By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Social and political epochs rarely end precisely on schedules provided by calendars. Many historians date the end of Europe's 19th century to 1914 and the outbreak of World War I. What we call "The Sixties" in the United States, with its ethos of reform and protest, ended with Richard Nixon's landslide reelection in 1972 and the winding down of the Vietnam War.
In the same way, the outcome of this year's election means that 2009 will, finally, mark the beginning of the 21st century.
It comes as we face parlous economic conditions and a slew of new threats. Nonetheless, we should view this as an opportunity to embrace the words of one of Barack Obama's favorite presidents. "As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew," Abraham Lincoln declared in 1862. "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."
For all the chatter about the world changing decisively after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, our reaction to the attacks was conditioned by 20th-century assumptions.
Instead of seeing the spasm of violence as representing something entirely new, President Bush's administration, aided by thinkers sympathetic to its approach, resolutely forced events into the interpretive boxes fashioned in previous decades.
Reactionary terrorists whose actions reflected the weakness of their position were raised up to world-historical status. They were "totalitarians," which suggested that they represented a threat as powerful as those embodied by Hitler and Stalin. They were "Islamofascists," a sobriquet that credited them with battling under the banner of a coherent, modern ideology when in fact they were inspired by a ragtag jumble of ideas rooted in the medieval past.
Osama bin Laden's commitment to reviving the power of the old Islamic "caliphate" was taken to be as real as the danger of Soviet troops pouring across the old East German border or of Hitler occupying Czechoslovakia. The new "global war on terror" was endowed with the same coherence as the old Cold War.
It was a dangerous and self-defeating set of illusions. Our battle with the terrorists is difficult precisely because it doesn't fit into the familiar categories. It grows out of struggles within Islam over which we have little control -- between Shiites and Sunnis, between modernizing and reactionary forces, between old regimes and new contenders for power.
It involves the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which, as the battle in Gaza shows, always threatens to fly out of control. But it also involves the struggle over Kashmir, as the attacks in Mumbai demonstrated, and the fears of Iranian-Shiite power in the Gulf.
None of this makes our situation easier, and it will certainly not make the danger of terrorism go away. But it does highlight the urgency of disenthralling ourselves from dated ideas.
So, too, does the rise of a new architecture of power in the world with the emergence especially of India and China. Fareed Zakaria says his book "The Post-American World" is not "about the decline of America," even if its catchy title suggests otherwise, but he's right to think anew about American influence.
What should fall is another illusion, the idea that the United States is the world's "sole remaining superpower." This notion weakened us because it suggested an omnipotence that no nation can possess.
By shedding this misapprehension, the United States could restore its influence. We could rediscover the imperative of acting in concert with others to build global institutions that strengthen our security and foster our values.
Nowhere is the need for a new understanding more obvious than in economic matters. Capitalism will not disappear, but the current crash has destroyed a series of damaging myths.
Those brilliant financiers were not so brilliant after all and certainly did not deserve the outsized rewards our system showered upon them for three decades. They did not understand that the financial instruments they created contained time bombs that would eventually rip apart the very system from which they so profited.
The market cannot operate without significant regulation, and dreaded government turns out to be the only institution with the capacity to repair things when market actors are routed from the field and sit, petrified, at the sidelines.
Barack Obama will have as free a hand as history ever allows to chart a new course and to define a new era. He may or may not succeed, but the country was right to seize the opportunity he offered to put the previous century and its assumptions behind us.
Thursday, 1 January 2009
Monday, 3 November 2008
The imminent election of Obama as US president.
Monday 3rd November 2008
The four great transformations driving Obama's victory
Are the Bush years going to end with the election of a cerebral, liberal black man born to a Muslim goat-herd from Kenya and an atheist farm-girl from Kansas?
Can it happen? Are the Bush years going to end with the election of a cerebral, liberal black man born to a Muslim goat-herd from Kenya and an atheist farm-girl from Kansas? Will we witness it in less than 48 hours? Whisper it: yes we can. At the midnight hour tomorrow night – unless opinion polls are wrong; more wrong than they have ever been – the era of President Barack Obama will begin.
It’s hard to see what this will mean for the world yet. Obama himself has written: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” But we can already map out the four tectonic shifts rumbling beneath this election. They all began before Obama – but his cool stride has brought them into history sooner than many of us thought possible.
Transformation One: The Transcending of Race. Just forty years after Martin Luther King had a dream of a post-racial America, a coalition of white workers in Pennsylvania, retired Jews in Florida, and bilingual Hispanics in New Mexico is poised to put a black man in the White House. If the polls are right, Obama will be the first Democrat to win a majority of white votes since 1964.
This hints at one of the reasons why so many of us love the US, even as we hate some of its actions. The country is capable of many crimes – but it is also open and free enough to produce the antibodies that begin to put them right. It gives us Dick Cheney, but also Noam Chomsky. It gives us Jim Crow, but also Barack Obama. Is there any better symbol of how the American Revolution can correct itself than the realisation that the first 26 Presidents of the US could have owned the 44th President as a piece of property?
This shift will only accelerate. By 2040, white people will be a minority in America, part of a patchwork of ethnic minorities. The US will look more and more like a universal nation of peoples from everywhere, united behind the constitution. Young Americans are strikingly relaxed about this: for under-30s, Obama has a 47 percent lead. Not a 47 percent vote – a 47 percent lead.
Yet the US state is still riddled with racist outcomes. To give just one example: the American Civil Liberties Union found in 2006 that although the races use drugs at the same rate, black Americans - who comprise 12 percent of the population - make up 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Obama could very easily have slipped into this vortex when, as a young man, he occasionally snorted coke. If he had been arrested and jailed for it like one in five black men, he wouldn’t be President; he wouldn’t even be able to vote. This election shows a desire by American people to move beyond the sterile stupidities of racism, but it is the middle of the story, not the end.
Transformation Two: The Death of Reaganism. For a generation, American Presidents have pledged to roll back the state and let the market rip. Even Democrats bowed to this orthodoxy: it was Bill Clinton was said “the era of big government is over” and began deregulating the banks. The result was the financial collapse and the worst inequality since the 1920s. Today, the top one percent of Americans own 21 percent of all income – while the bottom 50 percent own just 13 percent. Obama, by contrast, ran mocking “the idea we can give more and more to the most, and somehow prosperity will trickle down,” and argued for the state to “spread the wealth around”. The era of limp, passive government is over – at precisely the moment when we need athletic government to prevent a depression and stop global warming.
Transformation Three: The Palin’ of the Culture War. For decades now, the American right has successfully disguised its help-the-rich, slap-the-rest ideology by presenting Democrats as out-of-touch elitists on the social issues: God, guns and gays. This election, the trick stopped working. Sarah Palin made the base gurgle, but her cultural wedgies repelled everyone else. The real elite have been laid bare on Wall Street; shrieks of “elitism!” from their deregulators and defenders now sound absurd. We have been here before: the 1920s was a culture war decade, with bitter moral crusades for Prohibition and against Catholics. In the 1930s, it all died off in the dust bowl.
Transformation Four: The End of the Unipolar Fantasy. The Bush administration believed that, as the last remaining super-power, it could impose its will on the world with force. It made little effort to compromise with – or even listen to – a world it wanted to bring to heel. It boasted of the need to maintain “full spectrum dominance” over the planet, and to have more firepower than all their potential rivals combined. It trashed treaties, scorned the UN, and refused to talk to anybody they disagreed with. It was always doomed to failure, because very few international problems can be handled with force. You can’t fire cruise missiles at an unravelling climate or a tricky peace process or bird flu.
But what now? A man with a background among the colonized has never before become the head of the world’s largest empire. Obama’s grandfather was detained in a British Guantanomo for six months during the bloody occupation of Kenya. As a child, Obama watched helpless as the CIA armed and funded the crazed dictator Suharto to commit mass murder of civilians. Yet how much has this informed Obama’s policies, as a pragmatic politician working within a system riddled with undemocratic pressures?
He certainly disagrees with many of the vicious extremes of Bush, from Iraq to torture. His plans for a massive investment in renewable energy to wean the US slowly off its addiction to oil will have transform the country’s foreign policy, ending its need for the Saudi tyranny and bursts of war in Mesopotamia.
But in the medium-term, it seems Obama will be a conventional Democratic multilateralist leaving in place many of the ugly aspects of US foreign policy – from the crowbar-policies of the International Monetary Fund to unwavering support for the thuggish governments of Egypt, Colombia and Israel. The democratic antibodies of opposition aren’t strong enough to overturn the Big Money or hard geopolitics that demand these policies. So there will still be plenty to oppose in Obama’s foreign policy – but when a giant shuffles just a few steps to the left, the ants below feel a great pressure lifting from them.
But then the fear comes: what if the American people are too addled by the race-fear, and turn to McCain at the last moment? At the Democratic convention, Obama said to his fellow Americans: “We are better people than the last eight years.” The ghosts of the drowned children of New Orleans and the burned children of Baghdad may have stared down sceptically – but I believe he was right. The tidal force of these four transformations is too great. And yet, and yet… I won’t be sure until I watch Obama’s acceptance speech through salty tears – and I hear the Statue of Liberty let out a slow sigh of relief.
The four great transformations driving Obama's victory
Are the Bush years going to end with the election of a cerebral, liberal black man born to a Muslim goat-herd from Kenya and an atheist farm-girl from Kansas?
Can it happen? Are the Bush years going to end with the election of a cerebral, liberal black man born to a Muslim goat-herd from Kenya and an atheist farm-girl from Kansas? Will we witness it in less than 48 hours? Whisper it: yes we can. At the midnight hour tomorrow night – unless opinion polls are wrong; more wrong than they have ever been – the era of President Barack Obama will begin.
It’s hard to see what this will mean for the world yet. Obama himself has written: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.” But we can already map out the four tectonic shifts rumbling beneath this election. They all began before Obama – but his cool stride has brought them into history sooner than many of us thought possible.
Transformation One: The Transcending of Race. Just forty years after Martin Luther King had a dream of a post-racial America, a coalition of white workers in Pennsylvania, retired Jews in Florida, and bilingual Hispanics in New Mexico is poised to put a black man in the White House. If the polls are right, Obama will be the first Democrat to win a majority of white votes since 1964.
This hints at one of the reasons why so many of us love the US, even as we hate some of its actions. The country is capable of many crimes – but it is also open and free enough to produce the antibodies that begin to put them right. It gives us Dick Cheney, but also Noam Chomsky. It gives us Jim Crow, but also Barack Obama. Is there any better symbol of how the American Revolution can correct itself than the realisation that the first 26 Presidents of the US could have owned the 44th President as a piece of property?
This shift will only accelerate. By 2040, white people will be a minority in America, part of a patchwork of ethnic minorities. The US will look more and more like a universal nation of peoples from everywhere, united behind the constitution. Young Americans are strikingly relaxed about this: for under-30s, Obama has a 47 percent lead. Not a 47 percent vote – a 47 percent lead.
Yet the US state is still riddled with racist outcomes. To give just one example: the American Civil Liberties Union found in 2006 that although the races use drugs at the same rate, black Americans - who comprise 12 percent of the population - make up 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Obama could very easily have slipped into this vortex when, as a young man, he occasionally snorted coke. If he had been arrested and jailed for it like one in five black men, he wouldn’t be President; he wouldn’t even be able to vote. This election shows a desire by American people to move beyond the sterile stupidities of racism, but it is the middle of the story, not the end.
Transformation Two: The Death of Reaganism. For a generation, American Presidents have pledged to roll back the state and let the market rip. Even Democrats bowed to this orthodoxy: it was Bill Clinton was said “the era of big government is over” and began deregulating the banks. The result was the financial collapse and the worst inequality since the 1920s. Today, the top one percent of Americans own 21 percent of all income – while the bottom 50 percent own just 13 percent. Obama, by contrast, ran mocking “the idea we can give more and more to the most, and somehow prosperity will trickle down,” and argued for the state to “spread the wealth around”. The era of limp, passive government is over – at precisely the moment when we need athletic government to prevent a depression and stop global warming.
Transformation Three: The Palin’ of the Culture War. For decades now, the American right has successfully disguised its help-the-rich, slap-the-rest ideology by presenting Democrats as out-of-touch elitists on the social issues: God, guns and gays. This election, the trick stopped working. Sarah Palin made the base gurgle, but her cultural wedgies repelled everyone else. The real elite have been laid bare on Wall Street; shrieks of “elitism!” from their deregulators and defenders now sound absurd. We have been here before: the 1920s was a culture war decade, with bitter moral crusades for Prohibition and against Catholics. In the 1930s, it all died off in the dust bowl.
Transformation Four: The End of the Unipolar Fantasy. The Bush administration believed that, as the last remaining super-power, it could impose its will on the world with force. It made little effort to compromise with – or even listen to – a world it wanted to bring to heel. It boasted of the need to maintain “full spectrum dominance” over the planet, and to have more firepower than all their potential rivals combined. It trashed treaties, scorned the UN, and refused to talk to anybody they disagreed with. It was always doomed to failure, because very few international problems can be handled with force. You can’t fire cruise missiles at an unravelling climate or a tricky peace process or bird flu.
But what now? A man with a background among the colonized has never before become the head of the world’s largest empire. Obama’s grandfather was detained in a British Guantanomo for six months during the bloody occupation of Kenya. As a child, Obama watched helpless as the CIA armed and funded the crazed dictator Suharto to commit mass murder of civilians. Yet how much has this informed Obama’s policies, as a pragmatic politician working within a system riddled with undemocratic pressures?
He certainly disagrees with many of the vicious extremes of Bush, from Iraq to torture. His plans for a massive investment in renewable energy to wean the US slowly off its addiction to oil will have transform the country’s foreign policy, ending its need for the Saudi tyranny and bursts of war in Mesopotamia.
But in the medium-term, it seems Obama will be a conventional Democratic multilateralist leaving in place many of the ugly aspects of US foreign policy – from the crowbar-policies of the International Monetary Fund to unwavering support for the thuggish governments of Egypt, Colombia and Israel. The democratic antibodies of opposition aren’t strong enough to overturn the Big Money or hard geopolitics that demand these policies. So there will still be plenty to oppose in Obama’s foreign policy – but when a giant shuffles just a few steps to the left, the ants below feel a great pressure lifting from them.
But then the fear comes: what if the American people are too addled by the race-fear, and turn to McCain at the last moment? At the Democratic convention, Obama said to his fellow Americans: “We are better people than the last eight years.” The ghosts of the drowned children of New Orleans and the burned children of Baghdad may have stared down sceptically – but I believe he was right. The tidal force of these four transformations is too great. And yet, and yet… I won’t be sure until I watch Obama’s acceptance speech through salty tears – and I hear the Statue of Liberty let out a slow sigh of relief.
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
The World That Awaits
Richard N. Haass
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Nov 3, 2008
MEMORANDUM
TO: The president-elect
RE: Foreign policy
FROM: Richard N. Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations
There are only two and a half months—76 days, to be precise— between Election Day and your Inauguration, and you will need every one of them to get ready for the world you will inherit. This is not the world you've been discussing on the trail for the last year or more: campaigning and governing could hardly be more different. The former is necessarily done in bold strokes and, to be honest, often approaches caricature. All candidates resist specifying priorities or trade-offs lest they forfeit precious support. You won, but at a price, as some of the things you said were better left unsaid. Even more important, the campaign did not prepare the public for the hard times to come.
There will be days when you will wonder why you worked so hard to get this job. What will make it so difficult is not just all that awaits, but the constraints that will limit what you can actually do. When George W. Bush became president nearly eight years ago the world was largely at peace, the U.S. military was largely at rest, oil was $23 a barrel, the economy was growing at more than 3 percent, $1 was worth 116 yen, the national debt was just under $6 trillion and the federal government was running a sizable budgetary surplus. The September 11 attacks, for all they cost us as a nation, increased the world's willingness to cooperate with us. You, by contrast, will inherit wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, tired and stretched armed forces, a global struggle with terrorism, oil that has ranged as high as $150 a barrel, a weaker dollar (now worth 95 yen), substantial anti-American sentiment, a federal budget deficit that could reach $1 trillion in your first year, a ballooning national debt of some $10 trillion and a global economic slowdown that will increase instability in numerous countries.
You will take office two decades after the end of the cold war. What some dubbed the unipolar moment is history. Economic, political and military power is held by many hands, not all of which belong to states, not all of which are benign. This does not mean the United States is weak. To the contrary, this country is still the single most powerful entity in the world. But the United States cannot dominate, much less dictate, and expect that others will follow. There are limits to U.S. resources; at the same time the country has serious vulnerabilities. Enron, Abu Ghraib, Katrina and the financial crisis have taken their toll: America's ability to tell others what to do, or to persuade them through example, is much diminished.
Against this backdrop, you will face specific challenges. Many are to be found in the greater Middle East, the part of the world where every president beginning with Jimmy Carter has stubbed his toe. Consider Iraq, the issue that most dominated the foreign policy of Bush. There will be ample time for historians to sort out the wisdom (or lack thereof) of embarking on this costly war of choice. The priorities now are to gradually reduce U.S. force presence, back the integration of Iraq's Sunni minority into national institutions, persuade Arab states to help the government and resume a dialogue with Iran on Iraq's future. The good news is that many of the arrows in Iraq are finally pointing in the right direction and it will not dominate your presidency. The bad news is that you know you are in for a rough ride when Iraq is the good news.
The arrows are pointing in the opposite direction in Afghanistan. The Taliban is gaining ground; security is deteriorating; drugs and corruption are rampant. More U.S. and NATO troops are needed, but any increase will need to be temporary, given rising Afghan nationalism. The chief priority should be training Afghanistan's Army and police. Regular talks are needed with those with a stake in the country's future, including Iran, Pakistan, India, China, Russia and NATO. The government should be encouraged to meet with Taliban leaders willing to accept a ceasefire. Counterdrug efforts, while essential, should be targeted and low-key, lest an alienated populace grow more so.
It may be better to view Afghanistan and Pakistan as one problem, since Pakistan provides sanctuary for the Taliban. Pakistan's government appears unable or unwilling to control its own territory. The country's return to democracy is at best incomplete and fragile; its economy has slowed. The world's second-most-populous Muslim nation—home to 170 million people, several dozen nuclear weapons and many of the world's terrorists, including Al Qaeda—is failing. Promised assistance should continue to flow; additional economic and military aid should be provided to bolster the government, but only if Islamabad accepts conditions on its use. Military incursions targeting terrorists need to be limited to those instances where there is a high likelihood of accomplishing something truly substantial.
Iran constitutes another challenge where the campaign generated more heat than light. If Tehran continues its current progress in enriching uranium, early on in your presidency you will be presented with the choice of attacking Iran (or greenlighting an Israeli attack) or living with a nuclear Iran. Yogi Berra said that when you approach a fork in the road, take it. I respectfully disagree. Neither option is attractive. A military strike may buy some time, but it won't solve the problem. It will, however, lead to Iranian retaliation against U.S. personnel and interests in Iraq and Afghanistan, and much higher oil prices—the last thing the world needs, given the financial crisis. An Iran with nuclear weapons or the capacity to produce them quickly would place the Middle East on a hair trigger and lead several Arab states to embark on nuclear programs of their own.
I would suggest that we work with the Europeans, Russia and China to cobble together a new diplomatic package to present to the Iranians. Ideally, Iran would be persuaded to give up its independent enrichment capability or, if it refused, to consider accepting clear limits on enrichment and intrusive inspections so that the threat is clearly bounded. We should be prepared to have face-to-face talks with the Iranians, without preconditions. In general, it is wiser to see negotiations not as a reward but as a tool of national security.
It will be important, too, to ratchet up diplomacy vis-à-vis the Israelis and Palestinians. The current impasse threatens Israel's future as a secure, democratic, prosperous and Jewish state. It breeds radicalism among Palestinians and throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds, and is a major source of anti-Americanism. What is more, time is working against us: physical and political developments will only make it harder to achieve a two-state solution.
We cannot solve this problem quickly—those Palestinians who are willing to compromise for peace are too weak, and those who are strong are not willing to compromise—but we can bolster Palestinian moderates who, over time, could be partners for Israel. Sooner rather than later you should be prepared to articulate your vision of a fair and stable peace, press Israel to stop settlement activity and push Arab governments and the European Union to do more to raise Palestinian living standards. Hamas should be told that abiding by a ceasefire is a must if it is to participate in any Palestinian election or diplomatic effort.
A New Strategic Framework
Other challenges are equally urgent: contending with a nuclear North Korea; working to moderate a resentful and resurgent Russia; brokering peace between Israel and Syria; and taking steps to stabilize those African countries beset by civil strife. But at the same time, it's important not to lose sight of the fundamentals. Unlike most previous eras, in which the dominant threat was posed by a great-power rival, ours is the era of globalization, in which flows of just about anything—from people, dollars and drugs to arms, greenhouse gases and viruses—move across borders in great volume and with great velocity. Many of these flows represent real threats. The problem is that global arrangements have not kept pace.
The economic institutions created in the wake of World War II (the IMF in particular) require updating. We similarly lack machinery for dealing with climate change, energy security, the spread of nuclear materials, disease and the threat of terrorism. Dean Acheson, Harry Truman's secretary of state, immodestly but accurately titled his memoir "Present at the Creation." Your goal should be no less ambitious: to design and implement a foreign policy that closes the gap between this era's major challenges and the international architecture and rules meant to manage them.
America cannot do this by itself; the challenges of this era have no single national origin and no national solution. Multilateralism is the only realistic way ahead. The operative term is "integration." We need to bring other major powers into the design and operation of the world—before the century is overwhelmed by the forces globalization has unleashed. This will require sustained consultations followed by sustained negotiations. (This poses no problem, as our diplomats are much less stretched than our soldiers.) It will also require American leadership. There is a real opportunity to make progress: many of today's powers understand that they will either cooperate with one another or pay a steep price.
People Matter
There will be time to do detailed interagency reviews of policies toward these and other challenges. Let me make a few general recommendations. First, people matter. Very little about history is inevitable. You have talked about a bipartisan administration, and should make this happen. The next four years promise to be difficult, and you do not want to try to lead the country with narrow majorities.
One of these people deserves special mention. The vice president should be your counselor, a minister without portfolio, and not a cabinet secretary with a specific set of responsibilities. You need someone with an administration-wide perspective who can tell you what you need to hear, even if it isn't always what you want to hear. The one person around you (other than your spouse) you cannot fire is best placed to do this. That said, you should reduce the size and role of the VP's staff. The interagency process is sufficiently sclerotic without adding yet another national-security bureaucracy to the mix.
Avoid big reorganizations. The last two—Homeland Security and the intelligence community—have been less than total successes. Your inbox is sufficiently daunting without the added strain of reorganization; it is rarely a good idea to remodel the operating room when the patient is on the table. The one exception may be energy policy, which has never received the attention it merits. Energy policy is national-security policy.
Facing Up to Facts
Speaking of energy, the current situation is untenable. We are channeling vast numbers of dollars to some of the world's most unsavory governments, strengthening them while leaving ourselves vulnerable to supply interruptions and price fluctuations.
Prices have come down recently as demand has dropped off, but recession cannot become our energy policy. Substantial research demonstrates that we can reduce consumption without slowing economic growth. Your campaign didn't talk much about conservation or efficiency, but the greatest potential for making a difference over the next four years is just this. I am talking not about carbon taxes but rather the setting of energy standards for what this country produces and does. We can offer tax breaks and subsidies as long as they are linked to greater efficiency and "greenness." We should devote resources to the development of alternatives, although resources will be in short supply and developing alternatives will take time.
Trade is also worth talking about now, even though it was hardly mentioned after the Ohio primary. By the time you take office it will have been 19 months since the president enjoyed trade promotion authority, which gives him the ability to negotiate complex multilateral trade agreements by limiting Congress to a straight up-or-down vote. Several bilateral free-trade agreements are languishing at considerable cost to our economy and to our relationship with friends such as Colombia.
It will be important to resurrect your ability to negotiate and conclude trade pacts. A new global trade agreement offers the best noninflationary, anti-recession tool for the American and global economies. Estimates are that a new global agreement could add as much as 1 percent growth each year to the U.S. and world economies. Trade brings an added benefit: it is an engine of development for poor countries. Access to the American market can provide jobs and wealth. This will be especially important given that we are unlikely to have as much money for foreign aid.
I'd like to think the arguments in favor of open trade would carry the day, because on the merits they do. The most successful sector of our economy right now consists of firms that export. Imports give consumers choice and keep inflation low. Job losses tend to be tied to technological change, not imports or offshoring. But I've learned that facts are only part of the story in politics. The only way you are likely to win a debate on trade is if you do more to cushion individual workers from the vagaries of modern global life. This means tax-deferred retraining and education accounts, and a health-care option not linked to jobs. So if you are going to press for health care, I suggest you link it to trade.
Trade is not the only area where America needs to make sure we stay open for business. We must encourage others to continue to recycle their dollars here—in part by buying and investing in American companies. We require $2 billion a day just to stay afloat. Blocking legitimate investments can also trigger crises in important bilateral relationships. Such protectionism must be resisted at all costs.
You ran hard against Bush in this campaign, and understandably so, given his historically low approval ratings. But you should be wary of distancing yourself too far from his administration. This is especially important because Bush already distanced himself from himself in his second term. Remarkably, he leaves behind a good deal you can build on: programs to combat HIV/AIDS around the world, diplomatic efforts in the Middle East, a strategic breakthrough with India, important consultative arrangements with China and a good relationship with Brazil, increasingly the anchor of a centrist bloc of South American countries.
One area, however, where you would be wise to put some distance between yourself and "43" involves democracy. America does not have the ability to transform the world. Nor do we have the luxury. We need to focus more on what countries do than on what they are. This is not an argument for ignoring human rights or setting aside our interest in promoting democracy. But we should go slow and focus on building its prerequisites—the checks and balances of civil society and constitutionalism—and not rush elections or impose political change through force. Bush was right when he called for a humble foreign policy. You should practice what he preached.
Let me close where I began. This is a sobering moment in American history. You begin with a good deal of popular support, but mandates must be replenished. I suggest you think of the Oval Office as a classroom, and explain to the American people what we need to accomplish and what it will require. Some 21st-century version of the fireside chat is called for. My reading of things is that the American people are ready to be leveled with. Once the campaign is over, let the leveling begin.
Tuesday, 28 October 2008
Rebuilding the state
In a failed state where the original social contract has been blatantly violated, where people have lost all the sense of secuirty, where people's life and liberty is threatened there is obiviously a need to either renew the old social contract or simply allow the failing state to fade away. Let us join the debate.
By Dr Mubashir Hasan
WHERE is the state in Pakistan to protect life, property, liberty and honour of citizens? Where is the state to dispense justice to all its citizens?
Where is the polity which all Baloch, Sindhis, Pathans, Punjabis and other nations, nationalities and linguistic groups can take pride in calling their own?
Men and women, rich and poor, landowners and tillers, villages and cities, factories and workshops, banks and business houses, schools and hospitals, and mosques and churches are in a state of insecurity. The security of the police and the army, the ultimate guardians of security of the people and the state, is also endangered, necessitating extraordinary measures.
The rule of law is the foundation for a just state. However, when our police is obliged to keep people in illegal custody for investigation, when it has to kill people in ‘police encounters’ as it does not expect a fair trial in our court rooms, when our security forces have to kidnap citizens for investigation, when the enforcers of law turn into law breakers to maintain law and order, whither the rule of law?
The prevalence of corruption and inordinate delays in dispensing justice in the courts; the recovery of kidnapped citizens on payment of a ransom; the settlement of civil disputes on payment of a fee by private ‘courts’ held by goondas and strongmen make a mockery of our system of justice. Above all, when a state blatantly ignoring constitutional provisions and violating the basic axioms of human values and morality, legislates pardons for criminals under investigation in the name of ‘national reconciliation’, the state loses all legitimacy to be ruling in the name of law.
Acute energy shortage, rising prices, paucity of jobs, shortage of essential commodities, unbearable governmental levies and taxes, precipitous decline in the value of the rupee, endangered bank deposits and flight of capital are definitive indications of complete failure of the economic management and regulation by the state. Endemic poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, disease, absence of health care and sanitation are direct manifestation of the absence of the state of Pakistan for an overwhelming majority of its citizens.
Without the state, Pakistan is left with the apparatuses of a state — groups of self-regulating, self-perpetuating and self-serving officers — operating independently under the laws of the land made to further imperial interests. The sovereignty of the people is all but lost in the extrajudicial, illegitimate, uncoordinated authority exercised by the services. Pakistan has been turned into a non-state: a state merely in name.
Time is opportune to rebuild our state. In a new social contract there must come into being a new state in which the people exercise power over themselves and for themselves. The provinces decide what powers and authority they would like to bestow on the federal government. In order to be truly sovereign Pakistan must be transformed into a state of all the peoples for all the peoples.
Big government should give way to small government. What the people collectively can decide and implement at a smaller level of population should not be decided and implemented by the body of an area of a larger population.
There should be three levels of government — citizens’, provincial and federal — of councils elected by the people at each of these levels to exercise political, social and economic power as prescribed in the constitution.
The citizens’ government at the level of the village or cluster of villages or tribes should have the jurisdiction and authority for the protection of persons and property, the management of local policing and the setting up of citizen courts for enforcing criminal law.
The citizens’ government at the level of tehsils and talukas will have its own administration to maintain land records and will adjudicate on questions such as those presently dealt with by the revenue officials of tehsils and talukas. It will also have its own civil courts. The citizens’ governments at the district and city level shall perform both legislative and executive functions as prescribed in the constitution.
The expenditure of the citizens’ governments should be met from the revenues collected by the provincial tax-collecting apparatus and directly credited to the account of each district, tehsil, taluka, village and cluster of villages. The revenues of the poorest councils may receive a subsidy from the provincial government.
The provinces should exercise power over all matters not specified in the jurisdiction of the citizens’ and federal governments. The government of the province should conduct inter-provincial relations and relations with the federal government.
The guarantee for the emergence of a sovereign Pakistan also lies in erasing the perception of being a client state of foreign powers and in establishing healthy relations with the countries of South and South-West Asia. There exists a massive commonality in the economic and strategic interests of Pakistan and the countries of the region including Turkey which can form the basis of very close cooperation.
It is time that the people of Pakistan, especially the young and educated, conscientious and committed form groups in every province, agree on what needs to be done and come forward to mobilise the people of each province, then of the entire country, to change the shape of things.
By Dr Mubashir Hasan
WHERE is the state in Pakistan to protect life, property, liberty and honour of citizens? Where is the state to dispense justice to all its citizens?
Where is the polity which all Baloch, Sindhis, Pathans, Punjabis and other nations, nationalities and linguistic groups can take pride in calling their own?
Men and women, rich and poor, landowners and tillers, villages and cities, factories and workshops, banks and business houses, schools and hospitals, and mosques and churches are in a state of insecurity. The security of the police and the army, the ultimate guardians of security of the people and the state, is also endangered, necessitating extraordinary measures.
The rule of law is the foundation for a just state. However, when our police is obliged to keep people in illegal custody for investigation, when it has to kill people in ‘police encounters’ as it does not expect a fair trial in our court rooms, when our security forces have to kidnap citizens for investigation, when the enforcers of law turn into law breakers to maintain law and order, whither the rule of law?
The prevalence of corruption and inordinate delays in dispensing justice in the courts; the recovery of kidnapped citizens on payment of a ransom; the settlement of civil disputes on payment of a fee by private ‘courts’ held by goondas and strongmen make a mockery of our system of justice. Above all, when a state blatantly ignoring constitutional provisions and violating the basic axioms of human values and morality, legislates pardons for criminals under investigation in the name of ‘national reconciliation’, the state loses all legitimacy to be ruling in the name of law.
Acute energy shortage, rising prices, paucity of jobs, shortage of essential commodities, unbearable governmental levies and taxes, precipitous decline in the value of the rupee, endangered bank deposits and flight of capital are definitive indications of complete failure of the economic management and regulation by the state. Endemic poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition, disease, absence of health care and sanitation are direct manifestation of the absence of the state of Pakistan for an overwhelming majority of its citizens.
Without the state, Pakistan is left with the apparatuses of a state — groups of self-regulating, self-perpetuating and self-serving officers — operating independently under the laws of the land made to further imperial interests. The sovereignty of the people is all but lost in the extrajudicial, illegitimate, uncoordinated authority exercised by the services. Pakistan has been turned into a non-state: a state merely in name.
Time is opportune to rebuild our state. In a new social contract there must come into being a new state in which the people exercise power over themselves and for themselves. The provinces decide what powers and authority they would like to bestow on the federal government. In order to be truly sovereign Pakistan must be transformed into a state of all the peoples for all the peoples.
Big government should give way to small government. What the people collectively can decide and implement at a smaller level of population should not be decided and implemented by the body of an area of a larger population.
There should be three levels of government — citizens’, provincial and federal — of councils elected by the people at each of these levels to exercise political, social and economic power as prescribed in the constitution.
The citizens’ government at the level of the village or cluster of villages or tribes should have the jurisdiction and authority for the protection of persons and property, the management of local policing and the setting up of citizen courts for enforcing criminal law.
The citizens’ government at the level of tehsils and talukas will have its own administration to maintain land records and will adjudicate on questions such as those presently dealt with by the revenue officials of tehsils and talukas. It will also have its own civil courts. The citizens’ governments at the district and city level shall perform both legislative and executive functions as prescribed in the constitution.
The expenditure of the citizens’ governments should be met from the revenues collected by the provincial tax-collecting apparatus and directly credited to the account of each district, tehsil, taluka, village and cluster of villages. The revenues of the poorest councils may receive a subsidy from the provincial government.
The provinces should exercise power over all matters not specified in the jurisdiction of the citizens’ and federal governments. The government of the province should conduct inter-provincial relations and relations with the federal government.
The guarantee for the emergence of a sovereign Pakistan also lies in erasing the perception of being a client state of foreign powers and in establishing healthy relations with the countries of South and South-West Asia. There exists a massive commonality in the economic and strategic interests of Pakistan and the countries of the region including Turkey which can form the basis of very close cooperation.
It is time that the people of Pakistan, especially the young and educated, conscientious and committed form groups in every province, agree on what needs to be done and come forward to mobilise the people of each province, then of the entire country, to change the shape of things.
Monday, 27 October 2008
The Only Way Forward
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.
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.
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.
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