tom Perrillo is a light-skinned man of Italian heritage.
Virgil Goode should be ashamed of himself.
(But does this mean he's running a bit scared of losing what until recently looked like a fairly safe seat?)
LSE's Willem Buiter today looks at the fi-cri in a comparative way, comparing the financial stabilization effort underway in the US with that in Europe's Benelux region (Belgium, Netherlands, Luxemburg.) He concludes:
Paul Krugman is (cautiously) for it, writing:
For my part, I am very "troubled" about the name of the plan and what it connotes. It is not the "Troubled (or Toxic) Assets" that need "Relief". It is the economy as a whole and all the hard-working people who participate in it that need relief from the current strangulation of the credit markets and the very real threat of Depression.
What the Toxic Assets themselves need, by contrast, is radical restructuring and re-regulating. I call this my "Three R's program."
And what the present holders of the toxic assets need is discipline. Not the alleged "discipline" of the market, either; but the discipline and accountability of a legislated scheme to regulate the financial markets that has been publicly deliberated and adopted, and is well understood and well implemented. Enough with all these wild Ponzi schemes and dodgy financial "instruments" that have proliferated just about incomprehensibly in the barely regulated financial markets of the past nine-ten years.
As for the TARP-- the idea of this extremely expensive bailout being discussed in Washington is that it should be extensive enough to protect the whole of the financial from further corrosion of its claimed "value." No-one is sure if the $700 billion TARP is actually big enough to do this. To my view, the only value of any such bailout plan (if one is indeed needed) is that it should prevent total corrosion/meltdown of the financial system just for long enough to allow the Three Rs program to be carried out on the financial assets that it protects.
What is material wealth for, after all?
If it is good for anything, it should surely be used to allow all of humanity (or, in a more restricted sense, all members of a single national community) to have the basic underpinnings of human flourishing. That, after all, is the way to "buy" a decent sense of security, wellbeing, and hopefulness for all of us.
Meantime, Buiter's comment about the dysfunctionality (in British English, disfunctionality) of the US political system at this time of crisis is certainly right on the mark.
(Update, 10:55 a.m.: Kudos to Rep Marcy Kaptur (Dem-Ohio) for her proposal for a Wall Street Reckoning project to replace the TARP bail-out proposal. (HT: Juan Cole.) Kaptur calls for a "modernized Glass-Steagall Act" to re-regulate the US banking sector. Glass-Steagall was the landmark 1933 legislation that established the FDIC. It was repealed in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999. Sen. Phil Gramm is a close ally of John McCain's and has been tipped to become Secretary of the Treasury if McCain wins the election.)
So it looks as if the Democratic Party leaders in Congress finally get it about the interdependence of the United States with the other six billion people of the world, and about the counter-productive nature of a policy of escalation, confrontation, and possible war?
That's how it seems from this report by Nicholas Kralev in today's Washington Times, who writes that
The resolution in question, House Concurrent Resolution 362, has been very heavily pushed by AIPAC, the mammoth-sized pro-Israel lobby in Washington DC. They no doubt hoped they could ram it through Congress in the period when members are maximally concerned about fund-raising and accusations of "being soft on Iran" in the run-up to the election.
Kralev notes,
Howard L. Berman, California Democrat and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said he has concerns about the current text and will not bring it before the committee until those issues are addressed. That, in effect, blocks the document from reaching the floor.
But then, we all made the point that with this administration, if congress gives them an inch in terms of escalating tensions with another country, quite likely Bush will end up taking a couple hundred miles... And with the military as overstretched as it now is, and in the current global economic climate, do we really want to start yet another war, this time against Iran?
Over the summer, persistent lobbying by the peace movement managed to peel five of the bill's original co-sponsor's off that roster. Now Berman and his colleagues have definitively closed down the possibility of AIPAC getting the bill considered and voted on before the election. (After which, it will almost certainly die because of its own considerable demerits.)
I am so glad the congressional leaders finally connected these dots... between their responsibilities as lawmakers and the belligerent and near-criminal irresponsibility of the administration... between a rise in tensions in the Middle East and the probability of further huge blows to the world's economic system (not to mention the US military)... between the global image of the US as a unilateralist, ill-governed bully on the world stage and the fact that right now, like Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, our country is dependent on the goodwill of others.
There are signs of intelligent life in Washington! Praise the Lord!
(And maybe we should all send thank-you notes to Howard Berman.)
So Bush and Paulson failed in their attempt to conclude a deal with the congressional leaders yesterday on the proposed financial bailout. And it was their fellow Republicans in Congress, egged on by a grandstanding John McCain, who stymied the plan. Today, the negotiations resume.
My judgment is that Obama came out of the events of the past two days looking a lot better than than McCain. (Sorry that in an earlier version I put that the wrong way round. I'm working on a very small screen here) Here's the NYT's account of yesterday's White House emergency summit. It was McCain who'd injected campaign politics into the negotiations by insisting that both he and Obama should be at the table-- but then he came out looking like a childish drama queen and spoiler, while Obama came out looking much more statesmanlike.
That political judgment is quite independent of the actual content of the plan, which still looks like a pig however much lipstick they daub onto it. This is a good round-up of the views of many academic economists. Calculated Risk pulled out some money quotes, as follows:
... "The root of the issue is recapitalizing banks," said Glenn Hubbard, dean of Columbia Business School and a former chairman of President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. "That could be done more efficiently through the government injection of preferred equity. Then the market could figure out the prices of the assets."
But the problem of confidence goes much further than just between one financial institution and another. There is a much deeper crisis of confidence in the US financial and economic system as a whole-- one that is made a lot worse by the fact that the regulatory structure underlying the financial part of the economy has been so badly eroded that we've arrived at a point almost of "anything goes", and certainly, one of great unpredictability.
The crisis of confidence now infects the whole of the US's governance system, regarding this issue and perhaps other issues, too. From that perspective, having John McCain rushing around like drama queen makes the problem worse. But it is already bad enough.
What an amazing week. To see Bush apparently handing over control of the economy to a cabinet member, said cabinet member coming in with a massive blackmail demand against taxpayers, the congressional Democrats dancing to the tune of the big bankers, the congressional Republicans and McCain working hard to demagogue the issue, the economy heading south, and the US's international reputation plunging even more rapidly... And all this, while the Chinese are doing their first space walk, and Russia has stuck a nail in the coffin of Bush's lengthy campaign of coercive diplomacy against Iran...
And we haven't even seen Friday's news yet.
Yesterday evening I was one of about 250 participants in an interfaith iftar (fast-breaking dinner) and conversation hosted here in New York by the Iranian mission to the UN. The guest (and speaker) of honor was Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Other speakers included a number of US religious leaders from different faiths, the President of the UN General Assembly, Nicaragua's Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, and Norway's former prime minister Kjell-Magne Bondevik. Both these latter spoke about the very deeply felt religious motivations for their engagement in public life.
I found Ahmadinejad much more impressive as an orator than I had expected. In t.v. clips he often looks a little ranty. But in life, it turned out he has a commanding rhetorical style. He has a much deeper voice than I'd expected, and used it with evident expertise regarding timing, modulation, and other aspects of oration. He spoke in Farsi, only occasionally looking down at notes. I suspect it was a speech he had delivered a number of times before in different settings?
Unfortunately the simultaneous interpretation was not great; but I imagine we non-Farsi speakers received a fair idea of the main points of what he said.
The format of the event was strange, and shifted a number of times as the evening progressed. The "main event" was set up as a panel discussion with five participants. The moderator said at the beginning that he would have a little bell he'd ring to keep each main speaker to seven minutes. And he promised there'd be time for questions from the floor afterwards.
So the first four speakers (and D'Escoto) all spoke their seven-minutes' worth first. They made some very good points. Then Ahmadinejad spoke-- for around 40 minutes.
But what, really, could one have expected? That he'd be "just another panelist", speaking alongside the others? He is, after all, the President of a country...
And there was no time for questions.
Among the points raised by the four preceding panelists were their concerns about Iran's human rights situation; about the non-transparency of Iran's nuclear technology program; and about Ahmadinejad's fierce opposition to Israel's continued existence as a Jewish state and his denials of the broadly accepted facts about Hitler's Holocaust. These panelists all, also, issued impassioned pleas for the United States' differences with Iran to be resolved through peaceful means.
In his speech, Ahmadinejad pushed back forcefully on all the points of criticism the earlier speakers had raised. He said that citizens from the country that had invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, had supported Israel's attacks against Lebanon and the Palestinians, and had been responsible for so many rights abuses in Iraq, Aghanistan and Guantanamo were in a poor situation to speak about Iranian rights abuses. (But besides, there weren't any.) He said that citizens of a country that has a huge nuclear arsenal, some of which is close to Iran and pointed at it, are in a poor situation to say anything about Iran's nuclear program, which "as we all know" is for solely scientific and peaceful purposes. He did not mention the Holocaust directly. But he did say that during World War 2 some 60 million people lost their lives (or he might have said 20 million? Unclear.) ... And that the perpetrators responsible for all that killing had been Europeans-- yet it had been the Palestinians who were forced to pay the price.
On Palestine, he talked at some length about the "Zionist occupation" of Palestine as having lasted for more than 60 years, and inflicting terrible harm on the Palestinians. He argued that at and after the creation of Israel five million Palestinians were displaced (a huge exaggeration of their numbers then, but less than the number of Palestinian refugees today)-- along with one million Jews, presumably those from the Arab countries.
While expressing strong support for Judaism as a faith, he said that Zionism has nothing to do with Judaism and transgresses against it.
He spoke in a consistently religiously-based vein, lacing his speech with comments about "What would the Prophets have done if... ?" and expressing a lot of support for the world's poor, hungry, and displaced. He also took the opportunity to accuse the US of being motivated by greed and indifference to the sufferings of others in Africa, the Middle East, or elsewhere. His religious views seemed to include considerable millennialism, but cast in a sort of interfaith vein: he seemed to be referring not only to the possibly imminent return of a Mahdi-like figure but also to that of a Christ-like figure. (I wish the interpretation had been clearer.)
At the end, there was no time for questions. Mary-Ellen McNish, the Executive Secretary of the American Friends Service Committee, presented Ahmadinejad with a reproduction of a famous painting by a 19th century artist, Edward Hicks, representing "the lion lying down with the lamb" and a bunch of other peaceable animals lying around, too. Then he left to catch his plane back home.
While he's been in New York for the General Assembly this year, he has met with large numbers of different groups of people, including an MSM journalists' group, yesterday morning.
McNish and some other Quakers, including Joe Volk, the head of the Friends Committee for National Legislation, have been among the faith group leaders in this country who have been participating in interfaith dialogue with Ahmadinejad and other Iranian regime figures for two or three years now. I haven't talked with any of them since last night's event, but I imagine some of them may be feeling that it's a pretty long, slow process to get beyond the "opening statements." But still, having these dialogues, and hanging in with them, is so much better than not having them-- especially given how loudly the drums of an anti-Iranian war continue to beat in this country. Also, many of the points Ahmadinejad made about US policies have considerable validity. No-one should judge a situation of gross double standards on issues like human rights or WMDs to be fair or acceptable.
I was interested, too, to see both the fact and the nature of the engagement in the event by D'Escoto and Bondevik. D'Escoto spoke with huge passion about the need for human equality and caring for all of God's children in all countries, of all faiths. I think it's great to have a person with such views and such commitment steering the work of the General Assembly. (Ah, but how about the much more elitist and powerful Security Council? That would be even better!)
It has been evident for several years now to people who watch the Palestinian situation closely that this strange bird the Middle East 'Quartet' that was tasked in 2002 with midwifing a speedy peace between Palestinians and Israelis and improving the lives of the Palestinians has failed. Miserably.
Now, a coalition of 21 western and international aid agencies that work in the Occupied Palestinian Territories has issued a stinging report that confirms that conclusion.
This matters.
During the six years the Quartet has existed, Israel's implantation into the West Bank of colonial settlers and the completely segregated infrastructure that supports them has continued, and even in the past year accelerated. The Palestinians have continued to live lives tightly circumscribed by fences, repressive regulations, widespread arrest campaigns,and economic strangulation. A peace agreement is nowhere in sight.
I have always thought the Quartet was quite inappropriately constituted. It unites, under the explicit "leadership" of the US government, the government of Russia, the European Union-- and the United Nations itself. It is a complete distortion of the relationship between the US and the UN to imagine that the UN, which represents the interests of all of humanity, should in any matter be actually subordinated to the supervision of the US government, which "represents" the interests of less than five percent of humanity.
That subordination needs to be ended by the Security Council.
So the US has a veto in the Security Council, and might be expected to use it in such a vote, just as it has used it so many times in the past to block international efforts to protect Palestinian rights?
Let it try.
The world is changing. If the US wields a veto to keep the UN in subordination to itself over this vital issue in world affairs, the consequences would likely be enormous.
Nobody elected Hank Paulson. Prior to being named US Treasury Secretary in March 2006, he was the CEO of Goldman Sachs, so his credibility as someone who has the interest of the whole citizenry first and foremost in his mind is not necessarily high. We did, however, elect George W. Bush to be President, back in 2004. He is the one who has to be held responsible for the actions of all members of his administration, who answer to him. That certainly includes Hank Paulson.
So if the country's financial system is in such a dire situation that it will take $700 billion of taxpayers' money to sort it out, shouldn't it have been the president who told us about that last Friday, at the point when the bailout decision was first announced?
Instead of which, Pres. Bush waited until last night-- a full five days later-- to make any public statements at all about the crisis and the bailout proposal.
I watched his performance on the t.v. last night, and found it terrifying.
If he was trying to "reassure" the markets and the citizenry, I cannot imagine that he succeeded in doing that.
I think Gail Collins was quite right to note this morning that that Bush was,
There is, in a way, a kind of talent required to tell the nation that it’s teetering on the brink of disaster in a way that makes the viewers’ attention wander. Bush’s explanation about how the rescue bill would unclog the lines of credit made the whole thing sound less important than a Liquid-Plumr commercial.
And Bush has an MBA from Harvard? (And has been in charge of our country's economy for nearly eight years, already?)
But it was even worse than that. His face was puffy, his hair a little bushy and ill-kempt, his expression that of a scared rabbit, his affect wooden. He looked as if he'd been having a rough day-- or a rough week.
Understandable, perhaps. But he is the person whom, for better or worse, we elected to be the one to take charge of the administrative charge in crises like the present one. And he campaigned hard for the job, two times. So he has to take the responsibility.
And now, we're in the middle of the election for his successor...
I have to say, first, that I think it's completely inappropriate for any presidential candidate to be injecting himself (and thereby, the whole business of election-campaign politics) into the present situation of crisis-time economic governance. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama has any responsibility under the law for dealing with the current crisis that is any greateer than that of any of the other 98 US senators. They are not the leaders of-- or even, as far as I know, members of-- any of the relevant Senate committees. Yes, they need to be kept informed of what's going on in the negotiations in Washington (which are reported to be nearing completion.) But they are not members of the current congressional leadership. It is that leadership, the leadership of the administrative branch, and the heads of the Federal reserve and SEC who between them need to reach agreement on the size, terms, and modalities of the bailout package.
McCain's rushing around acting as though he is currently the "leader" of something is childish at best, an active distraction at worst.
Reminds of a certain young member of our family... someone I'll refer to only as A... who on one occasion when we came back from a family outing to discover raw sewage welling up into the finished basement of the house started rushing around with a face mask and wellington boots on, shouting "Nobody panic! It's all under control!" ... while the rest of us more quietly set about shoveling out the muck, calling the plumber and the water department, and generally cleaning up.
Actually, that was pretty funny both at the time and in retrospect. McCain's behavior is definitely not funny.
And neither has Bush's been on this crisis, so far. It seemed for the first five days after last Friday as if it was Hank Paulson calling the shots. Bush was almost completely MIA on the issue.
Reassuring, as an example of Constitution-based good governance of the country at a time of crisis?
I think not. Shades of 9/11 and the "Pet Goat", or of Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina (which famously included taking a bunch of time out to present a birthday cake to John McCain.)
And then, when the Hidden Imam of the White House finally did appear last night, his performance was, as noted, distinctly unreassuring, in style and in content.,
Steve Clemons blogged, quite rightly, that Bush's performance,
What is shocking about the presentation by Bush -- and the deal that is unfolding is that we don't see any acceptance of responsibility for the failure of his team's stewardship of the economy...
We didn't hear Bush say that it's time to reverse the tax cuts that he put in place to help those who have already benefited from the perverse finance and housing bubble that was pumped up.
We didn't hear a firm commitment from Bush to help the working families who hold these sub-prime and adjustable rate mortgages to stay in their homes and to help stabilize the lives of hard-hit Americans, their neighborhoods and their jobs. All the while, the macro players and big firms and their stakeholders are bailed out...
The big international players in the global economy don't seem reassured by Washington's performance on the crisis so far, either. That matters a lot, given the deep interconnections between the US and the rest-of-the-world's economies.
Steven Mufson and Anthony Faiola wrote in the WaPo today,
Senior U.S. officials, notably Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., have in recent days urged the leaders of other industrialized countries to help prop the global financial system. But the appeals have fallen short...
He wrote,
Peer Steinbrück, the German finance minister, countered in a speech in Berlin that the conditions that gave rise to the current turmoil in the markets were allowed to develop because of a reckless pursuit of short-term profit and huge bonuses in “Anglo-Saxon” financial centers — along with a lack of political backbone to stand up to what he characterized as bankers’ greed.
“Investment bankers and politicians in New York, Washington and London were not willing to give these up,” he said. “The financial market crisis is above all an American problem”
The long-term consequences, Mr. Steinbrück added, could be serious for the United States. “The U.S. will lose its status as the superpower of the world financial system,” he told the Bundestag. “The world financial system will become multipolar.”
The Wall Street Journal published a much broader article today (p.A3, behind their paywall), in which it looked at the reaction in numerous foreign capitals to the US financial crisis so far. The bottom line of the reporters who reported that one from Beijing, Berlin, and Seoul: "The troubles of the past several weeks seem to have done more than any downturn in recent decades to sow doubt about the U.S. approach."
I'll say.
There are signs that some influential US bankers and financiers are playing a greedy and self-centered game of, essentially, blackmailing the rest of the citizenry (and everyone else with an interest in the integrity of the US financial system) with their-- the bankers'-- non-cooperation in the bailout unless they continue to be able to lead their self-centered and completely irresponsible lifestyle and continue to be able to exercize their accustomed level of untramelled control over vast portions of the world economy and financial system...
See e.g. this quote from Bloomberg today (HT: Calculated Risk):
That type of ``loss participation'' proposal would endanger companies' ability to raise private capital afterwards, Jeffrey Rosenberg, head of credit strategy research at Bank of America Corp. in New York, wrote in a report yesterday.
Paulson and Bernanke tried to ram their "no equity, no restrictions" plan through Congress early week without any further deliberation, discussion, or changes. Perhaps they and their financier friends were counting on two things to succeed at this: (1) Fear, and (2) The lovey-dovey relationships the banking world has built up with all the members of the relevant congressional oversight committess over the years, greased by often massive campaign contributions.
So far, the US Congress has dug in its heels and resisted the strong railroading blackmail/pressure being exerted on it by the Bush administration and the "community" of uber-rich (and right now, spectacularly unsuccessful) bankers and financiers in this country. This, in parallel with the resistance to the administration's plans that has been exhibited in recent weeks by the (actually, US-constituted) government in Iraq...
It seems the Bushists' ability to cow and intimidate their opponents has waned considerably?
We still, quite evidently, need a financial bailout/reform/restructuring plan. But let it be one that is fair to all stakeholders, including at the head of the queue the US citizens who're being asked to sign on to the whole of the costs involved.
Oops. Maybe trying to ram this legislation through in the pre-election period wasn't such a smart idea for the Bush administration people after all?
(Publishing note: I am writing this on an extremely slow internet connection, as provided by my hosts here in Lewes, Delaware. I'm a little web-deprived right now, but I'll be back at a good connection in NYC by Thursday afternoon. Expect resumption of normal JWN posting at that point. In the mean-time, for updates on the global implications of the US financial crisis, read Calculated, Moon, Krugman, etc.)
...were earned for what? John Gapper of the FT has done some digging around, and found that in the period before Paulson quit being GS's CEO to become US Treasury Secretary in May 2006, he was busy slicin', dicin', and repackagin' those old mortgage-backed securities along with the rest of them.
Gapper found that GS's regulatory filing for the first quarter of 2006 reported that,
Well, I guess that for "Hank" Paulson, as everyone seems very chummily to refer to him, where you stand really does depend on where you sit.
Because yesterday, he was all over the airwaves denouncing as "irresponsible" the way in which the big banks and financial houses had been slicing' and dicin' all those worthless pieces of mortgage-paper junk.
Gapper also recalls that GS gave Paulson a performance bonus of $18.7 million for the first half of 2006.
Intriguing to see even such a dedicated free-marketer as John Gapper wondering in public whether,
I see John McCain today said during a campaign stop that "The senior executives of any firm that is bailed out by Treasury should not be making more than the highest paid government official."
Not a bad principle, at all.
No comment from Washington yet about Chinese President Hu Jintao's explicit linking of help for the financial crisis to the question of Taiwan. However, Treasury Secretary Paulson and Fed chief Bernanke did engage this morning in somewhat public international consultations on the crisis with their counterparts from "Group of Seven" industrial nations.
This is interesting from a couple of perspectives. The "G7" is a quite idiosyncratically composed (and completely unaccountable) grouping of what are described as "the world's leading industrial countries." Until recently, it was known as the "G8", but there was a proposal to kick Russia out because of the Georgia conflict; and it looks as if that has happened already.
But whether 7 or 8, this "G" grouping notably doesn't include China-- though it does include Japan, the US's other mega-creditor on the international scene.
Today's statement about the actions the various G members have taken has the air of a slightly self-congratulatory group hug:
China's President Hu Jintao has now explicitly linked his country's readiness to show good cooperation in resolving the US financial crisis to the question of Taiwan.
Beijing's official Xinhua news agency reported today that Hu and Pres. Bush conferred thusly about the crisis yesterday evening (Washington time):
Hu [said he] hoped the measures would soon take effect and lead to a gradual recovery of the financial market, which he said not only serves the interests of the United States, but also those of China, and benefits the stability of the world financial market and the sound development of the world economy.
... He said China is ready to work with the U.S. side to intensify dialogue, exchanges and cooperation, and properly handle issues concerning mutual interests and of major concern, particularly the Taiwan question, in a bid to push forward the sustained and steady development of the Sino-U.S. constructive and cooperative ties.
I see no mention of this crucial phone call at the White House's website. I wonder why not? All the WH has on the financial crisis today is this extremely contentless little statement.
On Saturday, I noted that China's current investment in/exposure to the US markets includes around $900 billion held in T-bills and Fannie and Freddie stock. They also have substantial holdings in privately owned US financial entities.
Over at Bernhard's blog, I commented that:
But these things will not happen overnight. After the UK's big end-of-empire overstretch (Suez, 1956) was "called" by Eisenhower the Brits, French and Israelis withdrew from Sinai fairly rapidly but it took a further 14 years for Britain to wind down its permanent naval presence "East of Suez." This time, it might happen somewhat faster, but the inter-great-power readjustment of security forces and obligations in East Asia will probably still take the best part of a decade?
I can understand, certainly, the very reasonable fears and concerns of US citizens worried about losing "control" of big portions of the country's economy to non-Americans who are not accountable to them in any way.
On the other hand, for decades now, the making of US national economic policy has been in the hands of shady and irresponsible financial institutions and the many legislators they've kept handily on their payroll, who have abandoned many or most of their obligations to remain accountable to the citizenry. So the change wouldn't be as big as it might seem, anyway?
But as the bailout proposals get discussed in Congress this week, we need to see an outpouring of concern from Americans for the interests of the most vulnerable people who will be affected by the continuing economic downturn, both at home and abroad. As I wrote here recently, we really do have a chance to "Re-imagine America" at this time. But none of that will happen if our legislators aren't kept strictly to the path of putting the people's interests first, well before those of the Wall Street speculators who got the American (and world) financial systems into this mess in the first place.
Ehud Olmert has been an ineffectual lame duck in Israeli politics for over two years now. It's possible many people have forgotten that he is still, actually, the country's prime minister.
But he presented his resignation today, four days after his protege Tzipi Livni won the internal Likud Kadima contest for the party's leadership.
Livni now has 42 days to wrangle enough of Israel's other parties into a coalition that the coalition can be stable. That will take us to just before the US elections. Right now, Israel's internal politics look provincial and not terribly important. The country doesn't have a functioning, nationally significant pro-peace or pro-withdrawal party. The only choices are between Olmert and Livni's Kadima Party, a center-right party that loves to engage in endless, just-for-show, negotiations with Washington tame "Palestinian" interlocutors (led by still-President Abbas) that are as unserious as they are unprincipled, and Likud, which is more plainspoken and doesn't even bother about putting on that show.
The main significance Israeli politics might have for world politics in the coming weeks is if, as function of the country's internal political wrangling, Olmert and/or Livni should decide they want to "look tough" and launch some kind of disastrous military adventure against Iran.
Still-President Bush should get both of them on the phone and tell them absolutely No Way!
Paulson and Bernanke seem to be asking the US Congress to agree to the $500-1,000 billion bailout of Wall Street within the next week, before their regularly scheduled session adjourns.
I hope our lawmakers remember the horrendous consequences that flowed from the equally momentous decision-- the enabling resolution for the war against Iraq-- that they were railroaded into, also from a sense of very imminent fear, back in October 2002, and that this time around they refuse to be similarly hurried into enacting very far-reaching and potentially extremely damaging legislation just before yet another national election.
There are a number of huge questions about the Paulson/Bernanke proposal that need to be answered before legislators make a firm move on the subject. If the lawmakers need more time, they should take it. The country's big outside creditors are all so deeply invested in (exposed within) the US financial sector that they-- like us, the US taxpaying public-- need Congress to get it right, rather than acting in haste.
We elected these legislators to have oversight over the national budget and that is what, right now and for as long as it takes, they need to do.
I realize there's an election looming. That consideration will have to take second place for the legislators until they have dealt properly and responsibly with this crisis. Paul Krugman has raised many questions about the bailout plan as reported so far. They are well expressed here.
Bernhard of MoA has an even broader set of critiques, expressed here. He proposes the following far-reaching plan to address the whole broad, house-of-cards dimensions of the crisis:
Lawmakers, get this right! Make it fair to the whole national community. Make it sustainable and workable. And above all, don't get hustled by the fearmongers.
Did you know that China has over $900 billion of exposure/investment in US Treasury bills and in debt issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac-- and that the Chinese government has therefore (quite understandably) been exerting its influence in Washington and elsewhere to prevent the US financial system tumbling completely off the cliff of insolvency?
You might never know that fact if you read only the mainstream media in the US, which have been dominated by highly Americo-centric stories about the anguished interplay among the big players in the US government and economy.
But an article buried deep within today's WaPo tells us this:
... China ... is estimated to hold a fifth of its currency reserves -- as much as $400 billion -- in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debt. In addition, its banks have billions of dollars worth of exposure to the American International Group, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and other companies in crisis. The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, for example, has $151 million in bonds issued or linked to Lehman; China Merchants Bank has $70 million of Lehman bonds; and the Bank of China has $75.62 million of Lehman bonds.
Today's WaPo piece is by Blaine Harden, reporting from Tokyo, and Ariana Eunjung Cha, reporting from Shanghai. The information it gives about tyhe actual content of Wang's interventions in Washington, and the US reaction to them, is sketchy or non-existent. But at least Harden and Cha do give some important information about the role that both China and the also heavily exposed/invested Bank of Japan have been playing in the current crisis, matters that provide a crucial geostrategic background and framing for the current crisis.
The WaPo's editors saw fit, however, to bury it deep within the "Business" section of the paper, as though it was of no particular interest to the general public.
Also buried deep within the business section is another article illustrating another significant international dimension of the US financial crisis. That is this article, that reminds us that enormous though the current-- hopefully one-off-- taxpayer bailout of the financial sector will be, still, it is roughly the same size as just one year of the Pentagon's budget.
I'll deal with some of the intriguing implications of this latter fact later on. But the Harden/Cha article contains some extremely important information that I think the WaPo's editors should have given a lot more prominence to.
It starts with this assessment from an associate director of the Bank of Japan:
"The reason why we stress the importance of stability is that the amount which we have in U.S. assets is so enormous," said Sogano, referring to the roughly $860 billion of the bank's $1 trillion in reserves that are in U.S. investments, mostly Treasury bonds.
As I noted here recently, the latest figure on the amount of T-bills Japan owes is $593 billion. That means it owns around $260 billion in other, quite possibly much more risky US investments. Later in the piece, Harden/Cha write that on Friday, "Finance Minister Bunmei Ibuki conceded at a parliamentary hearing that the government and central bank hold about $74.5 billion in debt issued by... Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac." Well, not nearly as much as the Chinese hold in Fannie and Freddie. But still, not inconsequential.
Harden and Cha also wrote this:
In a week of epochal market turmoil, for the Bank of Japan being very careful has meant being aggressively interventionist. Besides injecting the equivalent of about $96 billion in four days into money markets for overnight loans, the bank has gone into the business of making dollar loans.
It joined with four other central banks in a $180 billion currency swap with the Federal Reserve and will use its $60 billion share to supply dollars to local and foreign institutions.
Sogano said that the Bank of Japan feels that U.S. market turmoil, even if it continues for months or years, will not alter the central place the United States occupies in global finance and will not undermine the willingness of the Bank of Japan to invest in the United States. "There will be no change because we quite understand the importance of the U.S. market and the stability of the dollar," he said.
...Ibuki, the Finance Minister, said Friday that Japan would consider funding the International Monetary Fund or other international lending agencies to help with bad debt.
Sogano said there is no political support in Japan for mobilizing the several trillion dollars in Japanese pension funds and other savings funds to recapitalize troubled U.S. financial institutions. He agreed that such investments, if properly managed, could increase returns for savers in Japan.
Regarding China, Harden and Cha note that, unlike the Japanese, China might indeed be willing to intervene to buy up some troubled US financial entities-- including the troubled financial giant Morgan Stanley.
Harden and Cha write:
China's delegation, headed by a 60-year-old ex-banker who comes from the country's depressed coal-mining region, has been among the most vocal, according to sources briefed on the discussions.
... As U.S. officials were deciding in August whether to take over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the Treasury Department held informal talks with officials from the People's Bank of China, the country's central bank. At that time, investors in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in China were dramatically reducing their holdings. The U.S. side told China that a cash infusion was in the works; China said that it expected the U.S. government to "do whatever is necessary" to protect the investments.
Accompanied by a delegation that includes senior officials from China's central bank and Ministry of Finance, as well as banking, insurance and securities regulators, [Vice Premier] Wang had originally traveled to the United States on Sept. 14 for trade talks in Los Angeles. But as new shocks hit earlier this week, Wang flew to Washington to meet with Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr.
Wang sought assurances that if the Chinese government were to encourage its companies to seek investments in the United States, the deals would not face the same political opposition that has undone past Chinese investment proposals.
Andy Xie, an independent economist who was formerly Morgan Stanley's chief Asia economist, said the United States needs to accept that a large amount of U.S. assets must be transferred to other countries' ownership. "If the U.S. is not willing to accept that," Xie said, "they will have to print money and the dollar will fall. And we will be headed toward a global financial meltdown."
Companies in the United States and in Europe are already reaching out to Chinese investors.
Morgan Stanley chief executive John Mack has been in contact with the China Investment Corp., the sovereign wealth fund that manages $200 billion, and with China's Citic Group. La Compagnie Financière Edmond de Rothschild on Thursday announced that it had sold a 20 percent, $340 million stake to Bank of China.
It's unclear how Chinese investors will respond to the overtures, especially given that their biggest investment in Wall Street to date, CIC's investment in asset manager Blackstone Group, has turned out to be a disaster -- its investment has lost half its value.
... At the end of last month I wrote here about the extent to which the economy of the "rest-of-the-world" was becoming decoupled from that of the US. It is true that that decoupling has been happening-- in the sense that countries other than the US now do a lot of trade and financial business with each other that does not involve the US or US-owned companies at all. But this decoupling has been a process, not a binary on-off switch; and it is still very far from being anywhere near complete. Indeed, given the very "open", globalized nature of the world economic system, it will never be complete. The US will still certainly, for the entire foreseeable future, be one significant participant in the world economy. But it will not dominate the world economy to anything like the extent it did from 1945 until recently.
Meanwhile, what we have seen in the past few days, is the extent to which non-US governments, seeing the size of the stake their countries' economies have in the good health of the US financial system, have stepped in to try to help Washington shore up the system. It is true that these other countries-- primarily Japan, China, some European countries, and Saudi Arabia-- are not helping to save the US financial system out of pure altruism. They strongly need the US system to remain fundamentally sound. There is a very deep interdependence between the US and these these other countries.
But it is also the case that, as they help Washington shore up the US system, they will be buying increasingly large stakes in the whole of the US economy-- and in both the policies that steer the US economy, and the policies that might affect it.
Those latter policies include many strands of Washington's foreign policy, with at the forefront its incredibly expensive maintenance of a bloated (and often actively dysfunctional) worldwide military machine.
What's more, Washington has been using that military-- and threatening to use it--in a number of different ways that directly affect the national interests of what we might now handily start to call "our friendly creditors" among the world's other nations. Those friendly creditors will most likely be having an increasingly strong say in the content of some of those policies.;
Use the military-- or threaten to use it-- against China, or in a way that escalates tensions between China and Japan?
You gotta be kidding.
Use the military in Afghanistan in ways that destabilize China's long-time friend Pakistan and continue to foment additional Islamist extremism in Central Asia (including Western China)?
The Chinese will most have something to say about that, too.
Use the military to launch an act of war against Iran or to help Israel to do that?
Many of the friendly creditor nations will have plenty to say about that.
The world is changing with unprecedented speed these days...
The eventual size of the US taxpayers' bailout to the troubled financial sector is unknown, but it is bound to be gargantuan. This morning, the ranking Republican on the Senate Banking Committee said it could go as high as a trillion dollars. Actually, it could go considerably higher than that.
You thought the Iraq war was expensive? The latest cost estimate I heard for that was $859 billion. But that was a week ago.
If there is a silver lining in the still unfolding financial crisis, it is that it gives all of us who are US citizens the chance to re-imagine at a fairly deep level what our country might become in the years ahead. This, for two reasons:
2. The fact that the US's citizenry will all become co-equal "owners" of a huge chunk of the country's financial infrastructure means that we are all stakeholders in how its should be rebuilt. We should take this responsibility quite seriously and ensure that no groups of citizens are marginalized from having their voice heard and or from having their numbers-proportionate say in what should be done. This is certainly not a matter only for the (previous or current) owners of corporate and financial wealth, or the technocrats and economic "whizz-kids" who have largely dominated public discussions of these matters until now. It is all of our responsibility.
This is self-referential and anti-humane media "coverage" of the most disturbing kind. We know that most of these bankers and stock traders we see pictures of on the nightly news will end up being okay. (And none of the industry "leaders" or failed regulators who got us into this crisis yet seem to be exhibiting any shame or remorse, at all.)
But where are the media stories about the crisis in the nation's food banks, or about those made homeless because of the sub-prime scandals? These are the stories and the voices that need to be included.
For years now, the "big" MSM in this country has been presided over by media "stars" like Tim Russert (RIP), Katie Couric, Charlie Gibson, etc... And whenever they got new contracts the salary levels they would lock in would be breathlessly reported all over the place... $1 million, $2 million, $5 million and more. So there is a complete air of unreality when these people solemnly pretend that when they "discuss the impact of" the crisis, they are doing so purely as disinterested observers. At the very least, they owe the rest of us substantial disclosure--as we demand from politicians-- regarding which sectors they hold their personal wealth in. Or, they should hold it in a blind trust until their retirement.
But this investor-centric nature of the news coverage is only one symptom of a deeper distortion in the country's political culture: namely, the robustness until now of the myth that "everyone" in the US has a substantial ownership stake in the country's means of production and wealth creation. That is, after all, the myth that allows people in the MSM to imagine that when they give us their very investor-centric take on breaking events, they are speaking for and to "everyone."
But this myth of universal "ownership of wealth" is palpably untrue. I've been trying to look for a measure of the degree of inequality of wealth among citizens in the US, which I know has been growing apace over recent decades. This is the best source I've found in a quick search-- plus it gives a pretty nice explanation of how the Gini coefficient of inequality is calculated.
If you scroll down beneath the color-coded world map there, it gives the following data for the nationwide Gini coefficent for personal wealth, sourced to the US Census Bureau. Remember that for the Gini, "1" is perfect inequality-- one person owns everything, everyone else owns nothing; and "0" is perfect equality:
Here, for an international comparison, are some figures on the Gini coefficients of various nations regarding distribution of income, not wealth. (Though over a few years of income differences, that usually gells out into a significant difference in wealth; and the "income" measured is quite often a return on investments, rather than earned salary, so it is related to wealth in that way, too.)
All the other countries there have significantly lower Gini coeffficients of income than we do.
Norway is notable because it is a country that has considerable, nationalized oil production and revenues therefrom. But it has established ways of managing those revenues in ways that have stimulated the whole economy and have not substantially increased inequalities. Given that we US taxpayers are about to become co-owners of huge chunks of nationalized wealth, I think we could look to Norway to find out good ways to do so in a responsible, socially equalizing, and politically accountable fashion.
How about a well managed and accountable Sovereign Wealth Fund to take over all these financial and other entities we suddenly find that we've "bought".
Here are a few other guidelines I'd like to put into the discussion:
2. As large-scale property-owners in many closer-in districts where ploughing under makes no sense, the Sovereign Wealth Fund (Housing Division), should certainly use its clout in the housing market to become an innovative developer of sustainably car-free communities. That would mean building up a lot of these areas into much denser mixed-use communities, whose density allows the installation of economically sustainable mass transit systems that can link them to each other and to nearby city centers.
3. The economic crisis can reliably be expected to get quite a lot worse than at present, before it gets any better. We need to use the assets of the Sovereign Wealth Fund to invest in our national infrastructure at all levels. Yes, Keynesianism-- as with FDR's New Deal. But this time, Keynesianism with a strongly pro-Green purpose. Wind far,ms and all other forms of renewable energy. Innovative forms of cradle-to-cradle housing and manufacturing. The whole shebang. And perhaps as a capstone project: A completely new, Ultra-High-Speed Rail System that knits the whole country back together in a way that we haven't seen since Eisenhower's Interstate highway system.
4. As another part of the rebuilding of the nation's social and economic infrastructure, we should have a commitment to an excellent, universal and single-payer healthcare system, and other essential parts of a caring and accountable human welfare system.
But here's the thing: Suddenly, we taxpayers find we have "bought" this huge bundle of assets. (Okay, yes, and liabilities, too)... And suddenly the numbers everyone is talking about in regard to these assets are absolutely enormous: right up there in the area of-- or in many cases, well above-- the costs that have always been mentioned as necessary in order to "fix" (or tinker with) this or that other aspect of the national system.
So now we, our legislators, and our next president will all have to suddenly think very "large" about what to do with these big new commitments Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke have bequeathed us with. So let's think just a little larger still. Let's think about what the point of all this "wealth" and all this stuff is. Is it to enable a few superstars of the stage, screen, ballpark, or news-anchor's desk to become even more unimaginably wealthy that before? Or is it to start over at trying to build a national community that values everyone, and that supports everyone to live up to her or his maximum human potential?
Time to think big here. (And yes, please add your own ideas below on how we might use the present opportunity to re-imagine America.)
Alternatively, we could just return to an increasingly plutocratic, mean-spirited, and unaccountable business as usual...
"Governance"? I think I was too generous in the post I wrote last night on the flaws in the American theory of governance. Well, okay, I did write that the Bush administration has pursued an active policy of what you might call de-governing this country and all the other parts of the world it could lay its hands on...
Lee Pickard, a former director of the SEC has now said publicly that back in 2004 the SEC changed the rules it applied to the country's five biggest broker-dealer firms, allowing them to borrow up to 40 times their net capital holdings, where previously they'd been held to the same cap of 12 times net holdings as all the other, smaller brokerage firms.
It was Julie Satow of the New York Sun who broke that story this morning.
Barry Ritholtz of the Big Picture writes,
I got all this with a hat-tip to Bernhard of MoA who notes that Christopher Cox, who has chaired the SEC since 2005, was mentioned by rightwing commentator Bob Novak back in March as an excellent VP pick for McCain. (I note that Novak had been acting strangely for a while, including claiming he didn't remember he'd knocked over a pedestrian on DC's K St; and recently, he was diagnosed with a large cancer on the brain.)
All the more ironic that McCain has now called for Cox's firing.
But there is clearly a far deeper rot at the SEC than just Cox-- who became chair after the 2004 rule change, after all.
Congress is in the last portion of its term now. But it and the president between them face a tsunami of huge and very immediate decisions about economic governance. These include:
2. What further steps need to be taken by the federal government to stanch the present rapid erosion of global confidence in the integrity of US economic governance; and
3. How to hold accountable those responsible for the crisis up until now.
And regarding the confidence of overseas investors, yesterday, the overseas edition of China's People's Daily published a (signed) commentary arguing that,
Hat-tip Salah for that Reuters report. Reuters notes that de-coupling is not actually Chinese state policy at this point, and adds:
"The Chinese government is well aware of the fact that the United States, which is the world's largest developed country, and China, which is the world's largest developing country, should have constructive and cooperative economic and trade relations," he said.
As of July 31, China held $518.7 billion of US T-bills, second only to Japan ($593.4 bn.)
Keep watching all strands of this story. The earth is shifting.
When the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs goes to Pakistan and the Defense Secretary to Afghanistan on the same day, as they did yesterday, you have to know they are either mighty worried or up to something big.
Which is it?
Here. "In fact, it really does look as if the foundations of US capitalism have shattered."
While its mediation between Israel and Syria continues, Turkey's foreign ministry has now also launched a mediation between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Fascinating.
Read this and weep.
Canada has an election coming up October 14, and it seems its commitment to the NATO mission in Afghanistan could be an issue.
(Hat-tip Afghanistan Conflict Monitor.)
I went to see Gen. Wesley Clark speaking at the New America Foundation today. Given that there are, you know, so many important things happening in the arena of global security these days, I thought it would be really interesting and instructive to hear what he had to say. The guy did used to be the Supreme Allied Commander, NATO, after all. And he's said some very helpful things about the need to engage diplomatically with Iran, made some good criticisms of the invasion of Iraq, etc etc.
Also, he made a brief run to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004 (for what that's worth), and was mentioned by some as a possible running mate for Barack Obama this time round.
Quite a disappointment.
This is how his talk was billed: AMERICA NEEDS URGENT ACTION: NO NONSENSE THOUGHTS ON AMERICA'S ECONOMIC CRISIS AND NATIONAL SECURITY DILEMMAS. (Sorry about the caps. They were there in the invitation.)
He made a short-ish opening statement, which seemed like a Milton Friedman-style version of basic Econ 101. Strongly market fundamentalist, with a big dose of US-first boosterism. His main policy recommendation was to freeze homeowners' mortgage rates in place for five years. But he said nothing concrete about how, precisely, the government should use the powers its has acquired over Bear, AIG, and the GSE's to restructure them for the good of the citizenry. Or how the obligations the government has acquired with respect to those acquisitions will be financed; or anything else.
Steve Clemons, who was moderating, had a good opening question about the international effects of the US now being seen as "exporting poisoned financial instruments." But Clark failed to say anything substantial about the serious issues of international credibility and legitimacy that underlay the question.
I was puzzled. Why was this guy, whose whole professional training had been in military affairs, acting as though he had something of value to say on the current big issues of financial management and economic governance (or, mis-governance)? Why didn't he say a lot more about the massive national-security challenges of the day?
The only explanation I could come up with was that Clark-- like so many people in all branches of the US commentatoriat-- is currently very concerned indeed about the state of his own, non-trivial investments. (And apparently somewhat less so about the horrendous crisis that NATO now faces in Afghanistan?)
Clark retired from the military as a four-star general in 2000, with a pension of around $85,000. Plenty to get along nicely on, you'd think? Well, I guess he disagreed. He almost immediately went home to Little Rock, Arkansas, and started working for an investment bank called the Stephens Group. A handy chart here shows you how his earnings rocketed up at that point. This article from Fortune tells you about a $1.2 million sweetheart deal he got from Goldman Sachs and a German manufacturer of industrial gases in early 2004. You get the general picture.
Clark's is an extremely common, "all-American" story of a person who used the the skills and contacts he acquired while in government service to make a ton of money in the private sector as soon as he left the government. That does not, however, make him any kind of an expert on economics. And it is really a pity that it seems to have distracted him from paying the kind of attention to strategic affairs that the country so sorely needs.
(I asked him about Afghanistan. He answered with a handful of meaningless slogans.)
It is possible he might have made a good Vice-presidential candidate? On balance, I think not.
On Monday, I wrote a long post here on the two big (and escalating) crises that Washington currently faces: the financial meltdown and the roiling escalation in Af-Pakistan. It was a bit rambly. The main thing that linked the two crises in the post was just their size.
I've thought more about the whole topic since. Another crucial thing that links these two crises-- as well as most of the other big crises the US has faced in recent years-- is that they reveal the degree to which the American theory and practice of governance fails to meet the needs of human communities in today's complex and interconnected world.
Other examples of what I'm talking about include Washington's failure to have anything like a workable plan for the reconstruction of post-2003 Iraq, and the parallel failure to have workable plans for reconstruction in New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 2005, or in Galveston, TX today.
I think the key weakness in the American approach to governance is the active dislike and distrust of central government that has run through the whole history of the European settlers here, since the beginning of the colonial settler project. Those original settlers came here, the national myth tells us, because they were fleeing repressive governments back home in Europe. Well, some were doing that, and some merely came along for the free land and bounty that they could get their hands on here. (But they all shared the myth.) ... And then, as the east coast became populated, numerous hardy, dissident, and/or land-hungry souls set out westward. And though those west-heading settlers were always well protected by the US Cavalry as they laid claim to more and more "free" land, they still maintained the myth of the "rugged individualist", perhaps as way of erasing the uneasy memory of the fact that their bounty had, in fact, come to them in good measure from the public trough.
... Americans have nearly always had a robust culture of churches, private associations, and non-governmental groups banding together to look after people's needs. But they have nearly always also had an exaggerated distrust of the role that governments can and should play, especially in difficult times. FDR, and those later champions of the 'Great Society', Presidents LBJ and Nixon, were small blips on the screen of a national picture otherwise dominated by the image of the rugged individualist, pulling him- or herself up "by his or her own bootstraps."
George Bush's gutting of the capabilities of the federal government over the past eight years tried to make that picture more real than ever.
... I grew up in England at a time of some non-trivial economic disruption there. The thing I'm missing here in the US today, that I would expect and hope to hear more of, is leaders from different walks of life-- including political leaders-- talking publicly about how "we are all in the current crisis together", and "we need to take extraordinary steps to help the most vulnerable among us in these difficult times," and so on.
I haven't heard anything of that, yet.
Well, I guess this is only to be expected from a country in which medical care has been deeply marketized, where the materially rich are treated like demi-gods, and where the most common assumption in the mainstream media is that people are concerned about the economy primarily as investors, rather than as working families with pressing social and economic needs.
It would be great if the current crisis could lead to a new, richer understanding here of the intimate relationship between the situation of society ("the public good") and the situation of the individual citizens.
Now that the federal government has agreed to bail out Bear Sterns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the giant insurer AIG, surely we need a deep reconsideration of these issues? In the 21st century, it is quite insane to imagine that we might all live like ruggedly individualist frontiers-people! Our lives are inter-connected with, and interdependent on, the lives of the rest of the country's citizenry in so many different ways.
So now, we need a new, more explicit and more just social compact, a new view of the role of government in society, and new systems to ensure the accountability of central government to the citizens. Yes, that will certainly involve getting money out of the political system as far as is humanly possible. But it should also involve a real commitment to universal health care, a range of new Keynesian-style public-works projects aimed at renewing the national infrastructure... and a new , much better relationship with the other nations of the world.
The "American way" isn't looking so good these days-- to outsiders, or to many Americans. We can do better.
The L.A. Times's Ned Parker has a great piece of reporting from Baghdad in today's paper, charting the main dimensions of the recent collapse of the US's influence in Iraq.
He leads with this:
Iraq's police and army now operate virtually on their own, and with Washington's mandate from the United Nations to provide security here expiring in less than four months, Maliki is insisting on imposing severe limits on the long-term U.S. military role, including the withdrawal of American forces from all cities by June.
America's eroded leverage has left Iran, with its burgeoning trade and political ties, in a better position to affect Iraqi government policies.
It also means that whichever U.S. presidential candidate is elected ... will have less ability to sway Baghdad than did the Bush administration.
Many in DC still talk about the ability of Washington to "place conditions on" the financial and security aid that it still gives to the Baghdad government.This, though Maliki has shrugged off and/or avoided meeting all of the stated conditions until now, including enacting an oil law, or holding provincial elections, or conducting the Kirkuk referendum, or... or... or..
Parker quotes one long-time DC-based "conditionalizer", Colin Kahl of the Center for a New American Security. Kahl says the US still has some ability to influence the Malili government, but that "leverage" is now diminishing.
Parker quotes him as saying:
Note that Kahl, like the vast majority of other DC analysts, looks at the Iraq issue as either a strictly bilateral (US-Iraq) issue, or a trilateral (US-Iraqi-Iranian) issue. Most DC "insiders" pay far too little heed to the idea that there are numerous other actors who can and should be involved in the search for a durable political outcome in Iraq. These include the Arab League, the United Nations, China, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, at a bare minimum.
Remembering that these other stakeholders exist, have non-trivial powers, and can help Iraqis and Americans to extricate themselves from the fateful embrace of military occupation in a way that does not involve Iraq splintering into mutually conflicted fragments, is a really helpful thing to do. Involving all these other parties seriously in the diplomacy of the Iraqi end-game-- or rather, having the UN involve all of them plus the US and Iraqi governments-- is, as I have long argued, the best way to arrive at a "responsible", that is, non-catastrophic, US pullout from Iraq. It will also very helpfully remind Americans that no, we are not the center of the universe any more.
There's been quite a flurry in the blogosphere over some well-authenticated reports that the Republican Jewish Coalition has been conducting a poll of Jewish voters in selected states in which the pollsters request responses to some blatantly untrue statements about Barack Obama and others, including Pres. Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Jonathan Cohn of TNR's The Plank blogged the details of the call he received, which was from a company claiming to be simply a netural polling company.
He wrote:
But then there was an odd inclusion: Jimmy Carter.
I can't say I made much of it at the time...
But soon enough I understood why they were asking about Carter. After going over some more issues and confirming the fact that I was likely to vote for Obama, the caller made a series of rather pointed inquiries. Would it affect my vote, he said, if I knew that
the leader of Hamas, Ahmed Yousef, expressed support for Obama and his hope for Obama's victory
the church Barack Obama has attended is known for its anti-Israel and anti-American remarks
Jimmy Carter's anti-Israel national security advisor is one of Barack Obama's foreign policy advisors
Barack Obama was the member of a board (sic) that funded a pro-Palestinian chartiable organization
Barack Obama called for holding a summit of Muslim nations excluding Israel if elected president
All he would tell me was that he was calling from Central Marketing Research Inc. in New York City...
David Kurtz of TPM considered the question as to whether this was what's called a "push poll"-- that is, an interrogation designed not to test the views of potential voters but to plant certain smears in their minds about opposing candidates. He concluded that they probably weren't "push polls" at all, but perhaps polls designed to test-run some negative messages that the RJC or the McCain campaign might be planning. However, Kurtz's major argument on this point had to do with the relative costs of the two different kinds of interrogation:
And the smears certainly have been planted, and have been reverberating for a good chunk of the day around the blogosphere.
.. Including the smear that Carter's national security adviser Zbig Brzezinski, can appropriately be labeled as "anti-Israel."
Excuse me????
For example, in Ben Smith's Politico article, he repeats the entire list of questions that Jonathan Cohn wrote down, as noted above, including the one about "Jimmy Carter's anti-Israel national security adviser." Then Smith writes:
So let's just think about a few salient facts about Brzezinski, and Carter, and the policies that the two of them oversaw when Carter was president... Including the fact that that was the team that brokered Israel's first-ever peace agreement with an Arab country... And not just any Arab country, but Egypt, which is by far the most strategically weighty Arab country of all, and whose enmity to Israel had been the dominant fact of Israel's strategic geography from 1948 through 1978.
"Flipping" Egypt from a stance of hostility to Israel to one of full, formal peace with Israel transformed Israel's strategic position overnight. But Smith and others let stand in their writings the idea that Brzezinski is somehow "anti-Israel"?
(Full disclosure: Back in the day Bill the spouse was Brzezinski's staff person on Arab-Israeli issues and was deeply involved in his very successful peace diplomacy.)
Sadly, when Pres. Clinton came into office in 1993, the pro-Israeli operatives who surrounded him persuaded him to have nothing at all to do with anyone who'd worked on Jimmy Carter's successful Arab-Israeli diplomacy. Instead he relied on Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, and all those other pro-AIPAC ideologues, who thereupon proceeded to waste nearly all the great opportunities Jim Baker and the Norwegians handed them for further peacemaking breakthroughs... One of the few things those ideologues succeeded in doing, however, was planting in the minds even of many Democrats that Brzezinski had somehow been "anti-Israel." What utter nonsense.
Well, it's interesting to see that the Republican Jewish Committee has been forced to stoop to such low tactics as these phone calls purporting to be neutral "opinion research" that oh, by the way, just along the way have the effect of spreading so many blatant untruths about Obama, and Brzezinski, and others.
Let's hope that means that the RJC is actually getting pretty desperate?
Many indeed are the fruits, on the international scene, of the two developments that:
2. The naval forces of the US and its allies became hopelessly over-stretched as they found themselves unable to disentangle from the mission of maintaining and protecting the US's long and vulnerable military supply lines into Iraq and Afghanistan.
Today, Der Spiegel has a fascinating insider's account of how one recent act of off-Somalia piracy progressed-- and how it was finally resolved through a pay-off of around $1.1 million.
Reporters Udo Ludwig and Holger Stark base their account on interviews with the ship's German owner. They write that finaly, after some weeks of tough negotiation,
Wouldn't it be great if the Somali people could reach an internal political agreement that would allow them to constitute an accepted and non-corrupt national government capable of providing decent basic services to the citizens... including public security both on the land and at sea? Then Somali fishermen could fish in safety; Somalia traders and shipowners could ply sea-based trade in safety. And, oh yes, international shipping could have its safety assured by the Somali and other coastal governments...
The military arrogance displayed by the US in recent decades around the world, and the serious overstretch that has resulted-- along with the state failure that has been the result of US policies in so many countries: All these phenomena have had real and wrenchingly difficult consequences for people around the world, and disproportionately for the world's most vulnerable and politically marginalized peoples.
The world desperately needs an alternative.
Alaskan blogger AKMuckraker has been doing some excellent blogging about Sarah Palin from her home state. In this post, she describes a big anti-Palin, pro-Obama rally that materialized with very little pre-planning in Anchorage, on Sunday. (Hat-tip Ruth B.)
AKM wrote:
In other recent posts AKM has been delving into various aspects of Palin's record in the state.
I have to confess that viewing the video clip made me nostalgic for all those long weeks and weeks and weeks I would stand out on the sidewalk waving my antiwar sign. Maybe it's time to get back onto the streets and do a bit more "public witnessing" again.
Thank goodness Reidar Visser has been paying some good close attention to what the senator and Veep candidate has been saying about Iraq since the Democratic convention, when suddenly all his Iraq-related writings suddenly disappeared from his website.
Since 2006,, Biden has been an ardent advocate of the radical decentralization of political power in Iraq. Most notably in his co-authorship along with Les Gelb for a plan that called for the "federalization" of the country. At the time of the Democratic convention, those were the writings that disappeared.
But now Visser reports that Biden's "radio silence" on Iraq was only temporary, and that he has resumed his previous practice of talking about the country in a way that-- like the US occupation authorities since 2003-- stresses the sectarian or ethnic identities of Iraqis, de-emphasises their Iraqiness and the existence of many cross-cutting inter-ethnic and inter-sectarian alliances, and ignores almost.completely the many political schisms within each of the major demographic blocs.
Visser writes:
All in all, on questions relating to state structure in Iraq, Biden has been mistaken on all counts: in terms of his interpretation of Iraqi politics (through continuing to deny the growing centralist trend and through continuing to focus on the exceptional 2006 situation); through his reading of the Iraqi constitution (by overlooking the asymmetrical and bottom-up character of Iraqi federalism); and through his failure to highlight the potentially grave regional consequences of his scheme (especially in terms of Iranian influence, which would probably be stronger in an ISCI-dominated federal entity than under any other arrangement). While the pro-Kurdish tendency inside the US Democratic Party is entirely understandable (and to some extent laudable) given all the suffering of the Kurds in the past, this should not be translated into an attempt to impose a Kurdish agenda on the rest of the country (as seemed evident for example in the recent US Democratic initiative to prevent oil deals with the central government). Most Iraqis are in fact perfectly prepared to accept the notion of complete Kurdish control in Kurdistan. It is the way Kurdish power is being used to push Iraq south of Kurdistan towards a decentralised system that many object to. On this issue, Biden is going against the prevailing wind in Iraq perhaps more than any other American politician.
... Iraqi politicians already speak about Biden as the father of a second “Balfour declaration” because of his “plans”, and the Democratic Party would lose its credibility in the entire Arab world if these schemes were allowed to snowball. Rather than conniving in soft partition agitation in the name of party unity, Democrats should now make a firm and public stand against an imposed federalisation of Iraq. A more sustainable Iraq position would be to start focusing on cross-sectarian politics and the unitary state as the best way forward – with federalism as an option for areas where there is a real popular demand for it (like Kurdistan and perhaps Basra), but not as an imposition on the entire country through US “help” and sponsorship. That would also be in the true spirit of the “carefulness in getting out of Iraq” so rightly advocated by Barack Obama.
But we need to keep a couple of other points in mind:
2. As I've noted here since early June, the logic of the power balance inside Iraq has already tipped against the US being able to say or do anything very much to affect the way the Iraqis choose to run their affairs, especially their domestic political affairs. Except at the margins. So Biden's present bloviations may be unhelpful, particularly in terms of misleading US voters about what is going on inside Iraq. But I don't think they're going to make nearly as much difference on the ground in Iraq as the Senator himself presumably hopes they will.
Yesterday, Henry Kissinger once again expressed support for opening direct talks with Iran over its nuclear enrichment program, without preconditions. He did that at a forum where four other Secretaries of State-- Jim Baker, Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright, and Warren Christopher-- also expressed support for such talks.
Let's hope Kissinger's message gets home loud and clear to President and Vice-President, whose offices are just a stone's throw from where he was speaking, at George Washington University. After all, when they invaded Iraq they were taking his advice to do that. So let's hope that when his advice is far, far saner than that earlier piece of grave mis-advice, they also pay him good heed.
Kissinger's espousal of talking to, rather than bombing, Iran is not new. Back in March, Bloomberg reported this:
There has been no response so far from Iran, he said.
"I've been in semi-private, totally private talks with Iranians," he said. "They've had put before them approaches that with a little flexibility on their part would, in my view, surely lead to negotiations." He didn't elaborate on who was engaged in the talks.
... There has been no direct contact between the U.S. and Iran since the 1979 Iranian revolution, except for talks in Baghdad on Iraqi security between their ambassadors or technical experts.
Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said March 9 that Iran wouldn't engage with the U.S. until President Bush's successor is elected.
At yesterday's forum at GWU, Colin Powell also notably said he hadn't yet decided who to support in the presidential race.
Time was, an endorsement from Powell would have meant a huge amount to Obama. However, Powell's pathetic, weak-kneed performance during Bush-43's first term has considerably dented his political "brand."
Pity. He's probably a nice man.
I have JWN's design just about where I want it now. What reactions does anyone have to the new features I've introduced?
In the coming weeks I might introduce a more visual banner than the one that tops the blog right now... I might moderate the colors a little, since the blue still looks a little too loud... I might try to put a bounding line down the righthand side, if I could figure out how. But that's about it.
But meantime, it looks as though something dire happened to the blog's numbers last week. Does anyone know why? Did any of you have big interruptions of service, or long periods when the layout was crazy? Sorry, if so. But please do let me know if that happened to you.
I shall try hard not to have anything crazy happen to the blog's public appearance from here on.
Also, if you could tell me how to put a bounding line down the righthand side, I'd appreciate that. Thanks!
This time last year, when I was poring over the figures for the shares of the global arms market held by each of the big exporters for my Re-engage book, I produced a little pie-chart showing how they had divided it up in the most recent year for which I had figures, which was 2005. The US's share of the international arms market that year was 45.6%.
I guess I should have read my 2008 edition of The Military Balance more carefully when it dropped on my doormat a couple of months ago.
It tells us that in 2006, the US's market share went up to 51.9%
Eric Lipton had a good article on this whole phenomenon in the NYT yesterday. He quotes Bill Hartung of the New America Foundation as saying, “Sure, this is a quick and easy way to cement alliances... But this is getting out of hand.”
He also quoted Representative Howard L. Berman of California, chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, as saying that while he supported many of the individual weapons sales, still, the big sales blitz could also have some negative effects: “This could turn into a spiraling arms race that in the end could decrease stability."
Berman is quite right to be worried. Proliferation of even conventional weapons increases the motivation for other nations to compete in selling... And it also, certainly, increases the motivation for other nations to acquire weapons-- whether conventional or non-conventional-- to try to "counter" the effects of US-supplied weapons that their neighbors or local competitors have acquired.
Why does the US government pump weapons into the international scene in this obscene and mindless way? Why not convert all those weapons factories into places that produce something useful, like rail cars, wind turbines, bridge struts, or prefabricated housing? You'd still have lots of employment in them... It would help stimulate the productive parts of the US economy across the board... And we could export a lot of these products, and make some good revenue and some good friends by doing so.
Washington's decisionmakers are today confronted with two huge and hard-to-handle crises. On Wall Street the large brokerage firm Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, after Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson decided the US taxpayer couldn't afford to bail it out Merrill Lynch and the insurance firm AIG are also in very bad trouble. And in Afghanistan and Pakistan, tensions between the US and anti-US forces, primarily the resurging Taliban, have escalated to a point where they now pose a serious political crisis to the broadly pro-US (and nuclear armed) government of Pakistan.
Each of these crises points out the extent to which Washington, on its own, is no longer able to exert control over aspects of international life that until recently it was easily able to dominate.
Regarding the Wall Street crisis, the actions and preferences of foreign investors-- primarily those from East Asia-- has been crucial. The timing Paulson's actions regarding Lehman-- where he intensively explored a number options before he finally decided not to intervene-- and earlier, in the case of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, was reportedly chosen to allow him to have the maximum impact before the Asian and European stock markets opened after their weekend. One of the banks he was hoping could help bail out Lehman was Britain's Barclay's Bank; and one of the other chief candidates to help out was reportedly a South Korean investment entity. But he was unable to clinch any of these deals.
Meanwhile, in the single, rapidly agglomerating crisis zone that I am tempted to call Af-Pakistan, it is becoming increasingly clear that the US-- even with its NATO allies-- is quite unable, without the help of the world's other big powers, to calm the tensions and start to resolve the deep political problems that underlie the present crises in both constituent parts of Af-Pakistan. (I made this argument, regarding Afghanistan, in this early-August CSM piece.)
Some of the most thoughtful, up-to-date, and consistent reporting on Af-Pakistan is that provided by Joshua Foust at Registan.net. Today he writes this about the latest reported US raids into Pakistan:
Pretending the Pakistani government has done nothing about the tribal areas is daft: at American insistence, they have lost nearly 1,000 troops trying to quell the uprising there since 2004—about double what NATO and Coalition nations have lost in Afghanistan since 2001. Though only now, since removing the odious Pervez Musharraf, has the government been trying negotiations not with the militant leaders but the few tribal leaders left alive who are willing to take a stand, these have not been given a chance to succeed. It takes time—during the war against the Faqir of Ipi from 1936-1947, the British had miserable luck even getting the local maliks to tamp down on anti-British violence, though on occasion it worked. But the Faqir was only undermined after Partition, when agitating for a Muslim State became unnecessary...
Actually, the stance and policies that the US is now adopting towards Pakistan look somewhat comparable to the stance that Israel adopted for many long decades towards Lebanon, which was also a US ally.
Both in the days when the PLO had an armed presence in Lebanon, and later, when Hizbullah grew up there, Israel would (and still does) claim the "right" to launch "punitive raids" into the country, whether under a doctrine of "hot pursuit" or some other pretext. Indeed, some of those raids sent ground forces deep inside Lebanon, where they would stay and run an occupation regime for some length of time: most famously, the 22-year occupation of the so-called "security zone" in South Lebanon.
All this though Israel prides itself on being a law-abiding nation and a US ally, and while Lebanon was also a US ally...
In Af-Pakistan, the structure of the conflict is a little different. It is the US occupation force in Afghanistan, not the Afghan government, that is undertaking the raids into Pakistan. And Pakistan is directly an ally of the US. Go figure.
This morning, the BBC reported this:
It emerged last week that US President George W Bush has in recent months authorised military raids against militants inside Pakistan without prior approval from Islamabad...
In the latest incident, the tribesmen say they grabbed their guns and took up defensive positions after placing their women and children out of harm's way.
Pakistan's army has warned that the aggressive US policy will widen the insurgency by uniting the tribesmen with the Taleban.
Last week the army chief declared that Pakistan would defend the country's territorial integrity at all cost, although the prime minister has since said this would have to be through diplomatic channels rather than military retaliation.
It is hard, at this point, to figure out how these two big crises might affect the election here in the US.
On the economy, McCain yesterday continued to insist that "the fundamentals of the US economy are strong." He looked as though he was trying to run on a bit of an anti-Wall Street, populist platform? Obama, more seriously and more plausibly called the fall of both Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch "the most serious financial crisis since the Great Depression" of the 1930s.
He also took the opportunity to criticize McCain's broader economic philosophy:
"It's a philosophy that says even common sense regulations are unnecessary and unwise, and one that says we should just stick our heads in the sand and ignore economic problems until they spiral into crises..."
On Af-Pakistan, Obama's has been quite clear for many months now that he supports the use of US military power against suspected terrorist targets inside Pakistan, even without gaining the permission of Islamabad.
This is just one of the ways in which, as Dan Eggen writes in today's Wapo, "Bush's overseas policies [have begun] resembling Obama's."
Eggen writes that Obama's aides say that some of the recent foreign-policy moves Bush has taken
"What we have here, in many ways, is that a McCain presidency would look a lot like a Bush first term and a move back in that direction," said Rand Beers, who.. is now an unpaid adviser to the Obama campaign. "The flip side of that is that John McCain is therefore to the right of George Bush, which I don't think is the way he conceived of his campaign."
It certainly wouldn't be the first time that's happened here...
Is pacifism the new Realism? Or is Realism the new pacifism? I've been toying with both arguments for a while now, including back in June when I made the first of them in connection with the panel discussion I did at USIP on 'Foreign Policy and the next US administration.' That was linked to my growing, evidence-based conviction that foreign wars have been become growingly unwinnable.
Okay, so then came the Russian-Georgian War. Russia to a great extent (though not wholly) "won" that war. So if we judge that Georgia is "foreign" for Russia--as by and large I think we must-- then they had waged a foreign war and won it.
(Some Russians might perhaps argue that Georgia is not actually foreign for them, and/or that they engaged in the war to save the lives of the Russian citizens-- both Ossetians and Russian peacekeeping troops-- who were getting badly attacked in Ossetia. Neither is a trivial argument, but on balance I don't think either of them holds up sufficiently.)
What is much more the case, it seems to me, is that long-distance foreign wars have become very nearly or wholly unwinnable. I argued one part of this when I blogged about 'The Return of Geography', a couple of weeks ago.
I would like to note now, though, that some of the most serious and cautious thinking about the Georgia-Russia war-- as, earlier about the US invasion of Iraq-- has come from pillars of the Realist and "Old" (paleo-)conservative movements in the United States. That, while Obama and many other Democrats have been bending very strongly toward a McCain-like level of pro-Georgian partisanship and anti-Russian outrage over the whole Georgian issue-- and while Obama and many other Democrats have been worryingly belligerent in arguing for escalations of US force deployment and use in Afghanistan and also against Pakistan..
In this recent article (PDF, and registration required) in The American Conservative the paleocon former CIA officer Philip Giraldi wrote candidly that,
Giraldi's piece is well worth reading. We should remember, too, the excellent and very constructive role that he and other paleocons have played for some years now in running the Antiwar website and making other contributions to the battle of ideas against neocon militarism.
In that same issue of The American Conservative Pat Buchanan's take-down (PDF, registration also required) of McCain's lead foreign-policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann is also worth reading. Scheunemann is the same man who, as a well-paid lobbyist for Georgia's president Mikheil Saakashvili, has had as one of his primary missions the winning of US support for Saakashvili's reckless war venture into South Ossetia.
Buchanan doesn't mince his words when he writes about Scheunemann:
Scheunemann came close to succeeding. Had he done so, U.S. soldiers and Marines from Idaho would be killing Russians in the Caucasus and dying to protect Scheunemann's client...
Now Scheunemann is the neocon agent in place in McCain's camp. The neocons got their war with Iraq. They are pushing for a war on Iran. And they are now baiting the Russian Bear. Why would McCain seek foreign-policy counsel from the same discredited crowd that has all but destroyed the presidency of George W. Bush?
So the main place where Washington's Realists hang out is at, guess where, the Nixon Center. And there, too, there has been some good, solid thinking going on about the Georgia crisis. For example, in this (Word doc) testimony that Center director Paul Saunders delivered to the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe September 10, he shared the following lessons:
Second, U.S. officials must be much more careful when and how they put American credibility on the line...
Thirdly, it is now clear that Russia’s commitment to and interests in Georgia and other former Soviet Republics along its southern frontier exceed our own... [Return of Geography, anyone?]
Fourth, we should learn a powerful lesson about “precedents” and “vetoes”. American officials and others argued vociferously that NATO military action against Serbia without approval of the United Nations Security Council, and American and European recognition of Kosovo’s independence without Serbia’s consent, did not establish a precedent because Kosovo was a unique case. The problem with this is that we are not in charge of what others interpret as a precedent. We decide on our national interests, the best policies to advance them, and the best arguments to explain them. We don’t get to decide how others see what we do or how they decide to respond...
Finally, we should remember what NATO did right during previous rounds of enlargement: insist that prospective new members resolve internal problems with their ethnic minorities...
So what I want to note here, firstly, is that all this good sense from the Realists is pushing clearly toward a much less belligerent and more diplomacy-focused policy toward Russia than either McCain or Obama is currently espousing. Secondly, I'd note that many of these same people were also against the invasion of Iraq, back in the day.
Historically, in this country, the 'Realists' have been people who took a big-picture look at the balance of power in world politics and argued for robust-- often very belligerent-- action by the US government, using all its many levers of power, in order to maximize a version of "the US national interest" that was chauvinistic and was generally dominated by the interests of US corporations, not necessarily the US citizenry.
Looking at the "global balance of power" in the way they did most often meant that they respected the traditional, post-Westphalian view of national sovereignty, which is more or less that whatever a government does inside its own country is its own business and not that of anyone else.
The neocons and their allies among the liberal hawks broke clean away from that view, arguing that the US could and should use all the elements of its national power (including, if necessary, military power) to end dictatorships and to "bring" human rights to populations formerly denied them.
How "rights" could ever meaningfully be "brought" to long-oppressed populations by outsiders, and on the tips of cruise missiles, was a conundrum they never satisfactorily solved.
Personally, having lived for six years in a situation of active war, in Lebanon, I have quite a bit more sympathy with the Westphalian model than most of my colleagues in the western rights movement. I have seen at first hand the degree to which warfare is itself a massive motor for the abuse of the rights of all persons living in its path. The idea that westerners might fairly easily go to war in an effort to improve the rights situation of others is one that could only be dreamed up in salons thousands of miles distant from any actual war zone.
Also, though it is true that, under the Westphalian model, there are high "walls" of sovereignty around each country that protect the ability of dictators to carry on oppressing the subjects trapped behind them, throughout history those walls of sovereignty have also-- much more significantly-- protected the ability of settled and more liberal-minded populations to progress toward greater democracy, and respect of human rights, without the various despots who were their neighbors having any recognized "right" to intervene to abort their liberal project. Too many of the neocons and liberal hawks have forgotten that aspect of Westphalia's history.
So personally, I see some things of value in the position of the Realists-- historically, and even more so today, when the raw pragmatism and respect for empirical ground truth that underlie their approach has brought them to a situation of extreme caution in their attitude toward war.
So maybe pacifism is becoming the new Realism, as well as the other way around?
I think what my form of Quaker pacifism adds to the traditional Realist way of looking at things, though, is that it adds a commitment to caring about and according equal respect to every one of the world's people, not just those who happen to be my compatriots, and a commitment to undertaking the kinds of nonviolent mass actions and other nonviolent initiatives that by themselves, without the use of arms, can actually transform political realities towards a greater respect for everyone's rights.
I like to think that these are very pragmatic, or one could even say 'Realist', ways to look at the world, too...
McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his vice-president is an insult to all American voters, regardless of gender. It also raises the disturbing prospect-- in the event she becomes President-- that the country would once again, as through much of the past eight years, be effectively ruled not by the elected president but by a group of unaccountable people who operate in the shadows around the White House.
The depth of the insult that McCain's choice of Palin represents to the American people was revealed even more clearly yesterday in the clips that ABC News aired of the interview that Charlie Gibson conducted with her earlier in the day. (Partial transcript here. You can also see the video on that ABC News site.)
The interview showed a tightly scripted, generally extremely controlled woman who was nonetheless quite unable to answer a question about one of the principal strategic issues our country faces-- whether in fact the President should continue to claim, as President Bush did in his National Security Strategy of 2002, that the US has the right to engage in "preventive" military action whenever it perceives a threat might arise. Asked about this by Gibson, Palin blustered and shifted uneasily in her seat as she tried to avoid revealing her ignorance of what the 'Bush Doctrine' actually is. The incident is recorded on page 4 of the transcript.
In the interview, Palin also said some extremely hawkish things. On whether the US should urge Israel to exercise restraint against Iran, she said clearly (p.3), "We cannot second guess the steps that Israel has to take to defend itself." What, Sarah, we can't say anything even if Israel's actions threaten--as indeed they would-- to bring strong Iranian retribution back against all the US forces deployed in Iraq and the Gulf?
And in response to a clear question as to whether the US has the right to send forces from Afghanistan into Pakistan, even without the approval of the Pakistani government, to "go after" suspected terrorists located there, she said (p.4):
Also, it appears that in the heat of the interview she had a hard time recalling some of the "detail" that her handlers had evidently been pumping into her over the past week. "All options" and "on the table" are the twinned sets of codewords that represent the hawkish US stance in the force-backed US diplomacy over Iran, not the policy toward Pakistan.
What I find particularly insulting, as a person who has studied and written about national security and foreign policy issues for more than 20 years now, is the assumption of Palin's political handlers that if they take this self-proclaimed "hockey mom" from a small town in Alaska and coach her intensively on foreign policy issues for just one week, then they somehow they can persuade American voters that she is "Ready on Day One" to be president, in the sorry event that McCain should become incapacitated.
Palin's handlers-- who are all high-level McCain political operatives, working under, presumably, his command-- must have a very low view of the intelligence and integrity of the American people if they think we will be deceived by her Pygmalion-ish performance, which was the result of their own, still continuing Henry Higgins-like machinations and manipulations..
Her performance insulted all of us. The performance of her Henry Higgins manipulators was reckless in the extreme. And it raises some very disturbing questions about the degree to which having Sarah Palin in the White House would represent any kind of a "change" from the sorry situation we've been in with George W. Bush.
George W. Bush was also extremely Unready on Day One to be the president of even a small-size private company-- let alone the United States of America. Because of his unreadiness, manifested in both his ignorance of huge areas of economic and international affairs and his active disinterest in learning the details about these matters, vital aspects of the country's foreign policy were left in the shadowy and nearly completely unaccountable hands of others, primarily Dick Cheney.
So for me, Palin's performance last night was not primarily a gender thing. It was a matter of experience, and equally, a matter of the integrity and accountability at the highest levels of our government.
If McCain were younger or in better health, I would say that he could much more easily take a chance on choosing a running mate who could expect to have a number of years of "on the job training" before being called on to be President. But he is not. It is quite legitimate for all of us to expect that he pick as running mate someone who's ready to take over, if necessary, "on Day One."
In yesterday's interview, Charlie Gibson asked Sarah Palin, outright, if she felt confident about doing that, and she answered with a forceful and unqualified 'Yes.'
But as revealed by the whole of the interview that was aired last night, she is quite clearly not ready. If she does take over on Day One, or Day A Hundred and One, the country will once again be ruled by a shadowy and unaccountable network of people who stand around and guide the president. We have had that situation for the past eight years. Look where it has brought our country, and the depths of infamy into which it has dragged our Constitution.
GIven the massive size of the challenges that face Americans today, we cannot risk a repeat of that situation of unaccountable and irresponsible governance.
For many Americans, including many who have seen the war in Iraq as unjustified and unwise, the war in Afghanistan has until now had a very different aura. In the US, Afghanistan has generally been thought of (sometimes in direct contrast to the war in Iraq) as "the Good War." It has, after all, always been presented to the US public as both
(b) laudable in a more general sense because it has "saved" the hard-pressed Afghan people from the desperately repressive and backward-looking social policies of the Taleban.
1. How the US went to war.
Yesterday, I went to a great session at the New America Foundation where former Senator Lincoln Chafee talked about his new book Against the Tide: How a Compliant Congress Empowered a Reckless President. Until he was defeated in the 2006 elections, Chafee was one of the last (very) few liberal Republicans in either house of Congress. The whole of his book is worth reading. It is steeped in a deep sense of regret for where our country is heading. The book's sub-title more or less tells you what his main theses are.
In Chapter 6 (and in the presentation yesterday) Chafee recalled the sequence of events in Washington right after the 9/11 attacks. As early as 9/14, both houses of Congress were presented with two draft bills. One had to do with approving a large donation of emergency funds to New York City. The other was an Authorization for the Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, known as AUMF.
Chafee writes that both bills were presented together that morning, and in such a rushed fashion that it was hard for many members-- including himself-- to even figure out which bill they were voting for during each vote. His original intention was to vote "aye" on the funds for New York and "nay" on the AUMF, which he did. He recalled saying to a fellow senator, "We have to slow this thing down. We haven't thought this thing through. We haven't had any real discussion."
But at the impassioned urgings of his staff Chafee then changed his vote on the AUMF to an "aye" before the vote was closed. During the session yesterday he didn't (to my regret) express any real regret for having done that. He noted only that the one member, Rep. Barbara Lee (Democrat of California's 9th district), who had voted against the AUMF received so many death threats afterwards that she had to have police protection.
I'd like to take this opportunity to salute Rep. Lee once again for the exemplary bravery she exhibited that day.
She said at the time that she had voted "no",
I have always disagreed with that. I have always argued that robust international police work in conjunction with all those many other governments around the world that were horrified by 9/11 would have been more successful in the long run. At the same time, strong political engagement with the reasonable concerns of Muslim publics around the world would have reduced toward zero the numbers of Muslims worldwide who were still prepared to condone the activities of the violent extremists in their midst. Addressing the constituencies of present Qaeda condoners in a way that would reduce toward zero their desire to continue condoning this violence was always, in my view, the real key to longterm success.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11 even Afghanistan's Taleban rulers might well have been persuaded to disavow Al-Qaeda and stop giving them sanctuary. That was, indeed, the key (force-backed) demand, or demarche, that the Bush administration delivered to them. The Taleban's first response was to offer to try Bin Laden in an Islamic court. That was not an acceptable offer, but Washington could at least have undertaken some sustained further attempts-- working alongside allies-- to persuade the Taleban to get serious about disavowing Bin Laden, cooperating in dismantling his networks, and handing him and his key lieutenants over to a duly constituted international court for trial.
Washington made no attempt at all to pursue that "robust diplomacy" option. Instead, only 48 hours after the demarche had been delivered the US military started an assault against Afghanistan designed to expel the Taleban from power and replace them with US allies. The invasion and subsequent US-led military operations in Afghanistan were named Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF), though the Bush administration's original concept of OEF covered just about any aspect of the "Global War on Terror" that it chose-- apart from the invasion of Iraq, which was called Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) from the get-go.
2. What happened during the war.
Probably the best near-contemporaneous account and analysis of the initial invasion phase of the war is the exhaustively researched and carefully written Strange Victory: A critical appraisal of Operation Enduring Freedom and the Afghanistan war, which was published by Carl Conetta of the Project on Defense Alternatives in January 2002. In Appendix 1 of the report, Conetta tried to cut through the considerable "fog of war" that still then-- and indeed to this day-- hung over Afghanistan, a country that already, prior to 2001, had lived through 22 years of nearly constant large-scale internal and external armed conflict.
Conetta wrote there:
Regarding the more direct casualties, in a companion study published earlier in January 2002 Conetta wrote: "In Afghanistan, it is very likely that the bombing campaign claimed 1000-1300 civilian lives." He noted that that bombing campaign caused greater numbers of civilian casualties than NATO's 1999 bombing campaign against Serbia, though nearly twice as many munitions had been used in Serbia as in Afghanistan.
Of course, many members of Al-Qaeda, members of the armed forces of the official (Taleban-run) Afghan government security forces, and many alleged members of those two bodies were also killed, whether from the air or the ground. In some of the most anti-humane incidents of the war, a number of entire sealed shipping containers full of alleged pro-Taleban fighters were simply kept sealed until the people inside them suffocated to death. (See also this report of the incident, from the Guardian in September 2002.)
In "Strange Victory" Conetta wrote that "More than 800 Taliban coalition troops were killed in reprisals or after capture." I think that is a significant under-estimate-- but if anyone can provide better estimates, please give us links to the relevant data in the comments here.
At the political level what happened during the war was, as we know, that the Taleban regime was toppled. Those of its members who survived melted back into the Pushtun population of south Afghanistan and/or northwestern Pakistan. The US won a UN resolution that ex-post-facto gave the Security Council's endorsement to the invasion. It convened a big gathering of Afghan politicians and barely reformed long-time warlords in Bonn, Germany, in early December 2001; and from that gathering arose a coalition that wrote a quasi-liberal Constitution for the country, which resulted in the installation-- under US and UN auspices-- of Hamid Karzai as President.
3. What happened in 2002-2003.
With Afghanistan apparently "handled", the Bush administration's zealots-- and, we should note, John McCain-- all turned their attention to the "need" to launch a similarly regime-changing invasion of Iraq. That decision brought about results in Iraq (and for the US's force planning, federal budget, and general standing in the world) that have all been documented at length here and elsewhere.
In Afghanistan, the major consequence of the decision to invade Iraq was that massive amounts of the funds and careful public attention that should have gone into the careful rehabilitation of Afghanistan were diverted instead into the sinkhole known as Iraq.
It is nice to imagine that if the funds and careful attention had been kept focused on Afghanistan and could have made the situation a lot better for the country's 32 million people. Certainly, we in the US should recognize that we have a huge debt still outstanding to them, given the degree to which, back in the 1980s, we used their country as the battlefield in which US power brought the old Soviet Union to its knees. And then, after the Soviet collapse, the US simply walked away from Afghanistan.
Well, it's nice to imagine that our government "might" have done the right thing in Afghanistan after 2001, absent the diversion to Iraq. However, there is little or no evidence that, under the Bushists with their heavily over-militarized mindset, this would ever have happened.
4. So where is Afghanistan today?
The situation for the country's civilian population seems to have been deteriorating over the past two to three years. And the situation for the US and NATO forces there has certainly been deteriorating.
Regarding the situation of civilians, Human Rights Watch reported on September 8 that, "Civilian deaths in Afghanistan from US and NATO airstrikes nearly tripled from 2006 to 2007, with recent deadly airstrikes exacerbating the problem."
And remember the big, very controversial US airstrike of August 22 in which, the Afghan government and the UN say, around 90 people, mainly civilians, were killed? This Reuters report from Kabul today tells us that,
Major-General Zaher Azimi said there was no military justification for an air strike in western Herat last month in which the government says more than 90 people, most of them women and children, were killed, a figure backed by the United Nations.
"It is difficult for the Afghan people to tolerate any more. Civilian casualties happen in war, but they are now so much on the rise," said Azimi, a former mujahideen commander and now an adviser and spokesman at the Afghan defence ministry.
The U.S. military, which plans to reinvestigate the Aug. 22 bombing in Herat's Shindand district, says the air strike was called after coalition and Afghan army forces came under intense fire during an operation against suspected Taliban militants in the area.
It said 30 to 35 militants were killed in the raid.
But Azimi said the operation was flawed from the beginning because it was launched on the basis of intelligence input that was not coordinated with the Afghan National Army...
And then there's the rising death toll amongst the US and NATO military. This graph from the ACM shows us that as the US fatalities in Afghanistan nowadays inch toward 600, those of the allied NATO forces there are inching toward 300. This bar graph shows clearly how the numbers of occupation-force fatalities have risen each year since 2002, with the 12-month total this year also poised to increase over last year.
5. Bottom line, September 11, 2008
So the situation in Afghanistan today, seven years after Bush took the fateful decision to invade the country rather than use any of the other paths that were available to him in late 2001, remains very unstable. The first victims of that situation are undoubtedly the country's own people.
At this point, we can ask whether the situation of the Afghan people is worse or better than how it might have been at this point if President Bush had chosen a path other than military invasion. From where I sit, I honestly cannot tell whether it is better or worse. I do know that under the Taliban, the entire female population of the country was horribly repressed; so were many male members of non-Pushtun ethnic groups. And several million Afghans were still displaced from their homes either inside or outside the country.
Today, it is not certain that the situation of either women as a whole (outside of Kabul), or of various ethnic groups or of the conflict-deisplaced is actually, on balance, any better than it was in August 2001. That is already a terrible indictment of the record of the US government, which has exercised effective tutelage over the whole country since November 2001.
In addition, though they ruled through violence, repression, and a medieval interpretation of Islam, the Taliban did restore a sense of public security to many areas of the country, and they clamped down hard on the opium business. In the present situation of continuing armed conflict both among different Afghan factions and also involving the very lethal weaponry of the US, in many parts of the country rampant public insecurity now suppresses the rights of women and men alike, while the ballooning of the opium business speaks to the failure of the US occupation regime's projects to restore the country's economy and livelihoods.
And did I mention that the US still have not caught Osama Bin Laden...and the Taliban have been making a very serious political and military comeback in many parts of southeastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan?
At a broader level, too, this situation now poses an growing threat to the security of a large portion of Central and Southern Asia.
Back on August 4, I wrote in the Christian Science Monitor that a continuation of the present model of US domination of the political/security effort in Afghanistan cannot, there or in Iraq, lead to any durable and meaningful "victory" for the citizens of these countries. The US needs to share responsibility for the campaign that is still needed to restore peace and stability to the two countries, much more broadly with the world's other Big Powers.
Such powers certainly include both China and Russia-- both of which are also very much closer to Afghanistan than the US. Both of them also, having large and restive Muslim populations of their own, also have another very strong reason to want to see a broad-based reconstruction and peacemaking effort succeed. In this JWN post August 30, I noted that by making huge investments in both Iraq and Afghanistan, China already seemed to be putting down a down-payment to be included in the diplomacy going forward.
... And so, as the clock ticks on toward the dawn of yet another anniversary of 9/11, I think it is important this year for all US citizens to think about the effects that our government's over-hurried, over-militarized, and ill-considered decision to respond to 9/11 by invading Afghanistan have had on the country's still so vulnerable and war-traumatized people.
How many Afghans have lost their lives because of that decision? How many Afghan women-- including many whose hopes may have been raised high by the original overthrow of the Taleban-- have instead found their lives blighted over the past seven years by bereavement, loss of livelihoods, or a patriarchal oppression at home that may not even have changed much over the past 20 years?
It is certain that the number of Afghan casualties from the war and continuing instability in their country is now many times greater than the 2,800 Americans who died here on 9/11. Because of our government's decision to invade and exercise effective, occupation-style domination over the country, there-- just as in Iraq-- the US bears the principal responsibility for assuring the security and wellbeing of its citizens. Washington has failed, quite tragically, to live up to that responsibility.
And the vast majority of the Afghan people had no responsibility for 9/11, at all.
But after 9/11 George Bush, the vast majority of the US political (and media) establishment, and a large portion of the American people simply wanted to "hit back" as close to Bin Laden as they could, and using the crudest means possible.
Tonight, I am thinking about all those, in the US, in Afghanistan, and elsewhere who have been bereaved by all this senseless and anti-humane violence, and those whose lives have been blighted by it in so many other ways, too.
Please, can we take a couple of important lessons from this whole tragic narrative:
2. The use of violence is a very counter-productive way to try to win peace.
Thomas Fingar, the U.S. government's highest ranking intelligence analyst, recently told a semi-public audience that he envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, according to this intriguing report in today's Wapo.
Joby Warrick and the venerable Walter Pincus wrote the WaPo piece. They add that the still unpublished report that Fingar was previewing in his recent speech,
It is also an argument that I have made, very explicitly, here on JWN and in Chapter 6 of my book Re-engage! America and the World After Bush.
Coincidentally, today's WaPo also has a report, citing congressional budget analysts, that notes that, when the federal budget year ends on September 30, the one-year federal budget deficit will have risen to $407 billion-- "and the next president is likely to face a shortfall [annually, on the current account] in January of well over $500 billion."
All these repeated months and years of deficits add up to the horrendous mountain of accumulated debt that is one of Pres. Bush's primary legacies to the nation-- debt that our children and grandchildren will be laboring under for generations to come. That WaPo article also has a handy graphic charting how the current-account budgets have plummeted from a $236.2 billion surplus in FY 2000 to the expected $407 billion deficit this year.
Back to Fingar. He is a significant voice for calm reason and reality-based analysis within the US government. Back in 2002, when he was the head of analysis in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, his was one of the government's few intelligence outfits that stuck to its skepticism regarding the claims that Saddam had ongoing WMD programs. But the INR view (which was shared by many of the professional career analysts in the CIA-- though they were notably unsupported by Mr. 'Slam Dunk' George Tennet) got crowded out on that occasion by the vociferous rantings and fabricated charges raised up by the pro-war ideologues in various other government intel shops, primarily those within Rumsfeld's and Cheney's offices.
As the head of the newly created (and over-arching) National Intelligence Office, Fingar is now the person responsible for the periodic 'National Intelligence Estimates' that aim to provide the very best data, analysis, and conclusions to the President and-- as appropriate-- the public. In doing this job he has worked hard to instill, throughout the whole of the country's unwieldy alphabet soup of official intel agencies, the same standards of rigorous analysis, professional integrity, and accountability that he previously upheld at INR.
I heard him speak at the New America Foundation a few weeks ago. He seemed very straightforward and smart. He also seemed very aware that rebuilding the external credibility of the US intelligence agencies, after the travesty of their performance over the WMDs-in-Iraq charges was revealed for all to see, will be every bit as hard (and is every bit as important in a democracy) as rebuilding the internal professional standards and sense of professional pride and morale within all the agencies themselves.
Well, the report that Fingar was previewing in his recent speech, a National Intelligence Council report titled "Global Trends 2025", will apparently be published pretty soon. We should all watch out for it.
Warrick and Pincus explain that the presentation in which Fiongar laid out these argument was given to a gathering of intelligence professionals in Orlando, Florida last Thursday. (I imagine Fingar himself, who is a savvy public-affairs operative, made sure that copies of the transcript fell into Warrick and Pincus's hands.)
They write,
... In the years ahead, Washington will no longer be in a position to dictate what new global structures will look like. Nor will any other country, Fingar said. "There is no nobody in a position . . . to take the lead and institute the changes that almost certainly must be made in the international system," he said.
The predicted shift toward a less U.S.-centric world will come at a time when the planet is facing a growing environmental crisis, caused largely by climate change, Fingar said. By 2025, droughts, food shortages and scarcity of fresh water will plague large swaths of the globe, from northern China to the Horn of Africa.
For poorer countries, climate change "could be the straw that breaks the camel's back," Fingar said, while the United States will face "Dust Bowl" conditions in the parched Southwest. He said U.S. intelligence agencies accepted the consensual scientific view of global warming, including the conclusion that it is too late to avert significant disruption over the next two decades. The conclusions are in line with an intelligence assessment produced this summer that characterized global warming as a serious security threat for the coming decades.
The new assessment saw a continued threat from Iran, however. Fingar predicted steady progress in the Islamic republic's attempts to create enriched uranium, the essential fuel used in nuclear weapons and commercial power reactors. For now, however, there is no evidence that Iran has resumed work on building a weapon, Fingar said, echoing last year's landmark National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, which concluded that warhead-design work had halted in 2003.
He said Iran's ultimate decision on whether to build nuclear weapons depended on how its leaders viewed their "security requirement" -- whether they thought their government sufficiently safe in a region surrounded by traditional enemies.
Iranians are "more scared of their neighbors than many think they ought to be," Fingar said. But he noted that the United States had eliminated two of Iran's biggest enemies: Iraq's Saddam Hussein and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
"The United States took care of Iran's principal security threats," he said, "except for us, which the Iranians consider a mortal threat."
But that's a matter of emphasis. In general, his report will be well worth watching for.
Regarding budget, though, I do wonder how much the whole exercise of producing this report has cost US taxpayers? Just imagine, Thomas Fingar could simply have bought a copy of my book-- cover price $14.95-- and covered almost exactly the same range of issues, and reached very similar conclusions....
Big thanks to everyone who sent comments in response to the post I put up recently on my desire to upgrade several aspects of the blog. If you're reading this post on the JWN site you will already have seen that the design is changing a bit. Bear with this process as it continues. I decided that rather than spend time discussing with a web designer what I wanted to do it might be a lot easier to start trying to do as much of the redesign myself as I am able. Especially as I now have quite a lot of experience of tweaking my own Movable Type.
In this first step, I reorganized the front page into a two-sidebar format, since the old sidebar had become ways long, crowded, and clunky; and I tweaked other design elements quite a bit along the way. However, the visual redesign of the site is by no means finished yet. I think I'm going to look for something 'cleaner' and classier. I really don't like the blue I have on the banner right now. Ways too bright and perky!
I would love to have a well designed JPG-imaged banner, though I haven't found anything I like yet. Can anyone out there make one for me? I'm thinking something classy, lots of white, some blue, possibly some greys... an image of the world, a peace dove or something... and of course the text that we have on the banner now. If you can make one for me, please send it along!
Also, any comments you have about the redesign to date. Giving the main blog text a fixed 55-px width rather than a proportional width was a suggestion from Bill the spouse. I have yet to implement that in the archived versions of the posts. Does anyone else have thoughts on that?
Onward and upward.
Update, Sept. 11: Sorry about any strange effects you might experience. I'm trying to keep them to a minimum. ~HC.
You know there's been this long-running dispute between, on the one hand, the US military command in Afghanistan and on the other, the Afghan government and the United Nations, over the number of civilians killed in a controversial US air attack near Azizabad, Afghanistan on August 22.
According to this story in today's London Times it turns out the US military was relying to some degree in its repeated confirmation of its original (very low) casualty estimates on the say-so of-- guess who-- that infamous trickster Oliver North.
Hat-tip to Siun of Firedoglake.
I completely concur with the judgment Siun expressed there: "Pardon me while I throw up."
For those too young to remember, North was the Marines colonel who was deeply involved in planning and implementing the Reagan administration's infamous Iran-Contra affair of the mid-1980s. In May 1989 he was convicted of three charges in connection with Iran-Contra: accepting an illegal gratuity, aiding and abetting in the obstruction of a congressional inquiry, and destruction of documents. Those convictions were later "vacated" on a technicality.
So today, in Afghanistan, he is still hard at work covering up governmental malfeasance, it seems.
The Times's Tim Coghlan reports from Kabul that,
The US military said that its findings were corroborated by an independent journalist embedded with the US force. He was named as the Fox News correspondent Oliver North, who came to prominence in the 1980s Iran-Contra affair, when he was an army colonel.
Commenter Bill, down near the bottom, wrote:
However, offering this up as proof is ridiculous. It showed nothing and the second video was looped material. I think it is disingenuous to loop a short clip or two to try a make your material seem more complete and a bit obvious.
Many survivors and even victims of the US air attack were Afghan government employees, or members of their families. Gall, like Coghlan, includes in the web edition of her story a link to a video taken August 23 by a doctor from a nearby town. It shows a large number of bodies on the floor of what seems to be a mosque. The bodies are wrapped in blankets, and the video shows someone walking round and uncovering the faces of many of the bodies, while in the background mourners wail.
Gall wrote,
The accounts of the airstrike’s aftermath given by Afghans and Americans could not be further apart.
A visitor to the village and to three graveyards within its limits on Aug. 31 counted 42 freshly dug graves. Thirteen of the graves were so small they could hold only children; another 13 were marked with stones in the way that Afghans identify women’s graves.
Villagers questioned separately identified relatives in the graves; their names matched the accounts given by elders of the village of those who died in each of eight bomb-damaged houses and where they were buried. They were quite specific about who was killed in the airstrikes and did not count those who died for other reasons; one of the fresh graves, they said, belonged to a man who was killed when villagers demonstrated against the Afghan Army on Aug. 23.
At the battle scene, shell craters dotted the courtyards and shrapnel had gouged holes in the walls. Rooms had collapsed and mud bricks and torn clothing lay in uneven mounds where people had been digging. In two places blood was splattered on a ceiling and a wall. An old woman pushed forward with a cauldron full of jagged metal bomb fragments, and a youth presented cellphone video he said was shot on the day of the bombing; there was no time stamp.
The smell of bodies lingered in one compound, causing villagers to start digging with spades. They found the body of a baby, caked in dust, in the corner of a bombed-out room.
Cellphone images that a villager said that he shot, and seen by this reporter, showed two lines of about 20 bodies each laid out in the mosque, with the sounds of loud sobbing and villagers’ cries in the background.
An Afghan doctor who runs a clinic in a nearby village said he counted 50 to 60 bodies of civilians, most of them women and children and some of them his own patients, laid out in the village mosque on the day of the strike. The doctor, who works for a reputable nongovernmental organization here, at first gave his name but then asked that it be withheld because he feared retribution from Afghans feeding intelligence to the Americans.
The United States military, in a series of statements about the operation, has accused the villagers of spreading Taliban propaganda. Speaking on condition that their names not be used, some military officials have suggested that the villagers fabricated such evidence as grave sites — and, by implication, that other investigators had been duped. But many villagers have connections to the Afghan police, NATO or the Americans through reconstruction projects, and they say they oppose the Taliban.
The district chief of Shindand, Lal Muhammad Umarzai, 45, said he personally counted 76 bodies that day, and he believed that more bodies were unearthed over the next two days, bringing the total to more than 90. Mr. Umarzai has been praised for bringing security to the district in the three months since his appointment and is on good terms with American and NATO forces in the region...
A commitment that's about two weeks too late, I would say.
And prior to that, they were relying on Oliver North???
this latest air attack-- like the ones the US military has been launching against targets in Pakistan-- has almost certainly deepened the distrust between Washington and what was once a strongly pro-US government.
Human Rights Watch has a new report out today about the casualties from the US air attacks in Afghanistan. In an accompanying news release it says,
WaPo columnist Jackson Diehl is a quintessential liberal hawk. So when he expresses open criticism of Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, as he did today, that means there are serious cracks in the coalition of supporters that Saak had hoped to protect himself with, in Washington.
Diehl's column was titled "The Trouble with Saakashvili."
He writes,
(Teaser for that: Saak's bear-baiting ended up revealing for all to see the degree to which the US military has become completely overstretched, and therefore seriously dented-- or perhaps even destroyed completely-- the "credibility" of the US's long-sustained posture of conventional-force "deterrence". Is it just an accident, after all, that one of the developments that followed the Ossetian war was Kim Jong-il's announcement that he's about to resume his nuclear weapons program??)
Back to Jackson "Always gung-ho for liberal wars" Diehl. He writes pretty well about the political nuance of the situation Saak has placed the US in:
Still, if Georgian democracy needs Saakashvili to survive, it also needs, eventually, to reckon with him. If and when the Russian occupation can be ended and the imminent threat to the country overcome, the test for Georgians will become whether they can use democratic institutions to investigate and challenge their president's behavior and hold him accountable for the huge reversal he has inflicted on the country.
Here in the US, sadly, we have never till now held accountable the author of the very worst and most damaging war of choice of recent times: George W. Bush's decision to invade Iraq in 2003. (And I haven't heard Jackson Diehl calling for any such accountability here at home, either. Jackson?? )
But back to Georgia.
Diehl had the good luck and the good sense to meet last week with Nino Burjanadze, an impressive Georgian politician and jurist who has much stronger democratic credentials than Saak. After helping Saak lead the so-called 'Rose Revolution' of 2003, she was Speaker of the parliament and briefly head of state before the two fell out in June.
Diehl writes,
The Bush administration, too, needs to figure out how to separate its support for Georgia as a country and a democracy from its defense of Saakashvili. The new aid package doesn't do that -- a large part of the money will be channeled directly into the government budget. All of the funds are earmarked for economic support and reconstruction; none are aimed at strengthening democratic institutions or civil society. Perhaps that's necessary to deny Putin his victory. But it won't help solve Georgia's leadership problem.
By the way, Reuters had what looks like a very important interview with Burjanadze while she was in New York. You can read it here. Here's the nub of it:
“I need serious analysis. I need answers to the questions,” she said in an interview with Reuters on September 5 after speaking at Columbia University in New York.
When asked what would happen if it does turn out to have been avoidable, she said: “In this case, I wouldn't wish to be in the government's place.”
“I can say it's very difficult to imagine a good position for the president of a country that has such big problems,” Burjanadze said. “I don't think that he feels himself comfortable and well or stronger than he was before.”
“However, we, the Georgian people, do not consider the government as victims only and, of course, the time will come for a sober assessment of what went wrong in Georgia.”
This is a story everyone in the US-- but especially all those members of Congress who line up behind AIPAC's warmongering-- needs to read. Israeli president Shimon Peres tells the London Sunday Times that, regarding Iran, “The military way will not solve the problem... Such an attack can trigger a bigger war.”
How's that again?? In all the anti-Iran propaganda with which AIPAC lards its public communications, it forcefully makes the argument that the US and Israel should be prepared to use military attacks against Iran to prevent it ever getting a nuclear weapon... because such a capability could be fatal for Israel.
And now Peres, who was the father of Israel's own nuclear weapons program back in the 1950s and 1960s, tells us that an attack might actually be harmful, not helpful?
We might remember, too, that during the few months in 1995-96 when Peres was Israel's prime minister, he launched his own fateful war of choice against Lebanon. That was April 1996, and it did not turn out well for Israel, at all. Peres had launched it partly as an election ploy. It didn't work out well for him, either. He lost that election-- due in good part to the fact that his war in Lebanon persuaded large numbers of Palestinian-Israelis not to vote for him...
And now, the Sunday Times's Uzi Mahnaimi is writing this:
...“In my opinion, the Americans are making a mistake in their foreign policy.
“When they intervene abroad, they’d do better using the economy, which doesn’t provoke such antagonism.”
So, late in the day, yes. But still, words that people in the US policy elite definitely need to hear.
So today, Wired's Noah Schachtman draws attention to the fact-- as indeed, I suspected might well happen-- some strategists in the 'west' have started to recommend that, as it rebuilds its military, Georgia should use "a Hizbullah model", rather than the earlier US-Israeli model.
Hizbullah, the latest model for pro-western militaries!
One article Schachtman quotes from is this one, by Greg Grant of DoD Buzz.
Grant wrote:
... U.S. Army Lt. Col. Robert Hamilton, a military fellow at CSIS, and former chief of the Office of Defense Cooperation at the American embassy in Tiblisi,... writes, “Past U.S. military assistance to Georgia was not designed to equip it for war with Russia. Instead, it was designed initially to give the Georgian military the capability to rid its territory of Chechen militants Russia claimed were using it to rearm and refit, and later to train it in counter-insurgency operations as Georgian forces began to take on a significant role in Iraq.” He says the U.S. “deliberately” avoided training the Georgians for conventional warfare as it would be seen as too provocative.
Oh, and the training also prepared the Georgian army for the role they played as proxies for the US in occupying Iraq...
It is also very significant indeed if, as Hamilton said, prior to August 7 the US "'deliberately' avoided training the Georgians for conventional warfare as it would be seen as too provocative." If indeed that was the case, then someone should have told Saak his forces weren't getting trained to take on the Russian Bear... Or maybe they did, but he thought that by provoking the bear he could jerk NATO into rushing to his aid.
So if the "not provoking Moscow" rule was in force prior to August 7, why would anyone in the US want to see it dropped now? ... Anyone?
As it transpired, the very limited set of population-subjugating skills the US and Israelis passed on to the Georgians were not at all the skills needed to confront Russia's massed armor. What they needed, according to Grant and others, was actually.... Hizbullah's fighting skills instead!
He writes,
Equipped with top-shelf anti-armor systems, such as the U.S. Dragon and Javelin and the Russian-built RPG-29 and AT-14 Kornet, such a force would perhaps better be able to exploit Georgia’s mountainous and urbanized terrain against channelized Russian armored columns than a conventionally organized combat brigade, as Hezbollah did in south Lebanon. The lessons from the initial Russian incursion into Grozny in 1994 are instructive as well. Fighting in small tactical teams organized around close range anti-armor weapons, the Chechens savaged Russian tank columns.
Many in the U.S. military view such “hybrid” opponents, loosely organized, highly motivated infantry networks equipped with advanced weaponry, as the most challenging threat American troops may face in a future war. As the U.S. military ponders how to increase the combat power of the Georgian military to better defend itself against possible future Russian attacks, the Hezbollah model might be one to emulate. One thing the U.S. military cannot provide the Georgian military, and what Hezbollah had in spades and greatly increased their effectiveness, was very high discipline and motivation. The Georgians will have to come up with that on their own.
I have no idea what forces in Georgian society might be capable of mobilizing and maintaining the degree of motivation and disipline that Hizbullah has showed over the past 23 years. Evidently, if the Russians maintain a "security zone" in Georgia beyond the 'boundaries' of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, that will certainly increase the motivation of Georgians to resist their presence there-- just as Israel's attempt to maintain its own "security zone" inside Lebanon after it undertook a broad partial withdrawal in 1985 also kept Hizbullah's motivation high.
Also, Hizbullah's successes were won at a cost to their supporters and the rest of Lebanese society that was often wrenchingly high... and only at the end of a number of major-scale engagements with significantly sized Israeli forces (1993, 1996, 2006, to identify just a few.)
Does anyone really want to see Georgian society forced to pay such a high and continuing cost? And does anyone really want to see outright confrontations in the Russia-West relationship, such as we saw last month, repeated every few years, at unpredictable levels of escalation?
I think not.
Negotiating a sustainable and sufficiently fair political outcome to the Georgia-Russia crisis is far, far preferable to that. And it is, certainly, quite doable.
I hope that is what the leaders of all the world's big powers-- and both the contenders in the current US elections-- place their focus on.
Certainly, that rather than any harebrained and unavoidably inflammatory schemes to "rearm Georgia."
Two interesting recent posts from Wired's Noah Schachtman. In this one, Sept. 5, he cites this London Times report as saying that last week, US/NATO military people managed to connect Georgia's surviving air-defense missile radars to NATO's own broader air surveillance system.
This would seem to challenge or contradict what I wrote here recently about the US having decided, for now, not to give Georgia any military aid. More on that, below.
But was what happened last week between the Georgian and NATO a/d systems a "re-connect", rather than a "connect"?
Schachtman notes that back last December, Reuters had already quoted Georgia's defense minister as saying that "Georgia has plugged into NATO's integrated air defence radar system."
It makes a significant difference whether what happened last week was a connect or a re-connect. If the latter, then that presumably means that the Georgian radars were still "connected" to the NATO system back on August 7/8... Which would mean a couple of things:
(2) Somewhere in the archives of NATO's air surveillance system there almost certainly lie some pretty acurate records of who did what to whom, with what precise timing, back at the start of the war. (That's a politically important matter, since Pres. Saakashvili continues to claim he was only "responding" to a prior Russian attack rather than-- as most of the evidence seems to suggest-- actually starting the war himself.)
I actually judge that in Moscow, having Georgia plugged into the NATO system may not, on its own, be seen as strategically disadvantageous, as noted in point #1 above. Indeed, in a situation of gradually mending/evolving Russia-US ties, the "transparency" offered by the plug-in, as mentioned in point #2 above, could be seen as part of a broader regime of reciprocal confidence (re-)building in the region.
Wouldn't that be a nice thought?
The London Times writer, Michael Evans, made no reference to the idea that what happened last week may have been a re-connection, rather than a first connection. But he did say this about the US (and UK) policy on the question of rearming Georgia, more broadly:
As part of efforts to develop closer military ties with Georgia the US is also planning to set up a trust fund into which alliance members can donate money to assist Georgian military forces. “It's basically Nato passing the hat around,” an official said.
A Nato team of specialists has visited Tbilisi to find out what Georgia needs to rebuild its forces. Washington dismissed the claim by Moscow that the US warships sent to Georgia to offload tonnes of humanitarian aid had been delivering arms secretly.
“The thrust of Nato's efforts at present is to help Georgia get through the winter, preventing Russia from strangling the country. We've got to try to keep the democracy in the country going, but there's no talk about accelerating Georgia's application to join Nato as a member state,” one official said.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence in London said: “In light of recent events, Georgia needs time to reflect on requirements for the future. We intend to provide assistance to Georgia and will consider requests for assistance in discussion and co-ordination with our Nato and EU partners.”
* Afghanistan
* European energy supplies.
The story continues to evolve.
So I was at the checkout counter in our great locally owned foodstore here in Charlottesville this morning, and I bumped into Deborah McDowell, a chaired prof in the University of Virginia's rightly lauded English department. Debbie is an uber-talented African-American woman of commanding presence. After we said hi, I remarked how depressing it has been trying to deal with the emergence of Sarah Palin. She said she completely agreed. And as we stood there continuing to talk about the outrageous way Palin and other Repubs laid into Obama last week, the checkout clerk (female, white, over 40) joined in too.
We walked on out of the store. Debbie was asking, in her great English prof's voice, "just how stupid can the American people be if they fall for this nonsense, after all that we've seen from Bush for eight years, and they elect just a continuation of the same thing... ?" Another woman, whom neither of us knew, (white, around 40?) walked over, cappuccino cup in hand, and joined in. She asked a question of fact-- "Isn't it true, though, that the Democrats have been in charge in Congress for the past two years?-- that we tried to address. Later, I said one of the things I really resented was how Sarah had explicitly, from the get-go, tried to expropriate the feminist "mantle" from Hillary Clinton, whereas the policies she and McCain espouse on issues of particular relevance to women, including but certainly not limited to the right to choose to abort an early-term fetus, are deeply, deeply, anti-female.
Our new friend agreed completely with that, and said that-- though she's a little fed up with the raucousness of some of the Obama supporters around here-- she does intend to vote for him. Because of the way she had asked the question at the beginning, she struck me as a thoughtful person.
All in all, an interesting conversation. Not a representative sample of anything, but indicative that there are still plenty of women around who have not been bamboozled by all the evident flair, the feistiness, and fol-de-rol of Sarah Palin.
I haven't blogged for, what, three days now. Which is fine. Sometimes the posts come thick and fast, sometimes there's a gap. I don't feel I need to blog with any particular frequency; and anyway, the few weeks right after August 8 were pretty intense and, I think, fruitful for the blog.
These past few days I've been doing some other things. Some things with my beloved Quaker meeting, which is always good to do because it keeps me grounded. Some thinking about longterm strategic directions for the blog and myself. More on that below... And a few things connected with the next big development in my family/personal life: which is the arrival (G-d willing) of my daughter Leila's first child-- our first grandchild-- in early November.
Leila and her husband Greg live in New York (Brooklyn), so I'm hoping to be there with them as much as possible in the first weeks of the newborn's life. I am completely thrilled they're having this baby! It's bringing back a lot of memories of when I gave birth to Leila and her slightly older brother, Tarek, in Beirut in the late 1970s. Back then, my sister Hilly came from England to help out. And okay, my then-husband and I had a wonderful live-in nursemaid, too. She made the post-delivery weeks a lot easier than they are for most young parents in the US or other western countries.
Having a baby and dealing with all the adjustments involved are huge challenges. The endless chains of broken nights are what I chiefly recall. Those, and suddenly this sense that, as the mother, you're basically in servitude for a period of time to this small person who can't even articulate her or his needs or desires... So scary! So as the parent, you suddenly need to learn all these completely new skills of 'reading' your baby's needs... It's quite amazing that any of us ever survived this process (as parents or, long before that, as babies.)
But my experience of having done this, like that of just about all the parents I know, has been truly amazing. I have learned so much-- about the world, about the human condition, about myself, about relationships in general, about what is truly valuable in life (and oh, also, I suppose about baby-care and childrearing)... Simply by having hung in there and raised these three young people, now aged 23-30: all of them compassionate, well-grounded, talented, and a huge amount of fun to be with.
American society doesn't give anything like enough support to the parents and caregivers of young children. Compared with anywhere in Europe, the situation here is brutal. I imagine that even in many low-income countries, women get more support from society as a whole. For example, Leila is a teacher in the New York City school system, where the teachers' union is quite strong. But even with this allegedly "strong" contract the union has won for them over the years, she's not entitled to any paid maternity leave. And children's (cash) benefits, such as many European governments give to mothers as a matter of course?... Or the services of a home-visiting 'district nurse' or health visitor in the crucial post-partum days? Fuggedaboutit. We are truly in the Dark Ages here. No wonder that in some American inner cities, the infant and child mortality rates are on a par with some very low-income countries.
... So I'll be in New York quite a lot in the weeks after the baby arrives. Obviously, the babe will make her/his own decisions about the timing. Before that (I hope), I'll be on the west coast for much of October, doing various events to promote my Re-engage! book, and I have a couple of events on the east coast (New Jersey and Delaware) later in September. Check this page on the book's website for details of those.
Meantime, I've been doing some thinking about future directions for, in particular, this blog. You know, I've been publishing it for 5.5 years now... A total of nearly 3,000 posts... Some of them, in retrospect, still really good, some of them somewhat scattershot or idiosyncratic.
To some degree, the whole blog has been idiosyncratic from the very start... From the day in early January 2003 when Tarek said, "You know, mom, you really ought to start writing a blog;" and I said, "A what?" ... And he got me started reading Josh Marshall's blog, which has gone from strength to strength since then, and Juan Cole's blog, and, and, and... And a couple of weeks later he got me started on my own blog... 'Just World News': nice name, huh? We started out with Blogger software; he shifted me to Movable Type (where I found I'd picked the same template as Jonathan Edelstein)... and I've been married to writing JWN ever since.
So now (drumroll... ) I've decided to try to take JWN to a whole new level.
You know, for just about all these past 5.5 years I've thought of JWN as "something on the side", or "a drafting notebook", or something a little like (ghastly word, this), a "hobby". But really, for a long time now, it's been a whole lot more than that. It has become an important part of my professional and personal identity.
Bloggo ergo sum, as Descartes would have blogged if he could have torn himself away from contemplating dripping candles and inventing dualism.
Okay, maybe that's an exaggeration. But not wholly.
So now I'm going to think about ways to become a whole lot more intentional about what I do here on JWN. I think I want to invest in a re-design, and I know I want to think harder about getting some different kinds of quality content up here. One thing I'm definitely thinking about is interviews with interesting figures in the policy world.
Bill the spouse says I should have photos, videos and audio clips, too. Videos I totally can't envisage posting (unless I hire someone who can do that for me.) But really, it's not my comparative advantage. Audio clips maybe I could manage. In conjunction with the interviews, perhaps? And the odd photo or whatever.
Maybe.
But all that stuff takes time. Time that, mostly, I would rather spend writing, thinking, reading, and talking to people. Face it, I'm fundamentally a words person. That's what I am. But I can make the words better organized, more intentional, more interesting and thought-provoking, more useful, and better displayed. That's what I want to do.
I also want to figure out a way to have this baby blog generate a bit of income for us. I don't need a lot, but some would be nice.
So readers and admirers of JWN, here is your chance to have input into helping to revision JWN. I am still right at the start of the process. Please tell me, either privately or in the open comments section here, any thoughts or suggestions you have on:
* Ditto, the visual or organizational design;
* A good, affordable web-designer I could work with on the re-design;
* Your reactions to my suggestions on the blog, above;
* Any ideas you have for potential 'strategic partnerships' I might explore between JWN and institutions or individual philanthropists (yourself? anyone you know?) who might want to support the blog financially, or sponsor it in some other way...
Georgia's US- and Israeli-built armed forces got pulverized by the Russians during last month's short war over South Ossetia. The Bush administration has promised $1 billion to the Georgians in reconstruction aid. So far, administration spokespeople have been at pains to stress that this aid is for humanitarian relief and reconstruction, and no mention has yet been made of the idea of rebuilding Georgia's military.
The Bush administration's actions during the entire Georgia crisis until now have been marked by a degree of caution and risk-avoidance that, in the circumstances, is entirely appropriate. Remember the reports about how the 100 or so military trainers the US had in Georgia at the time of the war were immediately told to change into civvies, stash any weapons they had out of sight, and sit out the war hanging round hotel swimming pools?
So why did the Bushists behave like that? Three reasons. First, they had no spare forces-- their own, or forces of 'allied' nations-- to send in. Second, they didn't want to get drawn into a direct mano-a-mano with another Big (and also nuclear-armed) Power. Third, remember that the Russians have agreed to help out NATO's campaign in Afghanistan by allowing non-military supplies to be shipped to NATO's forces there through Russia.... So Moscow might have large parts of western Europe over a barrel. But it has the US over a railhead.
For now, the war has died down... I'm assuming that Pres. Saakashvili is desperately eager to rebuild his armed forces. There would be a number of logistical problems regarding how the US (or its Israeli surrogate) might undertake any rearming of Georgia. Ships through the Black Sea? Airlifts? Overland through Turkey?
Those problems could be solved, I suppose. But it's the political problems that are still limiting all foreign reconstruction aid to non-military items.
So far, the call to "re-arm Georgia!" has not become any kind of a big issue in the US election campaign. (Imagine how different things might be if we had a Democrat in the White House.) But the Georgia situation has not been anywhere near resolved yet, in any durable political way. If the present status quo remains in place, I suppose it is possible a sort of "Finlandization by default" may emerge there.
However, reaching a formal, negotiated agreement on Georgia's status-- one that's agreed to by all relevant parties including Russia, and that also resolves the currently contested status of the two now-seceded regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia-- is far preferable. Absent such an agreement, all of Georgia, including the two seceded regions, would be unable to do the kind of long-term economic planning and investment that made Finlandization into a palatable and workable deal for Finland itself. Absent that agreement, all of Georgia will remain mired in the kind of directionless limbo that seems to mark Kosovo to this day.
I think I asked this before. But where in the world is Ban Ki-Moon?
On August 31, Al-Sharq al-Awsat published a leaked version of the nearly completed text US-Iraqi security (SOFA) agreement. That text was dated August 4. Raed Jarrar of the American Friends Service Committee worked over the weekend providing a full translation into English, which you can read on AFSC's website, here.
Great work, Raed!
Yesterday, Raed also blogged a translation of an important interview with Iraqi parliament Speaker Dr. Mahmoud al-Mashhadani explaining that the Iraqi parliament must ratify any such agreement-- but why, in fact, it is quite unable to do that at this time.
So there is a sort of unreal aspect to all the discussion of clauses and sub-clauses in the draft "text" of the treaty. (As I have been arguing here for a long time now. Most recently, here.)
Indeed, the Iraqis side has had the "upper hand" in the negotiations for at least the past 2-3 months. All the talk in the US political elite about the US being able to ram the US's "conditions" down the throats of the Iraqis is just that-- talk. It has zero basis in reality.
Still, there are a number of mildly interesting points in the August 6 negotiating draft. Most of them come toward the end. And most are the points where lack of agreement is still indicated, rather than agreement.
For example, this:
1- This agreement is valid for (…) years unless it is terminated earlier based on a request from either sides or extended with the approval of both sides.
Or this:
Iraqi Suggestion: the Iraqi delegation has suggested the following title to this article:
Transferring security responsibilities to Iraqi authorities, and the withdrawal of the U.S. forces from Iraq
U.S. Suggestion: the U.S. delegation has suggested combining paragraphs 1 and 2 as follows:
1- Both sides have agreed on the following time targets to handover complete security responsibilities to the Iraqi security forces and the withdrawal of the U.S. forces from Iraq:
A- U.S. combat troops will withdraw from Iraq completely at the latest on (…)
B- U.S. forces will withdraw from all cities, towns, and villages at latest by June 30, 2009 unless the Iraqi authorities request otherwise.
Note: the head of the U.S. delegation offered to accept the new title only if their combined paragraph is accepted, and he linked the two as one deal
1- Iraq may reach an agreement with any other country participating in the Multi-National forces to ask for their help in achieving security and stability in Iraq.
2- Iraq is permitted to reach an agreement that includes any of the articles mentioned in this agreement with any country or international organization to ask for help in achieving security and stability in Iraq.
... Well, as I note above, there is an unreal air to this whole exercise. I quite agree with Raed when he writes in his blog:
I think the US government should consider a different type of agreement with Iraq: an agreement for a complete withdrawal that leaves no troops, no mercenaries, and no permanent bases (and no 5,000 employees embassy either.)
One final point. Most Iraqi parliamentarians have been quite forthright in pursuing their rights, as an elected legislative body, to have rights of ratification before any international agreement of such great impact for the country goes into effect. Back in October 2002, the members of the US legislature faced imminent legislative elections and in those circumstances proved themselves easily cowed by a bellicose and overbearing administration... And they simply rolled over and gave the president the widest possible authorization to conduct any kind of operations against Iraq up to and including a full-blown war of invasion and occupation.
Which is how we got to where we are in Iraq, in the first place.
This fall, in the lead-up to yet another momentous round of US elections, let's hope the members of the US Congress keep their heads and don't allow themselves to be cowed into giving the president any permissions for either war-making or occupation-prolongation, such as would later turn out to be dangerous traps for our country.
Yesterday, Human Rights Watch started to step back from the claims it made very loudly last month that during the fighting in Georgia,"Russian aircraft dropped cluster bombs in populated areas in Georgia, killing at least 11 civilians and injuring dozens." Those claims were first made August 15, and were repeated in two further public statements issued by the organization, this one on August 21 and this one on September 1. In addition, individual HRW staff members repeated these accusations against Russia-- which it claimed were backed up by solid "evidence"-- in a number of other signed articles, media appearances, etc.
I blogged here, on September 2, about the flawed nature of the "evidence" HRW had used in its accusations against Russia, and the impact that such accusations can have on raising tensions and galvanizing opinion for war. (Cf., the "Kuwaiti incubator story" of 1991.)
Yesterday's statement was titled Clarification Regarding Use of Cluster Munitions in Georgia. Referring only to its report of August 21 on this matter, not the earlier August 15 report, it said:
...This clarification does not affect Human Rights Watch’s findings on August 15 that Russia used aerial cluster bombs to attack the village of Ruisi and the town of Gori on August 12. Eleven civilians were killed and dozens more injured in these two locations. In Ruisi, Human Rights Watch researchers found submunitions that they identified as PTAB 2.5M, which are known to be in Russia’s arsenal. Human Rights Watch based its findings on visual identification of the submunitions and the cluster bomb carrier in Ruisi, craters typical of submunition impact, and accounts from Georgian victims in both towns, as well as doctors and military personnel. The Russian government has yet to adequately respond to these findings.
On August 31, as HRW told us September 1, the government of Georgia informed them that it had had a stockpile of ground rocket-launched cluster munitions that contained M85 submunitions. The Georgian government also told HRW it had used some cluster bombs "during an attack on Russian military forces near the Roki tunnel." That tunnel is at South Ossetia's northern border, quite a long way away from Gori.
It occurs to me that one explanation for what HRW's witnesses in the Gori area saw is that the Russian aircraft might have blown up some of Georgia's cluster bombs stockpiled in the area.. In HRW's August 21 statement, and in the latest "Clarification", the eye-witnesses to the attacks are quoted as saying that "Russian air strikes on Georgian armored units located near Shindisi and Pkhvenisi were followed by extensive cluster munition strikes that killed at least one civilian and injured another in Shindisi." Would this description not be consonant with (a) the Russians having bombed ground targets in these areas-- hopefully only legitimate military targets, and then (b) some of those strikes, hitting units equipped with cluster bombs, had caused secondary explosion of those cluster bomb munitions?
I looked at the video of one such attack that HRW has on its site, and this could be an explanation of what I was seeing.
If this is what happened-- and I would welcome any comments on that from experts-- then it's very tragic. Well, whatever the explanation, it's very tragic for all those noncombatants who were hit.
I note, though, that HRW's "Clarification" is still far from satisfactory. It still maintains that the submunitions found in Ruisi and in Gori itself were of the the (Russian-owned) PTAB 2.5M type-- though it gives us absolutely none of the evidence on which this finding is based. The photos of submuntions in the August 21 statement-- published with no provenance given, though they seem to have been from Shindisi or Pkhvenisi-- had been identified in the text as "Russian" too, though as NDRE noted, they actually were not.
So we still need to see HRW's "evidence" regarding Ruisi and Gori.
The latest "Clarification" is also insufficient in the following ways:
2. It says nothing about any internal investigation, within HRW, into the issue of how the organization could have earlier gotten the facts so very wrong about Shindisi and Pkhvenisi. Without such a thorough, transparent, and credible investigation, why should anyone believe what they say.... on anything?
Many parts of the world stand on the brink of major new escalations that could erupt before the day of the US elections, November 4. I would include in that list Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Georgia, and Ukraine. Doubtless there are more, too.
I've been trying to think through what the effects of such escalations might be on the US elections. I reckon almost any of them-- with the important exception of Iraq-- would tend to strengthen the electoral appeal of John McCain, who "promises" the US voters that he'll be tough, will stand up to aggressors, has military experience, etc.
Iraq is an exception to that rule because McCain has been running very strongly on the argument that he was "right" about the Surge, and that Obama was quite wrong to oppose it.
If there are escalations or problems inside Iraq that are of a scale to become relevant in the US elections, then that could damage McCain, given how tightly he has lashed himself to the mantra of that the Surge has "succeeded." It would also raise for US voters the even bigger question that McCain has tried to distract them from, which was the question of the advisability of the US having invaded Iraq at all.
But what if there is a major new outbreak of violence in Iraq and also in some other global trouble spot? Then, things could get really complicated...
At one level, the result of the US election will make a difference to the prospects of world peace that is less than many Obama supporters might hope. There are serious structural limitations on the ability of any US president to even maintain the present levels of overseas deployment of US forces-- let alone, his ability to launch new wars or aggressions. Whoever is president will most likely have to find a way to withdraw in some sort of good order from Iraq within the next three years-- and also, to find a way to "internationalize" the challenge of governing in Afghanistan. John McCain is not totally incapable of summoning the requisite diplomatic skills. Indeed, I can see a scenario in which he could be the "De Gaulle" or "Nixon" figure who is aboe to sell significant a significant pullback of global power to the US citizenry precisely because of his previous image as a tough guy.
Nonetheless, I think Obama shows more of the "reframing" and rethinking skills that are needed in global affairs, at this prtesent po0nt. And at the level of domestic policies I strongly prefer his approach over John McCain's.
Anyway, the two months ahead will be a sensitive time in world affairs. Let's see what happens.
The best-known U.S. Quaker to have undertaken a peace-witnessing mission inside post-invasion Iraq was Tom Fox, the widely loved member of Christian Peacemaker Teams who was killed there in early 2006. From my own personal experience, I know there are many Quakers, all around the world, who are working in different ways to help restore the rights of the Iraqi people, to provide humanitarian assistance to them, and/or to end the US occupation of their country.
Now, I can reveal to you that Bob Fonow, whose 'End of Assignment report' from his work as the US Embassy's chief telecoms adviser I shared with you here recently, is also a Quaker. What's more, shortly after Bob finished his 18-month term working with the Embassy inside the heavily fortified 'Green Zone', he returned to Iraq as a private individual, with the aim of trying to mediate an apparently complex set of disputes among shareholders of the country's largest mobile phone company.
He went on that mission in April. And that time, he was working in what many people call the 'Red Zone'-- that is, the area outside the Green Zone.
Tom Fox and his CPT colleagues made a point of working in the Red Zone.
Bob is a member of the Herndon, Virginia 'Meeting' --that is, congregation-- of the Religious Society Friends. (The RSF is the official name of the church, though we've been called 'Quakers' since almost the beginning of the RSF's emergence as a pacifist Protestant church, back in 17th century England.) He first got in touch with me back in, I think, December, to challenge the assertion I'd made that I thought I was the only Quaker who's also a member of the International Institute of Strategic Studies. Not so, he said, since he is one, too.
And unlike a number of other Quakers-- oh, for some reason Richard Nixon comes to mind-- who have strayed pretty far from their connection with their home meeting, Bob has stayed in good touch with, and well grounded by, his meeting.
Bob has now been kind enough to say I can publish here a couple of the short reports that he sent back from the 'Red Zone' to members of his home meeting during and right after his late-April stay in the Red Zone. His descriptions of life there, and of the attitudes of the people he met and worked with, are certainly valuable for all of us to read and to reflect on. When he was there was when the US military was trying-- using massive amounts of violence and force-- to fight its way deep into Sadr City...
In his second letter to the Herndon friends, Bob wrote:
Several Mahdi Army officers visited my host in Baghdad on Tuesday to tell him that they can’t take much more. They are being attacked after calling a truce. They will have to declare all out war in a few days if the attacks don’t stop.
... How is any more violence going to lead to peace, unless you kill every potential militant in Sadr City – which means hundreds of thousands of men and women? I haven’t yet met any Iraqis or Americans prepared to suggest that alternative. So there has to be a political and diplomatic solution.
It’s time to stand down the military attack on Sadr City. It’s a useless operation with no strategic utility. There must be a better way.
And now, the whole US citizenry and our government need to look much more seriously for the clearness we all need, at the broader level, regarding Iraq. As Bob wrote, "there has to be a political and diplomatic solution." It so happens that-- as longtime JWN readers are doubtless aware-- I have done quite a lot of thinking about what that solution might look like, stretching back more than three years now.
... But now, I am just very happy to let you read the full text of Bob's two reports from the Red Zone. To read them, just keep on reading or click on the link below. Thanks, Bob-- and here's praying for your safety in your continuing world travels.
Bob Fonow
Baghdad, Iraq
28 April 2008
I’m back in Baghdad again, only three weeks after leaving government service in the US Embassy in the Green Zone as the senior US reconstruction official for telecommunications in Iraq. This time it’s to mediate a dispute among shareholders of the largest mobile phone company. If the dispute is not resolved within the next two weeks the cell phone service in Iraq could shut down. The system is the lifeline for most people in Iraq, and the primary instrument of stability in the country. So it’s a serious issue. In any other country there would be technical alternatives. In Iraq there aren’t. A shut down will impair food distribution, fuel distribution, emergency services, general commerce, just about everything.
I’m in the Red Zone in Baghdad, staying in a secure complex, with a bodyguard 24 hours a day, and numerous other guards around. Stress in the Red Zone is different than in the Green Zone. In the Green Zone it’s the constant threat of rockets and mortars. In the Red Zone people fear car bombs, kidnapping and assassination. (The Red Zone is everywhere in Iraq outside the Green Zone military and government area in central Baghdad). It has been confirmed by my Iraqi hosts what many of us believed in the Embassy: overall violence is down, targeted assassinations of doctors, dentists, professors, local politicians, teachers, engineers, etc. are up. My protection service in the Red Zone – people who live ordinary daily lives – say that life in Baghdad isn’t getting better.
The guest house in the security complex where I’m staying is very nice, with a bedroom and even a pool table in the nicely furnished living room. In the Embassy I lived in a gray metal trailer. It’s a gilded cage of course, but if you have to live in a cage, gilded is preferable. I can hear the mortars exploding in the Green Zone during the day and at night the military action taking place in the city. One tends to sleep fitfully in such circumstances and I must always remain aware of the impact this has on my emotional, physical and psychological condition. I can’t do this work continuously – on my own with minimal support.
My relationship to the Embassy has changed dramatically. I’m having trouble getting a badge to enter the Green Zone. I have to cross into the Green Zone just as an ordinary Iraqi. That means passing through a cordon of six checkpoints, getting frisked twice, emptying my pockets three times, taking the battery out of my cell phone, being interrogated by Iraqi, African and South American guards several times through a quarter mile of barbed wire and fencing.
An important part of my role as a mediator in Baghdad is to get the Embassy to engage. The telecommunications sector is considered a success in Iraq so it’s hard to get attention for a problem that hasn’t happened yet, when so much else is going wrong. Yet, if the State Department gets involved in the Iraqi mobile phone services dispute, they will carry sufficient weight to bring it to a successful resolution. They have talented people with negotiating experience, and that’s what’s needed for this problem. This particular dispute could lead to loss of American and Iraqi lives. Who wants more of that here?
By now I’m known by many as a Quaker in Baghdad, a member of the Religious Society of Friends, often called a “peace church” due to its rejection of war as a political instrument. The closest thing to a core belief in Quakerism is “a seed of God in everyone”, and that the potential for grace is within every person. For several centuries many Quakers have expressed this belief in the mediation of difficult disputes. I have made my affiliation known to the disputing parties and that I expect a certain flexibility and good will going forward. It’s to my advantage that many officials in Iraq today have worked with Friends in their years in exile.
An Iraqi official said to me today that we need more love and less bombing and bullets from the United States. This was after he received a delegation from the Mahdi Army saying that they were only days away from declaring an open war on the United States in Iraq after increasingly deadly attacks on their stronghold in Sadr City, a giant rat infested, festering slum of three million people in East Baghdad that even Saddam left alone. This sounded a little embarrassing to me, the man was a fighter for many years, a leader of armed resistance forces, and it seemed almost like a Sixties admonition to make love not war. But he was trying in a second language to express his views that we Americans have missed many chances for peace in Iraq and there aren’t many left. He said that the US should be bringing the people of Sadr City to the negotiating table, not killing them. While Americans believe we are peaceful people, he said this is no longer shared by many Iraqis.
Violence, danger and the ugliness of war is present everywhere in Iraq today. I have accepted this assignment as a private American Quaker as a “mission to protect” my friends in Iraq – and American soldiers and civilians - from the collapse of the mobile system that is their vital lifeline to the necessities of complex urban life in a war zone. If service shuts down Iraqi society will be even more chaotic, desperate, dangerous and miserable than it is today. But if we can find a peaceful resolution to this difficult problem, up to now intractable, we may have a model that others involved in the confrontation in Iraq may use to their peaceful advantage.
Having said that, I still would rather be at the monthly pot luck dinner next Sunday at the Herndon, Virginia Friends Meeting House, or camping along the Shenandoah River at Friends Wilderness Center near Harpers Ferry.
Bob Fonow
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Bob Fonow is Managing Director of RGI Ltd., a troubleshooting firm for the international telecommunications industry. He a member of the Religious Society of Friends, Quaker. Herndon, Virginia Meeting.
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It has been quite a week in Baghdad. I’m in Kuwait now trying to negotiate my little part of the madness into a favorable resolution. With any luck – and it will take some – the mobile phone system may stay operating after the middle of May, but it’s no certainty.
For ten days until Wednesday night I was in the Red Zone trying to mediate – i.e. in the middle of - a nasty shareholder dispute that has the potential of destroying the only functioning part of the Iraqi infrastructure. American generals accused me of exaggerating or trading for business on my former position in the Embassy as the senior advisor for telecommunications, as if my entire career as a troubleshooter was based on that sole assignment. Diplomats say I’m being alarmist – a much cleverer use of language. You only have to read the newspaper this week to understand why I’m getting such a reaction. Things aren’t getting better, they’re deteriorating. I’m off message.
I was probably safer in the Red Zone than the Green Zone. This is because Coalition forces, read that as US and Iraq Army forces, are attacking Sadr City. The Sadrist Mahdi Army is firing rockets into the Green Zone in return. Americans in the Green Zone are frightened, some are leaving, and many are angry. But I don’t think they should be surprised. US diplomats should be asking the US military to explain the strategy behind their attacks, and how it contributes to stability and peace in Iraq.
Sadr City is portrayed as a nest of militant criminals, proxies for Iran in Iraq. In fact, it’s a slum of three million people living in indescribable poverty. It has always been poor and militant. Saddam wouldn’t attack it as long as the people kept to themselves and didn’t threaten his regime. Unfortunately, thanks to the US they have a taste now for democracy and elections, and they tend to elect people the current US Administration doesn’t like very much.
At an Iraqi government meeting I was asked to attend on Tuesday I heard that several hundred thousand people in Sadr City have no clean water. They are drinking sewage, or water from filthy canals. The city is rat infested from garbage piling up. Electricity is limited to a couple hours a day. Medical services are holding up but US and Iraqi Army units are stopping ambulances. So far in the two weeks since Coalition forces started their attacks 925 Sadr City people have been killed and 2695 wounded. Earlier in the day I was told by one official that US Army snipers are playing games with killing. For a couple hours they are shooting men in the testicles, then a couple hours to the foreheads, and then a couple hours aiming at the heart. I hope this isn’t true, but I hope someone investigates.
Several Mahdi Army officers visited my host in Baghdad on Tuesday to tell him that they can’t take much more. They are being attacked after calling a truce. They will have to declare all out war in a few days if the attacks don’t stop. Wouldn’t that be convenient?
Today we learned in the international press that satellite guided precision weapons are being used against enemy command posts in Sadr City. This means that Americans in bunkers in the western part of the United States using video cameras and a classified version of something like Google Earth are remotely guiding, over the international telecommunications network, Predator unmanned vehicles over Baghdad to fire Hellfire missiles at ramshackle breezeblock huts holding a few guys with cell phones.
If you add up all the costs of this futile and ridiculous endeavor, the cost of that missile strike, which killed six illiterate young men, since most men in Sadr City are illiterate, would easily be several million dollars. The cost of one missile strike could remove the piles of feces off the streets and alleys of Sadr City, purchase a fleet of water tankers, provide textbooks for schools, set up centers for adult literacy, equip playgrounds, and even plant a few trees in the moonscape of this destroyed city within a city in Baghdad.
A second missile hit a bunch of kids picking up scrap metal to sell. The US claims it wasn’t a Hellfire. OK. We accept that. But what do you think the Iraqis believe? How is any Hellfire missile going to improve the situation in Sadr City? How is any more violence going to lead to peace, unless you kill every potential militant in Sadr City – which means hundreds of thousands of men and women? I haven’t yet met any Iraqis or Americans prepared to suggest that alternative. So there has to be a political and diplomatic solution.
It’s time to stand down the military attack on Sadr City. It’s a useless operation with no strategic utility. There must be a better way.
I’d like to go back to Baghdad, and I don’t want to go back. I want to help but I don’t want to get killed. I don’t know how to reconcile these competing feelings or how to determine the right level of my commitment to Iraq and the people I have learned to understand and like. Time for a clearance committee.
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Bob Fonow
3 May 2008
On August 15, Human Rights Watch issued a statement-- still published on their website without comment-- saying its researchers "have uncovered evidence that Russian aircraft dropped cluster bombs in populated areas in Georgia." On that same page is a photo of Georgian men standing around a crater pointing to what is described in the caption as "the remnants of an RBK-250 cluster bomb dropped by Russian aircraft on the village of Rusisi..."
This story about "Russia's use of cluster bombs in Georgia" got huge play in the western MSM, many of whose leading contributors have come to treat HRW with almost oracular reverence.
On August 21, HRW issued another statement on the same subject, adding that despite Russia's denials that it had used these weapons, its researchers had "documented additional Russian cluster munitions attacks during the conflict in Georgia."
It turns out, though that the "research" in question was considerably less than expert or thorough, and that HRW's much-lauded lead "researcher" on this topic, Marc Garlasco, may have fallen victim-- or worse-- to a Georgian disinformation campaign.
Bernhard of Moon of Alabama is just one of those who've been pointing out that the bomb remnants in the photos published by HRW in those two releases are very different from those of a Russian "RBK-250 cluster bomb", or its submunitions. Indeed, they're not items of Russian manufacture at all... but Israeli, as can easily by seen by comparing them with stock weapons-ID photos and charts.
However... At some point in late August, the Georgian government finally confessed to HRW that it had used cluster bombs during the recent conflict-- and that these had indeed been of Israeli manufacture. That news was posted on the HRW website yesterday, here.
The latest HRW news release does nothing to retract or raise questions about its earlier "reports" about Russian use of cluster bombs in Georgia. Instead it says this:
We need to understand what Garlasco's original "research" or "documentation" on the cluster-bomb remains in Georgia consisted of.
Here's what the first of the reports on the HRW website said about the research methodology:
Garlasco also considerably-- perhaps fatally-- undermines his own credibility by stating that the cluster bomb remnant in the photo is that of a "cluster bomb dropped by Russian aircraft", since the remnant in question not only isn't Russian but also was not dropped by any aircraft, since its fins have the distinctive curving of the 'pop-put' fins of an artillery-launched bomb.
Garlasco seems guilty of, at the very least, considerable professional slipshoddiness as a researcher. And how could his superiors at HRW have accepted-- and agreed to publish-- as "evidence" for his claims, just a few photos whose provenance, timing, and other attributes have not been thoroughly checked and cross-checked? The professional slipshoddiness at HRW goes considerably higher than just Marc Garlasco. And it also extends to those media outlets that just reproduced all his/HRW's arguments and claims about "Russian" use of cluster bombs-- for which we still have no actual evidence, at all-- without interrogating and trying to understand the extremely flimsy nature of the "evidence" he was using.
This incident reminds me a lot of the time in January 1991 when Amnesty International got "used" by the Kuwaiti hasbara machine in Washington to give its stamp of approval to Kuwait's fabricated story about the Iraqis throwing babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital. Then, as now-- and as very frequently happens when people are trying to beef up public support for a war venture-- the "bloody shirt" of the civilian losses inflicted by the other side is waved to try to persuade people of "our side" to support confrontation, escalation, and war.
Was Marc Garlasco used, or did he connive in the Georgian disinformation? Either way, why is he still apparently regarded by HRW-NY as a credible researcher on these matters?
This matters to me because I still sit on the Middle East advisory committee of HRW. HRW's work in the Middle East has certainly been the location of a lot of disagreement about priorities and policies, but overall the Middle East division has done some excellent, ground-breaking work. Work that has always-- with one notable exception, back in November 2006-- been painstakingly researched, documented, and reviewed long before it is released for publication.
What happened to that whole extensive documentation and review process this time round? HRW has some very serious questions of methodology and internal procedures that it now needs to address.
Also, HRW, which is one of many organizations around the world calling for greater accountability by all kinds of public bodies, needs to become much more accountable, itself.
The November 2006 incident occurred when the organization rushed out a statement criticizing-- on grounds allegedly derived from international humanitarian law-- an action of mass nonviolence undertaken by Palestinian organizations in Gaza. I was one of those who prominently and publicly called them out on it, noting that nothing in IHL provided any basis for criticizing the action in question. HRW then took more than three weeks to issue a correction. And when it did so, it did it without fanfare and without even distributing the correction to the whole of the same list that had received the original accusation.
That is not good accountability.
This time around, HRW needs to assemble a high-level team of credible people-- not including Marc Garlasco-- to investigate the performance of the whole organization regarding these accusations of Russia's use of cluster bombs, and other aspects of its work during the Russian-Georgian war, and then in a timely manner to issue a public report on what was done well and what was done badly during this work. This report should also contain concrete recommendations regarding methodology and internal procedures, to ensure that slipshod and potentially inflammatory work like that done by Marc Garlasco does not appear in the organization's name again.
I quite understand that, being a privately-funded organization, HRW has a lot of motivation to have "something to contribute" to the public discussion on the latest issues of the day. They probably think this is necessary in order to keep their funding flowing in. (And it also lets HRW's leaders appear to be "big players" on the international scene.) But there can be no substitute for careful, painstaking, and thoroughly well documented research. Human rights work should never seek to be "flashy", and should absolutely never allow itself to become politicized.
Wake up, Ken Roth and the rest of the HRW leadership. This issue is most likely your "Kuwaiti incubator story," and you need to deal with it effectively, honestly, and well.
And yes, if you invite me to sit on your "Georgia incident special investigation team", I would be happy to do so.
Last week we learned that China has 'beaten' all those bit-champing western oil companies, and has signed a $3 billion deal to help develop Iraq's al-Ahdab oil field.
It turns out that the relationships that Chinese businesses have with various different sectors of the Iraqi economy is far more extensive than I-- or, I suppose, most other Americans-- had realized.
Bob Fonow is a veteran IT consultant and trouble-shooter who in March concluded an 18-month term as the U.S. State Department's "Senior Telecommunications and IT Consultant to the Government of Iraq." In the End of Assignment Report that he submitted recently, he wrote about the broad presence he saw various Chinese government bodies and corporations as having established throughout Iraq. Fonow, I should note, saw nearly all these relationships as being good for Iraq, as I do; and he urged his former clients at the State Department to continue and strengthen them.
Fonow makes many other very informative points in his report. He has kindly given me permission to publish it. It's a 14-page PDF document, and since I don't think I can upload it directly to JWN, I have uploaded it here instead.
He writes,
I found some informative-- if slightly dated-- background about China's economic activities in post-2003 Iraq in this article, which was published by Yufeng Mao on the Jamestown Foundation's website in May 2005.
She wrote:
China opposed American intervention in Iraq in 2003 partly because of its substantial economic interests there under Saddam Hussein's regime. During the years before the war, Beijing actively pursued oil and construction contracts with Iraq under the UN Oil-for-Food program. From China's perspective, a war in Iraq would substantially hurt Chinese interests since it would result in the loss of Iraqi contracts valued at over one billion U.S. dollars, which in turn would disrupt its oil supply and increase oil prices...
The American decision to invade also raised concerns among Chinese leaders and analysts that the strong influence of the United States in the Middle East would hinder China's effort to access economic resources in the region. China's repeated call for the return of sovereignty to the Iraqis reflects a deep anxiety concerning U.S. domination of Iraq's economic resources.
China... jumped on the bandwagon of reconstruction after the war. Beijing's pledge of $25 million and an agreement to forgive a large part of Iraq's multi-billion dollar debt made China a significant donor to the country, but this generosity is not motivated by sheer goodwill. Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Shen Guofang explicitly stated that China hoped to forgive some debt owed by Hussein's regime in order to gain access to the bidding processes on big oil and infrastructure projects.
Desire to do business in Iraq has contributed to intensified efforts towards improving relations with the new Iraqi authority. The Chinese embassy in Baghdad reopened less than two weeks after the transfer of authority to the Iraqi interim government in June 2004. China offered material assistance for the January election, provided fellowships for Iraqi students to study in China, and is helping to train a small number of Iraqi technicians, management personnel, and diplomats. For example on April 1, 2005, 21 Iraqi diplomats were funded by the Chinese government to start their month long training program at China Foreign Affairs University.
... In contrast to its usual inactivity in the United Nations on Middle Eastern affairs, since the beginning of the Iraq crisis, China has engaged in a flurry of activity. In early 2003, the Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan flew to UN headquarters in New York four times to lobby for a political solution to the Iraq problem. Most significantly, on May 26, 2004, China submitted to the Security Council an "unofficial document," offering Chinese views on how to revise a draft resolution proposed by the U.S. and the UK. This marked an unprecedented move by Beijing to seek a more visible role on Middle Eastern affairs. In this document, China proposed that the U.S.-led multinational force withdraw from Iraq in January 2005. Even though Resolution 1546 did not adopt this suggestion, Beijing believes that its document contributed to the resolution's terms about full Iraqi sovereignty over its resources and security matters. Moreover, China has consistently called for a larger UN role in Iraq, both with regard to WMDs and reconstruction efforts. From China's perspective, a more prominent UN role would not only limit American power in the region, but it would also give China more leverage in dealing with the new Iraqi authority.
In Bob Fonow's report, he laid special emphasis on the role he judged China could play in training a whole new generation of Iraqi IT managers.
He wrote:
China is the best place to conduct this training. [My emphasis there, as everywhere else. ~HC] After the Cultural Revolution a system of telecommunications universities was set up to improve quickly China’s telecom infrastructure. Today this system produces the equivalent of one Regional Bell Operating Company a year. China today maintains the largest cell phone, Internet, landline networks, etc. in the world. The training requirement within China has peaked and there are sufficient places for thousands of Iraqi students a year at price points that can’t be matched in other countries.
The Office of Communications, with the knowledge of the China desk at Main State, has introduced the Ministry of Communications to the key telecommunications education officials in China. Coordination in Iraq is necessary between the Ministry of Communications, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Higher Educations. The Chinese appear willing to consider training large numbers of technicians and the planning for the program is underway in 2008.
The China training programs should be limited to specific technical and operations training requirements. Bachelor level education should be conducted in Iraq, since the education system produces acceptable entry level engineering graduates. Graduate level training and research should remain in the United States.
This may not sit well with those in the Department of Defense who consider China to be the next strategic enemy. However, pragmatism should be the guiding principle in Iraq to achieve order, stability and rapid reconstruction, certainly in essential services. The major Chinese communications equipment vendors Huawei and ZTE already train hundreds of Iraqi students a year at their commercial training facilities in Shenzhen. Several times a year Government of Iraq ministerial officials with telecommunications and IT portfolios , in groups of 24 or so, are invited to China, flying first and business class, staying in five star hotels in Beijing, the latest limos provided and spending money passed out. The Chinese have a long term commercial and diplomatic plan for Iraq.
... Anyway, I can see I'm assembling the building blocks here for a really interesting article on how George Bush's completely misplaced reliance on military assault and invasion in both Iraq and Afghanistan has not only not "resolved" the problem of violent Islamist extremism... It has not only resulted in the deaths of 4,200 Americans and uncountable scores of thousands of citizens of Iraq and Afghanistan... It has not only destroyed a lot of Iraq's vital physical and institutional infrastructure, and failed after nearly seven years to bring public security or public order to most of Afghanistan... It has not only helped plunged the US into trillions of dollars worth of debt-- that our grandchildren will be paying off for many decades to come-- with much of that debt held by Japan and yes, also by China... But it has also made these Iraq and Afghanistan suddenly incredibly hospitable to Chinese mercantilism, and has considerably accelerated China's emergence as significant political actor in both south-central Asia and the Middle East.
Heckuva job, George!
But perhaps that isn't totally a fair assessment. It wasn't only that George Bush and his advisers turned out to be unbelievably wrongheaded, shortsighted, and maladroit in their handling of these two countries... It was also, it seems to me, that the Chinese regime has until now played its cards in both countries incredibly well.
Also, the bigger lesson, as noted here several times before: In the modern world, we are no longer in the 19th century. Relying on military power just doesn't get you what you want any more...
The folks at Japan Focus have republished my recent JWN post on some implications of China's investments in Iraq and Afghanistan. What's more, they did a light edit on it and put in photos. So classy! You can see their version-- here.
I have long experienced at first hand the way that some men try to belittle and exclude women in public life through aggressive and often painful forms of name-calling and public humiliation.
I have also, certainly, heard "white" men-- and women-- use similar forms of name-calling to belittle, humiliate, and exclude African-Americans, Muslims, Arabs, gay people, and even occasionally Jewish people from the public discourse. When I, as a straight, "white" woman hear such appeals to a supposed ethnic or straightnik solidarity that the perpetrators imagine I might share with them, it is sometimes a challenge to know how to respond. What I always like to do in such circumstances-- and certainly try to do-- is draw a clear line by saying I find such language offensive and don't want to stick around to hear it.
I actually don't hang around a lot with people who say such ugly things. And it's been a long, long time since any guys of my acquaintance used language around me that was openly demeaning to women.
Maybe that's largely a function of my selection of companions.
So what does it tell us about VP candidate Sarah Palin that, as Governor of Alaska already, she would
(b) during the on-air interview, after they have called another leader in the state's Republican politics both a "cancer" and a "bitch", she would do nothing but give a nervous little giggle before assuring them warmly that she has enjoyed being on the show with them?
Even without taking into consideration that the political rival in question, the Republican president of the Alaska State Senate, Lyda Green, is herself a cancer survivor. Though of course that makes it a lot worse. (And we should surely assume that Palin knew of Green's health status at the time.)
In Juan's post there, he also adds a clip from a GOP fundraiser earlier this year when a woman very loudly asks John McCain -- in relation to, I imagine, Hillary Clinton-- "How are we going to beat the bitch?"... and there are prolonged and loud guffaws of complicity all round, including from John McCain.
Both incidents tell us a lot about these two people who aspire to lead our country.
Neither of them drew any lines in the sand at all against the public use of such hateful language. Both seemed to me to be a little embarrassed by their interlocutors' use of the B-word. But that didn't stop eithert of them from laughing at it. And most importantly, neither of them did anything at all, right there and then, to dissociate themselves from the general idea that such language is quite acceptable and "okay" to use in pubic political discourse.
Palin reportedly, later, issued a public apology to Green. (But it may have been of the exculpatory form that "I am sorry if Ms. Green took offense at what was said"... blaming the victim for her reaction, rather than the perpetrators for their hate-fueled boorishness.)
But how about her reaction at the time, which came across like a couple of short bursts of possibly nervous giggling?
She didn't stand up to her interviewers then at all. Not one iota. She giggled along with them.
John McCain is not a young man. If Palin becomes president, is she the kind of person we want answering the 3 a.m. phone calls when there's an international crisis?
Not her. And not McCain either, for reasons too numerous to mention.
I've been doing a bit of background research for a post I'm planning on China's growing presence in Iraq... I hope to have a pretty interesting post about that topic up on the blog soon.
But in the meantime, here's a little teaser that shows you just how longstanding Iraqi-Chinese relations really are.
How venerable do you guess they would be?
Try 1,250 years?
If you go to this page on the website of DC's Smithsonian Institution, you can find the catalogue and an on-line interactive display related to a late-2004 exhibit that either the Freer or the Sackler Gallery had, titled Iraq & China: Ceramics, Trade, and Innovation. (To see both of those, click on "Interactive" on the portal page... and in the "Interactive" section, click on "Resources" to get the catalogue.)
Here's what I learned from the catalogue:
By the end of the 10th century, the Abbasid caliphate was starting to disintegrate. But by then the ceramic techniques developed in Basra had spread to other points in the Muslim world, including Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain...
Back at the moment of that first contact in the eighth century, it was the Muslims who were good at (and wanted to invest in doing) the seafaring, while the Chinese were always wary about straying too far over the ocean, but had great land-based technologies.
And now, 1,250 years later? China and Iraq look poised for a new era of technological interaction in a large number of spheres. Not only oil tech, as revealed by the news of China's latest big investment in that, but many other technologies too...
The plan, as described on Hamas's website here, could be huge. It will almost certainly have a much bigger impact than the two-small-ship siege-busting effort undertaken from Europe last month. That latter effort did a lot to focus European (and to a lesser extent, US and other western) attention on the gross injustices of Israel's punitive, 30-month siege of Gaza. But in terms of actually either delivering goods to Gaza or changing the policies of the source-country governments, it did very little.
The Egyptian siege-busting project is being organized by a group from "the Egyptian judges club [association], parties, and popular forces," and will aim to cross into Gaza from Egypt on October 9. Here's what the Hamas website says about it:
He said that the delegation would leave from the relief committee at the Cairo doctors syndicate on 10/9 heading to Gaza and would carry whatever they could collect of foodstuff and medicine. He said that Egyptian MPs would join the convoy.
Dr. Hamdi Hassan, member of the Muslim Brotherhood parliamentary bloc, urged all legal and relief organizations along with the Egyptian masses to join the delegation to break the siege.
He said, "I will go alone in my car and carry whatever it could take of food supplies and medicine, anyone is welcome to coordinate with me or with others".
Now, it seems, that calculus has changed.
The fact that the convoy organizers have announced their plans so publicly and so far in advance is a key tactic of nonviolent mass organizing, a strategy to which the Egyptian MB has been committed since the mid-1980s. What can or will the Cairo government do to stop them-- especially during the holy month of Ramadan-- that will not itself make the situation worse? Possibly, a lot worse?
This convoy could succeed in getting huge amounts of much-needed goods into Gaza. It could succeed in opening the Rafah crossing for considerably longer than just a few hours. And most crucially, at a time when Egypt is suffering fin-de-regime jitters that could well be a lot worse than any it has suffered since 1952, this project could put the MB and its agenda into a position in Cairo that is much stronger than anyone in the fortress-like US embassy there (and their Israeli allies/overlords) can be happy with.
Savvy JWN readers will know that Hamas was originally, back in 1987, a project of the Palestinian branch of the MB. Back in January, when Hamas felled the high barrier walls between Gaza and Egypt and organized the big "bust-out" of deprived Gazans across the felled walls to buy some badly needed basic supplies, Egypt's ageing president Hosni Mubarak made a huge and partially successful effort to portray that bust-out as an "invasion" of Egypt's national territory by those repressed, hunger-driven-- and almost completely unarmed-- souls.
You can access some of the commentary I wrote about that whole series of incidents, and about the crucial role that Egypt plays in the long-range planning of the Hamas leaders, here.
But now, it looks as though what the MB and its allies are planning for next month is a "bust-in" into Gaza, instead.
Watch this story as it develops.