Web| Oct 20, 2008
View From Israel
Jews and Arabs, are "condemned" to live together, whether they like it or not. But, the joint fabric is still weak. In order to change this, we must all have the courage to look the problem in the eye, to see it as it is, without hypocrisy or falsification.
URI AVNERY
THROUGHOUT ITS thousands of years of history, Akko has never been an Israelite town.
Even according to the mythological story of the Bible, the Israelites did not conquer the city, which was already an ancient port. The first chapter of the Book of Judges, which contradicts much of the description given in the Book of Joshua, states unequivocally: "Neither did [the tribe of] Asher drive out the inhabitants of Akko. (Judges 1:31)
Only a few of the world's cities can boast such a stormy and checkered history as Akko (Akka in Arabic, Acre in French and English), the main port of the country. It was a Canaanite-Phoenician town, traded with Egypt, rebelled against Assyria, confronted the Jewish Hasmoneans, was conquered by the Crusaders, served as a battle-ground for the legendary Saladin and the no less legendary Richard the Lion-Hearted, was the capital of the semi-independent Arab state of the Galilee under Daher al-Omar and withstood the siege of Napoleon. All these periods have left their traces in Akko, in the form of buildings and walls. A fascinating town, perhaps the most beautiful - and surely the most interesting - after Jerusalem.
During some of these periods, there existed in Akko a small Jewish community, but it never was a Jewish town. On the contrary: among the Rabbis there was an ongoing discussion whether Akko, from the point of view of religious law (Halacha), belonged to Eretz Israel at all. This was important, because certain commandments apply only to the Land of Israel. Some rabbis believed that Akko did not belong, while others asserted that at least a part of the town did. (That did not prevent us in our youth from singing "Akko, too, belongs to Eretz Israel" - meaning the old Crusaders' fortress on the sea-shore, where the British held prisoners from the Jewish underground organizations.)
In the 1948 war, Akko was occupied by the Israeli forces, and since then it has lived under Israeli rule: 60 years out of a history of 5000 years and more.
This is the background of last week's events in Akko. The Arab inhabitants consider Akko as the town of their forefathers, which was forcibly occupied by the Jews. The Jewish inhabitants consider it a Jewish town, in which the Arabs are a tolerated minority - at most.
For years the town was covered by a thin blanket of hypocrisy. Everybody praised and celebrated the wonderful co-existence there. Until the blanket was torn, and the naked truth was exposed.
I AM a very secular person. I have always advocated a complete separation between state and religion, even in the days when that sounded like a crazy idea. But it has never entered my mind to drive on Yom Kippur. There is no law forbidding it, no law is necessary.
For a traditional Jew, Yom Kippur is a day like no other. Even if one does not really believe that on this day God makes the final decision about the life or death of every human being for the next year and writes it all down in a large book, one senses that one has to respect the feelings of those who do believe. I would not drive on Yom Kippur in a Jewish neighborhood, just as I would not eat in public during Ramadan in an Arab neighborhood.
It is difficult to know what the Arab driver Tawfiq Jamal was thinking of when he entered a predominantly Jewish neighborhood in his car on Yom Kippur. It is reasonable to assume that he did not do it out of malice, as a provocation, but rather out of stupidity or carelessness.
The reaction was predictable. An angry Jewish crowd chased him into an Arab house and besieged him there. In a distant Arab neighborhood the loudspeakers of the mosques blared out that Arabs had been killed and that an Arab was in mortal danger.Excited Arab youngsters tried to reach the house of the besieged Arab family but were blocked by the police. They gave vent to their feelings by wrecking Jewish shops and cars. Jewish youths, reinforced by members of the extreme right, burned down the homes of Arab inhabitants, who became refugees in their own town. In a few minutes, 60 years of "co-existence" were wiped out - proof that in the "mixed" town there is no real co-existence, only two communities who hate each other's guts.
IT IS easy to understand this hatred. As in other "mixed" towns, indeed as in the whole of Israel, the Arab public is discriminated against by the state and municipal authorities. Smaller budgets, inferior education facilities, poorer housing, crowded neighborhoods.
The Arab citizens are the victims of a vicious circle. They live in crowded towns and neighborhoods that have turned into neglected ghettos. When the standard of living of the inhabitants rises, there is a desperate demand for a better environment and better housing. Young couples leave the neglected and underfunded Arab neighborhoods and move into Jewish areas, something that immediately arouses opposition and resentment. The same has happened to Afro-Americans in the USA, and before them to the Jews there and elsewhere.
All the talk about equality, good neighborliness and co-existence goes up in smoke when Arab families live in a hostile Jewish environment. Reasons are always to be found, and the incursion of Tawfiq Jamal was only an especially grievous example.
Such a situation can be found in many places on earth. Religious, nationalistic, ethnic or community sensitivities can explode at any time. It took a hundred years after the emancipation of the slaves in the US until the civil rights laws were enacted, and during those years there were regular lynchings. Another 40 years passed before a black candidate could come near the White House. The police in London is notorious for its racism, citizens of Turkish origin are discriminated against in Berlin, an African can play football for the French national team but has no chance of becoming president.
In these respects, Akko is no different from the rest of the world.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE said that each of us contains a little racist. The only difference is between those who recognize and try to overcome him and those who give in to him.
As chance would have it, I spent Yom Kippur, while the riots were shaking Akko, reading the fascinating book by William Polk, "Neighbors and Strangers", which deals with the origins of racism. Like other animals, ancient man lived from hunting and gathering. He roamed around with his extended family, a group of no more than fifty people, in an area that was barely sufficient for their subsistence. Every stranger who entered his territory was a mortal threat, while he tried to invade his neighbor's territory in order to increase his chances of survival. In other words: the fear of the stranger and the urge to drive him out are deeply embedded in our biological heritage and have been for millions of years.
Racism can be overcome, or at least reined in, but that needs conscious, systematic and consistent treatment. In Akko - as in other places in the country - there has been no such treatment.
In this country the racism is, of course, connected with the national conflict which has been going on already for five generations. The Akko events are just another episode in the war between the two peoples of this country.
The Jewish extreme right, including the hard core of the settlers, does not hide its intention of driving out all the Arabs and turning the entire country into a purely Jewish state.Meaning: ethnic cleansing. It looks like the dream of a small minority, but public opinion research shows that this tendency is gnawing at a much wider public, even if only in a half-conscious way, hidden and denied.
In the Arab community, there are probably some who dream about the good old days, before the Jews came to this country and took it by force.
When Jews carry out a pogrom in Akko, whatever the immediate reason, it becomes a national event. The burning of Arab homes in a Jewish neighborhood at once arouses fear of ethnic cleansing. When the Arab young people storm into a Jewish neighborhood in order to save an endangered Arab brother, it immediately evokes memories of the 1929 massacre of the Jews in Hebron - which, at the time, was also a "mixed" town.
THERE IS reasonable hope that at some future time we shall end the national conflict and reach a peaceful solution that both peoples will accept (if only because there is no alternative.) A Palestinian state will come into being side by side with Israel, and both peoples will understand that this is the best possible solution.
(The Akko events should give rise to second thoughts in the mind of anyone who believes in the "One-State solution"' where Jews and Arabs would live in brotherhood and equality. Such a "solution" would turn the entire country into one big Akko.)
But peace, based on two states living side by side, will not automatically solve the problem of the Arab citizens in Israel, a state that defines itself as "Jewish". We must be ready for a long, consistent fight over the character of our state.
The extreme rightist Avigdor Liberman has proposed that the Arab villages on the Israeli side of the Green Line should be attached to the Palestinian state, in return for the Jewish settlement blocs beyond the Green Line that would be attached to Israel. That would not affect, of course, the Arab inhabitants of Akko, Haifa, Jaffa, Nazareth and the Galilee villages. But even in the villages near the Green Line, no Arab agrees to this idea. Although Liberman proposes to turn over the entire villages to the Palestinian state together with all their lands and properties, not a single Arab voice has been raised in agreement.
Why? The million and a half Arab citizens in Israel do not like the government's policies, the flag and the national anthem, not to mention the treatment of the population in the occupied territories. But they prefer the Israeli democracy, the social progress, the National Insurance system and the social services. They are rooted in the life and mores of Israel much more deeply than they themselves recognize. They want to be citizens in this state, but on terms of equality and mutual respect.
The Jews who dream of ethnic cleansing do not understand how large a contribution the Arab community makes to Israel. Like the other inhabitants of Israel, they work here, they contribute to the GNP, they pay their taxes like everybody else. Like all of us, they have no alternative - they pay value-added tax on everything they buy and they, too, get their salaries only after income tax is deducted.
There are many questions that have to be recognized and discussed, and from which conclusions must be drawn.Is it desirable or not desirable, at this stage, for Arabs to live in Jewish neighborhoods and Jews in Arab neighborhoods? How can the Arab neighborhoods be elevated economically to the level of Jewish neighborhoods, in practice and not only in talk? Should every Jewish child learn Arabic and every Arab child learn Hebrew, as the mayor of Haifa proposed this week? Should Arab education receive the same status and the same budgets as, for example, the independent but government-funded Jewish Orthodox education system? Should autonomous Arab institutions be established? Finding solutions to these problems, or at least to some of them, is a vital part of the fight against racism - attacking its roots, and not only its symptoms.
Actually, there is no alternative: the citizens of Israel, Jews and Arabs, are "condemned" to live together, whether they like it or not. But, as the Akko events have shown again, the joint fabric is still weak. In order to change this, we must all have the courage to look the problem in the eye, to see it as it is, without hypocrisy or falsification. This is the only way we can find solutions.
Monday, 27 October 2008
Sunday, 19 October 2008
George Moniibot
One Cause, Two Crises
The financial crisis is nothing. Well, nothing by comparison to what's coming. It prefigures the real collapse, when humanity bumps against its ecological limits. The cause: Extracting resources at a rate beyond the level of replenishment...
GEORGE MONBIOT
This is nothing. Well, nothing by comparison to what’s coming. The financial crisis for which we must now pay so heavily prefigures the real collapse, when humanity bumps against its ecological limits.
As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year, as a result of deforestation alone(1). The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Sukhdev arrived at his figure by estimating the value of the services - such as locking up carbon and providing freshwater - that forests perform, and calculating the cost of either replacing them or living without them. The credit crunch is petty when compared to the nature crunch.
The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences. I used to believe that collective denial was peculiar to climate change. Now I know that it’s the first response to every impending dislocation.
Gordon Brown, for example, was as much in denial about financial realities as any toxic debt trader. In June last year, during his Mansion House speech, he boasted that 40 per cent of the world’s foreign equities are now traded here. "I congratulate you Lord Mayor and the City of London on these remarkable achievements, an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London."(2) The financial sector’s success had come about, he said, partly because the government had taken "a risk-based regulatory approach". In the same hall three years before, he pledged that "in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers"(3). Can anyone, surveying this mess, now doubt the value of the precautionary principle?
Ecology and economy are both derived from the Greek word oikos - a house or dwelling. Our survival depends upon the rational management of this home: the space in which life can be sustained. The rules are the same in both cases. If you extract resources at a rate beyond the level of replenishment, your stock will collapse. That’s another noun which reminds us of the connection. The OED gives 69 definitions of stock. When it means a fund or store, the word evokes the trunk - or stock - of a tree, "from which the gains are an outgrowth"(4). Collapse occurs when you prune the tree so heavily that it dies. Ecology is the stock from which all wealth grows.
The two crises feed each other. As a result of Iceland’s financial collapse, it is now contemplating joining the European Union, which means surrendering its fishing grounds to the Common Fisheries Policy. Already the prime minister Geir Haarde has suggested that his countrymen concentrate on exploiting the ocean(5). The economic disaster will cause an ecological disaster.
Normally it’s the other way around. In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond shows how ecological crisis is often the prelude to social catatrosphe(6). The obvious example is Easter Island, where society disintegrated soon after the population reached its highest historical numbers, the last trees were cut down and the construction of stone monuments peaked. The island chiefs had competed to erect ever bigger statues. These required wood and rope (made from bark) for transport and extra food for the labourers. As the trees and soils on which the islanders depended disappeared, the population crashed and the survivors turned to cannibalism.(Let’s hope Iceland doesn’t go the same way.) Diamond wonders what the Easter islander who cut down the last palm tree might have thought. "Like modern loggers, did he shout ‘Jobs, not trees!’? Or: ‘Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood.’? Or: ‘We don’t have proof that there aren’t palms somewhere else on Easter … your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering’?"(7).
Ecological collapse, Diamond shows, is as likely to be the result of economic success as of economic failure. The Maya of Central America, for example, were among the most advanced and successful people of their time. But a combination of population growth, extravagant construction projects and poor land management wiped out between 90 and 99% of the population. The Mayan collapse was accelerated by "the competition among kings and nobles that led to a chronic emphasis on war and erecting monuments rather than on solving underlying problems"(8). Does any of this sound familiar?
Again, the largest monuments were erected just before the ecosystem crashed. Again, this extravagance was partly responsible for the collapse: trees were used for making plaster with which to decorate their temples. The plaster became thicker and thicker as the kings sought to outdo each other’s conspicuous consumption.
Here are some of the reasons why people fail to prevent ecological collapse. Their resources appear at first to be inexhaustible; a long-term trend of depletion is concealed by short-term fluctuations; small numbers of powerful people advance their interests by damaging those of everyone else; short-term profits trump long-term survival. The same, in all cases, can be said of the collapse of financial systems. Is this how human beings are destined to behave? If we cannot act until stocks - of either kind - start sliding towards oblivion, we’re knackered.
But one of the benefits of modernity is our ability to spot trends and predict results. If fish in a depleted ecosystem grow by 5% a year and the catch expands by 10% a year, the fishery will collapse. If the global economy keeps growing at 3% a year (or 1700% a century) it too will hit the wall.
I’m not going to suggest, as some scoundrel who shares a name with me did on these pages last year(9), that we should welcome a recession. But the financial crisis provides us with an opportunity to rethink this trajectory; an opportunity which is not available during periods of economic success. Governments restructuring their economies should read Herman Daly’s book Steady-State Economics(10).
As usual I haven’t left enough space to discuss this, so the details will have to wait for another column. Or you can read the summary published by the Sustainable Development Commission(11). But what Daly suggests is that nations which are already rich should replace growth ("more of the same stuff") with development ("the same amount of better stuff"). A steady state economy has a constant stock of capital maintained by a rate of throughput no higher than the ecosystem can absorb. The use of resources is capped and the right to exploit them is auctioned. Poverty is addressed through the redistribution of wealth. The banks can lend only as much money as they possess.
Alternatively, we can persist in the magical thinking whose results have just come crashing home. The financial crisis shows what happens when we try to make the facts fit our desires. Now we must learn to live in the real world.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Richard Black, 10th October 2008. Nature loss ‘dwarfs bank crisis’. BBC Online.
2.Gordon Brown, 20th June 2007. Speech to Mansion House.
3. Gordon Brown, 16th June 2004. Speech to Mansion House.
4. Oxford English Dictionary, 1989. Second Edition.
5. Niklas Magnusson, 10th October 2008. Iceland Premier Tells Nation to Go Fishing After Banks Implode
6. Jared Diamond, 2005. Collapse: how societies choose to survive or fail. Allen Lane, London.
7. Page 114.
8. Page 160.
9. George Monbiot, 9th October 2007. Bring on the Recession
10. Herman E. Daly, 1991. Steady-State Economics - 2nd Edition. Island Press, Washington DC.
11. Herman E. Daly, 24th April 2008. A Steady-State Economy. Sustainable Development Commission.
The financial crisis is nothing. Well, nothing by comparison to what's coming. It prefigures the real collapse, when humanity bumps against its ecological limits. The cause: Extracting resources at a rate beyond the level of replenishment...
GEORGE MONBIOT
This is nothing. Well, nothing by comparison to what’s coming. The financial crisis for which we must now pay so heavily prefigures the real collapse, when humanity bumps against its ecological limits.
As we goggle at the fluttering financial figures, a different set of numbers passes us by. On Friday, Pavan Sukhdev, the Deutsche Bank economist leading a European study on ecosystems, reported that we are losing natural capital worth between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year, as a result of deforestation alone(1). The losses incurred so far by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion. Sukhdev arrived at his figure by estimating the value of the services - such as locking up carbon and providing freshwater - that forests perform, and calculating the cost of either replacing them or living without them. The credit crunch is petty when compared to the nature crunch.
The two crises have the same cause. In both cases, those who exploit the resource have demanded impossible rates of return and invoked debts that can never be repaid. In both cases we denied the likely consequences. I used to believe that collective denial was peculiar to climate change. Now I know that it’s the first response to every impending dislocation.
Gordon Brown, for example, was as much in denial about financial realities as any toxic debt trader. In June last year, during his Mansion House speech, he boasted that 40 per cent of the world’s foreign equities are now traded here. "I congratulate you Lord Mayor and the City of London on these remarkable achievements, an era that history will record as the beginning of a new golden age for the City of London."(2) The financial sector’s success had come about, he said, partly because the government had taken "a risk-based regulatory approach". In the same hall three years before, he pledged that "in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers"(3). Can anyone, surveying this mess, now doubt the value of the precautionary principle?
Ecology and economy are both derived from the Greek word oikos - a house or dwelling. Our survival depends upon the rational management of this home: the space in which life can be sustained. The rules are the same in both cases. If you extract resources at a rate beyond the level of replenishment, your stock will collapse. That’s another noun which reminds us of the connection. The OED gives 69 definitions of stock. When it means a fund or store, the word evokes the trunk - or stock - of a tree, "from which the gains are an outgrowth"(4). Collapse occurs when you prune the tree so heavily that it dies. Ecology is the stock from which all wealth grows.
The two crises feed each other. As a result of Iceland’s financial collapse, it is now contemplating joining the European Union, which means surrendering its fishing grounds to the Common Fisheries Policy. Already the prime minister Geir Haarde has suggested that his countrymen concentrate on exploiting the ocean(5). The economic disaster will cause an ecological disaster.
Normally it’s the other way around. In his book Collapse, Jared Diamond shows how ecological crisis is often the prelude to social catatrosphe(6). The obvious example is Easter Island, where society disintegrated soon after the population reached its highest historical numbers, the last trees were cut down and the construction of stone monuments peaked. The island chiefs had competed to erect ever bigger statues. These required wood and rope (made from bark) for transport and extra food for the labourers. As the trees and soils on which the islanders depended disappeared, the population crashed and the survivors turned to cannibalism.(Let’s hope Iceland doesn’t go the same way.) Diamond wonders what the Easter islander who cut down the last palm tree might have thought. "Like modern loggers, did he shout ‘Jobs, not trees!’? Or: ‘Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood.’? Or: ‘We don’t have proof that there aren’t palms somewhere else on Easter … your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering’?"(7).
Ecological collapse, Diamond shows, is as likely to be the result of economic success as of economic failure. The Maya of Central America, for example, were among the most advanced and successful people of their time. But a combination of population growth, extravagant construction projects and poor land management wiped out between 90 and 99% of the population. The Mayan collapse was accelerated by "the competition among kings and nobles that led to a chronic emphasis on war and erecting monuments rather than on solving underlying problems"(8). Does any of this sound familiar?
Again, the largest monuments were erected just before the ecosystem crashed. Again, this extravagance was partly responsible for the collapse: trees were used for making plaster with which to decorate their temples. The plaster became thicker and thicker as the kings sought to outdo each other’s conspicuous consumption.
Here are some of the reasons why people fail to prevent ecological collapse. Their resources appear at first to be inexhaustible; a long-term trend of depletion is concealed by short-term fluctuations; small numbers of powerful people advance their interests by damaging those of everyone else; short-term profits trump long-term survival. The same, in all cases, can be said of the collapse of financial systems. Is this how human beings are destined to behave? If we cannot act until stocks - of either kind - start sliding towards oblivion, we’re knackered.
But one of the benefits of modernity is our ability to spot trends and predict results. If fish in a depleted ecosystem grow by 5% a year and the catch expands by 10% a year, the fishery will collapse. If the global economy keeps growing at 3% a year (or 1700% a century) it too will hit the wall.
I’m not going to suggest, as some scoundrel who shares a name with me did on these pages last year(9), that we should welcome a recession. But the financial crisis provides us with an opportunity to rethink this trajectory; an opportunity which is not available during periods of economic success. Governments restructuring their economies should read Herman Daly’s book Steady-State Economics(10).
As usual I haven’t left enough space to discuss this, so the details will have to wait for another column. Or you can read the summary published by the Sustainable Development Commission(11). But what Daly suggests is that nations which are already rich should replace growth ("more of the same stuff") with development ("the same amount of better stuff"). A steady state economy has a constant stock of capital maintained by a rate of throughput no higher than the ecosystem can absorb. The use of resources is capped and the right to exploit them is auctioned. Poverty is addressed through the redistribution of wealth. The banks can lend only as much money as they possess.
Alternatively, we can persist in the magical thinking whose results have just come crashing home. The financial crisis shows what happens when we try to make the facts fit our desires. Now we must learn to live in the real world.
www.monbiot.com
References:
1. Richard Black, 10th October 2008. Nature loss ‘dwarfs bank crisis’. BBC Online.
2.Gordon Brown, 20th June 2007. Speech to Mansion House.
3. Gordon Brown, 16th June 2004. Speech to Mansion House.
4. Oxford English Dictionary, 1989. Second Edition.
5. Niklas Magnusson, 10th October 2008. Iceland Premier Tells Nation to Go Fishing After Banks Implode
6. Jared Diamond, 2005. Collapse: how societies choose to survive or fail. Allen Lane, London.
7. Page 114.
8. Page 160.
9. George Monbiot, 9th October 2007. Bring on the Recession
10. Herman E. Daly, 1991. Steady-State Economics - 2nd Edition. Island Press, Washington DC.
11. Herman E. Daly, 24th April 2008. A Steady-State Economy. Sustainable Development Commission.
The Face of Evil
Wednesday, July 23, 2008;
Richard Hoolbroke
Standing with Slobodan Milosevic on the veranda of a government hunting lodge outside Belgrade, I saw two men in the distance. They got out of their twin Mercedeses and, in the fading light, started toward us. I felt a jolt go through my body; they were unmistakable. Ratko Mladic in combat fatigues, stocky, walking as though through a muddy field; and Radovan Karadzic, taller, wearing a suit, with his wild, but carefully coiffed, shock of white hair.
The capture of Karadzic on Monday took me back to a long night of confrontation, drama and negotiations almost 13 years ago -- the only time I ever met him. It was 5 p.m. on Sept. 13, 1995, the height of the war in Bosnia. Finally, after years of weak Western and U.N. response to Serb aggression and ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats in Bosnia, U.S.-led NATO bombing had put the Serbs on the defensive. Our small diplomatic negotiating team -- which included then-Lt. Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Christopher Hill (now the senior U.S. envoy to North Korea) -- was in Belgrade for the fifth time, trying to end a war that had already taken the lives of nearly 300,000 people.
These three men -- Milosevic, Mladic and Karadzic -- were the primary reason for that war. Mladic and Karadzic had already been indicted as war criminals by the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. (Milosevic was not to be indicted until 1999.) As leaders of the breakaway Bosnian Serb movement, they had met with many Western luminaries, including Jimmy Carter.
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But, in a change of strategy, the negotiating team had decided to marginalize Karadzic and Mladic and to force Milosevic, as the senior Serb in the region, to take responsibility for the war and the negotiations we hoped would end it. Now Milosevic wanted to bring the two men back into the discussions, probably to take some of the pressure off himself.
We had anticipated this moment and agreed in advance that, while we would never ask to meet with Karadzic and Mladic, if Milosevic offered such a meeting, we would accept -- but only once, and only under strict guidelines that would require Milosevic to be responsible for their behavior.
I had told each member of our negotiating team to decide for himself or herself whether to shake hands with the mass murderers. I hated these men for what they had done. Their crimes included, indirectly, the deaths of three of our colleagues -- Bob Frasure, Joe Kruzel and Nelson Drew, who had died when the armored personnel carrier they were in plunged down a ravine as we attempted to reach Sarajevo by the only route available, a dangerous dirt road that went through sniper-filled, Serbian-controlled territory.
I did not shake hands, although both Karadzic and Mladic tried to. Some of our team did; others did not. Mladic, not Karadzic, was the dominant figure that evening. He engaged in staring contests with some of our team as we sat across the table. Karadzic was silent at first. He had a large face with heavy jowls, a soft chin and surprisingly gentle eyes. Then, when he heard our demand that the siege of Sarajevo be lifted immediately, he exploded. Rising from the table, the American-educated Karadzic raged in passable English about the "humiliations" his people were suffering. I reminded Milosevic that he had promised that this sort of harangue would not occur. Karadzic responded emotionally that he would call former president Carter, with whom he said he was in touch, and started to leave the table. For the only time that long night, I addressed Karadzic directly, telling him that we worked only for President Bill Clinton and that he could call President Carter if he wished but that we would leave and that the bombing would intensify. Milosevic said something to Karadzic in Serbian; he sat down again, and the meeting got down to business.
After 10 hours, we reached an agreement to lift the siege, after more than three years of war. The next day, we finally were able to fly into the reopened airfield in Sarajevo. The indomitable city was already beginning to come back to life. Two months later the war would end at Dayton, never to resume.
But while the Dayton agreement gave NATO the authority to capture Karadzic and Mladic, an arrest didn't occur for nearly 13 years. Finally, one of these dreadful murderers has begun the trip to The Hague. It is imperative that Mladic follow Karadzic on this one-way journey.
His capture is all the more important because it was accomplished by Serbian authorities. Serbian President Boris Tadic deserves great credit for this action, especially since his good friend Zoran Djindjic, then prime minister of Serbia, was assassinated in 2003 as a direct result of his courage in arresting Milosevic and sending him to The Hague in 2001. Karadzic's arrest is no mere historical footnote; it removes from the scene a man who was still undermining peace and progress in the Balkans and whose enthusiastic advocacy of ethnic cleansing merits a special place in history. It also moves Serbia closer to European Union membership.
Karadzic's capture is another reminder of the value of war crimes tribunals. Even though 12 years-plus is an inexcusably long time, the war crimes indictment kept Karadzic on the run and prevented him from resurfacing. In far-away Khartoum, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was indicted last week by the International Criminal Court, should be paying close attention.
Richard Holbrooke, the chief architect of the Dayton Peace Agreement, writes a monthly column for The Post.
Richard Hoolbroke
Standing with Slobodan Milosevic on the veranda of a government hunting lodge outside Belgrade, I saw two men in the distance. They got out of their twin Mercedeses and, in the fading light, started toward us. I felt a jolt go through my body; they were unmistakable. Ratko Mladic in combat fatigues, stocky, walking as though through a muddy field; and Radovan Karadzic, taller, wearing a suit, with his wild, but carefully coiffed, shock of white hair.
The capture of Karadzic on Monday took me back to a long night of confrontation, drama and negotiations almost 13 years ago -- the only time I ever met him. It was 5 p.m. on Sept. 13, 1995, the height of the war in Bosnia. Finally, after years of weak Western and U.N. response to Serb aggression and ethnic cleansing of Muslims and Croats in Bosnia, U.S.-led NATO bombing had put the Serbs on the defensive. Our small diplomatic negotiating team -- which included then-Lt. Gen. Wesley K. Clark and Christopher Hill (now the senior U.S. envoy to North Korea) -- was in Belgrade for the fifth time, trying to end a war that had already taken the lives of nearly 300,000 people.
These three men -- Milosevic, Mladic and Karadzic -- were the primary reason for that war. Mladic and Karadzic had already been indicted as war criminals by the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. (Milosevic was not to be indicted until 1999.) As leaders of the breakaway Bosnian Serb movement, they had met with many Western luminaries, including Jimmy Carter.
ad_icon
But, in a change of strategy, the negotiating team had decided to marginalize Karadzic and Mladic and to force Milosevic, as the senior Serb in the region, to take responsibility for the war and the negotiations we hoped would end it. Now Milosevic wanted to bring the two men back into the discussions, probably to take some of the pressure off himself.
We had anticipated this moment and agreed in advance that, while we would never ask to meet with Karadzic and Mladic, if Milosevic offered such a meeting, we would accept -- but only once, and only under strict guidelines that would require Milosevic to be responsible for their behavior.
I had told each member of our negotiating team to decide for himself or herself whether to shake hands with the mass murderers. I hated these men for what they had done. Their crimes included, indirectly, the deaths of three of our colleagues -- Bob Frasure, Joe Kruzel and Nelson Drew, who had died when the armored personnel carrier they were in plunged down a ravine as we attempted to reach Sarajevo by the only route available, a dangerous dirt road that went through sniper-filled, Serbian-controlled territory.
I did not shake hands, although both Karadzic and Mladic tried to. Some of our team did; others did not. Mladic, not Karadzic, was the dominant figure that evening. He engaged in staring contests with some of our team as we sat across the table. Karadzic was silent at first. He had a large face with heavy jowls, a soft chin and surprisingly gentle eyes. Then, when he heard our demand that the siege of Sarajevo be lifted immediately, he exploded. Rising from the table, the American-educated Karadzic raged in passable English about the "humiliations" his people were suffering. I reminded Milosevic that he had promised that this sort of harangue would not occur. Karadzic responded emotionally that he would call former president Carter, with whom he said he was in touch, and started to leave the table. For the only time that long night, I addressed Karadzic directly, telling him that we worked only for President Bill Clinton and that he could call President Carter if he wished but that we would leave and that the bombing would intensify. Milosevic said something to Karadzic in Serbian; he sat down again, and the meeting got down to business.
After 10 hours, we reached an agreement to lift the siege, after more than three years of war. The next day, we finally were able to fly into the reopened airfield in Sarajevo. The indomitable city was already beginning to come back to life. Two months later the war would end at Dayton, never to resume.
But while the Dayton agreement gave NATO the authority to capture Karadzic and Mladic, an arrest didn't occur for nearly 13 years. Finally, one of these dreadful murderers has begun the trip to The Hague. It is imperative that Mladic follow Karadzic on this one-way journey.
His capture is all the more important because it was accomplished by Serbian authorities. Serbian President Boris Tadic deserves great credit for this action, especially since his good friend Zoran Djindjic, then prime minister of Serbia, was assassinated in 2003 as a direct result of his courage in arresting Milosevic and sending him to The Hague in 2001. Karadzic's arrest is no mere historical footnote; it removes from the scene a man who was still undermining peace and progress in the Balkans and whose enthusiastic advocacy of ethnic cleansing merits a special place in history. It also moves Serbia closer to European Union membership.
Karadzic's capture is another reminder of the value of war crimes tribunals. Even though 12 years-plus is an inexcusably long time, the war crimes indictment kept Karadzic on the run and prevented him from resurfacing. In far-away Khartoum, Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was indicted last week by the International Criminal Court, should be paying close attention.
Richard Holbrooke, the chief architect of the Dayton Peace Agreement, writes a monthly column for The Post.
Friday, 17 October 2008
Who is a terrorist?
Show a picture of a uniformed man battling a wild-looking civilian to a hundred people and ask them to identify the terrorist. Ninety-nine will po
The Jihadi
int to the civilian; one might point to the man in uniform.
It's a question of political or ideological optics: one man's terrorist can be another's perceived freedom fighter. These are the two, interlinked and often interchangeable, faces of terror. Which is why in international, or non-parochial media, the preferred word to describe an individual who resorts to indiscriminate violence against society and the state to further his own ideological or religious agenda is ‘militant' not 'terrorist'. Media professionals, no less than serious historians, are only too uncomfortably aware that today's 'terrorist' might become tomorrow's victorious champion of the downtrodden, or a martyr crucified for a noble cause.
You are the local magistrate. Brought before you by the police is a scruffy individual, of no fixed address, who not only has a chargesheet of physical assaults on prominent members of the banking profession but has also been holding public rallies alarmingly subversive of the sovereignty of the state. You would classify the accused as a dangerous extremist, a proto-terrorist if not a full-fledged suicide bomber, and deal with him accordingly. Which is what Pontius Pilate did in the case of the State vs Jesus Christ.
"What is truth?" jested Pilate, and did not wait for an answer. If he had, it might have perplexed him not a little. As it has done in the case of successive generations and governments. For Indians, Bhagat Singh was, and always will be, a tragic hero in our fight for freedom. To the British imperialists of the time he was a political criminal, a terrorist. Which is how the apartheid government of South Africa saw a guerrilla called Nelson Mandela, subsequently hailed as the African Mahatma.
It's often said that history is a partisan narrative dictated by the winning side. But yesteryear's victors — from Pilate to the British Raj — become the villains of the present, and their mortal enemies are valorised by their victimhood.
But can even the most tortuous turns and twists of history justify the killing of innocents, including women and children, as collateral sacrifices on the altar of a higher cause? In what we call India's First War of Independence - and which others still refer to as the Sepoy Mutiny - in what was then known as Cawnpore, and in other places, civilians, including women and children, were put to the sword and flame by the insurgents. Fighters for independence or mutinous terrorists? The Allies justified the atom-bombing of the civilian centres of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the grounds that the alternative to ending World War II - an infantry invasion of Japan - would have cost even more lives. Justifiable act of war, or a terrorist attack on an unprecedented - and still unsurpassed - scale?
Take a look at that picture of a uniformed man combating an unkempt civilian. Imagine the uniform to be that of the Chinese army, and the civilian to be a Tibetan activist. Still sure which - invariably and unalterably - is the true face of terror?
Divisve Politics of Inida
SHASHI ON SUNDAY
Stop the politics of division
12 Oct 2008, 0102 hrs IST, Shashi Tharoor
Last week, in responding to some of the hundreds of reactions i received to my September 28 column on the anti-Christian violence in Orissa and Karnataka, i tackled the vexed question of conversions to Christianity, which many readers argued constituted a provocation for the violence. But the conversion issue is not purely a religious one: behind it lies a profoundly political question, one which goes to the heart of the nature of the Indian state, and indeed to the very idea of India itself.
In my original piece i argued that violence is part of a contemptible political project whose closest equivalent can in fact be found in the 'Indian Mujahideen' bomb blasts. Both actions are anti-national; both aim to divide the country by polarising people along their religious identities; and both hope to profit politically from such polarisation. In this context, the issue of conversion becomes a diversion. Because to say that conversions are somehow inherently wrong would accord legitimacy to the rhetoric of the Bajrang Dal and its cohorts - who declare openly that conversions from Hinduism to any other faith are anti-national. Implicit is the idea that to be Hindu is somehow more natural, more authentically Indian, than to be anything else, and that to lapse from Hinduism is to dilute one's identification with the motherland.
As a Hindu, I reject that notion utterly. I reject the presumption that the purveyors of hatred speak for all or even most Hindus. Hinduism, we are repeatedly told, is a tolerant faith. The central tenet of tolerance is that the tolerant society accepts that which it does not understand and even that which it does not like, so long as it is not sought to be imposed upon the unwilling. One cannot simultaneously extol the tolerance of Hinduism and attack Christian homes and places of worship.
And as an Indian, i would argue that the whole point about India is the rejection of the idea that religion should be a determinant of nationhood. Our nationalist leaders never fell into the insidious trap of agreeing that, since Partition had established a state for Muslims, what remained was a state for Hindus. To accept the idea of India you have to spurn the logic that divided the country in 1947. Your Indianness has nothing to do with which God you choose to worship, or not.
To suggest that an Indian Hindu becoming Christian is an anti-national act not only insults the millions of patriotic Indians who trace their Christianity to more distant forebears, including the Kerala Christians whose families converted to the faith of Saint Thomas centuries before the ancestors of many of today's Hindu chauvinists even learned to think of themselves as Hindu. It is an insult, too, to the national leaders, freedom fighters, educationists, scientists, military men, journalists and sportsmen of the Christian faith who have brought so much glory to the country through their actions and sacrifices. It is, indeed, an insult to the very idea of India. Nothing could be more anti-national than that.
One reader, Raju Rajagopal, writing "as a fellow Hindu", expressed himself trenchantly in describing 'terrorism' and 'communal riots' as "two sides of the same coin, which systematically feed on each other." The only difference, he added, is "that the first kind of terrorism is being unleashed by a fanatical few who swear no allegiance to the idea of India, whereas the second kind of terror is being unleashed by those who claim to love India more dearly than you and i, who are part of the electoral politics of India, and who know the exact consequences of their actions: creating deep fissures between communities, whose horrific consequences the world has witnessed once too often in recent decades."
That is the real problem here. Nehru had warned that the communalism of the majority was especially dangerous because it could present itself as nationalist. Yet, Hindu nationalism is not Indian nationalism. And it has nothing to do with genuine Hinduism either. A reader bearing a Christian name wrote to tell me that when his brother was getting married to a Hindu girl, the Hindu priest made a point of saying to him before the ceremony words to the effect of: "When i say God, i don't mean a particular God." As this reader commented: "It's at moments like that that i can't help but feel proud to be Indian and to be moved by its religiosity - even though i'm an atheist."
As a Hindu, I relish pointing out that i belong to the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. Hinduism asserts that all ways of belief are equally valid, and Hindus readily venerate the saints, and the sacred objects, of other faiths. Hinduism is a civilisation, not a dogma. There is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. If a Hindu decides he wishes to be a Christian, how does it matter that he has found a different way of stretching his hands out towards God? Truth is one, Vivekananda reminded all Hindus, but there are many ways of attaining it.
So, the rejection of other forms of worship, other ways of seeking the Truth, is profoundly un-Hindu, as well as being un-Indian. The really important debate is not about conversions, but between the unifiers and the dividers - between those who think all Indians are "us", whichever God they choose to worship, and those who think that Indians can be divided into "us" and "them". The reduction of non-Hindus to second-class status in their own homeland is unthinkable. It would be a second Partition: this time a partition not just in the Indian soil, but in the Indian soul.
It is time for all of us to say: stop the politics of division. We are all Indians.
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Stop the politics of division
12 Oct 2008, 0102 hrs IST, Shashi Tharoor
Last week, in responding to some of the hundreds of reactions i received to my September 28 column on the anti-Christian violence in Orissa and Karnataka, i tackled the vexed question of conversions to Christianity, which many readers argued constituted a provocation for the violence. But the conversion issue is not purely a religious one: behind it lies a profoundly political question, one which goes to the heart of the nature of the Indian state, and indeed to the very idea of India itself.
In my original piece i argued that violence is part of a contemptible political project whose closest equivalent can in fact be found in the 'Indian Mujahideen' bomb blasts. Both actions are anti-national; both aim to divide the country by polarising people along their religious identities; and both hope to profit politically from such polarisation. In this context, the issue of conversion becomes a diversion. Because to say that conversions are somehow inherently wrong would accord legitimacy to the rhetoric of the Bajrang Dal and its cohorts - who declare openly that conversions from Hinduism to any other faith are anti-national. Implicit is the idea that to be Hindu is somehow more natural, more authentically Indian, than to be anything else, and that to lapse from Hinduism is to dilute one's identification with the motherland.
As a Hindu, I reject that notion utterly. I reject the presumption that the purveyors of hatred speak for all or even most Hindus. Hinduism, we are repeatedly told, is a tolerant faith. The central tenet of tolerance is that the tolerant society accepts that which it does not understand and even that which it does not like, so long as it is not sought to be imposed upon the unwilling. One cannot simultaneously extol the tolerance of Hinduism and attack Christian homes and places of worship.
And as an Indian, i would argue that the whole point about India is the rejection of the idea that religion should be a determinant of nationhood. Our nationalist leaders never fell into the insidious trap of agreeing that, since Partition had established a state for Muslims, what remained was a state for Hindus. To accept the idea of India you have to spurn the logic that divided the country in 1947. Your Indianness has nothing to do with which God you choose to worship, or not.
To suggest that an Indian Hindu becoming Christian is an anti-national act not only insults the millions of patriotic Indians who trace their Christianity to more distant forebears, including the Kerala Christians whose families converted to the faith of Saint Thomas centuries before the ancestors of many of today's Hindu chauvinists even learned to think of themselves as Hindu. It is an insult, too, to the national leaders, freedom fighters, educationists, scientists, military men, journalists and sportsmen of the Christian faith who have brought so much glory to the country through their actions and sacrifices. It is, indeed, an insult to the very idea of India. Nothing could be more anti-national than that.
One reader, Raju Rajagopal, writing "as a fellow Hindu", expressed himself trenchantly in describing 'terrorism' and 'communal riots' as "two sides of the same coin, which systematically feed on each other." The only difference, he added, is "that the first kind of terrorism is being unleashed by a fanatical few who swear no allegiance to the idea of India, whereas the second kind of terror is being unleashed by those who claim to love India more dearly than you and i, who are part of the electoral politics of India, and who know the exact consequences of their actions: creating deep fissures between communities, whose horrific consequences the world has witnessed once too often in recent decades."
That is the real problem here. Nehru had warned that the communalism of the majority was especially dangerous because it could present itself as nationalist. Yet, Hindu nationalism is not Indian nationalism. And it has nothing to do with genuine Hinduism either. A reader bearing a Christian name wrote to tell me that when his brother was getting married to a Hindu girl, the Hindu priest made a point of saying to him before the ceremony words to the effect of: "When i say God, i don't mean a particular God." As this reader commented: "It's at moments like that that i can't help but feel proud to be Indian and to be moved by its religiosity - even though i'm an atheist."
As a Hindu, I relish pointing out that i belong to the only major religion in the world that does not claim to be the only true religion. Hinduism asserts that all ways of belief are equally valid, and Hindus readily venerate the saints, and the sacred objects, of other faiths. Hinduism is a civilisation, not a dogma. There is no such thing as a Hindu heresy. If a Hindu decides he wishes to be a Christian, how does it matter that he has found a different way of stretching his hands out towards God? Truth is one, Vivekananda reminded all Hindus, but there are many ways of attaining it.
So, the rejection of other forms of worship, other ways of seeking the Truth, is profoundly un-Hindu, as well as being un-Indian. The really important debate is not about conversions, but between the unifiers and the dividers - between those who think all Indians are "us", whichever God they choose to worship, and those who think that Indians can be divided into "us" and "them". The reduction of non-Hindus to second-class status in their own homeland is unthinkable. It would be a second Partition: this time a partition not just in the Indian soil, but in the Indian soul.
It is time for all of us to say: stop the politics of division. We are all Indians.
About Us | Advertise with Us | Careers @ TIL | Terms of Use | Privacy Policy | Feedback | Sitemap
Copyright © 2008 Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd. All rights reserved. For reprint rights: Times Syndication Service
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Tuesday, 7 October 2008
Samantha Power
Volume 55, Number 13 · August 14, 2008
The Democrats & National Security
By Samantha Power
Us vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security
by J. Peter Scoblic
Viking, 350 pp., $25.95
Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats
by Matthew Yglesias
Wiley, 251 pp., $25.95
1.
Since the Vietnam War the Republican Party has developed a reputation for having a superior approach to national security. Americans have long trusted the views of Democrats on the environment, the economy, education, and health care, but national security is the one matter about which Republicans have maintained what political scientists call "issue ownership."
Partly, this is for particular historical reasons. President Eisenhower initiated US involvement in Vietnam, and President Nixon escalated the war in 1969 and kept US troops on the ground in a manifestly unwinnable mission until 1975. But John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were tagged as the primary culprits. President Carter was widely seen as having bungled the Iran hostage rescue mission and having responded ineffectually to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Although he substantially increased US military spending, he was never forgiven for his claim that Americans had "an inordinate fear of communism."
President Reagan of course did more than any other person to entrench the Republican reputation for toughness on national security. He ran his election campaign against Carter's apparent softness, brought the Iran hostages home upon taking over the White House, nearly doubled the US military budget, invaded tiny Grenada, and staged covert operations throughout Latin America and beyond. Many "Reagan Democrats" crossed party lines precisely because they saw him as more able to confront Communist threats, and the fall of the Berlin wall confirmed their view.
Harvard / Financial Crisis Books
President Clinton, elected just after the cold war ended at a time when national security was not a dominant concern, never really recovered from having been branded a draft-dodger, alienating the military by his botched effort to integrate gays into the armed services, or presiding over the 1993 fiasco in Somalia. Even though US military operations in Bosnia in 1995 and in Kosovo in 1999 cost no casualties and largely ended ethnic cleansing in both regions, they were not traditional conflicts; NATO's intervention was not seen as promoting vital national interests, and thus made little dent in the public understanding of Democrats' competence in managing national security. Throughout the 1990s, the Democratic Party made only small progress in chipping away at what by 1999 was a thirty-point edge for Republicans on national security in public opinion surveys.
In the 2000 election George W. Bush, who had shirked military service, succeeded in presenting himself as more reliable on national security than Al Gore. This was despite Gore's service in Vietnam, his seven years on the Senate Armed Services Committee, his four years on the House Intelligence Committee, his help in brokering a deal to dismantle the nuclear arsenal of former Soviet republics, and his creation of binational commissions with Russia, South Africa, Egypt, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine to deal with issues ranging from AIDS to disarmament. In 2004, too, even before the Swift Boat campaign, John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, had an uphill climb convincing voters that Democrats made reliable commanders in chief during wartime—even though a majority of Americans had already come to regret that the sitting commander in chief had chosen to wage war in the first place.
In the 2004 election, exit polls showed that Bush led John Kerry by nearly 20 percent on the question of which man would better protect the nation against terrorist attacks. The images of John Kerry as a hunter were greeted with greater ridicule than that of George W. Bush wearing a flight suit and staging a landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier off the coast of California. To paraphrase President Clinton's 2002 remark, American voters generally seem to prefer strong and wrong to smart and right.[1]
The performance and perception of recent presidents have had the greatest impact in shaping the public trust on national security. But other factors have given Republicans the edge over Democrats. The demographics of the US military are such that the officer corps and rank-and-file have traditionally leaned to the Republican side. Many US service members are observant Christians. During the last few years Democrats in political life have begun to embrace faith unselfconsciously, refusing to allow the Republican political establishment to usurp this terrain. Still, the military will likely continue to recruit a greater percentage of soldiers from red states in the South and middle America than from the coasts or major urban areas. With so many soldiers and officers counting themselves as Republicans, voters naturally associate the party with the country's primary symbol of security, those in uniform.
The Republican domestic agenda may also influence voters' perceptions about national security. The party that opposes strict gun control laws, seeks to crack down on illegal immigrants, wages a "war" on drugs, extols the "three strikes and you're out" approach to criminal sentencing, and has few qualms about capital punishment has been seen as "tougher," regardless of the effectiveness of these policies.
This faith in Republican toughness has had profound electoral consequences. Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican presidents in times of perceived danger and Democrats in times of relative calm.
The last eight years of Republican-run foreign policy, however, have undermined US security and global stability in highly visible ways. Since a Republican president took over in 2001, the United States has invaded two countries. In Afghanistan, after swift success ousting the Taliban, the administration made the inexplicable initial decision to reject NATO's help, insisting that the international military presence not extend beyond Kabul. It spent a pittance on reconstruction—$737 million in 2003 as compared with $10 billion in 2007. Further, with al-Qaeda on the run, the administration spent 2002 mobilizing support for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq, which required it to divert precious units from eastern Afghanistan. According to many observers, this allowed the Taliban and the al-Qaeda leadership to snatch survival from the jaws of defeat. Violence has spread to once-peaceful pockets of territory, and the number of suicide attacks has increased from two in 2003 to 137 in 2007. In June 2008, forty-six American and allied forces died in Afghanistan, more than during any other month since the war began nearly seven years ago, and more than the thirty-one Americans who died in Iraq that month.
As for Iraq, the war has taken the lives of more than four thousand American soldiers, created another front for US forces in combating al-Qaeda, and eroded US army readiness to such an extent that US commanders concede that the army is at its "breaking point." Since 2001, Congress has appropriated about $640 billion for the "Global War on Terror," most of this for operations in Iraq. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published in June found that the United States still lacked a strategy for meeting its goals in Iraq. The GAO found that violence had diminished somewhat; but according to the Pentagon, the number of Iraqi units capable of carrying out operations without US assistance continued to hover around 10 percent.
While the Iraqi authorities passed legislation readmitting some lower- level Baathists to the parliament, legislation was stalled on oil-sharing and the holding of provincial elections. Between 2005 and 2007, the GAO report found, the Iraq government spent less than a quarter of the $27 billion it budgeted for its own reconstruction efforts. And when it came to essential services, water supplies had improved, but electricity shortages persisted, meeting only about half of Iraqi demand by early May 2008.[2] Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank found in 2007 that the Iraq war had brought about a 600 percent increase in the average number of annual jihadist terrorist attacks throughout the world. Even if one didn't count attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, the incidence of terrorism increased 35 percent worldwide.[3]
By now, it is clear that "enhanced interrogation techniques"—in fact, torture—were authorized from the top of the Bush administration and were widely used from Afghanistan to Guantánamo to Iraq to "black sites" such as covert prison facilities or off-shore aircraft carriers. Al-Qaeda has made use of these excesses as recruitment propaganda. Donald Rumsfeld may be remembered for his policy failures, but he should also be remembered for the question he posed in a leaked memo in 2003: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" Many press reports and National Intelligence Estimates offer a resounding "no" to that question. According to polls, many voters are persuaded by the administration that torture can be justified. They probably have not heard from terror specialists who say that useful intelligence comes less from detainees than from informants, communities, and familiar sources. US agents have found that these sources began drying up as American mistreatment of prisoners became known.
"Based on my experience in talking to al-Qaeda members," John Cloonan, an FBI counterterrorism specialist testified to Congress recently,
I am persuaded that revenge, in the form of a catastrophic attack on the homeland, is coming, that a new generation of jihadist martyrs, motivated in part by the images from Abu Ghraib, is, as we speak, planning to kill Americans and that nothing gleaned from the use of coercive interrogation techniques will be of any significant use in forestalling this calamitous eventuality.[4]
The effect of the Bush administration's policies is that, notwithstanding the towering US military budget, which drastically exceeds that of its rivals, America's global influence has plummeted. This is evident in the administration's failure to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions. According to the IAEA, Iran now has 3,300 centrifuges to enrich uranium, as compared to the 160 the IAEA confirmed during a visit to Iran in 2003. Iran's political influence, whether in Iraq, Lebanon, or Gaza, has been dramatically expanded as a result of the US quagmire in Iraq and the crude strategies the US used to eliminate Iran's two greatest enemies—the Baathist and Taliban regimes.
Since the greatest potential risk to American lives comes from nuclear terrorism, and since the Bush administration leaders infamously invoked "mushroom clouds" as grounds for invading Iraq, one would have expected them to work zealously to retrieve or secure loose nuclear material. Instead, President Bush attempted to cut funding for the Nunn-Lugar program to secure such material in the former Soviet Union. In declaring an openness to using nuclear weapons for tactical purposes and in discarding the longstanding nuclear doctrine of "no first use," the administration weakened the nonproliferation regime and created additional incentives for nonnuclear countries to acquire nuclear weapons. The President also maintained uncritical support for the Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf despite the fact that Musharraf sheltered Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan, who was caught selling nuclear secrets to North Korea and Iran.
Bush's stated goals were to strengthen the US military, bring stability to Iraq and Afghanistan, combat terrorism, prevent rogue states and militants from acquiring nuclear weapons, and promote democracy around the world. In each case, two terms of Republican rule have been disastrous for US national security. The question is: Have American voters noticed?
2.
Joe Biden has. In an interview with MSNBC, Senator Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked whether Democrats could be trusted on national security. He erupted:
I refuse to sit back like we did in 2000 and 2004. This administration is the worst administration in American foreign policy in modern history—maybe ever. The idea that they are competent to continue to conduct our foreign policy, to make us more secure and make Israel secure, is preposterous.... Every single thing they've touched has been a near disaster.[5]
Poll data show that voters are in fact beginning to share Biden's view and at last question Republicans' reliability on national security. On Election Day in 2004 exit polls showed that a majority of voters (49–44 percent) believed that the war in Iraq had made the country less safe. Yet those same exit polls gave Bush an 18-percent edge in handling national security.[6] Between 2003 and 2006 the Republicans had as high as a thirty-point advantage over Democrats on the question of which party could best deal with Iraq. But in the summer of 2006 in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, the Democrats were given their first lead in handling Iraq—a three-point edge. This has since been expanded to double digits—an advantage that helps explain the Democrats' strong showing in the 2006 midterm elections. On handling international terrorism, too, the substantial Republican lead had dwindled by 2006; last year, for the first time, a majority of Americans (47–42 percent) said that the Democratic Party would do a better job protecting the country from security threats. President Bush did Republicans a disservice by wrongly conflating the invasion of Iraq and the "war on terror." The setbacks in Iraq have undermined public perceptions of Republicans' performance in combating terrorism more generally.
But the poll data raise three important questions. First, which voters have changed their minds? Interestingly, Democrats have improved their showing on security principally by convincing Democratic voters that their own party is more trustworthy than their opponents'. Independent voters still have slightly more faith that Republicans would better protect the country from terrorist attack. A June 2008 Rasmussen survey found unaffiliated voters still favored Republicans on national security by six points.
Second, will voters identify Senator McCain closely with the Republican Party, whose policies he has championed, or will he succeed in decoupling himself from a party whose national security credentials have been tarnished? Thus far, probably because of his record of personal heroism and his occasional criticisms of the Bush administration, many polls have judged him more suited to keeping the country safe than the faceless "Republican Party."
Third, and most important for the future of US security and the Democratic Party, can Democrats do more than exploit Bush's foreign policy blunders to gain a tactical electoral edge? Can they take advantage of the increased public confidence in their judgment to advance a distinct twenty-first-century foreign policy that voters will prefer and trust them to execute?
The first step toward undoing Republican dominance on foreign policy entails debunking the myth that conservative ideology enhances US national security. Here Peter Scoblic, the executive editor at The New Republic and former editor of Arms Control Today, does a great service in Us vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security. He considers five decades of arms control efforts in order to illuminate the common themes underlying hard-line conservative ideology on national security. He shows, most usefully, the continuity in conservative intellectual leadership across the years. John Foster Dulles wrote the Republicans' foreign policy platform in 1952, denouncing the Democrats' "futile and immoral policy of 'containment,' which abandons countless human beings to a despotism and godless terrorism." Barry Goldwater denounced the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which William Buckley's National Review termed a "nuclear Yalta." And during his first term, Ronald Reagan and the Reaganauts appeared to argue that doing away with an evil regime was more important than preventing nuclear war.
Scoblic shows that these men had in common several core premises. One cannot coexist with evil-doers, who are irreparably "fallen," and thus rollback is required. Negotiation is not merely pointless, it is costly "appeasement." And the United States should participate in only those international institutions that are servants of American power; those that constrain American power are enemies of the national interest.
Scoblic's book offers a terrifying glimpse of the persistent tendency of one militant strand of conservatism to pursue conflict over peace, arms races over arms control, and ideology over pragmatism. His analytic history is particularly strong in revealing how, in a world of uncontrolled forces, conservatives sought to impose complete control, whether by pursuing technological fixes (like the nuclear missile shield) or treating US security as if it were something that could simply be willed. Because many conservatives presume exceptional American virtue—and believe that this virtue is self-evident to others—they have also consistently failed to see how aggressive US actions can appear abroad, and how the fear they generate can give rise to threatening behavior by others, who believe they are acting in self-defense. Scoblic, who sympathetically describes Reagan's shift from denunciation to negotiation with Gorbachev over nuclear arms reduction, writes that it had not previously "even occurred" to Reagan
that adopting a war-fighting strategy, beginning a widespread civil defense program, researching a missile shield, while increasing the military budget by 35 percent, starting a new bomber program, deploying a new ICBM, and deploying missiles in Europe could be construed as threatening.
Scoblic's account becomes most chilling at the end, when the same conservative voices that had long preferred confrontation to cooperation—such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—actually become dominant players in George W. Bush's executive branch. On January 21, 2000, a year before he would move into the White House, Bush said:
When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world. And we knew exactly who the "they" were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who "them" was. Today we're not sure who the "they" are but we know they're there.
Having suffered through what one diplomat called the "enemy deprivation syndrome of the 1990s," September 11 gave hard-line conservatives an opportunity to apply their pre-hatched theories; and from the start they sought to unshackle the United States from international agreements and to reduce reliance on diplomatic engagement. When the Bush administration scored a rare recent diplomatic success, convincing North Korea to open up some of its nuclear records, Vice President Cheney was so disgusted by his own administration's pragmatic decision to take Pyongyang off the US terrorist blacklist that he snapped at reporters, "I'm not going to be the one to announce this decision. You need to address your interest in this to the State Department." He then abruptly ended the press encounter, and left the room.
What is striking about Scoblic's account of the hard-line conservatives' disdain for diplomacy and pragmatism is the resilience of the central tenets of their ideology. As they ridicule Senator Barack Obama's willingness to engage in negotiations with America's enemies, they seem unchastened by recent history. In 2003, for instance, when the reporter Jeffrey Goldberg told Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense, that US troops in Iraq had not been greeted with flowers, Feith said that the Iraqis had been too spooked by the presence of Saddam supporters to show their true emotions. "But," he said, "they had flowers in their minds."
Unfortunately, the Democrats have too often failed to contest such dangerous conservative fantasies. This is is the subject of Matthew Yglesias's briskly written, provocative book entitled Heads in the Sand. Yglesias draws on the last decade of US foreign policy to build his case that the Democratic Party's position on national security "has mostly been to play Charlie Brown perennially falling down as Lucy yanks away the football, swearing not to be fooled again...." In 2000 and 2004 Democrats did their best to move away from national security issues to other problems, such as Medicare, where they felt more at home, but they never put forward a strong foreign policy alternative. "Democrats," he writes,
have tended to approach security debates from a reflexive posture of fear, preemptively assuming a defensive crouch from which it is impossible to practice politics effectively.
Charlie Brown, he writes, "needs a football of his own."
Yglesias is persuasive in showing how mainstream Democrats, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, caricatured the antiwar left as a way of flaunting their national security bona fides. The intraparty squabble inhibited the creation of a pluralistic coalition united against the administration's unilateralism and militarism. Yglesias also gives an important account of the different positions that led to Democratic acquiescence in the war in Iraq—an acquiescence that neutered or delayed many Democrats' criticisms of the President. For some Democrats the Iraq war was the natural culmination of the thinking that earlier gave rise to President Clinton's intervention in Kosovo. It is true that Clinton bypassed the UN Security Council in the war of 1999, but to charge, as Yglesias does, that there was "no difference" between the two wars procedurally or substantively is to ignore the coordination of the Kosovo war with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The basic attitude of the Bush administration was described by one of its officials quoted in Strobe Talbott's recent book, The Great Experiment:
Your type agonizes, ours seizes opportunities. You see our interests in Iraq and in the UN as in tension with each other; we see an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.
We don't know how events in 2003 would have progressed without the Kosovo war, but it is hard to imagine that President Bush—a man who repudiated five treaties in his first year in office[7] and has consistently ridiculed the UN—would have been deterred in any way by the absence of past precedent.
Moreover, while some prominent "liberal hawks" favored the Iraq war, plenty of those who had supported NATO action in Kosovo for humanitarian reasons opposed the war in Iraq on those or other grounds. Yglesias wrongly implies that support for one war inevitably entailed support for the other; he also unfortunately lends credence to the surprisingly prevalent fiction that Bush invaded Iraq for humanitarian purposes.
Still, NATO action in Kosovo did make UN Security Council authorization seem more optional than it had in the past. Also, the Kosovo war helped build support for the invasion of Iraq by contributing to the false impression that the US military was invincible. The mistaken recollection that the US victory over the Serbs was nearly effortless, combined with the Bush administration's quick initial overthrow of the Taliban, caused many Democrats to agree with the Republican claim that the war in Iraq would in fact be the "cakewalk" that Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz promised.
Yglesias is most convincing when he discusses the other two factors behind the rush to war—an international security hawkishness among Democrats, who accepted Kenneth Pollack's argument that Iraq was indeed a "gathering storm"; and domestic political opportunism rooted in the belief that Washington careers would be ruined by the failure to support a war that proved successful (the so-called "Sam Nunn effect," after the Georgia senator whose presidential hopes were widely seen to have been dashed by his opposition to the first Gulf War).
Yglesias shows how, for the last five years, Democrats have allowed themselves to be hemmed in by the conservative mind-set about Iraq—arguing over tactics such as whether international support could be acquired, whether enough troops had been sent, or whether the surge has caused a drop in violence. They have neglected, meanwhile, to confront the Bush administration directly for its pursuit of global hegemony and seeming contempt for a rule-based liberal order. It wasn't only Bush's particular policies that happened to be foolish, Yglesias notes:
Conservative Republicans have not merely made some mistakes on Iraq, and some other mistakes on Iran, and some other mistakes on North Korea, plus some mistakes on Syria, while mishandling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, by coincidence, damaging our relationships with formerly close allies. Rather, they are making one big mistake in seeking to transform the United States' role in the world... to that of an imperial superpower that seeks to use its national strength to dominate the world and needlessly heighten conflicts.
A believer in international institutions and international law, Yglesias rightly dismisses the proposal to replace the UN with a group of like-minded countries, such as the League of Democracies favored by McCain. "An action opposed by Russia and China will not suddenly gain new legitimacy in Russian or Chinese eyes simply because a group from which they are excluded says so," he writes.
Having criticized the Democrats for failing to put forward an alternative strategy, Yglesias devotes fewer than ten pages at the end of his book to sketching one of his own. His brevity is partly justified by his basic argument—that the alternative is not "new" (he is irked by liberals' tendency to "fetishize novelty"). Democrats, he writes, should turn back to the same "reciprocity, rules, institutions and cooperation" that in his view prevented major conflict in the second half of the twentieth century.
3.
In a June interview with Fortune magazine, Charles Black, one of John McCain's top campaign advisers, credited the assassination of Benazir Bhutto with improving McCain's appeal in New Hampshire just ahead of the primary (a claim Jon Stewart termed the "Bhutto Bump"). "His knowledge and ability to talk about it reemphasized that this is the guy who's ready to be commander-in-chief," Black said. "And it helped us." He then went on to predict the effect of another terrorist attack on US soil on McCain's presidential bid: "Certainly it would be a big advantage for him," Black said. McCain had to dissociate himself from this remark but it seemed to lay bare Republican thinking.
McCain has tried to turn the 2008 election into a vote on national security. He believes that he has an edge in presenting himself as a natural commander in chief and in describing Obama as a rookie who is simply too naive to know how to deal with a deadly world. At a town hall meeting in June the Arizona senator read aloud a recent statement by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in which the Iranian leader again suggested Israel should "disappear." "It's a very clear choice, and whether it be on Iran, or whether it be on Iraq, or whether it be on other national security issues," McCain said, "Senator Obama does not have the experience and the knowledge and clearly the judgment, my friends."
McCain has pledged to continue many of Bush's national security policies. He backed Bush's invasion of Iraq, he raised the possibility of military action against Iran, and he deplored granting the right of habeas corpus to detainees. He has three main tactics for seizing public trust in the area of national security. The first is to invoke, however implicitly, his own military service. When Obama criticized McCain for his refusal to support Senator Jim Webb's proposal to increase college tuition benefits for recent veterans, McCain lashed out: "I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did."
McCain's second tactic is to evoke what he claims will be the costs of "embracing defeat" in Iraq—an al-Qaeda base, a genocide that will make Srebrenica "look like a Sunday-school picnic," and a regional war that will undermine US interests in the Middle East. Since voters have seen the debacles of the Republican-led status quo, McCain has to paint an even grimmer imagined picture of the costs of Democratic national security leadership.
His third tactic is to try to impose on Obama the conservative caricature of "liberals"—as weak, naive, elitist, and unfit to lead in a time of existential threats. Here McCain follows the example of Karl Rove at a conservative Republican gathering in New York in 2004: "Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."
How can Obama and his Democratic colleagues expose once and for all the fallacies in the conservative approach to national security, while putting forward a convincing alternative? They must start by not shying from the security debate or relying, with quiet relief, on polls showing that (unlike in 2004) only 4 percent of Americans today view terrorism as their top concern. Democrats must instead seize the advantage the polls show they could have on security issues. This means talking early and often about national security and going on the offensive by strongly presenting the foreign policy plans already devised, whether by members of Congress or by the Obama campaign.[8] It also means explaining how each plan—whether for retrieving loose nuclear material in the former Soviet Union or for assisting Iraqi refugees in Syria—advances the central goal of keeping Americans safe. Democrats can break with their reputation for squeamishness about national security issues by showing their ease and confidence in dealing with these topics. Instead of changing the subject when national security issues arise, they should look forward to taking part in detailed foreign policy discussions that allow them to show their new strength.
They must also answer McCain's apocalyptic claims about the effects of a US withdrawal from Iraq. Too often on Capitol Hill or in the primary battle, Democrats have confidently suggested that since the US-led invasion brought savage sectarian killing to Iraq, a US departure will rid the country of much of its violence. Critics of President Bush have seemed to imply that no serious harm will flow from a US withdrawal. But American voters realize that the effects of a US drawdown are in fact unknowable. The failure to acknowledge any possible humanitarian or strategic risks of leaving makes Democrats sound less sophisticated than they are, and deprives them of the chance to describe their plans to draw down troops in a careful and strategically sound way. McCain's alarmist forecast thus goes unchallenged.
Prominent Democrats must drive home the continuing costs of remaining in Iraq—costs to Iraq, the region, Afghanistan,[9] US military readiness, and national security as a whole—while describing the specific ways an Obama administration would limit the harmful consequences of withdrawal. (In fact, Obama outlined such plans in a speech last year but it got little attention and needs reinforcement from the Democratic echo chamber.)
Obama has long stated his intention to retain a Quick-Reaction Force in the region to carry out counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda and other such networks. He has made clear his concern for Iraqi civilians in mixed neighborhoods who might be more vulnerable following a withdrawal of US combat brigades. He would offer these civilians fair notice of US plans and would be open to relocating those who would feel more secure if they moved. He has promised $2 billion to assist the two million Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries. He would establish a war crimes commission to gather the testimony of survivors and put militia leaders on notice that they may eventually be prosecuted. Obama's plan to meet with the region's heads of state is the first of many steps that will be required to prevent regional conflict.
Since Vietnam there has never been a more auspicious time for the Democratic Party to establish close relations with the US military. Building on Obama's October 2002 speech explaining his opposition to the war in Iraq, Democrats can continue to argue that Obama and his party will never do what the Republicans have done: send US service members to fight unnecessary wars. He will not stretch the US military and military families to their breaking points by extending tours of duty beyond what is tolerable. He will not order young cadets and reservists to carry out cruel and inhuman acts against foreign detainees and then abandon them when it becomes politically inconvenient, allowing them to be court-martialed while those who authorized the practices take up high-paying jobs at corporate law firms or prestigious teaching posts at top-flight law schools.
Democrats should make it clear that they will listen to the military's pleas to make major improvements in the civilian components of the government that work with the military on policing, governance, and reconstruction. Republicans have had eight years to respond to the appeals of US generals like David Petraeus who have begged for more and better-equipped civilian partners to join US soldiers; yet more US personnel still serve in US military marching bands than in the foreign service.
With their grossly inadequate veterans' care, moreover, the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress badly failed many of those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It is Democrats in Congress such as Jim Webb and Obama who have put forth the health care and college tuition plans that treat American veterans with the respect and dignity they deserve during their difficult transitions to civilian life. The Republicans' failure to support first-class care for returning service members is not only immoral; it is contributing to the difficulty the armed forces are now having in recruiting and retaining volunteers.
Democrats must also help voters see—and reject once and for all—the false choice that George W. Bush and now McCain offer between militarism and "appeasement." When John F. Kennedy was ridiculed by the right for his plans to negotiate with Communist countries, he rejected outright the idea that "we have only two choices: appeasement or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead." Obama and the Democrats today can show that while the United States refused to talk to America's adversaries, Iran and North Korea both advanced much further in their nuclear development.
And finally Democrats must play up the sharp differences that exist between the two parties on national security. Here the voters seem to be accepting in larger numbers the principles of the Democratic foreign policy platform, but Democrats have not yet locked in their advantages. Three framing themes seem particularly worth emphasizing:
• The New versus the Old. Democrats should argue that their foreign policy is particularly well suited to meeting today's unconventional threats—those that cross borders. Meeting such threats will sometimes entail using military force, but it will almost always require mustering global cooperation. Here the Democrats must point to the security consequences of the loss of respect for the United States around the world: the US requires the assistance of others to aid it in combating terrorism, halting nuclear proliferation, and reversing global warming. In scorning international law and public opinion abroad, Republicans have alienated those the US needs to share the burden of neutralizing threats that Americans deem the most pressing. Democrats for instance, will be more effective in securing the cooperation of intelligence and law enforcement officials in the eighty countries in which al-Qaeda is now active.
• Deeds versus Words. In his National Security Strategy for 2002, Bush used the words "liberty" eleven times, "freedom" forty-six times, and "dignity" nine times; yet people who live under oppression around the world have seen few benefits from President Bush's freedom doctrine. Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state under Bush, put it best when he said, "Since 9/11 our principal export to the world has been our fear." The gulf between America's rights rhetoric and the abuses carried out against detainees in American custody has been fatal to American credibility. Obama needs to restore that credibility by ending those excesses, and by following through on his pledge to launch a foreign aid initiative rooted in Franklin Roosevelt's core democratic value: freedom from fear. The United States should invest in a long-term "rule of law" initiative that takes up the burden of helping other countries and international organizations to build workable legal systems in the developing world.
• Law versus Lawlessness. In arguing for closing down Guantánamo, ending extraordinary rendition, and returning to the Geneva Conventions, Democrats must remind voters of the national security consequences of being perceived as a lawbreaker. More terrorists take up arms against the United States, while fewer countries take up arms along with the United States. In stressing the importance of law, Democrats should also repudiate the extraordinary and illegitimate presidential power seized by Bush (and generally supported by McCain). As a constitutional lawyer, Obama is in a unique position to argue that as commander in chief, he will never hold himself or his advisers above the law.
For the first time in sixteen years, the Democrats in 2008 could end up in control of the House, Senate, and White House. This could enable them to scale back the ballooning budget deficit, put in place a universal health care plan, move the country along the path to energy independence, and commit the United States to combating climate change. Although few have focused on this, the Democratic Party today is also in a strong position to show that it will be more reliable in keeping Americans safe during the twenty-first century. If the party succeeds in doing this, it will not only wake up the United States and the world from a long eight-year nightmare; it will also lay to rest the enduring myth that strong and wrong is preferable to smart and right.
—July 17, 2008
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Notes
[1] Clinton's actual quote: "When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right." From a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council, 2002.
[2] "Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq: Progress Report: Some Gains Made, Updated Strategy Needed," June 23, 2008. See www.gao.gov/docsearch/abstract.php?rptno=GAO-08-837.
[3] Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, "The Iraq Effect: War Has Increased Terrorism Sevenfold Worldwide," Mother Jones, March/April 2007.
[4] John E. Cloonan, June 10, 2008. "Coercive Interrogation Techniques: Do They Work, Are They Reliable, and What did the FBI Know About Them?" Opening Comments by John E. Cloonan, Retired FBI Special Agent, available at http://judiciary.senate.gov/testimony.cfm?id=3399&wit_id=7228.
[5] Interview with Senator Joe Biden on MSNBC, "Morning Joe," May 23, 2008.
[6] ABC News Polling Unit and Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at Stanford University, November 9, 2004.
[7] ABM, Kyoto, Small Arms, ICC, and Biological Weapons.
[8] Obama has assembled several hundred high-level experts grouped into two dozen working groups, each of which has developed plans on issues as diverse as "reform of international financial institutions" and "sub-Saharan African food policy."
[9] In early July Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "I don't have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach, to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq." He continued, "Afghanistan has been and remains an economy-of-force campaign, which by definition means we need more forces there."
The Democrats & National Security
By Samantha Power
Us vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security
by J. Peter Scoblic
Viking, 350 pp., $25.95
Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats
by Matthew Yglesias
Wiley, 251 pp., $25.95
1.
Since the Vietnam War the Republican Party has developed a reputation for having a superior approach to national security. Americans have long trusted the views of Democrats on the environment, the economy, education, and health care, but national security is the one matter about which Republicans have maintained what political scientists call "issue ownership."
Partly, this is for particular historical reasons. President Eisenhower initiated US involvement in Vietnam, and President Nixon escalated the war in 1969 and kept US troops on the ground in a manifestly unwinnable mission until 1975. But John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson were tagged as the primary culprits. President Carter was widely seen as having bungled the Iran hostage rescue mission and having responded ineffectually to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Although he substantially increased US military spending, he was never forgiven for his claim that Americans had "an inordinate fear of communism."
President Reagan of course did more than any other person to entrench the Republican reputation for toughness on national security. He ran his election campaign against Carter's apparent softness, brought the Iran hostages home upon taking over the White House, nearly doubled the US military budget, invaded tiny Grenada, and staged covert operations throughout Latin America and beyond. Many "Reagan Democrats" crossed party lines precisely because they saw him as more able to confront Communist threats, and the fall of the Berlin wall confirmed their view.
Harvard / Financial Crisis Books
President Clinton, elected just after the cold war ended at a time when national security was not a dominant concern, never really recovered from having been branded a draft-dodger, alienating the military by his botched effort to integrate gays into the armed services, or presiding over the 1993 fiasco in Somalia. Even though US military operations in Bosnia in 1995 and in Kosovo in 1999 cost no casualties and largely ended ethnic cleansing in both regions, they were not traditional conflicts; NATO's intervention was not seen as promoting vital national interests, and thus made little dent in the public understanding of Democrats' competence in managing national security. Throughout the 1990s, the Democratic Party made only small progress in chipping away at what by 1999 was a thirty-point edge for Republicans on national security in public opinion surveys.
In the 2000 election George W. Bush, who had shirked military service, succeeded in presenting himself as more reliable on national security than Al Gore. This was despite Gore's service in Vietnam, his seven years on the Senate Armed Services Committee, his four years on the House Intelligence Committee, his help in brokering a deal to dismantle the nuclear arsenal of former Soviet republics, and his creation of binational commissions with Russia, South Africa, Egypt, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine to deal with issues ranging from AIDS to disarmament. In 2004, too, even before the Swift Boat campaign, John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, had an uphill climb convincing voters that Democrats made reliable commanders in chief during wartime—even though a majority of Americans had already come to regret that the sitting commander in chief had chosen to wage war in the first place.
In the 2004 election, exit polls showed that Bush led John Kerry by nearly 20 percent on the question of which man would better protect the nation against terrorist attacks. The images of John Kerry as a hunter were greeted with greater ridicule than that of George W. Bush wearing a flight suit and staging a landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier off the coast of California. To paraphrase President Clinton's 2002 remark, American voters generally seem to prefer strong and wrong to smart and right.[1]
The performance and perception of recent presidents have had the greatest impact in shaping the public trust on national security. But other factors have given Republicans the edge over Democrats. The demographics of the US military are such that the officer corps and rank-and-file have traditionally leaned to the Republican side. Many US service members are observant Christians. During the last few years Democrats in political life have begun to embrace faith unselfconsciously, refusing to allow the Republican political establishment to usurp this terrain. Still, the military will likely continue to recruit a greater percentage of soldiers from red states in the South and middle America than from the coasts or major urban areas. With so many soldiers and officers counting themselves as Republicans, voters naturally associate the party with the country's primary symbol of security, those in uniform.
The Republican domestic agenda may also influence voters' perceptions about national security. The party that opposes strict gun control laws, seeks to crack down on illegal immigrants, wages a "war" on drugs, extols the "three strikes and you're out" approach to criminal sentencing, and has few qualms about capital punishment has been seen as "tougher," regardless of the effectiveness of these policies.
This faith in Republican toughness has had profound electoral consequences. Since 1968, with the single exception of the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Americans have chosen Republican presidents in times of perceived danger and Democrats in times of relative calm.
The last eight years of Republican-run foreign policy, however, have undermined US security and global stability in highly visible ways. Since a Republican president took over in 2001, the United States has invaded two countries. In Afghanistan, after swift success ousting the Taliban, the administration made the inexplicable initial decision to reject NATO's help, insisting that the international military presence not extend beyond Kabul. It spent a pittance on reconstruction—$737 million in 2003 as compared with $10 billion in 2007. Further, with al-Qaeda on the run, the administration spent 2002 mobilizing support for its March 2003 invasion of Iraq, which required it to divert precious units from eastern Afghanistan. According to many observers, this allowed the Taliban and the al-Qaeda leadership to snatch survival from the jaws of defeat. Violence has spread to once-peaceful pockets of territory, and the number of suicide attacks has increased from two in 2003 to 137 in 2007. In June 2008, forty-six American and allied forces died in Afghanistan, more than during any other month since the war began nearly seven years ago, and more than the thirty-one Americans who died in Iraq that month.
As for Iraq, the war has taken the lives of more than four thousand American soldiers, created another front for US forces in combating al-Qaeda, and eroded US army readiness to such an extent that US commanders concede that the army is at its "breaking point." Since 2001, Congress has appropriated about $640 billion for the "Global War on Terror," most of this for operations in Iraq. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report published in June found that the United States still lacked a strategy for meeting its goals in Iraq. The GAO found that violence had diminished somewhat; but according to the Pentagon, the number of Iraqi units capable of carrying out operations without US assistance continued to hover around 10 percent.
While the Iraqi authorities passed legislation readmitting some lower- level Baathists to the parliament, legislation was stalled on oil-sharing and the holding of provincial elections. Between 2005 and 2007, the GAO report found, the Iraq government spent less than a quarter of the $27 billion it budgeted for its own reconstruction efforts. And when it came to essential services, water supplies had improved, but electricity shortages persisted, meeting only about half of Iraqi demand by early May 2008.[2] Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank found in 2007 that the Iraq war had brought about a 600 percent increase in the average number of annual jihadist terrorist attacks throughout the world. Even if one didn't count attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, the incidence of terrorism increased 35 percent worldwide.[3]
By now, it is clear that "enhanced interrogation techniques"—in fact, torture—were authorized from the top of the Bush administration and were widely used from Afghanistan to Guantánamo to Iraq to "black sites" such as covert prison facilities or off-shore aircraft carriers. Al-Qaeda has made use of these excesses as recruitment propaganda. Donald Rumsfeld may be remembered for his policy failures, but he should also be remembered for the question he posed in a leaked memo in 2003: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?" Many press reports and National Intelligence Estimates offer a resounding "no" to that question. According to polls, many voters are persuaded by the administration that torture can be justified. They probably have not heard from terror specialists who say that useful intelligence comes less from detainees than from informants, communities, and familiar sources. US agents have found that these sources began drying up as American mistreatment of prisoners became known.
"Based on my experience in talking to al-Qaeda members," John Cloonan, an FBI counterterrorism specialist testified to Congress recently,
I am persuaded that revenge, in the form of a catastrophic attack on the homeland, is coming, that a new generation of jihadist martyrs, motivated in part by the images from Abu Ghraib, is, as we speak, planning to kill Americans and that nothing gleaned from the use of coercive interrogation techniques will be of any significant use in forestalling this calamitous eventuality.[4]
The effect of the Bush administration's policies is that, notwithstanding the towering US military budget, which drastically exceeds that of its rivals, America's global influence has plummeted. This is evident in the administration's failure to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions. According to the IAEA, Iran now has 3,300 centrifuges to enrich uranium, as compared to the 160 the IAEA confirmed during a visit to Iran in 2003. Iran's political influence, whether in Iraq, Lebanon, or Gaza, has been dramatically expanded as a result of the US quagmire in Iraq and the crude strategies the US used to eliminate Iran's two greatest enemies—the Baathist and Taliban regimes.
Since the greatest potential risk to American lives comes from nuclear terrorism, and since the Bush administration leaders infamously invoked "mushroom clouds" as grounds for invading Iraq, one would have expected them to work zealously to retrieve or secure loose nuclear material. Instead, President Bush attempted to cut funding for the Nunn-Lugar program to secure such material in the former Soviet Union. In declaring an openness to using nuclear weapons for tactical purposes and in discarding the longstanding nuclear doctrine of "no first use," the administration weakened the nonproliferation regime and created additional incentives for nonnuclear countries to acquire nuclear weapons. The President also maintained uncritical support for the Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf despite the fact that Musharraf sheltered Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan, who was caught selling nuclear secrets to North Korea and Iran.
Bush's stated goals were to strengthen the US military, bring stability to Iraq and Afghanistan, combat terrorism, prevent rogue states and militants from acquiring nuclear weapons, and promote democracy around the world. In each case, two terms of Republican rule have been disastrous for US national security. The question is: Have American voters noticed?
2.
Joe Biden has. In an interview with MSNBC, Senator Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked whether Democrats could be trusted on national security. He erupted:
I refuse to sit back like we did in 2000 and 2004. This administration is the worst administration in American foreign policy in modern history—maybe ever. The idea that they are competent to continue to conduct our foreign policy, to make us more secure and make Israel secure, is preposterous.... Every single thing they've touched has been a near disaster.[5]
Poll data show that voters are in fact beginning to share Biden's view and at last question Republicans' reliability on national security. On Election Day in 2004 exit polls showed that a majority of voters (49–44 percent) believed that the war in Iraq had made the country less safe. Yet those same exit polls gave Bush an 18-percent edge in handling national security.[6] Between 2003 and 2006 the Republicans had as high as a thirty-point advantage over Democrats on the question of which party could best deal with Iraq. But in the summer of 2006 in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, the Democrats were given their first lead in handling Iraq—a three-point edge. This has since been expanded to double digits—an advantage that helps explain the Democrats' strong showing in the 2006 midterm elections. On handling international terrorism, too, the substantial Republican lead had dwindled by 2006; last year, for the first time, a majority of Americans (47–42 percent) said that the Democratic Party would do a better job protecting the country from security threats. President Bush did Republicans a disservice by wrongly conflating the invasion of Iraq and the "war on terror." The setbacks in Iraq have undermined public perceptions of Republicans' performance in combating terrorism more generally.
But the poll data raise three important questions. First, which voters have changed their minds? Interestingly, Democrats have improved their showing on security principally by convincing Democratic voters that their own party is more trustworthy than their opponents'. Independent voters still have slightly more faith that Republicans would better protect the country from terrorist attack. A June 2008 Rasmussen survey found unaffiliated voters still favored Republicans on national security by six points.
Second, will voters identify Senator McCain closely with the Republican Party, whose policies he has championed, or will he succeed in decoupling himself from a party whose national security credentials have been tarnished? Thus far, probably because of his record of personal heroism and his occasional criticisms of the Bush administration, many polls have judged him more suited to keeping the country safe than the faceless "Republican Party."
Third, and most important for the future of US security and the Democratic Party, can Democrats do more than exploit Bush's foreign policy blunders to gain a tactical electoral edge? Can they take advantage of the increased public confidence in their judgment to advance a distinct twenty-first-century foreign policy that voters will prefer and trust them to execute?
The first step toward undoing Republican dominance on foreign policy entails debunking the myth that conservative ideology enhances US national security. Here Peter Scoblic, the executive editor at The New Republic and former editor of Arms Control Today, does a great service in Us vs. Them: How a Half Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America's Security. He considers five decades of arms control efforts in order to illuminate the common themes underlying hard-line conservative ideology on national security. He shows, most usefully, the continuity in conservative intellectual leadership across the years. John Foster Dulles wrote the Republicans' foreign policy platform in 1952, denouncing the Democrats' "futile and immoral policy of 'containment,' which abandons countless human beings to a despotism and godless terrorism." Barry Goldwater denounced the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, which William Buckley's National Review termed a "nuclear Yalta." And during his first term, Ronald Reagan and the Reaganauts appeared to argue that doing away with an evil regime was more important than preventing nuclear war.
Scoblic shows that these men had in common several core premises. One cannot coexist with evil-doers, who are irreparably "fallen," and thus rollback is required. Negotiation is not merely pointless, it is costly "appeasement." And the United States should participate in only those international institutions that are servants of American power; those that constrain American power are enemies of the national interest.
Scoblic's book offers a terrifying glimpse of the persistent tendency of one militant strand of conservatism to pursue conflict over peace, arms races over arms control, and ideology over pragmatism. His analytic history is particularly strong in revealing how, in a world of uncontrolled forces, conservatives sought to impose complete control, whether by pursuing technological fixes (like the nuclear missile shield) or treating US security as if it were something that could simply be willed. Because many conservatives presume exceptional American virtue—and believe that this virtue is self-evident to others—they have also consistently failed to see how aggressive US actions can appear abroad, and how the fear they generate can give rise to threatening behavior by others, who believe they are acting in self-defense. Scoblic, who sympathetically describes Reagan's shift from denunciation to negotiation with Gorbachev over nuclear arms reduction, writes that it had not previously "even occurred" to Reagan
that adopting a war-fighting strategy, beginning a widespread civil defense program, researching a missile shield, while increasing the military budget by 35 percent, starting a new bomber program, deploying a new ICBM, and deploying missiles in Europe could be construed as threatening.
Scoblic's account becomes most chilling at the end, when the same conservative voices that had long preferred confrontation to cooperation—such as Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld—actually become dominant players in George W. Bush's executive branch. On January 21, 2000, a year before he would move into the White House, Bush said:
When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world. And we knew exactly who the "they" were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who "them" was. Today we're not sure who the "they" are but we know they're there.
Having suffered through what one diplomat called the "enemy deprivation syndrome of the 1990s," September 11 gave hard-line conservatives an opportunity to apply their pre-hatched theories; and from the start they sought to unshackle the United States from international agreements and to reduce reliance on diplomatic engagement. When the Bush administration scored a rare recent diplomatic success, convincing North Korea to open up some of its nuclear records, Vice President Cheney was so disgusted by his own administration's pragmatic decision to take Pyongyang off the US terrorist blacklist that he snapped at reporters, "I'm not going to be the one to announce this decision. You need to address your interest in this to the State Department." He then abruptly ended the press encounter, and left the room.
What is striking about Scoblic's account of the hard-line conservatives' disdain for diplomacy and pragmatism is the resilience of the central tenets of their ideology. As they ridicule Senator Barack Obama's willingness to engage in negotiations with America's enemies, they seem unchastened by recent history. In 2003, for instance, when the reporter Jeffrey Goldberg told Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense, that US troops in Iraq had not been greeted with flowers, Feith said that the Iraqis had been too spooked by the presence of Saddam supporters to show their true emotions. "But," he said, "they had flowers in their minds."
Unfortunately, the Democrats have too often failed to contest such dangerous conservative fantasies. This is is the subject of Matthew Yglesias's briskly written, provocative book entitled Heads in the Sand. Yglesias draws on the last decade of US foreign policy to build his case that the Democratic Party's position on national security "has mostly been to play Charlie Brown perennially falling down as Lucy yanks away the football, swearing not to be fooled again...." In 2000 and 2004 Democrats did their best to move away from national security issues to other problems, such as Medicare, where they felt more at home, but they never put forward a strong foreign policy alternative. "Democrats," he writes,
have tended to approach security debates from a reflexive posture of fear, preemptively assuming a defensive crouch from which it is impossible to practice politics effectively.
Charlie Brown, he writes, "needs a football of his own."
Yglesias is persuasive in showing how mainstream Democrats, in the run-up to the war in Iraq, caricatured the antiwar left as a way of flaunting their national security bona fides. The intraparty squabble inhibited the creation of a pluralistic coalition united against the administration's unilateralism and militarism. Yglesias also gives an important account of the different positions that led to Democratic acquiescence in the war in Iraq—an acquiescence that neutered or delayed many Democrats' criticisms of the President. For some Democrats the Iraq war was the natural culmination of the thinking that earlier gave rise to President Clinton's intervention in Kosovo. It is true that Clinton bypassed the UN Security Council in the war of 1999, but to charge, as Yglesias does, that there was "no difference" between the two wars procedurally or substantively is to ignore the coordination of the Kosovo war with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. The basic attitude of the Bush administration was described by one of its officials quoted in Strobe Talbott's recent book, The Great Experiment:
Your type agonizes, ours seizes opportunities. You see our interests in Iraq and in the UN as in tension with each other; we see an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.
We don't know how events in 2003 would have progressed without the Kosovo war, but it is hard to imagine that President Bush—a man who repudiated five treaties in his first year in office[7] and has consistently ridiculed the UN—would have been deterred in any way by the absence of past precedent.
Moreover, while some prominent "liberal hawks" favored the Iraq war, plenty of those who had supported NATO action in Kosovo for humanitarian reasons opposed the war in Iraq on those or other grounds. Yglesias wrongly implies that support for one war inevitably entailed support for the other; he also unfortunately lends credence to the surprisingly prevalent fiction that Bush invaded Iraq for humanitarian purposes.
Still, NATO action in Kosovo did make UN Security Council authorization seem more optional than it had in the past. Also, the Kosovo war helped build support for the invasion of Iraq by contributing to the false impression that the US military was invincible. The mistaken recollection that the US victory over the Serbs was nearly effortless, combined with the Bush administration's quick initial overthrow of the Taliban, caused many Democrats to agree with the Republican claim that the war in Iraq would in fact be the "cakewalk" that Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz promised.
Yglesias is most convincing when he discusses the other two factors behind the rush to war—an international security hawkishness among Democrats, who accepted Kenneth Pollack's argument that Iraq was indeed a "gathering storm"; and domestic political opportunism rooted in the belief that Washington careers would be ruined by the failure to support a war that proved successful (the so-called "Sam Nunn effect," after the Georgia senator whose presidential hopes were widely seen to have been dashed by his opposition to the first Gulf War).
Yglesias shows how, for the last five years, Democrats have allowed themselves to be hemmed in by the conservative mind-set about Iraq—arguing over tactics such as whether international support could be acquired, whether enough troops had been sent, or whether the surge has caused a drop in violence. They have neglected, meanwhile, to confront the Bush administration directly for its pursuit of global hegemony and seeming contempt for a rule-based liberal order. It wasn't only Bush's particular policies that happened to be foolish, Yglesias notes:
Conservative Republicans have not merely made some mistakes on Iraq, and some other mistakes on Iran, and some other mistakes on North Korea, plus some mistakes on Syria, while mishandling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, by coincidence, damaging our relationships with formerly close allies. Rather, they are making one big mistake in seeking to transform the United States' role in the world... to that of an imperial superpower that seeks to use its national strength to dominate the world and needlessly heighten conflicts.
A believer in international institutions and international law, Yglesias rightly dismisses the proposal to replace the UN with a group of like-minded countries, such as the League of Democracies favored by McCain. "An action opposed by Russia and China will not suddenly gain new legitimacy in Russian or Chinese eyes simply because a group from which they are excluded says so," he writes.
Having criticized the Democrats for failing to put forward an alternative strategy, Yglesias devotes fewer than ten pages at the end of his book to sketching one of his own. His brevity is partly justified by his basic argument—that the alternative is not "new" (he is irked by liberals' tendency to "fetishize novelty"). Democrats, he writes, should turn back to the same "reciprocity, rules, institutions and cooperation" that in his view prevented major conflict in the second half of the twentieth century.
3.
In a June interview with Fortune magazine, Charles Black, one of John McCain's top campaign advisers, credited the assassination of Benazir Bhutto with improving McCain's appeal in New Hampshire just ahead of the primary (a claim Jon Stewart termed the "Bhutto Bump"). "His knowledge and ability to talk about it reemphasized that this is the guy who's ready to be commander-in-chief," Black said. "And it helped us." He then went on to predict the effect of another terrorist attack on US soil on McCain's presidential bid: "Certainly it would be a big advantage for him," Black said. McCain had to dissociate himself from this remark but it seemed to lay bare Republican thinking.
McCain has tried to turn the 2008 election into a vote on national security. He believes that he has an edge in presenting himself as a natural commander in chief and in describing Obama as a rookie who is simply too naive to know how to deal with a deadly world. At a town hall meeting in June the Arizona senator read aloud a recent statement by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in which the Iranian leader again suggested Israel should "disappear." "It's a very clear choice, and whether it be on Iran, or whether it be on Iraq, or whether it be on other national security issues," McCain said, "Senator Obama does not have the experience and the knowledge and clearly the judgment, my friends."
McCain has pledged to continue many of Bush's national security policies. He backed Bush's invasion of Iraq, he raised the possibility of military action against Iran, and he deplored granting the right of habeas corpus to detainees. He has three main tactics for seizing public trust in the area of national security. The first is to invoke, however implicitly, his own military service. When Obama criticized McCain for his refusal to support Senator Jim Webb's proposal to increase college tuition benefits for recent veterans, McCain lashed out: "I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did."
McCain's second tactic is to evoke what he claims will be the costs of "embracing defeat" in Iraq—an al-Qaeda base, a genocide that will make Srebrenica "look like a Sunday-school picnic," and a regional war that will undermine US interests in the Middle East. Since voters have seen the debacles of the Republican-led status quo, McCain has to paint an even grimmer imagined picture of the costs of Democratic national security leadership.
His third tactic is to try to impose on Obama the conservative caricature of "liberals"—as weak, naive, elitist, and unfit to lead in a time of existential threats. Here McCain follows the example of Karl Rove at a conservative Republican gathering in New York in 2004: "Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers."
How can Obama and his Democratic colleagues expose once and for all the fallacies in the conservative approach to national security, while putting forward a convincing alternative? They must start by not shying from the security debate or relying, with quiet relief, on polls showing that (unlike in 2004) only 4 percent of Americans today view terrorism as their top concern. Democrats must instead seize the advantage the polls show they could have on security issues. This means talking early and often about national security and going on the offensive by strongly presenting the foreign policy plans already devised, whether by members of Congress or by the Obama campaign.[8] It also means explaining how each plan—whether for retrieving loose nuclear material in the former Soviet Union or for assisting Iraqi refugees in Syria—advances the central goal of keeping Americans safe. Democrats can break with their reputation for squeamishness about national security issues by showing their ease and confidence in dealing with these topics. Instead of changing the subject when national security issues arise, they should look forward to taking part in detailed foreign policy discussions that allow them to show their new strength.
They must also answer McCain's apocalyptic claims about the effects of a US withdrawal from Iraq. Too often on Capitol Hill or in the primary battle, Democrats have confidently suggested that since the US-led invasion brought savage sectarian killing to Iraq, a US departure will rid the country of much of its violence. Critics of President Bush have seemed to imply that no serious harm will flow from a US withdrawal. But American voters realize that the effects of a US drawdown are in fact unknowable. The failure to acknowledge any possible humanitarian or strategic risks of leaving makes Democrats sound less sophisticated than they are, and deprives them of the chance to describe their plans to draw down troops in a careful and strategically sound way. McCain's alarmist forecast thus goes unchallenged.
Prominent Democrats must drive home the continuing costs of remaining in Iraq—costs to Iraq, the region, Afghanistan,[9] US military readiness, and national security as a whole—while describing the specific ways an Obama administration would limit the harmful consequences of withdrawal. (In fact, Obama outlined such plans in a speech last year but it got little attention and needs reinforcement from the Democratic echo chamber.)
Obama has long stated his intention to retain a Quick-Reaction Force in the region to carry out counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda and other such networks. He has made clear his concern for Iraqi civilians in mixed neighborhoods who might be more vulnerable following a withdrawal of US combat brigades. He would offer these civilians fair notice of US plans and would be open to relocating those who would feel more secure if they moved. He has promised $2 billion to assist the two million Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries. He would establish a war crimes commission to gather the testimony of survivors and put militia leaders on notice that they may eventually be prosecuted. Obama's plan to meet with the region's heads of state is the first of many steps that will be required to prevent regional conflict.
Since Vietnam there has never been a more auspicious time for the Democratic Party to establish close relations with the US military. Building on Obama's October 2002 speech explaining his opposition to the war in Iraq, Democrats can continue to argue that Obama and his party will never do what the Republicans have done: send US service members to fight unnecessary wars. He will not stretch the US military and military families to their breaking points by extending tours of duty beyond what is tolerable. He will not order young cadets and reservists to carry out cruel and inhuman acts against foreign detainees and then abandon them when it becomes politically inconvenient, allowing them to be court-martialed while those who authorized the practices take up high-paying jobs at corporate law firms or prestigious teaching posts at top-flight law schools.
Democrats should make it clear that they will listen to the military's pleas to make major improvements in the civilian components of the government that work with the military on policing, governance, and reconstruction. Republicans have had eight years to respond to the appeals of US generals like David Petraeus who have begged for more and better-equipped civilian partners to join US soldiers; yet more US personnel still serve in US military marching bands than in the foreign service.
With their grossly inadequate veterans' care, moreover, the Bush administration and the Republican-controlled Congress badly failed many of those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It is Democrats in Congress such as Jim Webb and Obama who have put forth the health care and college tuition plans that treat American veterans with the respect and dignity they deserve during their difficult transitions to civilian life. The Republicans' failure to support first-class care for returning service members is not only immoral; it is contributing to the difficulty the armed forces are now having in recruiting and retaining volunteers.
Democrats must also help voters see—and reject once and for all—the false choice that George W. Bush and now McCain offer between militarism and "appeasement." When John F. Kennedy was ridiculed by the right for his plans to negotiate with Communist countries, he rejected outright the idea that "we have only two choices: appeasement or war, suicide or surrender, humiliation or holocaust, to be either Red or dead." Obama and the Democrats today can show that while the United States refused to talk to America's adversaries, Iran and North Korea both advanced much further in their nuclear development.
And finally Democrats must play up the sharp differences that exist between the two parties on national security. Here the voters seem to be accepting in larger numbers the principles of the Democratic foreign policy platform, but Democrats have not yet locked in their advantages. Three framing themes seem particularly worth emphasizing:
• The New versus the Old. Democrats should argue that their foreign policy is particularly well suited to meeting today's unconventional threats—those that cross borders. Meeting such threats will sometimes entail using military force, but it will almost always require mustering global cooperation. Here the Democrats must point to the security consequences of the loss of respect for the United States around the world: the US requires the assistance of others to aid it in combating terrorism, halting nuclear proliferation, and reversing global warming. In scorning international law and public opinion abroad, Republicans have alienated those the US needs to share the burden of neutralizing threats that Americans deem the most pressing. Democrats for instance, will be more effective in securing the cooperation of intelligence and law enforcement officials in the eighty countries in which al-Qaeda is now active.
• Deeds versus Words. In his National Security Strategy for 2002, Bush used the words "liberty" eleven times, "freedom" forty-six times, and "dignity" nine times; yet people who live under oppression around the world have seen few benefits from President Bush's freedom doctrine. Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of state under Bush, put it best when he said, "Since 9/11 our principal export to the world has been our fear." The gulf between America's rights rhetoric and the abuses carried out against detainees in American custody has been fatal to American credibility. Obama needs to restore that credibility by ending those excesses, and by following through on his pledge to launch a foreign aid initiative rooted in Franklin Roosevelt's core democratic value: freedom from fear. The United States should invest in a long-term "rule of law" initiative that takes up the burden of helping other countries and international organizations to build workable legal systems in the developing world.
• Law versus Lawlessness. In arguing for closing down Guantánamo, ending extraordinary rendition, and returning to the Geneva Conventions, Democrats must remind voters of the national security consequences of being perceived as a lawbreaker. More terrorists take up arms against the United States, while fewer countries take up arms along with the United States. In stressing the importance of law, Democrats should also repudiate the extraordinary and illegitimate presidential power seized by Bush (and generally supported by McCain). As a constitutional lawyer, Obama is in a unique position to argue that as commander in chief, he will never hold himself or his advisers above the law.
For the first time in sixteen years, the Democrats in 2008 could end up in control of the House, Senate, and White House. This could enable them to scale back the ballooning budget deficit, put in place a universal health care plan, move the country along the path to energy independence, and commit the United States to combating climate change. Although few have focused on this, the Democratic Party today is also in a strong position to show that it will be more reliable in keeping Americans safe during the twenty-first century. If the party succeeds in doing this, it will not only wake up the United States and the world from a long eight-year nightmare; it will also lay to rest the enduring myth that strong and wrong is preferable to smart and right.
—July 17, 2008
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Notes
[1] Clinton's actual quote: "When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have somebody who's strong and wrong than somebody who's weak and right." From a speech to the Democratic Leadership Council, 2002.
[2] "Securing, Stabilizing, and Rebuilding Iraq: Progress Report: Some Gains Made, Updated Strategy Needed," June 23, 2008. See www.gao.gov/docsearch/abstract.php?rptno=GAO-08-837.
[3] Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank, "The Iraq Effect: War Has Increased Terrorism Sevenfold Worldwide," Mother Jones, March/April 2007.
[4] John E. Cloonan, June 10, 2008. "Coercive Interrogation Techniques: Do They Work, Are They Reliable, and What did the FBI Know About Them?" Opening Comments by John E. Cloonan, Retired FBI Special Agent, available at http://judiciary.senate.gov/testimony.cfm?id=3399&wit_id=7228.
[5] Interview with Senator Joe Biden on MSNBC, "Morning Joe," May 23, 2008.
[6] ABC News Polling Unit and Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at Stanford University, November 9, 2004.
[7] ABM, Kyoto, Small Arms, ICC, and Biological Weapons.
[8] Obama has assembled several hundred high-level experts grouped into two dozen working groups, each of which has developed plans on issues as diverse as "reform of international financial institutions" and "sub-Saharan African food policy."
[9] In early July Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "I don't have troops I can reach for, brigades I can reach, to send into Afghanistan until I have a reduced requirement in Iraq." He continued, "Afghanistan has been and remains an economy-of-force campaign, which by definition means we need more forces there."
Georgia and the Balance of Power
Volume 55, Number 14 · September 25, 2008
By George Friedman
The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It has simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. The United States has been absorbed in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as potential conflict with Iran and a destabilizing situation in Pakistan. It has no strategic ground forces in reserve and is in no position to intervene on the Russian periphery. This has opened an opportunity for the Russians to reassert their influence in the former Soviet sphere. Moscow did not have to concern itself with the potential response of the United States or Europe; hence, the balance of power had already shifted, and it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that on August 8.
Let's begin simply by reviewing recent events. On the night of Thursday, August 7, forces of the Republic of Georgia moved across the border of South Ossetia, a secessionist region of Georgia that has functioned as an independent entity since the fall of the Soviet Union (see map).
Map
They drove on to the capital, Tskhinvali, which is close to the border. Georgian forces got bogged down while trying to take the city. In spite of heavy fighting, they never fully secured it, nor the rest of South Ossetia.
On the morning of August 8, Russian forces entered South Ossetia, using armored and motorized infantry forces along with air power. South Ossetia was informally aligned with Russia, and Russia acted to prevent the region's absorption by Georgia. In view of the speed with which the Russians responded—within hours of the Georgian attack—they had been expecting it and were themselves at their jumping-off points. The counterattack was carefully planned and competently executed, and over the next forty-eight hours the Russians succeeded in defeating the main Georgian force and compelling a retreat. By Sunday, August 10, they had consolidated their position in South Ossetia.
Univ. of Chicago / Manual of Style
On Monday, August 11, the Russians extended their offensive into Georgia proper, attacking on two axes. One was south from South Ossetia to the Georgian city of Gori. The other was from Abkhazia, another secessionist region of Georgia aligned with the Russians. (On August 26, Russia recognized South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence, turning the de facto situation of the last sixteen years into a de jure one.) This drive was designed to cut the road between the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and its Black Sea ports, Poti and Batumi. By this point, the Russians had bombed the Georgian military airfields at Marneuli and Vaziani and appeared to have disabled radars at the international airport in Tbilisi. These moves brought Russian forces to within forty miles of the Georgian capital, while making outside re-inforcement and resupply of Georgian forces extremely difficult should anyone wish to undertake it.
The Mystery Behind the Georgian Invasion
In this simple chronicle, there is something quite mysterious: Why did the Georgians choose to invade South Ossetia on August 7? There had been a great deal of shelling by the South Ossetians of Georgian villages for the previous three nights, but while possibly more intense than usual, such artillery exchanges were routine. The Georgians might not have fought well, but they committed fairly substantial forces that must have taken at the very least several days to deploy and supply. Georgia's move was deliberate.
The United States is Georgia's closest ally. It maintained about 130 military advisers in Georgia, along with civilian advisers, contractors involved in all aspects of the Georgian government, and people doing business there. (The United States conducted joint exercises with Georgian troops in July, with over a thousand US troops deployed. The Russians carried out parallel exercises in response. US troops withdrew. The Russian maneuver force remained in position and formed the core of the invading force.) It is inconceivable that the Americans were unaware of Georgia's mobilization and intentions. It is also inconceivable that the Americans were unaware that the Russians had deployed substantial forces on the South Ossetian border. US technical intelligence, from satellite imagery and signals intelligence to unmanned aerial vehicles, could not miss the fact that thousands of Russian troops were moving to forward positions. The Russians clearly knew that the Georgians were ready to move. How could the United States not be aware of the Russians? Indeed, given the deployments of Russian troops, how could intelligence analysts have missed the possibility that Russia had laid a trap, hoping for a Georgian invasion to justify its own counterattack?
It is difficult to imagine that the Georgians launched their attack against US wishes. The Georgians rely on the United States, and they were in no position to defy it. This leaves two possibilities. The first is a huge breakdown in intelligence, in which the United States either was unaware of the deployments of Russian forces or knew of them but—along with the Georgians—miscalculated Russia's intentions. The second is that the United States, along with other countries, has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when its military was in shambles and its government was paralyzed. The United States has not seen Russia make a decisive military move beyond its borders since the Afghan war of the 1970s and 1980s. The Russians had systematically avoided such moves for years. The United States had assumed that they would not risk the consequences of an invasion.
If that was the case, then it points to the central reality of this situation: the Russians had changed dramatically, along with the balance of power in the region. They welcomed the opportunity to drive home the new reality, which was that they could invade Georgia, and the United States and Europe could not meaningfully respond. They did not view the invasion as risky. Militarily, there was no force to counter them. Economically, Russia is an energy exporter doing quite well—indeed, the Europeans need Russian energy even more than the Russians need to sell it to them. Politically, as we shall see, the Americans need the Russians more than the Russians need the Americans. Moscow's calculus was that this was the moment to strike. The Russians had been building up to it for months, and they struck.
Western Encirclement of Russia
To understand Russian thinking, we need to look at two events. The first is the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. From the US and European points of view, the Orange Revolution repre-sented a triumph of democracy and Western influence. From the Russian point of view, as Moscow made clear, the Orange Revolution was a CIA-funded intrusion into the internal affairs of Ukraine, designed to draw Ukraine into NATO and add to the encirclement of Russia. US Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton had promised the Russians that NATO would not expand into the former Soviet empire.
That promise had already been broken in 1998 by NATO's expansion to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—and again in the 2004 expansion, which included not only the rest of the former Soviet satellites in what is now Central Europe, but also the three Baltic states, which had been components of the Soviet Union.
The Russians had tolerated all that, but the discussion of including Ukraine in NATO represented to them a fundamental threat to Russia's national security. It would, in their calculations, have rendered Russia indefensible and threatened to destabilize the Russian Federation itself. When the United States went so far as to suggest that Georgia be included as well, bringing NATO deeper into the Caucasus, the Russian conclusion—publicly stated—was that the United States in particular intended to encircle and break Russia.
The second and lesser event was the decision by Europe and the United States to back Kosovo's separation from Serbia. The Russians were friendly with Serbia, but the deeper issue for Russia was this: the principle accepted in Europe since World War II was that, to prevent conflict, national borders would not be changed. If that principle were violated in Kosovo, other border shifts—including demands by various regions for independence from Russia—might follow. The Russians publicly and privately asked that Kosovo not be given formal independence, but instead continue its informal autonomy, which was the same thing in practical terms. Russia's requests were ignored.
From the Ukrainian experience, the Russians became convinced that the United States was engaged in a plan of strategic encirclement and strangulation of Russia. From the Kosovo experience, they concluded that the United States and Europe were not prepared to consider Russian wishes even in fairly minor affairs. That was the breaking point. If Russian desires could not be accommodated even in a minor matter like this, then clearly Russia and the West were in conflict. For the Russians, as we said, the question was how to respond. Having declined to respond in Kosovo, they decided to respond where they had all the cards: in South Ossetia.
Moscow had two motives, the lesser of which was as a tit-for-tat over Kosovo. If Kosovo could be declared independent under Western sponsorship, then South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway regions of Georgia, could be declared independent under Russian sponsorship. Any objections from the United States and Europe would simply confirm their hypocrisy. This was important for internal Russian political reasons, but the second motive was far more important.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didn't mean that he wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which Russian national security was threatened by Western interests. As an example, consider that during the cold war, St. Petersburg was about 1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is less than a hundred miles away from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries that it sees as hostile to its interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United States, Europe, and, in some cases, China.
Resurrecting the Russian Sphere
Putin did not want to reestablish the Soviet Union, but he did want to re- establish the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet region. To accomplish that, he had to do two things. First, he had to reestablish the credibility of the Russian army as a fighting force, at least in its own region. Second, he had to establish that Western guarantees, including NATO membership, meant nothing in the face of Russian power. He did not want to confront NATO directly, but he did want to confront and defeat a power that was closely aligned with the United States, had US support, aid, and advisers, and was widely seen as being under American protection. Georgia was the perfect choice.
By invading Georgia as Russia did (competently if not brilliantly), Putin reestablished the credibility of the Russian army. (It was no surprise that its operations would render thousands of people homeless and cause civilian casualties.) But far more importantly, Putin's invasion revealed an open secret. While the United States is tied down in the Middle East, American guarantees have no value. This lesson is not for American consumption. It is something that, from the Russian point of view, the Ukrainians, the Balts, and the Central Asians need to digest. Indeed, it is a lesson Putin wants to transmit to Poland and the Czech Republic as well. In July, the Czech government signed an agreement with the United States to set up a ballistic missile defense installation in the Czech Republic, and in August, days after the conflict in Georgia began, the Polish government announced that it has agreed to allow the Americans to build an anti-missile base in Poland. The US–Polish agreement was hurriedly signed as a gesture of defiance to the Russians. The Russians responded with threats that Condoleezza Rice dismissed as "bizarre."
The Russians knew that the United States would denounce their attack. This actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior US leaders are, the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk. The Russians also know something else that is of vital importance. For the United States, the Middle East is far more important than the Caucasus, and Iran is particularly important. The United States wants the Russians to participate in sanctions against Iran. Even more importantly, it does not want the Russians to sell weapons to Iran, particularly the highly effective S-300 air defense system. Georgia is a marginal issue to the United States; Iran is a central issue. The Russians are in a position to pose serious problems for the United States not only in Iran, but also with weapons sales to other countries, like Syria.
Therefore, the United States has a problem—either it must reorient its strategy away from the Middle East and toward the Caucasus, or it has to seriously limit its response to Georgia to avoid a Russian counter in Iran. Even if the United States had an appetite for war in Georgia at this time, it would have to calculate the Russian response in Iran—and possibly in Afghanistan (even though Moscow's interests there are currently aligned with those of Washington).
In other words, the Russians have backed the Americans into a corner. The Europeans, who for the most part lack expeditionary military forces and are dependent upon Russian energy exports, have even fewer options. If nothing else happens, the Russians will have demonstrated that though they are not a global power by any means, they have resumed their role as a significant regional power with lots of nuclear weapons and an economy that is less shabby now than in the past. Russia has also compelled every state on its periphery to reevaluate its position relative to Moscow. That is what the Russians wanted to demonstrate, and they have demonstrated it.
The war in Georgia, therefore, is Russia's public return to great power status. This is not something that just happened—it has been unfolding ever since Putin took power, and with growing intensity in the past five years. Part of it has to do with the increase in Russian power, but a great deal of it has to do with the fact that the Middle Eastern wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left the United States off-balance and short on resources. This conflict created a window of opportunity. The Russian goal is to use that window to assert a new reality throughout the region while the Americans are tied down elsewhere and dependent on Russian cooperation. The war was far from a surprise; it has been building for months. But the geopolitical foundations of the war have been building since 1992. Russia has been an empire for centuries. The last fifteen years or so were not the new reality, but simply an aberration that would be rectified. And now it is being rectified. Whether the US and its allies can mount a coherent response has now become a central question of Western foreign policy.
—August 27, 2008
George Friedman is Founder and CEO of Stratfor, a private intelligence company publishing geopolitical and security analysis at www.stratfor.com. He is author of America's Secret War . His new book, The Next Hundred Years , will be published in January 2009.
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October 23, 2008: Daniel Fried, Georgia, the US, and the Balance of Power: An Exchange
By George Friedman
The Russian invasion of Georgia has not changed the balance of power in Eurasia. It has simply announced that the balance of power had already shifted. The United States has been absorbed in its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as potential conflict with Iran and a destabilizing situation in Pakistan. It has no strategic ground forces in reserve and is in no position to intervene on the Russian periphery. This has opened an opportunity for the Russians to reassert their influence in the former Soviet sphere. Moscow did not have to concern itself with the potential response of the United States or Europe; hence, the balance of power had already shifted, and it was up to the Russians when to make this public. They did that on August 8.
Let's begin simply by reviewing recent events. On the night of Thursday, August 7, forces of the Republic of Georgia moved across the border of South Ossetia, a secessionist region of Georgia that has functioned as an independent entity since the fall of the Soviet Union (see map).
Map
They drove on to the capital, Tskhinvali, which is close to the border. Georgian forces got bogged down while trying to take the city. In spite of heavy fighting, they never fully secured it, nor the rest of South Ossetia.
On the morning of August 8, Russian forces entered South Ossetia, using armored and motorized infantry forces along with air power. South Ossetia was informally aligned with Russia, and Russia acted to prevent the region's absorption by Georgia. In view of the speed with which the Russians responded—within hours of the Georgian attack—they had been expecting it and were themselves at their jumping-off points. The counterattack was carefully planned and competently executed, and over the next forty-eight hours the Russians succeeded in defeating the main Georgian force and compelling a retreat. By Sunday, August 10, they had consolidated their position in South Ossetia.
Univ. of Chicago / Manual of Style
On Monday, August 11, the Russians extended their offensive into Georgia proper, attacking on two axes. One was south from South Ossetia to the Georgian city of Gori. The other was from Abkhazia, another secessionist region of Georgia aligned with the Russians. (On August 26, Russia recognized South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence, turning the de facto situation of the last sixteen years into a de jure one.) This drive was designed to cut the road between the Georgian capital of Tbilisi and its Black Sea ports, Poti and Batumi. By this point, the Russians had bombed the Georgian military airfields at Marneuli and Vaziani and appeared to have disabled radars at the international airport in Tbilisi. These moves brought Russian forces to within forty miles of the Georgian capital, while making outside re-inforcement and resupply of Georgian forces extremely difficult should anyone wish to undertake it.
The Mystery Behind the Georgian Invasion
In this simple chronicle, there is something quite mysterious: Why did the Georgians choose to invade South Ossetia on August 7? There had been a great deal of shelling by the South Ossetians of Georgian villages for the previous three nights, but while possibly more intense than usual, such artillery exchanges were routine. The Georgians might not have fought well, but they committed fairly substantial forces that must have taken at the very least several days to deploy and supply. Georgia's move was deliberate.
The United States is Georgia's closest ally. It maintained about 130 military advisers in Georgia, along with civilian advisers, contractors involved in all aspects of the Georgian government, and people doing business there. (The United States conducted joint exercises with Georgian troops in July, with over a thousand US troops deployed. The Russians carried out parallel exercises in response. US troops withdrew. The Russian maneuver force remained in position and formed the core of the invading force.) It is inconceivable that the Americans were unaware of Georgia's mobilization and intentions. It is also inconceivable that the Americans were unaware that the Russians had deployed substantial forces on the South Ossetian border. US technical intelligence, from satellite imagery and signals intelligence to unmanned aerial vehicles, could not miss the fact that thousands of Russian troops were moving to forward positions. The Russians clearly knew that the Georgians were ready to move. How could the United States not be aware of the Russians? Indeed, given the deployments of Russian troops, how could intelligence analysts have missed the possibility that Russia had laid a trap, hoping for a Georgian invasion to justify its own counterattack?
It is difficult to imagine that the Georgians launched their attack against US wishes. The Georgians rely on the United States, and they were in no position to defy it. This leaves two possibilities. The first is a huge breakdown in intelligence, in which the United States either was unaware of the deployments of Russian forces or knew of them but—along with the Georgians—miscalculated Russia's intentions. The second is that the United States, along with other countries, has viewed Russia through the prism of the 1990s, when its military was in shambles and its government was paralyzed. The United States has not seen Russia make a decisive military move beyond its borders since the Afghan war of the 1970s and 1980s. The Russians had systematically avoided such moves for years. The United States had assumed that they would not risk the consequences of an invasion.
If that was the case, then it points to the central reality of this situation: the Russians had changed dramatically, along with the balance of power in the region. They welcomed the opportunity to drive home the new reality, which was that they could invade Georgia, and the United States and Europe could not meaningfully respond. They did not view the invasion as risky. Militarily, there was no force to counter them. Economically, Russia is an energy exporter doing quite well—indeed, the Europeans need Russian energy even more than the Russians need to sell it to them. Politically, as we shall see, the Americans need the Russians more than the Russians need the Americans. Moscow's calculus was that this was the moment to strike. The Russians had been building up to it for months, and they struck.
Western Encirclement of Russia
To understand Russian thinking, we need to look at two events. The first is the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. From the US and European points of view, the Orange Revolution repre-sented a triumph of democracy and Western influence. From the Russian point of view, as Moscow made clear, the Orange Revolution was a CIA-funded intrusion into the internal affairs of Ukraine, designed to draw Ukraine into NATO and add to the encirclement of Russia. US Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton had promised the Russians that NATO would not expand into the former Soviet empire.
That promise had already been broken in 1998 by NATO's expansion to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic—and again in the 2004 expansion, which included not only the rest of the former Soviet satellites in what is now Central Europe, but also the three Baltic states, which had been components of the Soviet Union.
The Russians had tolerated all that, but the discussion of including Ukraine in NATO represented to them a fundamental threat to Russia's national security. It would, in their calculations, have rendered Russia indefensible and threatened to destabilize the Russian Federation itself. When the United States went so far as to suggest that Georgia be included as well, bringing NATO deeper into the Caucasus, the Russian conclusion—publicly stated—was that the United States in particular intended to encircle and break Russia.
The second and lesser event was the decision by Europe and the United States to back Kosovo's separation from Serbia. The Russians were friendly with Serbia, but the deeper issue for Russia was this: the principle accepted in Europe since World War II was that, to prevent conflict, national borders would not be changed. If that principle were violated in Kosovo, other border shifts—including demands by various regions for independence from Russia—might follow. The Russians publicly and privately asked that Kosovo not be given formal independence, but instead continue its informal autonomy, which was the same thing in practical terms. Russia's requests were ignored.
From the Ukrainian experience, the Russians became convinced that the United States was engaged in a plan of strategic encirclement and strangulation of Russia. From the Kosovo experience, they concluded that the United States and Europe were not prepared to consider Russian wishes even in fairly minor affairs. That was the breaking point. If Russian desires could not be accommodated even in a minor matter like this, then clearly Russia and the West were in conflict. For the Russians, as we said, the question was how to respond. Having declined to respond in Kosovo, they decided to respond where they had all the cards: in South Ossetia.
Moscow had two motives, the lesser of which was as a tit-for-tat over Kosovo. If Kosovo could be declared independent under Western sponsorship, then South Ossetia and Abkhazia, the two breakaway regions of Georgia, could be declared independent under Russian sponsorship. Any objections from the United States and Europe would simply confirm their hypocrisy. This was important for internal Russian political reasons, but the second motive was far more important.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin once said that the fall of the Soviet Union was a geopolitical disaster. This didn't mean that he wanted to retain the Soviet state; rather, it meant that the disintegration of the Soviet Union had created a situation in which Russian national security was threatened by Western interests. As an example, consider that during the cold war, St. Petersburg was about 1,200 miles away from a NATO country. Today it is less than a hundred miles away from Estonia, a NATO member. The disintegration of the Soviet Union had left Russia surrounded by a group of countries that it sees as hostile to its interests in various degrees and heavily influenced by the United States, Europe, and, in some cases, China.
Resurrecting the Russian Sphere
Putin did not want to reestablish the Soviet Union, but he did want to re- establish the Russian sphere of influence in the former Soviet region. To accomplish that, he had to do two things. First, he had to reestablish the credibility of the Russian army as a fighting force, at least in its own region. Second, he had to establish that Western guarantees, including NATO membership, meant nothing in the face of Russian power. He did not want to confront NATO directly, but he did want to confront and defeat a power that was closely aligned with the United States, had US support, aid, and advisers, and was widely seen as being under American protection. Georgia was the perfect choice.
By invading Georgia as Russia did (competently if not brilliantly), Putin reestablished the credibility of the Russian army. (It was no surprise that its operations would render thousands of people homeless and cause civilian casualties.) But far more importantly, Putin's invasion revealed an open secret. While the United States is tied down in the Middle East, American guarantees have no value. This lesson is not for American consumption. It is something that, from the Russian point of view, the Ukrainians, the Balts, and the Central Asians need to digest. Indeed, it is a lesson Putin wants to transmit to Poland and the Czech Republic as well. In July, the Czech government signed an agreement with the United States to set up a ballistic missile defense installation in the Czech Republic, and in August, days after the conflict in Georgia began, the Polish government announced that it has agreed to allow the Americans to build an anti-missile base in Poland. The US–Polish agreement was hurriedly signed as a gesture of defiance to the Russians. The Russians responded with threats that Condoleezza Rice dismissed as "bizarre."
The Russians knew that the United States would denounce their attack. This actually plays into Russian hands. The more vocal senior US leaders are, the greater the contrast with their inaction, and the Russians wanted to drive home the idea that American guarantees are empty talk. The Russians also know something else that is of vital importance. For the United States, the Middle East is far more important than the Caucasus, and Iran is particularly important. The United States wants the Russians to participate in sanctions against Iran. Even more importantly, it does not want the Russians to sell weapons to Iran, particularly the highly effective S-300 air defense system. Georgia is a marginal issue to the United States; Iran is a central issue. The Russians are in a position to pose serious problems for the United States not only in Iran, but also with weapons sales to other countries, like Syria.
Therefore, the United States has a problem—either it must reorient its strategy away from the Middle East and toward the Caucasus, or it has to seriously limit its response to Georgia to avoid a Russian counter in Iran. Even if the United States had an appetite for war in Georgia at this time, it would have to calculate the Russian response in Iran—and possibly in Afghanistan (even though Moscow's interests there are currently aligned with those of Washington).
In other words, the Russians have backed the Americans into a corner. The Europeans, who for the most part lack expeditionary military forces and are dependent upon Russian energy exports, have even fewer options. If nothing else happens, the Russians will have demonstrated that though they are not a global power by any means, they have resumed their role as a significant regional power with lots of nuclear weapons and an economy that is less shabby now than in the past. Russia has also compelled every state on its periphery to reevaluate its position relative to Moscow. That is what the Russians wanted to demonstrate, and they have demonstrated it.
The war in Georgia, therefore, is Russia's public return to great power status. This is not something that just happened—it has been unfolding ever since Putin took power, and with growing intensity in the past five years. Part of it has to do with the increase in Russian power, but a great deal of it has to do with the fact that the Middle Eastern wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left the United States off-balance and short on resources. This conflict created a window of opportunity. The Russian goal is to use that window to assert a new reality throughout the region while the Americans are tied down elsewhere and dependent on Russian cooperation. The war was far from a surprise; it has been building for months. But the geopolitical foundations of the war have been building since 1992. Russia has been an empire for centuries. The last fifteen years or so were not the new reality, but simply an aberration that would be rectified. And now it is being rectified. Whether the US and its allies can mount a coherent response has now become a central question of Western foreign policy.
—August 27, 2008
George Friedman is Founder and CEO of Stratfor, a private intelligence company publishing geopolitical and security analysis at www.stratfor.com. He is author of America's Secret War . His new book, The Next Hundred Years , will be published in January 2009.
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Letters
October 23, 2008: Daniel Fried, Georgia, the US, and the Balance of Power: An Exchange
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