Helena – Page 111 – Just World News with Helena Cobban

And another thing about Finland

In this blog post last Thursday I wrote a bit about the prospects of a “Finland-like” outcome for Georgia– and several of us then had a pretty good quick discussion of the question on the comments board there.
I just want to expand on a reference I made there to the neutral-but-engaged status of Finland having positioned it to be the host of “important east-west gatherings like the 1974 Helsinki Conference.”
The Helsinki Conference gave rise to the very important Helsinki Treaty, which enshrined human rights as a topic of completely legitimate concern in east-west diplomacy in Europe and the whole of the then-Soviet Union. (Which thereby set the stage for the rise of the numerous nonviolent social movements that played such a transformative role in the politics of heartland Europe.)
The Helsinki Treaty also mandated the establishment of a continuing body for oversight and coordination, known as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE.)
Since its founding OSCE has frequently played a crucial role– midwifing the emergence of new democracies and mediating many of the conflicts that emerged during that process. Sadly it was not able to prevent the eruption of large-scale fighting in former Yugoslavia, but in many of the other, mainly ethnic, conflicts that emerged during the Soviet implosion, OSCE was there with technical help and principles-based mediation services, able to play a role in reducing tensions across the whole of the landmass covered by NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and the former Soviet Union.
Including during the Russia-Georgia tensions that arose in the early 1990s– after which OSCE ceasefire monitors continued to be deployed right up to and through the outbreak of the present crisis.. Which is why OSCE is poised right now to play a major role in implementing, and probably also helping to negotiate, the longer term settlement that’s required between Russia and Georgia, once the existing ceasefire is being adequately observed.
That longer term settlement may (or may not) include provisions for demilitarization and foreign-affairs neutrality in Georgia that put it into something very like the situation vis-a-vis Russia that in the post-WW2 decades Finland was in with regard to the old Soviet Union. We’re already hearing dire warnings among warmongers in the west against the dangers of “Finlandization.”
But as I tried to argue Thursday, Finlandization really is not the worst option, at all, for Georgia’s people. It ended up working out fairly well for most Finns, in a world that is certainly far short of an ideal one.
And it worked out pretty well for the rest of the world, too.
Watch for the role that OSCE will be playing in the weeks ahead.

Where in the world is… Ban Ki-Moon?

The Georgian-Russian war is the most significant watershed in world politics since George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003. As I noted last Sunday, it signals clearly for all the world to see that (1) The global power-projection capabilities of the highly over-militarized ‘west’ are currently stretched ways beyond what can be sustained, and (2) Russia, which was largely absent as a significant actor on the world stage since 1991 (or before), is now most certainly ‘back’ in the role of a substantial big power.
At such a watershed point, we should be more relieved than ever that over the past 63 years the world’s governments have created and sustained an entire network of globe-circling institutions, led by the United Nations, that are primed and ready to help ease all the tensions that a shift like the present one represents– and to do so in a sustainable, rights-strengthening way that radically decreases the possibility of further, possibly much more serious, war.
So where the heck has UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon been over the past eight days?
He should have been at the forefront of all the international diplomatic efforts aimed at ending the Russia-Georgia conflict and crafting a longterm settlement in that region that can also strengthen the UN’s essential norms of nonviolence, human equality, and the support of human flourishing and human security.
Where has he been?
Ireland’s RTE News tells us this morning– eight days into the crisis– that Ban “will interrupt his holiday to hold private talks with the ambassadors of the US, Russia and Georgia on how to formalise the ceasefire deal.”
So until now, he’s just been continuing his holiday?
On Thursday, the UN issued a press release assuring us that Ban (presumably speaking from his vacation hideaway) “has expressed deep concern at the humanitarian impact of recent fighting on the civilian population in Georgia.”
Not good enough. Anyone and everyone has issued a bland, humanitariany statement like that. But the UN is about a whole lot more than “humanitarian aid” and “humanitarian concern.”
Yesterday (Friday), Reuters reported that Ban,

But Ban’s spokesperson assured Reuters that “Ban is expected to meet Russia’s U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin, possibly on Saturday.”
Or possibly not, huh? Can’t cut that holiday too short, after all…
Here’s why this is important. For the past 15 years, the US has come increasingly to act like the “power of last resort” and the delegated enforcer for all portions of the earth’s surface except for some those limited portions of the global landmass that lie inside the national borders of Russia and China. No international body ever delegated these powers to the United States, whose citizens comprise under five percent of the world’s people. It just came to assume them, helped in many instances by a never-stable, ever-evolving cast of “allies,” like those roped in for occupation duty in Iraq (a group that dwindled significantly over time), or in Afghanistan (mainly, a subset of members of a strictly-military alliance that was formed for very different purposes 60 years ago.)
Now, the US-led “west” is hopelessly over-extended, with grave consequences for the peoples of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. The military-based, “US leadership” model of global governance that it represents cannot be sustained. We all need to take a few very deep breaths, reflect deeply on the consequences of war-waging and militarism wherever they have been practiced, and start a new worldwide conversation on how to do things a whole lot better going forward.
That’s where the United Nations comes in.
Yes, it’s imperfect. But we really don’t have time to start a wholly new organization from the ground up. And meanwhile, the UN has a number of very important attributes:

human

That is why all the world’s citizens– but most especially, the people living inside the self-referential bubble of the US system— now need to see some robust and sure-footed UN leadership in the diplomacy of resolving the Ossetian crisis. It will demonstrate to us all that there is a better way than reliance on US unilateralism and militarism as a way of ordering the world– and it will help strengthen the UN’s own capabilities and credibility, as well.
But all this past week, Ban Ki-Moon has been Missing in Action.
Ban, we need you! Come home!
Instead of seeing him leading the immediate diplomacy, what have we seen? More of the same, of “western” leaders just stepping in as if it is entirely their right to dominate all international diplomacy, on every issue, in every part of the world.
Excuse me? Who gave them that right?
Why should it be Condoleezza Rice who positions herself as “final arbiter” in the dispute between Georgia and Russia? Why would she or anyone imagine that– after all the considerable aid the Bush administration has given to Georgia in recent years– Washington has the neutrality that would be required for anyone credibly and effectively to play that role?
(Oh, maybe the whole sorry history of US domination of the Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking over the past 20 years got Americans into the idea that being deeply partisan is not incompatible with being a neutral peacemaker? Well, it hasn’t worked too well there, either, has it?)
In the present crisis, the two US allies Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel played a significant role as Condi’s scouts and wingmen in the diplomacy…
And between them, they have secured something of a ceasefire on paper at this date, which is a valuable first step.
But a more durable, longer term settlement between the Russians and Georgians is certainly still required. Personally, I hope it would be based on a wide and credibly monitored demilitarization of the two ‘contested territories’ within Georgia, and also of wide swathes of ‘inner Georgia’ itself, as well as of areas of Russian territory that border Georgia.
But whatever the content of the longer term settlement, to arrive at it will require strong and clear UN leadership of the diplomacy. Hard to see how Bush or either of his successors would have either the international credibility or the means to do that.
It will take tough talking– with the leaders of both Georgia and Russia. And it will take promulgation of a paradigm of what “peacemaking” is about that is very different from the US paradigm of “arm this side, then arm that side, then if they fight each other get in there with our own armies to rack up the violence level even higher…”
The west can’t sustain that approach any more. We are in desperate need of a new, much more cooperative and human-based approach to peacemaking, too. Help us out here, Ban Ki-Moon. Please?
But where the heck are you today?

Russian military assessment: New arms race?

Moscow Times today gives us a fascinating article by Simon Saradzhyan analyzing the Russian military’s performance in Georgia in some detail.
Of note there, that among the 171 Russian troops wounded was the general who was leading the entire Russian operation in Georgia, Lieut.-Gen.Anatoly Khrulev, commander of the 58th Army. Saradzhyan reports that 70 Russian troops were killed.
Saradzhyan and the Moscow-based experts whom he quotes give generally high marks to the Georgians for their high level of training and the success they had had integrating hi-tech western systems like drones (UAVs) into their operations. Saradzhyan writes bluntly that

One of his sources, retired army commando Anatoly Tsyganok, said the timing of the original Georgian offensive against South Ossetia was well chosen, since Putin was in Beijing and both President Dmitry Medvedev and the commander of the 58th Army, which is closest to South Ossetia, were on vacation. Indeed, Saradzhyan wrote that former Defense Minister Pavel Grachev had said the outbreak of the conflict represented “a major intelligence failure.” (That, contra the judgment expressed by Stratfor’s chief, that the whole affair had been a very cleverly spring trap laid by the Russians, which Saradzhyan also quotes.)
Saradzhyan describes the original Georgian offensive and the response of the Russian forces thus:

The Russians also, almost immediately, opened a second front in Abkhazia.
Saradzhyan writes:

The above account is consistent with either the intel failure or the “cunningly laid trap” narrative. If the latter, the trap may well have involved luring Saak into launching his attack by demonstrably having both Putin and Medvedev be away from their desks together. It woukd also indicate a willingness to take a non-trivial number of casualties– among both civilians and troops– at the beginning of the war. But hey, compared with the levels of casualties the Red Army took during the “Great Patriotic War”, these casualties could well be seen by Russia’s leaders as extremely low indeed.
In the account of the war so far that Saradzhyan provides, the Russian ground forces and elite and commando forces performed well, but serious deficiencies were revealed in the performance of both the air force and military intelligence.
He writes:

It is pretty evident that Russia’s very own military-industrial complex will try to use the results of this war to argue for a much more sizeable chunk of the country’s budget than it has been getting.
Saradzhyan writes:

Just one quick last note here. The Soviet military used to produce– and publish in Russian– some pretty objective and useful after-action assessments of various military engagements in which they or they allies had been involved. (Though they would usually attribute any negative judgments they expressed about the quality of Soviet arms or operations to those ever-handy “foreign sources.”) Today’s Moscow Times is not an “official” newspaper in the same sense the old Soviet papers were… But I’m pretty sure that many decisionmakers in Moscow would read an article like this one in it with considerable interest. I wonder whether the fact that it’s in English, and therefore not likely to be read by the great mass of Russian citizens, gives them more freedom to write about potentially touchy subjects like military deficiencies?
But anyway, from what Saradzhyan writes, it seems pretty clear that the Georgian war will have given a boost to the military-industrial complex’s lobbying power in Moscow– just as it almost certainly has done in Washington.
We do still have time to stop this new arms race in the field of hi-tech “conventional” weapons before it gets any further underway… But we need to start the worldwide campaign to do this now, rather than just letting all these arms manufacturers and their hired hands drive the agenda while the rest of us aren’t looking.
There are many better ways to resolve thorny conflicts than through war and killing. Let’s all try to be smart enough to understand that, and to start a huge global shift toward outlawing war and strengthening the nonviolent means of conflict resolution.

And now for a little audio

… of me discussing the MSM’s coverage of the Georgian crisis, over at FAIR’s ‘Counterspin’ radio yesterday.

Yglesias nails McCain

Think Progress and Matt Yglesias’s blog, now also over at the Center for American Progress, are emerging as two of the most thought-provoking blogs on foreign policy decisionmaking in Washington.
Today, Yglesias absolutely nails the irresponsible and dangerously escalatory nature of John McCain’s rhetoric over the Georgia crisis.
He notes that McCain has described the Georgia-Russia war the “first serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War” and joins with those (including Think Progress’s Satyam) who have pointed out that, erm, just a few other crises much graver than that in Georgia have occurred since 1991.
Matt adds:

the interesting thing is the confusion in terms of high-level concepts.

a near-constant hysteria about threat levels and a pathological inability to set priorities.

Holed it in one, Matt.
I particularly liked the “pathological” there, though perhaps “pathogenic” would also be a good description. Because this “gadfly” quality of McCain’s, that apparently does prevent him from setting clear priorities in global affairs, would cause considerable harm to Americans and the other 95% of the world’s people if he got elected President… Especially when allied to his longstanding tendency to see enormous threats wherever he looks. (We could call this latter condition “phobiaphilia.” Of course, the entire military-industrial-‘contractor’ complex depends on it.)

Sarkozy’s ceasefire, Georgia’s future

The NYT was able to use its people’s good relations with the Georgian government to get hold of the text of the ceasefire agreement that Sarkozy got the Russians to agree to at 2 a.m. Wednesday. Here it is, in PDF, with the French original bearing handwritten notes representing the Georgian side’s requests for further revisions, which according to this accompanying story by Andrew Kramer Russia had not accepted..
According to Kramer, when Sarkozy made his first stop in Tbilisi earlier this week he and the Georgians agreed to the first four four of the six points listed there. He then went to Moscow, where Putin (and Medvedev?) insisted on adding the last two points. So the six-point version without the phrases added in parentheses is what Moscow agreed to. And then, during Wednesday, yesterday, the Russians used the provision in Point 5 that says, “While awaiting an international mechanism, Russian peacekeeping forces will implement additional security measures” to advance further into Georgia, go into the military bases the Georgian forces had abandoned there, to confiscate all the weapons etc.
In the interest of assuring “security”, of course.
Since some of these bases had been built to strict NATO specifications, I imagine the Russians were also extremely interested in many of the things they found there, including computers, security systems, and so on.
But this provision about being able to implement “additional security measures” seems to give them very wide latitude to rush around wherever they please inside Georgia and to suppress any forces there that might oppose them.
(The Russians take as given that all the troops they have in Georgia are “peacekeeping forces.” Just another really horrible example– like the west’s much favored “humanitarian intervention”, or the idea of US troops as “liberators” in Iraq– of the misuse of eirenic language to euphemize what are obviously extremely coercive actions backed up by brute force.)
My reading of Moscow’s decisionmakers is that they most likely won’t, in fact, use the permission that Point Five might, by some readings, appear to give them to take over Tbilisi or other parts of Georgia. But they almost certainly will use their presence inside Georgia to extract the very best political terms they can from Tbilisi.
Charles Krauthammer, in his belligerent column today, warned against the “Finlandization” that he identified as being Russia’s goal in Georgia.
“Finlandization” is the term to describe the arrangement that tiny Finland worked out with Stalin’s Russia in 1947. It gave the Finns broad autonomy (or, a form of bounded “sovereignty”) over its conduct of the entire gamut of domestic affairs, while the Finns agreed that Moscow could exercise a virtual veto over its conduct of foreign affairs.
Wikipedia tells us that,

After the Paris Peace Treaty of 1947, Finland succeeded in retaining democracy and parliamentarism, despite the heavy political pressure on Finland’s foreign and internal affairs by the Soviet Union. Finland’s foreign relations were guided by the doctrine formulated by Juho Kusti Paasikivi, emphasizing the necessity to maintain a good and trusting relationship with the Soviet Union. To this end, Finland signed an Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union in April 1948. Under this pact, Finland was obliged to resist armed attacks by “Germany or its allies” against Finland, or against the Soviet Union through Finland, and, if necessary, ask for Soviet military aid to do so. At the same time, the agreement recognized Finland’s desire to remain outside great power conflicts, allowing the country to adopt a policy of neutrality during the Cold War. As a consequence, Finland did not participate in the Marshall Plan, and took neutral positions on Soviet overseas initiatives. By keeping very cool relations to NATO, and to western military powers in general, Finland could fend off Soviet preludes for affiliation to the Warsaw Pact…

In US public discourse, Finlandization is generally seen as a form of humiliating appeasement, and something to be avoided at even a very high cost. (Strange, then, that these same westerners have consistently been urging the Palestinians to accept a deal from Israel that gives them terms considerably less favorable than what Finland won from Moscow?)
Within Finland itself, the period of Finlandization is viewed with considerably more nuance than in the US. I’d like to suggest that in Georgia, some arrangement like the one that gave Finns such broad rights of local self-governance– under which they kept their country out of both the Warsaw Pact and NATO, used the revenues that they saved by not having to maintain large armies to make considerable advances in their socioeconomic and educational status, and used their neutral diplomatic status to host important east-west gatherings like the 1974 Helsinki Conference– might be considerably better for the country’s people(s) than a descent into further war?
… Anyway, the diplomacy over these issues has still only barely started. First, let’s hope the ceasefire holds.

Georgia crisis and the shifting global balance

Another great post from Bernhard of Moon of Alabama on the Georgian crisis, today.
What Bernhard really “gets” about this crisis is the degree to which it reveals the extreme constraints on Washington’s ability to exercise freedom of action– including military action– in parts of the world where, until recently, it felt quite confident of acting freely. The constraints being, as I’ve noted previously, both logistical and political (in terms of the balance of power in world politics, not– at this point– the balance within the US.)
From this perspective, the serried ranks of rightwing commentators who are published so widely in the US MSM suddenly look like (possibly quaint) dinosaurs as they bark out their calls for more “robust” US action against the Russian bear… Max Boot, Richard Holbrooke, and of course– Charles Krauthammer.
I was going to write a quick post here about Krauthammer’s NYT column today. But Bernhard’s commentary on it is even better than what I was going to write. Krauthammer had suggested some “stern”, but still only diplomatic, actions that Washington should take in an attempt to “punish” Moscow. Bernhard pointed out that Moscow has many more potent means of “punishing” the west, should it choose to use them. (Which I highly doubt it does.)
Then, Krauthammer’s “zinger” is a suggestion that Bush send Putin a copy of the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War”– “to remind Vlad of our capacity to make Russia bleed.”
But as Bernhard writes:

Putin while watching “Charlie Wilson’s War” might indeed get the idea that an occupation force in Afghanistan can be beaten and dislodged by supplying the Taliban with money and anti-air missiles. He may even thank Krauthammer for that fabulous idea.

The fact that Krauthammer had presumably not even thought of this possible consequence of his “suggestion” being put into operation is very revelatory. It reveals, to me, the depth of the guy’s extreme, US-centric self-referentiality and his inability even to imagine that someone else might interpret the world in ways different from him. (So what else is new?)
… But the main aim in all this should certainly not be to urge consideration or use of further risky and escalatory measures. Heck, Saakashvili’s performace last week should stand as a powerful object-lesson against anyone doing that! The aim should be to point once again– since it does still seem needed– to the interdependence of all the world’s peoples, including of all the world’s “big powers,” in the current era.
That’s a lesson that many citizens of the US need to understand a lot more clearly.
Actually, probably most of them do have a fairly strong understanding of it. But they are certainly not helped in their understanding by the wide dissemination given to the views of all those US-uber-alles dinosaurs who still dominate most of the country’s public discourse.
I think we need to underline a few distinctive lessons and principles:

cannot be resolved through force

“Nation-building”– some quick thoughts

I’ve just been invited to a talk next week at the New America Foundation titled “Does Nation-Building Have a Future? Lessons from Afghanistan.” The presenter is James Dobbins, who seems to have a pretty “realist” and well-informed view of such matters.
But it got me to thinking about this whole concept of “nation-building”, as it is used by so many earnest western policy people with regard to disordered countries in the Third World.
Can a nation, as such, actually be built? Even more important: Can it ever be “built” by outsiders?
I’m dubious in the extreme.
A “nation”, as such, can surely only ever come into being through the actions– more or less voluntary– of its citizens.
Does South Africa constitute a single discernible “nation”? Does Spain? Does Catalunya? Does Belgium?
All fascinating questions. Equally fascinating, the whole history of what the old Arab nationalists would have called “qita’iya” (sectionalism) within the Arab world… That is, the emergence over time of a distinctively “Jordanian”, or “Lebanese”, or “Qatari” view of national self-identification.
It strikes me that what outsiders can and do have an effect on in many of these cases is the establishment of state structures, with identified geographic boundaries between them… and then, if these states succeed at delivering basic services to their people, they acquire or increase their level of endogenous legitimacy, and thereby, something like a “national sensitivity” starts to take root.
Among the citizens concerned… which is the important point here.
In other words, contrary to the way many westerners talk about these matters, the state in many important ways predates and incubates the “nation”. Benedict Anderson argued much this same point in his work on “Imagined Communities.”
And actually the state’s capabilities, including its efficiency in delivering basic services (including crucially, public security) and its ability to provide predictable regulation for economic life, are often much more important to the wellbeing– and even survival– of its citizens than any sense of “nationalism”, which operates at a much more abstract level of human experience. But states never are and never can be, culturally neutral. They always have a cultural content, as manifested in the languages accepted as “official”, the calendar of work- and rest-days, and so on. This cultural content can be either “ethno-national” in content (as with language policies), or religious (as with most work-day calendars), or, more usually, both.
So religion can often be as important a determinant of the cultural content of a country as ethnicity. States are not necessarily defined in ethnic (or “national”) terms… Though as we have seen in the cases of Israel and Pakistan, where a state is formed on explicitly religious lines, that religion acquires within that state much of the character of a “nationality.” Here again, we see that the state predates the “nation.”
So back to the question posed by Dobbins. Shouldn’t outsiders be looking at the question of our countries’ support for effective state-building in Afghanistan or other disordered countries, rather than “nation”-building?
I guess another reason I feel uneasy with the concept of nation-building is that it seems such an extremely socially and psychologically intrusive thing to do. Outsiders would essentially be messing with the way people self-identify and feel. That’s no business of outsiders! But for the people(s) of Afghanistan– okay, definitely more than one “people” there– establishing a basically effective system of country-wide governance is certainly a strong and common interest. I’d call that state-building rather than nation-building.
And if the help of outsiders is indeed needed (as it seems probably to be), there is no reason to think the US of A– whose “national culture” contains a strong strain of disdain for the idea of government as such– is particularly well qualified to lead this effort…

Perriello and Goode in Charlottesville

Today, the two candidates for Virginia’s 5th Congressional District had their first sustained public exchange of views. I made a point of going along to the forum, which was held in the large, nicely funded Senior Center just north of Charlottesville. And I was confirmed in my judgment that our Republican incumbent, Virgil Goode, is a dangerous, mean-spirited man who needs to be defeated. But I also came away with some questions about the approach being followed by the Democratic challenger, 34-year-old Tom Perriello.
Here are the main things I noted at the 90-minute forum:

not

Goode, quite understandably, didn’t make many mentions of Bush at all. (And when he was asked about the tensions with Iran, he seemed eager to distance himself from Bush. He said he thought the President should make a point of having broad consultation before imposing any blockade on Iran, and should not pursue a “go-it-alone” policy. H’mm. I wish he’d fought for that same position during the build-up to the war on Iraq, too.,)
But for his part, Perriello wasn’t trying to position himself as running against the Bush legacy, either. I would have thought that in most of the Fifth District, which stretches from Charlottesville a long way south to the state line with North Carolina, and which includes numerous very economically depressed communities, running against the Bush legacy would have been an attractive thing to do… As would be noting that Goode has voted almost in lockstep with Bush on virtually every issue… As would noting the truly massive amounts of taxpayers’ money that Bush has shoveled into the horrendously wrong-headed invasion and occupation of Iraq. But Perriello made almost no mention of any of these things. And get this: where he did refer to the failed legacy of Bush, he nearly always twinned this by referring to an equally failed legacy of Pres. Clinton, as well.
I found that stunning. I do, certainly, have many criticisms of what Clinton did during his eight years in office. But to put those failures on a par with Bush’s failures, as Tom did? That boggles both logic and the imagination.
Thus, for example, he said nothing about the fact that Clinton had balanced the budget and was poised to start bringing down the national debt– until Bush came along and with his completely unfunded wars plunged the country back into deep deficits again.

2. The readiness that Goode showed to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment as part of his campaign.

He made the quite unsubstantiated claim that illegal immigrants are responsible for a big part of the health-care crisis in this country and argued for their summary deportation, the building of a huge wall system all along the border with Mexico, and an end to the phenomenon of “anchor babies.” Not clear how he proposed dealing with these squealing bundles of joy. Quite clear: the mean-spiritedness with which he showed himself ready to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment for his own political gain.

3. The degree to which Perriello was positioning himself as a certain kind of a “post-partisan” politician.

It wasn’t just those unfair references he made to the Clinton legacy, it was also the whole (extremely long-drawn-out) self-narrative that he presented. He described himself as belonging to– or “representing”? not clear– the second generation after the cohort that he and many Americans have taken to calling, in somewhat maudlin fashion, the “Greatest Generation”. (What Jim Crow?) So he talked quite a bit about his grandparents and their sterling qualities… And then, he said that many members of the next generation after theirs– he didn’t get personal about his parents here– had had a quite wrongheaded belief in the power of government to solve social and economic ills.
I found that critique outrageous. There was nothing there about the value of the civil rights movement– no mention of the civil rights movement, at all! That, here in Central Virginia, remember. Nothing about Medicare and Social Security– even though there in the Senior Center you had a clear majority of attendees at the forum who were the lucky beneficiaries of Medicare. Nothing about Head Start or any of the other great social programs of the 1960s, the era of belief in the possibility of a “Great Society.”
And then, he said, along came his generation, which did not believe that government could solve all the country’s problems but instead sought to make a difference through private entrepreneurship and work in non-profit organizations. (I’d bet that most of Tom’s income since he graduated Yale Law School in 2001 has come from inter-governmental or governmental funds, one way or another?)
He never did explain to my satisfaction how it was he made the transition from not believing that government has a significant role in solving social problems to thinking that he, personally, should run for political office. But evidently, that transition got made.
Tom’s positioning of himself as “post-partisan” in the way that he did made me distinctly uneasy. Not only because he really seemed not to have thought very deeply about many of those issues there, but also because I’d be very worried if Barack Obama shared this particular version of post-partisanship.
How can a person just blow off the whole experience of the Great Society– and also, by implication, the New Deal before that– and expect to have something useful to propose regarding the mounting social and economic difficulties this country faces? Does Tom Perriello think they can all be addressed through the work of private entrepreneurs and non-profit organizations? That would be a very dangerous position to hold, indeed.
Tom’s version of post-partisanship also seemed, at some points, to be related to a slightly vacuous self-referentiality. Especially in his opening comments, which were all about him and his place in his “three generation” scheme. Yes, he did make a passing reference there to having “a seven-point plan” for dealing with the country’s woes– but he never once told us what those seven points were! Ah, maybe he should have sent us to this page, on his campaign website.
Well, in the lengthy Q&A session, he was a lot better, and he generally gave answers that were sensible and thoughtful…. though he did get a little bellicose in talking about the need to “win America’s wars.”
Also of note in the forum: Both candidates made a number of references to the need to achieve “energy independence”, and to the dangers of “borrowing from the Chinese.” Two misleading memes there? Both also indicated some opposition to NAFTA.
Goode positioned himself as extremely anti-taxation (as well as anti-immigrant). At one point, right at the end, he made the outrageous claim that Obama “wants to send $845 billion” of US revenues to low-income countries.
Excuse me?
But Goode also, intriguingly, seemed to be predicting (or threatening?) that Obama would win the presidential race, when he used the argument that Virginians would benefit from having a strong Republican representation in congress to keep Obama in check.
I found the whole forum fascinating, though a little bit depressing. (Goode’s diatribes against immigrants got a disturbing amount of applause from the crowd. This, despite our city’s reputation as being a huge blob of liberals stuck at one end of a socially conservative district.) Still, there is something really important about having a constituency-based electoral system, where the people who represent you in the legislature have to come back to their districts each time there’s an election and stand face-to-face with their constituents. The political “representation” involved just seems so much more direct in this system than in a broad, nationwide p.r. system.
Anyway, if Tom Perriello reads this, I hope he (you) takes my remarks as an invitation to further discussion on some of these issues. I know that back in October, I also criticized some aspects of Tom’s “post-partisanship”. After that, I had a good, 40-minute discussion with him in the home of a neighbor. But I’m still concerned about his eagerness to criticize the work of earlier “generations” of Democrats.
Here’s a suggestion. Wouldn’t a stronger and more principled way to be “post-partisan” be to express appreciation of the work of some prominent members of the other party– as Obama has, with Chuck Hagel and even with some of his references to Ronald Reagan– rather than to feel you have to beat up on earlier “generations” of people from your own party?
Actually, I think that’s one key difference between Perriello’s version of post-partisanship and Barack Obama’s. That, and the fact that Obama seems to have a much more textured, informed, and realistic view of the role of (good) government in society. That view perhaps derived in large part from the direct, hands-on experience Obama gained working as a community organizer for low-income and other marginalized communities in Chicago, in his 20s.
Perriello has had only a little experience of doing work comparable to that– and most of that was in the distinctly “bwana-ish” situation of working in western-dominated institutions in West Africa and Afghanistan. But even in those situations, does he honestly think the dire social ills he witnessed could be solved just by private entrepreneurs and non-profits– and without the peoples of those countries finding a way to resolve their countries’ very deep-seated problems of governance? So far, he hasn’t given us any indication he has thought deeply about those issues, at all…

Georgia: More grandstanding?

If the situation in Georgia weren’t so tragic, it would be pretty amusing to see George W. Bush now posing as the guardian and gatekeeper of international legitimacy. In his statement in the Rose Garden today, he prissily lectured the Russians that,

Russia has sought to integrate into the diplomatic, political, economic, and security structures of the 21st century. The United States has supported those efforts. Now Russia is putting its aspirations at risk by taking actions in Georgia that are inconsistent with the principles of those institutions. To begin to repair the damage to its relations with the United States, Europe, and other nations, and to begin restoring its place in the world, Russia must keep its word and act to end this crisis…

All of which would have a lot more force if Bush had positioned himself over the previous 7.5 years as a staunch respecter and defender of the world’s multilateral institutions and their key organizing principles…
As it is, given the extreme constraints at both the logistical and the political levels on the Bush administration’s ability to respond militarily to Russia’s undoubted excesses in Georgia, all Washington is able to do is organize some airlifts of humanitarian supplies into Georgia.
As for Georgia’s intemperate president, Mikheil Saakashvili, he briefly claimed today that this airlift meant that the US would be taking over his country’s ports and airports. Yesterday, he had told CNN that the Russians were about to encircle his his capital. He said (once again) that the whole fate of world democracy was imperiled in his country, while he also blamed “the west” for letting his countrymen down.
Perhaps all those attempts at moral blackmail were intended to cover up for his own extreme lack of forethought in having provoked the Russian response with his military assault on South Ossetia last week?
In the event, little of Saak’s blackmail worked. The Pentagon was quick to “shoot down” the suggestion its forces were about to take over Georgia’s ports and airports. The the airlift to Tbilisi is being described as “continuous and robust”– but it will also apparently be strictly limited to humanitarian supplies. (I note that many items useful in humanitarian relief ops are also dual-use as basic military items; but at a certain level of military materiel, including all forms of weaponry and ammunition, these items have no reasonable “humanitarian” purpose.)
And while we’re looking at people seeking to use the present crisis for purposes of political grandstanding, top of that list must be Sen. John McCain, who is reportedly despatching two of his key advisers, Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, to Georgia.
I find this outrageous. The foreign policy of the country is supposed to be run by the President, and it can only considerably complicate the delicate task Bush faces in doing this if either of the candidates seems to be running his own foreign policy separate from that of the president.
Bush should rein in McCain and his Senatorial wingmen, in no uncertain terms.
(Imagine the uproar if Obama announced that her was sending his own personal envoys to Georgia to deal with the situation there!)
It is also, of course, extremely relevant that McCain’s key foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunman was until very recently a paid lobbyist for the Georgian president.
Another question: Though Lieberman and Graham are working as high-level advisers to the McCain campaign, they are also members of the US Senate in their own right. So if they do travel to Georgia in the days ahead, will they do so as Senators or as McCain campaign people?
It is all so very murky that they would do a lot better just not to go.