The following three-part series is an interview, held on August 28, between CNN's Matthew Chance and Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin. The CNN transcript is available here. Following the three-part series is the truncated version broadcast for Western audiences.iNoodle.com: CNN Interviews Putin (Video-English subtitles)
"...If the Democrats truly wish to distinguish themselves from the Republicans and offer a 'new direction for America,' as Representative Ackerman claims on his web site, they must draft a new resolution - one that demands not threats of violence but diplomacy, not blockade but face-to-face negotiations with no preconditions, not sanctions but the exchange of ambassadors, not embargo but the opening of embassies, not covert operations intended at inciting unrest, ethnic conflict and regime change, but a nonaggression pact - all with the condition, of course, that both nations abide by the terms of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT). That is, in return for an Iranian guarantee that its nuclear program is intended only for peaceful purposes and its cooperation in ensuring scrupulous inspections, the United States must end its bellicose posturing, sanctions and embargo, and abide by Articles I, II and VI of the NPT and reduce its nuclear arsenal, cease its development of a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons, and end its deployment of nuclear weapons around the world. This is the change we hope for; this is the new direction for America we must demand."CAMILLO "MAC" BICA, PH.D., IS A PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY AT THE SCHOOL OF VISUAL ARTS IN NEW YORK CITY. HIS FOCUS IS IN ETHICS, PARTICULARLY AS IT APPLIES TO WAR AND WARRIORS. AS A VETERAN RECOVERING FROM HIS EXPERIENCES AS A UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS OFFICER DURING THE VIETNAM WAR, HE FOUNDED AND COORDINATED FOR FIVE YEARS THE VETERANS SELF-HELP INITIATIVE, A THERAPEUTIC COMMUNITY OF VETERANS SUFFERING FROM POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER. HE IS A LONG-TIME ACTIVIST FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE, A MEMBER OF THE VIETNAM VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR, AND COORDINATOR OF THE LONG ISLAND CHAPTER OF VETERANS FOR PEACE. ARTICLES BY DR. BICA HAVE APPEARED IN CYRANO'S JOURNAL, THE HUMANIST MAGAZINE, ZNET, TRUTHOUT.ORG, COMMON DREAMS, ANTIWAR.COM, MONTHLY REVIEW ZINE, FOREIGN POLICY IN FOCUS, OPEDNEWS.COM AND NUMEROUS PHILOSOPHICAL JOURNALS.
Bill Moyers Journal:Is an imperial presidency destroying what America stands for? Bill Moyers sits down with ... Andrew J. Bacevich who identifies three major problems facing our democracy: the crises of economy, government and militarism, and calls for a redefinition of the American way of life....For video, transcript and more information, Click Here.
As campaign ads urge voters to consider who will be a better "Commander in Chief," Andrew J. Bacevich — Professor of International Relations at Boston University, retired Army colonel, and West Point graduate — encourage[s] viewers to take a step back and connect the dots between U.S. foreign policy, consumerism, politics, and militarism....
"The United States offered Israel an unprecedented $30 billion of military aid over 10 years on Thursday, bolstering its closest Mideast ally and ensuring the state's military edge over its neighbors long into the future. ����The package was meant in part to offset U.S. plans to offer Saudi Arabia advanced weapons and air systems that would greatly improve the Arab country's air force. Israel has said it has no opposition to the Saudi aid. ����The deal represents a 25 percent rise in U.S. military aid to Israel, from a current $2.4 billion a year to $3 billion a year over the next 10 years...."Technorati tags: US Government, Foreign Policy, International Relations, Israel, Saudi Arabia, news
Delaying the InevitableAs we struggle to extricate ourselves from Iraq, it’s useful to look at how the Soviet Union handled a similar position in the 1980s. Then we should do the opposite.Photo Credit: Nicholas D. Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 based partly on an intelligence failure analogous to our own in Iraq: they believed that their poorly behaved puppet in Kabul was poised to switch loyalties to the United States.
By 1986, the Soviets wanted to end the Afghan war, and tried some of the same approaches that we have tried or talked about: a new constitution, a new leader, a policy of “national reconciliation.”
These worked as well for them as they have for us.
Many Soviets just wanted to cut their losses and pull out. But other officials raised counterarguments that may sound familiar:
If we simply pull out, we’ll destroy our influence around the world for a generation. And if we leave, the country will fall apart, and there’ll be a bloodbath focusing on our friends. Muslim extremists will come to power, and it’s better to fight them over there than on our side of the border.
These were serious arguments, and there was truth to them. After the Soviets finally pulled out after nine years, ending what Izvestia called “the wound that would not heal,” Afghanistan did eventually collapse into a civil war that was worse than ever.
Yet in retrospect, it is also clear that the Soviets and Afghans alike would have been far better off if the U.S.S.R. had withdrawn earlier. Staggering on only delayed the inevitable, increasing their own casualties and empowering their enemies.
And that’s a lesson we should absorb in Iraq.
Gen. David Petraeus is doing an excellent job, but the surge isn’t about making streets safe. Rather its aim is to create political space for reconciliation — and in that respect the surge has failed.
Even in the Bush administration, everybody seems to recognize that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is incapable of achieving a reconciliation. So there’s talk of engineering a replacement of Mr. Maliki — but we tried that in Vietnam in 1963, and the Soviets tried that in Afghanistan in 1986. It didn’t work either time.
In the absence of realistic hope for reconciliation, let’s not drag things along as the Soviets did in the 1980s but bite the bullet as Mikhail Gorbachev did in 1987 and announce that we are headed for the exits.
There is a good argument for keeping a battalion in Kurdistan — the Kurds would love us to stay, and our presence would reduce the risk of a war between the Kurds and Turks. Moreover, in exchange for staying, we could wring concessions out of the Kurds that would reduce the risk of war in Kirkuk. Kurdistan is the one part of Iraq that is still hopeful, and we should try hard to keep it viable.
Some experts argue for keeping bases in western Iraq or southern Iraq as well. But unless local people are pleading with us to stay, our presence mostly serves to empower Moktada al-Sadr and turn him into Iraq’s most powerful politician.
Instead of spending billions in those places, let’s do more to help Jordan — which has been greatly destabilized by Iraqis pouring into that country. For humanitarian and strategic reasons alike, we should assure that refugee Iraqi children get an education and that Jordan doesn’t come apart at the seams.
There’s lots of talk about partitioning Iraq to reduce the violence, and it’s happening already — and that de facto partition is a crucial step to reduce the risk of genocide once we leave. But for the U.S. to embrace partition would be disastrous: We would be portrayed in madrassas around the world as the infidels who dismembered an Arab country to seize its oil and emasculate it on behalf of Israel.
An essential step is to work more closely with Iraq’s neighbors, including those we don’t like, such as Iran and Syria. These countries have as much interest in a stable Iraq as we do, and the moment Iran shoulders some responsibility for southern Iraq it will also risk instability in its despotic regime at home.
We also need to continue the push for progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace (and Israeli-Syrian peace). In the Middle East, there are dividends just for trying to achieve peace, even if the efforts fail, and that should be part of our Iraq recovery strategy.
At the end of the day, we have only so much money and so much energy. One option is to continue to devote $10 billion a month and countless lives to Iraq in hopes that our luck will somehow turn. Or we could devote those sums to health care at home and humanitarian programs all around the world — because in the long run, the best hope to defeat the jihadis worldwide isn’t to drop bombs but to build schools.
By Nicholas D. KristofCould Dick Cheney and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be twins separated at birth?Click for NYT Reader reactions to above.
The U.S. vice president and Iranian president, each the No. 2 in his country, certainly seem to be working together to create conflict between the two nations. Theirs may be the oddest and perhaps most dangerous partnership in the world today.
Both men are hawks who defy the international community, scorn the U.N. and are unpopular at home because of incompetence and recklessness — and each finds justification in the extremism of the other.
“Iranians refer to their new political radicals as ‘neoconservatives,’ with multiple layers of deliberate irony,” notes Gary Sick, an Iran specialist at Columbia University, adding: “The hotheads around President Ahmadinejad’s office and the U.S. foreign policy radicals who cluster around Vice President Cheney’s office, listen to each other, cite each others’ statements and goad each other to new excesses on either side.”
So one of the perils in the final 18 months of the Bush administration is that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Ahmadinejad will escalate provocations, ending up with airstrikes by the U.S. against Iranian nuclear sites.
Already we’re seeing a series of leaks about Iran that echo leaks in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. The reports say that Iran is turning a blind eye to Al Qaeda, is using Hezbollah to wage a proxy war against U.S. forces in Iraq, is transferring bomb-making skills to Iraq insurgents and is handing out armor-piercing bullets to fighters in Iran and Afghanistan so as to kill more Americans.
Yet the jingoists aren’t all in our government: These leaks may well all be accurate, for Mr. Ahmadinejad is a perfect match for Mr. Cheney in his hawkishness and contempt for the international community.
It’s worrying that Iran has just recalled its most able diplomat — Javad Zarif, ambassador to the U.N. — and sent him out to pasture as an academic. Hard-liners always hated Mr. Zarif; goons from a mysterious Iranian security agency detained me on my last trip to Tehran and accused me of being a C.I.A. or Mossad spy, apparently because they were trying to get dirt to use against Mr. Zarif (who had given me my visa).
Mr. Zarif’s departure last week suggests that Mr. Ahmadinejad doesn’t plan to solve his nuclear confrontation with the West through diplomacy.
So the danger is that the pragmatists on both sides will be sidelined, while the extremists will embolden and empower each other. The ultimate decision-makers may be President Bush and the Iranian supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, but Mr. Cheney may find a sympathetic ear when he makes an argument to Mr. Bush that goes like this:
How can we leave a nuclear Iran as our legacy? Tehran’s arms program will encourage Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey to seek nuclear weapons as well — and then there’s the worst-case scenario that Iran actually wants to destroy Tel Aviv. We just can’t bet on Iranian restraint.
These are real arguments, but a strike is no solution. For starters, it would delay the Iranian nuclear program by only about three years — and when it came back, the regime might be more likely than ever to use the weapons. And for Mr. Bush to launch a third war against a Muslim country would undermine Islamic moderates and strengthen radicals around the world.
Iran is also more complex and sophisticated than it pretends to be — and the fact is that standard deterrence has constrained it. Iran has a huge stockpile of chemical weapons, and the U.S. intelligence community suspects that it has sleeper agents in the U.S. who could be activated for terrorism. But we have deterred Iran from unleashing terror attacks against our homeland, and the best bet for eliminating the threat altogether is the collapse of Iran’s own neocons under the weight of their incompetence.
A recent opinion poll in Iran found that 70 percent of Iranians want to normalize relations with the U.S., and 61 percent oppose the current Iranian system of government. Any visitor to Iran knows that it is — at a people-to-people level — the most pro-American Muslim country in the region, and the regime is as out of touch and moribund as the shah’s was in the late 1970s.
The ayatollahs’ only hope is that we will rescue them with a military strike, which would cement them in place for many years to come. But look out, because that’s what may happen if bilateral relations are driven by those jingoistic twins, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Ahmadinejad.
Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
By Howard ZinnOn this July 4, we would do well to renounce nationalism and all its symbols: its flags, its pledges of allegiance, its anthems, its insistence in song that God must single out America to be blessed.Hat tip to Al B.
Is not nationalism -- that devotion to a flag, an anthem, a boundary so fierce it engenders mass murder -- one of the great evils of our time, along with racism, along with religious hatred?
These ways of thinking -- cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on -- have been useful to those in power, and deadly for those out of power.
National spirit can be benign in a country that is small and lacking both in military power and a hunger for expansion (Switzerland, Norway, Costa Rica and many more). But in a nation like ours -- huge, possessing thousands of weapons of mass destruction -- what might have been harmless pride becomes an arrogant nationalism dangerous to others and to ourselves.
Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.
That self-deception started early.
When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: "Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession."
When the English set fire to a Pequot village and massacred men, women and children, the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather said: "It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day."
On the eve of the Mexican War, an American journalist declared it our "Manifest Destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence." After the invasion of Mexico began, The New York Herald announced: "We believe it is a part of our destiny to civilize that beautiful country."
It was always supposedly for benign purposes that our country went to war.
We invaded Cuba in 1898 to liberate the Cubans, and went to war in the Philippines shortly after, as President McKinley put it, "to civilize and Christianize" the Filipino people.
As our armies were committing massacres in the Philippines (at least 600,000 Filipinos died in a few years of conflict), Elihu Root, our secretary of war, was saying: "The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the war began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness."
We see in Iraq that our soldiers are not different. They have, perhaps against their better nature, killed thousands of Iraq civilians. And some soldiers have shown themselves capable of brutality, of torture.
Yet they are victims, too, of our government's lies.
How many times have we heard President Bush tell the troops that if they die, if they return without arms or legs, or blinded, it is for "liberty," for "democracy"?
One of the effects of nationalist thinking is a loss of a sense of proportion. The killing of 2,300 people at Pearl Harbor becomes the justification for killing 240,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 3,000 people on Sept. 11 becomes the justification for killing tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And nationalism is given a special virulence when it is said to be blessed by Providence. Today we have a president, invading two countries in four years, who announced on the campaign trail in 2004 that God speaks through him.
We need to refute the idea that our nation is different from, morally superior to, the other imperial powers of world history.
We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.
Howard Zinn, a World War II bombardier, is the author of the best-selling "A People's History of the United States"(Perennial Classics, 2003, latest edition). This piece was distributed by the Progressive Media Project in 2006.
By Maureen Dowd“I miss Albania!” W. wails. “They know how to treat a president there. Women were kissing me and men rubbed my hair. The crowd kept yelling, ‘Bushie!,’ and they almost grabbed the watch right off my wrist trying to get at me.”
The concerned group huddling outside the president’s closed-bedroom door in Kennebunkport can barely hear him. His voice is muffled because he has his face buried in his feather pillow, which the Secret Service has carefully transported from Washington to Maine for the weekend, knowing that it would be needed. They guard it so conscientiously that they have even given it a code name. Since the president’s Secret Service name is Tumbler, his agents christened his beloved pillow Slumber.
“Son, I know how you feel,” Poppy calls in to him, trying to sound positive. “Riding high in 2002, shot down in 2007. That’s life, as Sinatra says. You were a puppet and a pawn to King Dick and it screwed up your presidency and our party and the Middle East and the Atlantic alliance and the family legacy and Jeb’s future, not to mention the fate of the planet. But you can’t just roll yourself up in a big ball and die, George. Your friend Vlad the Impaler is here, and I think you should come out and talk to him. You invited him and he came all the way from Russia, and you don’t want to be rude.
“I’ve already taken him to Mabel’s Lobster Claw and out on the boat. He scared all the fish away. I don’t know what else to do with him, George. He brained the Filipino manservant, the little brown one, with a horseshoe.”
Putin steps forward. “Let me try,” he tells Poppy.
“George, hey, it’s me, Ostrich Legs, Pooty Poot. Remember when you gave me those nicknames? Come out, and I show you my real soul. Dark, dark, dark. I put the Putin back in Rasputin. Listen, Albania stinks. Maine much nicer. I saw Moose and Squirrel in the woods. Let’s throw horseshoes at them! I love this American sport.”
Tumbler burrows into Slumber. “Why doesn’t anybody like me anymore, Daddy?” he keens. “Man, I miss Tony. My Iraq poodle left me with a porcupine. And I can’t believe my own Republicans crossed me on the immigration bill. Now my Mexican buddies from Midland are saying, ‘Adiós, Jorge.’ Vice doesn’t even want to be in the same branch of government as me. Where is Dick, by the way?”
His mother steps briskly up to the door. “Now listen, Georgie,” Barbara says. “We didn’t invite Dick. He’s not our kind. He has utterly ruined your presidency. There’s a Washington Post series I want you to read. I’ve put it in the kitchen by your bowl of Cookie Crisps. It explains all about how Dick played you for a fool on everything from Iraq to capital gains. He set up the West Wing paper flow in a way that undermined your goals and advanced his. He let you act like you were the Decider, dear, when you were really just the Dupe.”
W. howls, “Dick promised me I would never be a wimp and now I’m a wimp!”
Putin intervenes. “No, George, don’t blame Dick,” he says. “Dick good man. Shoots friend in face. But Dick too soft. Friend lived. He needs put more people in your Gitmo gulag, shut down newspapers, kill more critics. I’ll send you some of my special polonium-210 pellets. They just like Altoids, curiously strong.”
Clarence Thomas rushes up to the door, black robes flapping. “I got here as fast as I could,” he assures Poppy, before yelling in to W.: “I’m sorry about the Guantánamo decision. I don’t know what my brethren were thinking, applying the Constitution to Cuba. What’s law got to do with it? I should have fought harder. I was a little distracted by our decision to stop race from being a factor in making schools racially diverse. I needed to make sure that black children all over America would have none of the advantages I had.”
Henry Kissinger oils his way across the floor. “Mr. President,” he rumbles through the door, “it’s not so bad bungling a war. I got to date Jill St. John.”
Condi joins the group, and wrinkles her nose at Putin. He puts his arm around her and gives her head a noogie. “When I said U.S. aggression is like Third Reich,” he tells her, with his most charming K.G.B. smile, “I meant it in a good way.”
Condi ignores him and coos to W.: “There’s bad news and good news, sir. Or maybe it’s Vice versa. Cheney’s going to pardon Scooter. And the Albanians have agreed to put your presidential library in Tirana.”
Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
MALEHE, Congo
I’m taking a student, Leana Wen, and a teacher, Will Okun, along with me on this trip to Africa. Here in this thatch-roofed village in the hills of eastern Congo, we had a glimpse of war, and Leana suddenly found herself called to perform.
Villagers took what looked like a bundle of rags out of one thatch-roof hut and laid it on the ground. Only it wasn’t a bunch of rags; it was a woman dying of starvation.
The woman, Yohanita Nyiahabimama, 41, weighed perhaps 60 pounds. She was conscious and stared at us with bright eyes, whispering answers to a few questions. When she was moved, she screamed in pain, for her buttocks were covered with ulcerating bedsores.
Leana, who had just graduated from medical school at Washington University, quickly examined Yohanita.
“If we don’t get her to a hospital very soon, she will die,” Leana said bluntly. “We have to get her to a hospital.”
There was nothing special about Yohanita except that she was in front of us. In villages throughout the region, people just like her are dying by the thousands — of a deadly mixture of war and poverty.
Instead of spending a few hundred dollars trying to save Yohanita, who might die anyway, we could spend that money buying vaccines or mosquito nets to save a far larger number of children in other villages.
And yet — how can you walk away from a human being who will surely die if you do so?
So we spoke to Simona Pari of the Norwegian Refugee Council, which has built a school in the village and helped people here survive as conflict has raged around them. Simona immediately agreed to use her vehicle to transport Yohanita to a hospital.
The village found a teenage girl who could go with Yohanita and help look after her, and the family agreed that it would be best to have her taken not to the local public hospital but to the fine hospital in Goma run by Heal Africa, an outstanding aid group with strong American connections (www.healafrica.org).
Now, nearly four days later, Yohanita is on the road to recovery, lying on a clean bed in the Heal Africa Hospital. Leana saved one of her first patients.
What almost killed Yohanita was starvation in a narrow sense, but more broadly she is one more victim of the warfare that has already claimed four million lives in Congo since 1998. Even 21st-century wars like Congo’s — the most lethal conflict since World War II — kill the old-fashioned way, by starving people or exposing them to disease.
That’s what makes wars in the developing world so deadly, for they kill not only with guns and machetes but also in much greater numbers with diarrhea, malaria, AIDS and malnutrition.
The people here in Malehe were driven out of their village by rampaging soldiers in December. Yohanita’s family returned to their home a few months later, but their crops and livestock had been taken. Then Yohanita had a miscarriage and the family spent all its money saving her — which meant that they ran out of food.
“We used to have plenty to eat, but now we have nothing,” Yohanita’s mother, Anastasie, told us. “We’ve had nothing to eat but bananas since the beginning of May.” (To see video of our
visit and read blogs by Leana and Will, go to nytimes.com/twofortheroad.)
I’m under no delusion that our intervention makes a difference to Congo (though it did make quite a difference to Yohanita). The way to help Congo isn’t to take individual starving people to the hospital but to work to end the war — yet instead the war is heating up again here, in part because Congo is off the world’s radar.
One measure of the international indifference is the shortage of aid groups here: Neighboring Rwanda, which is booming economically, is full of aid workers. But this area of eastern Congo is far needier and yet is home to hardly any aid groups. World Vision is one of the very few American groups active here in the North Kivu area.
Just imagine that four million Americans or Europeans had been killed in a war, and that white families were starving to death as a result of that war. The victims in isolated villages here in Congo, like Yohanita, may be black and poor and anonymous, but that should make this war in Congo no less an international priority
Photo Credit: By Will Okun
Iran Arrests GrandmaMan, was I wrong about Iran.
I thought this regime was powerful and self-confident, and actually felt strengthened since we destroyed its two main enemies — the Taliban and Saddam. That could not be further from the truth. This Iranian regime is afraid of its shadow. How do I know? It recently arrested a 67-year-old grandmother, whom it accused of trying to bring down the regime by organizing academic conferences!
Yes, big, tough President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — the man who shows us how tough he is by declaring the Holocaust a myth — had his goons arrest Haleh Esfandiari, a 67-year-old scholar, grandmother and dual Iranian-U.S. citizen, while she was visiting her 93-year-old mother in Tehran. Do you know how paranoid you have to be to think that a 67-year-old grandmother visiting her 93-year-old mother can bring down your regime? Now that is insecure.
It’s also shameful. Haleh directs the Middle East program of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. She went to Iran in December to visit her aging mother — a trip she’s made regularly for the past decade. According to her husband, Shaul Bakhash, himself a renown Iran expert in the U.S., while Haleh was traveling to the Tehran airport on Dec. 30, to return home, she was stopped by three masked, knife-wielding men — Iran’s Intelligence Ministry always needs three men and three knives when confronting a grandmother — and they stole her belongings and her U.S. and Iranian passports.
This was followed by six weeks of intermittent questioning by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. Then, on May 7, Haleh was arrested. Yesterday, she was formally charged with “endangering national security through propaganda against the system and espionage for foreigners,” an Iranian spokesman said — apparently because of her work organizing academic conferences of Iranian and U.S. experts.
Why does Iran’s leadership do such a thing? Because its hard-liners fear relations with the U.S. and want to scuttle the Iran-U.S. dialogue that began this week in Baghdad. Just like Castro’s Cuba, Iran’s mullah dictators thrive on their clash with America. The conflict gives them status among anti-American countries, our sanctions allow them to explain away their poor economic performance, and U.S. “threats,” both real and imagined, allow them to crush all legitimate dissent by labeling it part of a U.S. conspiracy.
What to do? Obviously, one option is a military strike combined with fomenting revolution. But that could easily leave us with another unstable, failing state in the Middle East. I don’t want to create another boiling Iraq. A second option would be more economic sanctions to change the regime’s behavior. The third option is engagement aimed at restoring relations.
Alas, the Bush Iran policy has dabbled in all three, but never committed itself to one, and, as a result, Iran’s hard-liners have been strengthened. The only way out of our corner now is to get some leverage. And leverage can come only from stepped-up economic sanctions — particularly doing something to bring down the price of oil, Iran’s lifeblood — combined with aggressive engagement, like declaring that we don’t seek the toppling of the regime and that we are ready, if Iran curbs its nuclear program, to restore full diplomatic and economic ties the next day.
In other words, our only hope of either changing this Iranian regime or its behavior, without fracturing the country, is through a stronger Iranian middle class that demands a freer press, consensual politics and rule of law. That is our China strategy — and it could work even faster with Iran. The greatest periods of political change in modern Iran happened when the country was most intensely engaged with the West, beginning with the constitutional revolution in 1906.
Unfortunately, the Bush strategy — diplomatic/economic isolation plus high oil prices — has only frozen the regime in power and transformed it from mildly repressive to a K.G.B. state with a nuclear program. So now we face an Iranian regime that is both powerful and paranoid.
It has the resources to snub the world and its own people’s aspirations. Yet, no matter how much this regime tries to buy off its people with oil money, it knows that many despise it. It’s actually afraid of its own people more than anyone — so afraid it even criminalizes scholarly exchanges between Iranians and Americans that the regime can’t control.
That’s why a 67-year-old grandmother — whose only crime is getting people together in public to talk about building a better Iran — is such a threat.
Photo Credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
Time to brush up on your facts, folks. The following are MUST READ'S for all who are searching for Truth in the Land of Doublespeak:"Distorting the Venezuelan media story
"The Justice Department considered political affiliation in screening applicants for immigration court judgeships for several years until hiring was frozen in December after objections from department lawyers, current and former officials said."
Retired Army Colonel Ann Wright says the supplemental bill Congress passed to continue funding the Iraq war is really about "stealing Iraq's oil - the second largest reserves in the world. The "benchmark," or goal, the Bush administration has been working on furiously since the US invaded Iraq is privatization of Iraq's oil. Now they have Congress blackmailing the Iraqi Parliament and the Iraqi people: no privatization of Iraqi oil, no reconstruction funds."
Hampshire College Commencement Address by Martín Espada
"In a move sure to raise even more questions about the decision to go to war with Iraq, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence will on Friday release selected portions of pre-war intelligence in which the CIA warned the administration of the risk and consequences of a conflict in the Middle East.
Among other things, the 40-page Senate report reveals that two intelligence assessments before the war accurately predicted that toppling Saddam could lead to a dangerous period of internal violence and provide a boost to terrorists. But those warnings were seemingly ignored."
Journalist Seymour Hersh joins us to talk about another theory of who is backing the militant group - the Lebanese government itself, along with the United States
"Our leaders are promoting delusional thinking when boasting that the United States and Americans are superior to the rest of the world," says the Democratic Presidential candidate.
"While Gonzales has been associated with a pernicious assault on our freedoms, he has never been the independent actor, but rather a dutiful toady carrying out the wishes of a tightly monitored White House with the blessings of the president."
Monica Goodling, the former White House liaison for the Justice Department, testified Wednesday that she used a political litmus test in screening applicants for hire as Justice Department employees, in what appears to be a violation of numerous federal laws.
Carter caves. And lets us all down.
Operation Freedom From IraqisWHEN all else fails, those pious Americans who conceived and directed the Iraq war fall back on moral self-congratulation: at least we brought liberty and democracy to an oppressed people. But that last-ditch rationalization has now become America’s sorriest self-delusion in this tragedy.
However wholeheartedly we disposed of their horrific dictator, the Iraqis were always pawns on the geopolitical chessboard rather than actual people in the administration’s reckless bet to “transform” the Middle East. From “Stuff happens!” on, nearly every aspect of Washington policy in Iraq exuded contempt for the beneficiaries of our supposed munificence. Now this animus is completely out of the closet. Without Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to kick around anymore, the war’s dead-enders are pinning the fiasco on the Iraqis themselves. Our government abhors them almost as much as the Lou Dobbs spear carriers loathe those swarming “aliens” from Mexico.Iraqis are clamoring to get out of Iraq. Two million have fled so far and nearly two million more have been displaced within the country. (That’s a total of some 15 percent of the population.) Save the Children reported this month that Iraq’s child-survival rate is falling faster than any other nation’s. One Iraqi in eight is killed by illness or violence by the age of 5. Yet for all the words President Bush has lavished on Darfur and AIDS in Africa, there has been a deadly silence from him about what’s happening in the country he gave “God’s gift of freedom.”
It’s easy to see why. To admit that Iraqis are voting with their feet is to concede that American policy is in ruins. A “secure” Iraq is a mirage, and, worse, those who can afford to leave are the very professionals who might have helped build one. Thus the president says nothing about Iraq’s humanitarian crisis, the worst in the Middle East since 1948, much as he tried to hide the American death toll in Iraq by keeping the troops’ coffins off-camera and staying away from military funerals.
But his silence about Iraq’s mass exodus is not merely another instance of deceptive White House P.R.; it’s part of a policy with a huge human cost. The easiest way to keep the Iraqi plight out of sight, after all, is to prevent Iraqis from coming to America. And so we do, except for stray Shiites needed to remind us of purple fingers at State of the Union time or to frame the president in Rose Garden photo ops.
Since the 2003 invasion, America has given only 466 Iraqis asylum. Sweden, which was not in the coalition of the willing, plans to admit 25,000 Iraqis this year alone. Our State Department, goaded by January hearings conducted by Ted Kennedy, says it will raise the number for this year to 7,000 (a figure that, small as it is, may be more administration propaganda). A bill passed by Congress this month will add another piddling 500, all interpreters.
In reality, more than 5,000 interpreters worked for the Americans. So did tens of thousands of drivers and security guards who also, in Senator Kennedy’s phrase, have “an assassin’s bull’s-eye on their backs” because they served the occupying government and its contractors over the past four-plus years. How we feel about these Iraqis was made naked by one of the administration’s most fervent hawks, the former United Nations ambassador John Bolton, speaking to The Times Magazine this month. He claimed that the Iraqi refugee problem had “absolutely nothing to do” with Saddam’s overthrow: “Our obligation was to give them new institutions and provide security. We have fulfilled that obligation. I don’t think we have an obligation to compensate for the hardships of war.”
Actually, we haven’t fulfilled the obligation of giving them functioning institutions and security. One of the many reasons we didn’t was that L. Paul Bremer’s provisional authority staffed the Green Zone with unqualified but well-connected Republican hacks who, in some cases, were hired after they expressed their opposition to Roe v. Wade. The administration is nothing if not consistent in its employment practices. The assistant secretary in charge of refugees at the State Department now, Ellen Sauerbrey, is a twice-defeated Republican candidate for governor of Maryland with no experience in humanitarian crises but a hefty résumé in anti-abortion politics. She is to Iraqis seeking rescue what Brownie was to Katrina victims stranded in the Superdome.
Ms. Sauerbrey’s official line on Iraqi refugees, delivered to Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes” in March, is that most of them “really want to go home.” The administration excuse for keeping Iraqis out of America is national security: we have to vet every prospective immigrant for terrorist ties. But many of those with the most urgent cases for resettlement here were vetted already, when the American government and its various Halliburton subsidiaries asked them to risk their lives by hiring them in the first place. For those whose loyalties can no longer be vouched for, there is the contrasting lesson of Vietnam. Julia Taft, the official in charge of refugees in the Ford administration, reminded Mr. Pelley that 131,000 Vietnamese were resettled in America within eight months of the fall of Saigon, despite loud, Dobbs-like opposition at the time. In the past seven months, the total number of Iraqis admitted to America was 69.
The diplomat Richard Holbrooke, whose career began during the Vietnam War, told me that security worries then were addressed by a vetting process carried out in safe, preliminary asylum camps for refugees set up beyond Vietnam’s borders in Asia. But as Mr. Holbrooke also points out in the current Foreign Affairs magazine, the real forerunner to American treatment of Iraqi refugees isn’t that war in any case, but World War II. That’s when an anti-Semitic assistant secretary of state, Breckinridge Long, tirelessly obstructed the visa process to prevent Jews from obtaining sanctuary in America, not even filling the available slots under existing quotas. As many as 75,000 such refugees were turned away before the Germans cut off exit visas to Jews in late 1941, according to Howard Sachar’s “History of the Jews in America.”
Like the Jews, Iraqis are useful scapegoats. This month Mr. Bremer declared that the real culprits for his disastrous 2003 decision to cleanse Iraq of Baathist officials were unnamed Iraqi politicians who “broadened the decree’s impact far beyond our original design.” The Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, is chastising the Iraqis for being unable “to do anything they promised.”
The new White House policy, as Zbigniew Brzezinski has joked, is “blame and run.” It started to take shape just before the midterm elections last fall, when Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memo (propitiously leaked after his defenestration) suggesting that the Iraqis might “have to pull up their socks, step up and take responsibility for their country.” By January, Mr. Bush was saying that “the Iraqi people owe the American people a huge debt of gratitude” and wondering aloud “whether or not there is a gratitude level that’s significant enough in Iraq.” In February, one of the war’s leading neocon cheerleaders among the Beltway punditocracy lowered the boom. “Iraq is their country,” Charles Krauthammer wrote. “We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war.” Bill O’Reilly and others now echo this cry.
The message is clear enough: These ungrateful losers deserve everything that’s coming to them. The Iraqis hear us and are returning the compliment. Whether Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is mocking American demands for timelines and benchmarks, or the Iraqi Parliament is setting its own timeline for American withdrawal even while flaunting its vacation schedule, Iraq’s nominal government is saying it’s fed up. The American-Iraqi shotgun marriage of convenience, midwifed by disastrous Bush foreign policy, has disintegrated into the marriage from hell.
While the world waits for the White House and Congress to negotiate the separation agreement, the damage to the innocent family members caught in the cross-fire is only getting worse. Despite Mr. Bush’s May 10 claim that “the number of sectarian murders has dropped substantially” since the surge began, The Washington Post reported on Thursday that the number of such murders is going up. For the Americans, the cost is no less dear. Casualty figures confirm that the past six months have been the deadliest yet for our troops.
While it seems but a dim memory now, once upon a time some Iraqis did greet the Americans as liberators. Today, in fact, it is just such Iraqis — not the local Iraqi insurgents the president conflates with Osama bin Laden’s Qaeda in Pakistan — who do want to follow us home. That we are slamming the door in their faces tells you all you need to know about the real morality beneath all the professed good intentions of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Though the war’s godfathers saw themselves as ridding the world of another Hitler, their legacy includes a humanitarian catastrophe that will need its own Raoul Wallenbergs and Oskar Schindlers if lives are to be saved.
Photo Credit: Frank Rich. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr."Plenty of reasonable people can disagree about foreign policy. What's really strange is when one reasonable position is completely and forcibly excluded from the public debate.Photo: Ron Paul
Such was the case after 9-11. Every close observer of the events of those days knows full well that these crimes were acts of revenge for US policy in the Muslim world. The CIA and the 911 Commission said as much, the terrorists themselves proclaimed it, and Osama underscored the point by naming three issues in particular: US troops in Saudi Arabia, US sanctions against Iraq, and US funding of Israeli expansionism.
So far as I know, Ron Paul is the only prominent public figure in the six years since who has given an honest telling of this truth. The explosive exchange occurred during the Republican Presidential debate in South Carolina...."
Last week, President Bush appointed a “war czar,” Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, to oversee everything we’re doing in Iraq and Afghanistan — which raises the question: Who was doing this job up to now? The answer, amazingly, is no one. We’re like a fine restaurant that has decided five years after it’s opened — and has lost most of its customers — that it might be good to hire a head chef. Better late than never. General Lute comes advertised as smart and tough. Good. I hope his first memo to the president starts like this:
Mr. President, if you look around the region, all those we’ve tried to isolate — Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iraqi insurgents and the Taliban — are stronger today than they were two years ago. We have to reassess our strategy, beginning by facing up to the fact that we’ve fundamentally altered the geopolitical landscape in the Middle East.
We brought down the hard walls that surrounded Iran by destroying Iran’s two archenemies — the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam’s regime in Iraq. As a result, we are dealing today with an emboldened, resurgent Iran, which has taken advantage of our good works to expand its economic, cultural, religious and geopolitical influence into Persian-speaking western Afghanistan and into Shiite Iraq.
With Saddam gone, none of the Arab states are strong enough to balance Iran. They are all either too weak or too dysfunctional. This means we have two choices. We can be the regional power balancing Iran, which will require keeping thousands of troops in the area indefinitely. Or we have to engage Tehran in a high-level dialogue, in which we focus on our mutual interests in stabilizing Afghanistan and Iraq. You have to choose, Mr. President: I can’t do my job if you don’t face the fact that our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — and our energy gluttony — have empowered Iran.
War with Iran is not inevitable. Let me remind you how well we worked with the Iranians in Afghanistan, initially. As you recall, we had a regular cooperative dialogue between our ambassadors in Kabul. The Iranians helped to deliver us the Northern Alliance. Then they cut their financial support for their favorite warlord in Herat, Ismail Khan, so that the pro-American Afghan government could extend its authority there. When, in early 2002, we gave them the names of members of a Qaeda group operating in Meshad, Iran, they rolled them up and put them on a plane to Afghanistan. There was much more, until things went sour.
I don’t know who is responsible for the breakdown — the Iranians point to your calling them part of the “axis of evil,” after they had helped us so much. We can point to their involvement in bombings in Saudi Arabia in 2003. But for the past few years we’ve been in cold war with them — and today their proxies are beating our proxies in Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq.
As Vali Nasr, author of “The Shia Revival,” points out: “Stability in the Middle East is now about U.S.-Iran relations, and it is fantasy to think that we can go back to the old days where the Cairo-Riyadh-Amman axis manages the region for us.” Iran will not allow a stable Iraq to emerge if its interests are not protected, and if the new balance of power in Iraq — one based on a Shiite-Kurdish majority — is not recognized.
Yes, the Saudis will go nuts, but look what they’ve been doing: in private the Saudis tell us we can’t leave Iraq and in public their king denounces our occupation there as “illegal.” Of course, we must protect the Saudis. But they and their Sunni allies in Iraq have to accept the new reality there, and stop treating the Shiites as a lower form of life. Then we can cut them the best deal possible. If not, they’re on their own. Our kids are not going to die to restore Sunni minority rule to Iraq.
At the same time, we have to open a dialogue with Hamas — not to embrace it, but to lay out a gradual pathway that will bring it into relations with Israel. As Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University’s Palestinian expert and author of “The Iron Cage,” points out: “If we let the Palestinian Authority be destroyed, and then we keep Hamas isolated” — even though it won a democratic election that we sponsored — “we will end up with the hard boys, the gangs you see today on the streets of Gaza, who respond to no authority at all.”
If I thought that isolating Iran and Hamas was working, I’d continue it. But it manifestly is not — any more than isolating Castro has worked. So either we find a way to draw them in or we’ll be fighting them — and the hard boys — in Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza and Afghanistan for a long, long time.
Photo Credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
The President and WolfowitzAs Paul Wolfowitz is to the World Bank, the U.S. is becoming to the world.
We should look at the battle unfolding at the World Bank not as the story of one man falling to earth, but as a moral tale of the risks the U.S. faces unless the Bush administration spends more time rebuilding bridges it has burned all over the world.
Mr. Wolfowitz genuinely aspired to help Africa develop, but he ended up isolated, friendless and vulnerable; receiving no credit for his genuine accomplishments; and unable to make progress on the issues he cares about. And the U.S. is in a similar position today.
The similarity arises in part because although President Bush’s best-known role has been as a conservative hawk — and everything he has done in that role has been a disaster — he has also aspired to fight poverty and help Africa. And Mr. Bush has genuinely scored some major accomplishments as a humanitarian.
O.K., pick yourself off the floor: It’s true. In the world of foreign aid, Mr. Bush has done better than almost anyone realizes — or gives him credit for. It’s his only significant positive legacy, and it consists of four elements.
First and most important, Mr. Bush started Pepfar, his Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief in Africa — the best single thing he has done in his life. It’s a huge increase over earlier programs and will save more than 9 million lives. Granted, it has been too ideological about promoting “abstinence only” programs, but at the grass-roots level it is increasingly pragmatic (don’t tell the White House, but the U.S. still gives out far more condoms than any other country).
Second, Mr. Bush started a major new foreign aid program, the millennium challenge account. This involves giving large sums to countries selected for their good governance and from top to bottom reflects smart new approaches to foreign aid.
Third, the Bush administration elevated sex trafficking on the international agenda. Mr. Bush spoke about it to the U.N., and he appointed a first-rate ambassador for the issue, John Miller, who until his resignation late last year hectored and sanctioned foreign countries into curbing this form of modern slavery. (Alas, since Mr. Miller left, the administration’s anti-trafficking efforts have faltered.)
Fourth, Mr. Bush has begun to focus attention and funds on malaria, which kills more than 1 million people a year in poor countries and imposes a huge economic burden on Africa in particular.
So why doesn’t Mr. Bush get any credit for these achievements? Partly, I think, because he never seems very interested in them himself. And partly because, like Mr. Wolfowitz, Mr. Bush’s approach to governing is to circle the wagons rather than build coalitions; they both antagonize fence-sitters by coming across as unilateralist, sanctimonious, arrogant and incompetent.
In December, the White House held an event to call attention to malaria. But Mr. Bush’s staff barred me from attending: They apparently didn’t want coverage of malaria if it came from a columnist they didn’t like.
I can’t recall an administration as suspicious and partisan as this one, one so disinclined to outreach, one that so openly adheres to the ancient Roman maxim of Oderint dum metuant: Let them hate, so long as they fear.
So Mr. Bush, unwilling to concede any error, unwilling to reach out, unwilling to shuffle his cabinet, staggers on. And the U.S. itself has been tainted by the same haughtiness; long after Mr. Wolfowitz has gone, and even after Mr. Bush has gone, the next president will have to detoxify our relations with the rest of the world.
Moreover, even in those areas where Mr. Bush has done well, like foreign aid, our strained relations with the rest of the world have undermined our ability to succeed. Indeed, Bill Clinton (who wasn’t nearly as generous with foreign aid as Mr. Bush when he was in the White House) has shown in recent years how much can be accomplished when a leader cooperates with partners on issues like AIDS and development. If Mr. Clinton were pursuing Mr. Bush’s development agenda, it would be in a flurry of meetings and visits and multilateralism that would be far more effective in seeing that agenda put in place.
But instead the international stage is riven in ways that mirror the World Bank itself. And it looks as if we’re drifting toward the end of a failed presidency of the United States that parallels Mr. Wolfowitz’s failed presidency of the World Bank.
Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
By Thomas L. FriedmanI’m glad Democrats are keeping the pressure on President Bush for a withdrawal date from Iraq. It’s the only way to keep him and Iraqis focused on the endgame. But if Democrats really want to be taken seriously on foreign affairs, they need to recognize that they have only half a policy on Iraq. And it’s the easy half.
You can’t be in favor of setting a date to withdraw from Iraq without also being in favor of a serious energy policy to radically reduce our dependence on oil — now. To call for withdrawing from Iraq by a set date, no matter what the situation is on the ground there — without a serious energy plan here — is reckless. All we would be doing is making ourselves more dependent on an even more unstable Middle East, because any U.S. withdrawal from Iraq is likely, in the short run, to be destabilizing.
The Middle East today is deeply troubled. If we determine that our efforts to tilt that region in a different direction — by building a decent Iraq — have failed, then our efforts to minimize our exposure to that region have to begin. But the last thing we can afford to do is walk away from the Middle East militarily while remaining chained to it economically.
More important, if Iraq totally fails, but we still believe it is in our interest to promote reform in the Middle East, a serious U.S. energy policy that permanently brings down the price of oil — by developing scalable alternative energies — is actually the best Plan B there is. You will see reform in the Arab-Muslim world only when regimes there can’t survive just by extracting oil, but have to extract the talents of their people by educating, empowering and connecting them.
But to hasten that day, Democrats have to be a lot more serious about energy than they have been up to now. Everyone has an energy plan for 2020. But we need one for 2007 that will start to have an impact by 2008 — and there is only one way to do that: get the price of oil right. Either tax gasoline by another 50 cents to $1 a gallon at the pump, or set a $50 floor price per barrel of oil sold in America. Once energy entrepreneurs know they will never again be undercut by cheap oil, you’ll see an explosion of innovation in alternatives.
“Right now we’re looking for solutions in all the wrong places,” argues the noted oil economist Philip Verleger. “The only way one can effectively address this problem today and get an immediate kick is by raising the price at the pump and keeping it there.” Some of the revenue could be used to buy back the most fuel-inefficient vehicles on our roads, he added. “The best monument to 9/11 we could erect would be a mountain of crushed gas guzzlers.”
There are some hopeful signs: Chris Dodd has just broken ranks and become the first presidential candidate to issue a serious, comprehensive energy plan that includes the “T word.” He has called for a “corporate carbon tax” that would both help fight global warming emissions and raise gasoline prices.
“You say the word ‘tax’ and people usually head for the hills,” Mr. Dodd told me. “But this is one where the American people can handle the truth. Unless you address the issue of price, you’re not serious about moving us from Point A to Point B.”
Barack Obama also just got right in Detroit’s face. He went to Motown, called for much tougher fuel economy standards and bluntly told automakers and autoworkers the truth: “For years, while foreign competitors were investing in more fuel-efficient technology for their vehicles, American automakers were spending their time investing in bigger, faster cars. Whenever an attempt was made to raise our fuel efficiency standards, the auto companies would lobby furiously against it, spending millions to prevent the very reform that could’ve saved their industry.” Those are fightin’ words!
Finally, in a move that also merits praise, General Motors announced that it was joining other major U.S. corporations, like General Electric, and signing on to the United States Climate Action Partnership (U.S.C.A.P.), which calls for a cap-and-trade program to control carbon dioxide emissions. G.M. is the first auto company to do so.
None of these go far enough, but they are all new positions and may be harbingers of a new competition in which companies and candidates try to outdo each other in being serious about energy rather than phony. That would be a big deal — and it might give the Democrats a more comprehensive Iraq policy just in the nick of time.
You can’t be serious about getting out of Iraq if you’re not serious about getting off oil.
Photo Credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad. (The New York Times)
On Thursday there will be a regional conference in Egypt to discuss stabilizing Iraq, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will represent the U.S. President Bush should go instead and give this speech:
I want to take this opportunity to speak to the Arab and Muslim nations gathered here today and to the world at large. I begin with a simple message: I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I rushed into the invasion of Iraq. I honestly believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. I was wrong, and I now realize that in unilaterally launching the war the way I did, you all feel that I breached a bond of trust between America and the world. Not only did that alienate you from us, it made us less effective in Iraq. We had too few allies and too little legitimacy. I apologize — sincerely.
I’m most sorry, though, because my bungling of the war has prompted all of us to take our eye off the ball. I messed up the treatment so badly that people have forgotten the patient really does have a disease. Now that I’ve apologized, I hope you will stop fixating on me and look closely at what is happening in your backyard: the forces and pathologies that brought us 9/11 are still there and multiplying.
Friends, we are losing in Iraq. But whom are we losing to? Is it to the Iraqi “Vietcong” — the authentic carriers of Iraqi nationalism? No, it is not. We are being defeated by nihilistic Islamist suicide bombers, who are proliferating across the Muslim world. We are losing to people who blow up mosques, markets, hospital emergency wards and girls’ schools. They don’t even tell us their names, let alone offer a future.
Look at the past two weeks: On Thursday, at least nine Iraqi soldiers were found dead after a suicide car bomber rammed a checkpoint. Two suicide car bombers crashed into a Kurdistan Democratic Party office in Zamar. A day earlier, a suicide bomber killed four policemen in Balad Ruz. Two days earlier, nine U.S. soldiers were killed by a pair of suicide attackers driving garbage trucks packed with explosives. A few days earlier, five bomb attacks killed nearly 200 people in Baghdad. On Monday this week, a suicide bomber blew up a funeral in Khalis, killing at least 30.
That’s 12 suicide bombers in a little over a week. And it’s been like that every month. These suicide jihadists are so hard to defeat because they have no desire to build anything. Their only goal is to make sure that America fails in its effort to bring decent, pluralistic, progressive politics to Iraq. They will kill any number of Muslims to ensure that we fail.
Do not delude yourselves that this is only about Iraq. In March, a suicide bomber blew up an Internet cafe in Morocco, and on April 10 four more suicide bombers struck there. On April 11, a pair of suicide bombers, claimed by Al Qaeda, killed 24 people or more in separate attacks in Algiers. In February, a suicide bomber in Quetta, Pakistan, blew up a courtroom, killing the judge and at least 14 other people — the sixth suicide bombing in that country in a month. Last Friday, Saudi police arrested 172 who they said were jihadists who planned to do things like flying airplanes into oil fields. On Saturday, a suicide bomber in Pakistan killed at least 28 people while trying to blow up the interior minister.
You may think that I’m more dangerous than Bin Laden and that a strong America is more dangerous than Al Qaeda. You’re wrong. If we are defeated in Iraq, they’ll come after you. They already are. And if we’re defeated in Iraq, you’ll no longer have to contend with a world of too much American power. You’ll have to contend with a world of too little American power. You will not like it.
Don’t let your anger with me blind you to your own interests. You are holding your breath until I turn blue. But I’m not going to turn blue. You are. I want to get out of Iraq as soon as possible, but I need you Arab leaders to get off the fence. I know that you fear democracy in Iraq, but the alternative is much worse. If the jihadists win, the Arab world will have no future. I need your help in forging a settlement in Iraq and in denouncing this suicide madness from every mosque and minaret every hour of every day — with no qualifications.
And to Europe, China and Russia, I also say: Get off the fence — I can’t stabilize Iraq without your help. I don’t have the resources. I know I was a jerk in stiff-arming you. Believe me, I’m over it. I’m here to listen to what you want me to do. But unless we — the world of order — all pull together now, the forces of disorder are going to have their way, and there is no wall that will protect you.
Photo Credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
By Robert WrightNeoconservatives have been airing an explanation for the failure of the Iraq war that’s so obvious you’ll wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself: the war wasn’t neoconservative enough.Photo Credit: Robert Wright (journalist) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Last week Richard Perle, on “The Charlie Rose Show,” echoed what his fellow neocon John Bolton told the BBC last month: We should have turned Iraq over to the Iraqis much sooner. Then, presumably, the power of democracy to blossom pronto in even nutrient-depleted soil — the neocon élan vital — would have kicked in.
Nice try, but they’re just digging themselves in deeper. They’re highlighting a paradox within the neocon game plan that would have doomed this war even if it had been run competently (enough troops, a dollop of postwar planning, etc.).
On the one hand, we were going to bring democracy to Iraq. On the other hand, we were going to use Iraq as a platform for exercising military power. (Days after Baghdad fell, the neocon Weekly Standard festively titled an article “There’s No Place Like Iraq ... for U.S. Military Bases.”)
But wait. What if the Iraqi people, once empowered by democracy, decided they didn’t want their country to be a U.S. aircraft carrier? And isn’t that pretty likely? After all, America is bound to use bases on behalf of itself and key allies, and one key ally is Israel. What were the chances this would sit well with an Arab Muslim nation — not with the small ruling class of an authoritarian state like Saudi Arabia (our previous aircraft carrier) but with a whole electorate?
Maybe if we had resolved with miraculous speed the tensions besetting Israel — from Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iran — U.S. troops could have stayed in the Iraqis’ good graces. But neocons weren’t exactly pushing for dialogue on those fronts. They were going to let their new aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Iraq, do the talking. And surely Iraq’s majority Shiites would applaud the use of their soil to threaten Shiite Iran, right?
Meanwhile, neocons, and the Bush administration broadly, were endorsing the policies of Ariel Sharon, whose assertive policing of the occupied territories was proving counterproductive, helping to radicalize both Palestinian opinion and, via Al Jazeera, Muslim opinion globally.
You can empower people through democracy if you want. You can systematically antagonize them if you want. Doing both at once is ill advised.
Critics murmur that neoconservatism is “all about Israel.” I wish! Then the damage might be confined to one region. Alas, the neocon paradox — empower people and enrage them — is global. Neocons want to make China democratic ASAP; meanwhile, they pass the time arousing anti-American Chinese nationalism with vestigial cold war rants. Fortunately, they won fewer intra-administration battles over China than over the Middle East.
Even if neocons weren’t bent on spreading democracy, their chronic inflammation of world opinion would be unhealthy, because much of the world is already democratic and more of it will probably become that way.
But leave democracy aside. There’s another reason grass-roots opinion matters crucially.
A confluence of technologies, from the Internet to biotechnology, is making it easier and easier for far-flung hatred to assume organized form, intersect with weapons technology and constitute unprecedently potent terrorism. This growing lethality of hatred may be the biggest long-term problem we face.
Here’s a response favored by many left-of-center and right-of-center thinkers. Address the “demand side” — the desire to obtain and use nuclear and biological weapons — by reducing the number of people who hate the U.S. and the West. Address the “supply side” by improving arms control.
Neocons take the opposite tack: degrade the arms control infrastructure (the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, etc.) and antagonize the masses.
You can even do both at once! President Bush undermined the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by agreeing to give nuclear technology to India, a nonsignatory. This ratcheted up anti-Americanism in Pakistan — a Muslim nation with nukes, jihadist recruiters and an unstable government.
Neocons have their own formula for controlling arms: invade countries you think may have them. Of course, this approach will have to grow more cost-effective on repeated application if America is to warm up to it. But — who knows? — maybe we just need to make the next few wars more neoconservative.
Robert Wright, author of “Nonzero,” is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and runs the Web site Bloggingheads.tv.
Cupid and CupidityThere have been many tender love stories in war.
Ike and Kay. Pamela Harriman and Edward R. Murrow. Aeneas and Dido. Achilles and his tent temptation, Patroclus.
But my favorite is the unfolding saga of Wolfie and Shaha. Never has a star-crossed romance so perfectly illuminated a star-crossed conflict.
The weekend meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were consumed with the question of how the bank chief could fight corruption while indulging in cronyism. Who could focus on a weak yen when you had a weak Wolfie with a strong yen for Shaha?
In addition to the story about Paul Wolfowitz’s giving his girlfriend, Shaha Ali Riza, a promotion and a $60,000 raise because he felt guilty that she had to be transferred from the World Bank to the State Department when he took over, The Times reported yesterday on more imperialist hanky-panky.
Steven Weisman and David Sanger wrote that in 2003, when Wolfie was No. 2 at the Pentagon, the office of his consigliere, Douglas Feith, directed a private contractor to hire Ms. Riza, then at the World Bank, to spend a month traveling in Iraq to study ways to set up the new government.
(It was simple to get the contractor, the Science Applications International Corporation, to play along. As Vanity Fair reported, the Pentagon awarded SAIC seven contracts valued at more than $100 million before the war, without competitive bidding. Mr. Feith’s deputy was Christopher Henry, a former SAIC senior vice president.)
Wolfie and Shaha did not let a little thing like World Bank rules — which barred the bank from providing economic assistance to an area under military occupation — keep them from pushing the neocon delusions.
When she returned, Ms. Riza briefed members of the executive board of the World Bank on her trip, giving them a sanguine account of Iraq’s future and the fate of women there.
“The bank was under a lot of pressure at the time to do something in Iraq very quickly,” Jean-Louis Sarbib, a former bank vice president for the Middle East and North Africa, told The Times. But some of the bank’s directors, he said, were “very concerned about why she was briefing the board, under which authority and with whom she had gone there. I did not know anything about this at the time, and I was the vice president, and she was reporting to me.”
As they rushed to war, the neocons delighted in blowing off international treaties, international institutions and diplomats, treating them as impediments and whiners. So it only made sense that Wolfie wouldn’t hesitate to blow off rules he didn’t like once he began running an international institution himself.
Sometimes you’ve got to break some rules and tell some half-truths to help the world.
Despite fears among the bank’s member governments that Wolfie’s smug and stupid behavior is impairing the bank’s credibility, he has dug in his heels and said he will stay put. The president has backed him up.
Astonishingly, W., Wolfie, Dick Cheney and the Prince of Darkness himself, Richard Perle, have learned nothing from their mistakes of blindness and hubris, except to sweep them under the bed and indulge in more blindness and hubris.
In a chapter shown last night of the PBS series “America at a Crossroads,” Mr. Perle chatted with Pat Buchanan, his old colleague from the Reagan administration, arguing that America should ignore naysayers and work for regime change in Iran.
“There’s got to be some advantage to being a superpower,” Mr. Perle said grandly.
Asked by Bob Schieffer on “Face the Nation” on Sunday whether the administration had a credibility problem, given the problems with Alberto Gonzales, the optimistic statements about the death spiral in Iraq and the perjury conviction of Scooter Libby, the vice president replied, “You do the best you can with what you’ve got, obviously,” an echo of Rummy’s famous “You go to war with the Army you have.”
In America last week to promote a book about the occupation of Iraq, Ayad Allawi, Iraq’s former prime minister and failed U.S. puppet, told a group at the Council on Foreign Relations that the Bush administration had invaded an “imagined” country.
The Financial Times reported Mr. Allawi as saying that “the Iraqi exiles who advised the U.S. war planners described the country of their memories. Sadly, the Iraq with a solid infrastructure, a solid middle class and a secular tradition had ended ‘decades ago.’ ”
Shouldn’t Rummy and Cheney have followed their own advice: You go to war against the country you have, not the one you imagine?
Photo Credit: Maureen Dowd. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)
