Category: US foreign policy

So after his “surprise” press conference with the MSM people Wednesday morning, the Prez had a second gathering, with reps of the avowedly rightwing media, in the afternoon.
Dan Froomkin of washingtonpost.com wrote about that one, too.
Froomking writes that tellingly, while meeting with people closer to being his partisan soul-mates, “Bush made it clear to this group of supporters that ‘stay the course’ remains his strategy.”
So much for the President’s recent avowals– stridently backed up by spokesman Tony Snow(job)– that his mantra was no longer “stay the course”, and indeed it had been ages since that had ever been his mantra… As I noted here last week: “The President ‘at war’ (with himself.) Not a reassuring sight.”
Here’s the longer excerpt from Froomkin:

Continue reading “The ‘real’ George Bush?”

I’m very happy to publish the following commentary from Reidar Visser. Please disseminate it widely. Be aware that all material published on JWN is published under a Creative Commons license, and be aware of what that entails.
There Is No Biden Plan
by Reidar Visser, October 26, 2006

Reidar Visser is the author of Basra, the Failed Gulf State and editor of the Iraq website http://historiae.org.

To an outsider with no particular affection for the foreign policies of either US political party, the chief interest of the mid-term elections lies in their ramifications for the rest of the world. One of the most striking features of current Iraq discussion in the United States is that much of what is being said is based on the false premise that there exists a radical “third way” territorial solution to the Iraq crisis: a tripartite division of the country.
This option, often referred to as the “plan” of Senator Joseph Biden, would involve active American policy steps to bring about a three-way separation of Iraq’s ethno-religious communities – a Kurdish north, a Sunni Arab west, and a Shiite Arab center–south. These entities would form part of a loose confederation, with sharing of oil revenues as the glue that binds the system together. The senator has repeatedly stressed the supposed “constitutionality” of his plan.
The published accounts of this “Biden plan” reveal, however, that it violates the Iraqi constitution in two significant ways. Back in May, Sen. Biden boldly declared that he wanted the establishment of “one Iraq with three regions”. The problem here is that whereas the Iraqi constitution does establish federalism as a general principle of government for Iraq, it leaves the demarcation of any new federal units outside Kurdistan to the Iraqi people – who are empowered to create federal entities “from below”, through referendums. This means that no outsider can dictate any particular future Iraqi state structure – it might be two federal entities, five, or fifteen, or for that matter a unitary rump Iraq federated with a decentralized Kurdistan, all depending on the choice of the Iraqi people.
More recently, Biden seems to have realized this deficiency in his plan, and last month he admitted that “the exact number [of federal states] should be left to the constitution”. Still, he offered the “guess” that there would be three entities. But subtract the guesswork, and the bottom falls out of the plan.
Biden’s second point, oil distribution, is based on his first: he wants to see an agreement on sharing of oil revenues between his three imagined Iraqi sub-communities; presumably this would be inserted in the constitution through the planned revision process. But again, this is in dissonance with the Iraqi legal framework. The revision of the constitution is to be completed before October 2007, whereas no federalization is supposed to take place before April 2008. Hence, the only oil revenue settlement that would be politically neutral and could avoid pre-empting any subsequent popular initiatives on federal entities would be one based on the existing 18 governorates.
The remaining points in Biden’s plan are of less interest, either because they already enjoy cross-party support, or because they will be of limited significance to achieving political stability. “More Aid, But Tied to the Protection of Minority and Women Rights” is all fine, but frankly this is not something that will make or break the Iraqi reconciliation process. “Engage Iraq’s Neighbors” is a good point, but one that already enjoys increasing support among realist Republicans and, reportedly, in the State Department. That leaves us with the final item on Biden’s agenda – withdrawal of US forces – which in turn means that we are back to where we started: if Biden wishes to adhere to the Iraqi constitution, then he simply does not have a policy alternative that is truly distinctive. It considerably weakens the whole American debate on Iraq – and that of the Democratic Party in particular – if an illusory and spurious policy proposal like Biden’s is allowed to remain dominant.
But despite these contradictions, Biden continues his campaign, perhaps believing he can goad the Iraqis into adopting his own ideas. That too is problematic. In today’s Iraq, there exists far more diversity than the simplistic three-community model would suggest, but through his black-and-white discourse Biden bulldozes this pluralism and chases the Iraqis further into the mental prisons of sectarianism. For instance, within the Shiite community singled out by Biden for separate treatment, some voices in fact completely reject the idea of federal subdivisions among the Arabs of Iraq, whereas others are calling for several non-sectarian sub-entities among the Shiites instead of a single unit. (Does the senator know that a single governorate – Basra – holds more than 80% of what he describes as “Shiite” oil reserves?) Why are these groups not to be given a democratic hearing in the new Iraq? Why should they be forced to accepting an ethno-religious formula that could easily produce ethno-religious dictatorships if internal tensions within the federal units (say, Sadrists versus SCIRI) are ignored? It is alarming that on questions like these, people like Sen. Biden should be allowed to muddle Democratic Party discourse (and the US debate in general) by adopting an approach that was fashionable in the times immediately after the First World War but in recent years has been the preserve of neo-conservative fringe writers.
And sometimes there is an even more assertive Biden, one that does not restrict himself to “guessing” the outcome of the Iraqi federalization process. A few days ago, an angry voice could be heard on television: “Like heck we can’t tell the Iraqis what to do.” This was Joseph Biden, the Democratic senator! Yes, it is probably true that, if the United States seriously wishes to enforce a division of Iraq – by circumventing the Iraqi constitution – it has the military capability to do so. But it would be a tragic outcome of the supposed democratization of Iraq if Washington should choose to exit by neo-imperialistically imposing a particular state structure on the country. It would alienate huge sections of the Iraqi population. It would be a gross provocation to most of Iraq’s neighbors, who view a tripartite federation as a particularly brittle state structure and a powder keg in terms of potential regional instability. And it would be the ultimate gift to al-Qaida – who would finally get the manifest evidence they have been craving in order to back up their conspiracy theory of the US as a pro-Zionist force bent on subdividing the Middle East into weak and sectarian statelets. Senator Biden would do well to consider the long-term damage to American interests that would follow from such reactions before he annexes Basra to the Middle Euphrates, merges Diyala and Kut, and rips the heart out of Mosul.

Bush called a “surprise” press conference at short notice this morning. For the WaPo’s Bill Branigan the main story was that Bush said,

… he shares the American public’s dissatisfaction with the situation in Iraq, but he warned against succumbing to “disillusionment” about the U.S. purpose there and expressed confidence in both Iraq’s prime minister and his own defense secretary.

Here’s the official transcript.
(I don’t have time to read the whole thing. I’m about to go to the airport to travel to Amman for a week.)
In addition to having its main newspaper, the WaPo also runs a website called washingtonpost.com that carries most of the deadwood paper’s content and also– slightly confusingly– content from some of the website’s own writers. These latter include the site’s “White House” correspondent Dan Froomkin, who often puts good things up on his pages. Today, for example, he had his own quick account of the Bush press conference and the circumstances in which it was held, along with an excellent compilation of some of the best of the recent political reporting in the big MSM.
And almost immediately after posting that on the site, Froomkin ran a “live online” discussion about current events. He made this really interesting observation there:

Qun. from White Plains, N.Y.: I believe Mr. Bush was quoted earlier this weeks as having said “I never said ‘stay the course'” Why is the press not addressing this aggressively as a glaring example of the president”s knowing and willful distortion of reality?
Dan Froomkin: Oh but they are! With truly surprising vigor! See my columns today, and yesterday , and Monday.
In fact, a keen observer called me just yesterday to see if I could explain the vigor, given the many other similar opportunities that the corps has passed up. I don’t have a firm answer, but in my October 11 column, I wrote about how Bob Woodward’s book, “State of Denial,” had finally convinced establishment Washington that Bush has a serious credibility problem.

This is mind-boggling. Froomkin is simply assuming that the MSM press corps is part of “establishment Washington”– actually, not an unrealistic assumption, in general– and then saying that “establishment Washington” needs to get some kind of permission from Bob Woodward before it asks the tough questions about Bush’s credibility…
Better late than never I guess.
Incidentally, I’ve been reading this latest Woodward book. It has some interesting things in it, to be sure. But the guy’s narrative skills are not particularly good. Indeed, one of the least satisfying aspects of the book is that he just skips over a whole lot of things that he’d written about in his first two– much more laudatory– books. So it’s not a “complete” story at all. What somebody needs to do some day is to go back and put all of his accounts of this period together, into a single account– and also, crucially, to pull out all the glaring dissonances between the kinds of laudatory things he was publishing three or four years ago and the ways he describes almost exactly the same incidents today.
Oh well, the main story these days is still an intriguing one to follow: President Bush and his senior cabinet members struggling to come to terms– somehow!– with the collapse of their massive and very, very harmful project in Iraq… And to do this in a way that will minimize the damage the GOP suffers at the polls November 7.

Well! The WaPo has now finally come to roughly the same position regarding the US presence in Iraq that Juan Cole was espousing in June-July 2005. In a key editorial today, the paper’s august editorial team argued,

PRESIDENT BUSH said this month that he was willing to “change tactics” in Iraq if U.S strategy was not working. We believe the time has come for such a change. The Iraqi coalition government that Mr. Bush has been counting on to forge political compromises and disarm sectarian militias doesn’t seem to have the strength to carry out either mission. A U.S.-led attempt to pacify Baghdad by concentrating forces in the capital has failed, while contributing to a grievous spike in American casualties. Support for the war is rapidly slipping, in the country and in Congress; a congressionally mandated commission is likely to recommend a new course sometime after next month’s election. Mr. Bush would be wise to act sooner than that: The rapidly deteriorating situation in Iraq needs to be addressed urgently…
A revised U.S. strategy must aim to jump-start political accord and militia disarmament. But it must also provide for the possibility that decisive progress will not be achievable soon…
But if, as appears more likely, Iraq’s civil war deepens and spreads, the United States should abandon attempts to pacify Baghdad or other areas with its own forces. It should adopt a strategy of supporting the Iraqi government and army in a long-term effort to win the war… A reserve force of U.S. troops could remain as a guarantor against a military victory by insurgents and as a rapid reaction force that could strike al-Qaeda targets.

The editorial then plainly raises the possibility of failure:

“A change of course won’t necessarily rescue the U.S mission in Iraq.”

It ends with this plaintive (and fairly unrealistic) little bleat: “But there remains a chance the government could gain control over the country. As long as that prospect exists, the United States has a moral obligation and a practical interest to remain in Iraq.”
The clear implication there being, of course, that once it is clear there is no chance that the Iraqi government can “gain control over the country”, then it will be time for the US forces there to head for the exits, fast.
(So why not go straight to a “speedy, complete, orderly, and generous” withdrawal plan such as I have been advocating for some years now? H’mmm.)
But anyway, we do need to recognize the depth and importance of this shift in the WaPo’s position, especially given the intense degree to which the WaPo and its editorial board were cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq throughout 2002 and 2003, and have been supportive of the administration’s general policy there ever since.
And another indication of the current zeitgeist shift: Right opposite the editorial itself we have the latest signed column by Jim Hoagland (who had probably also helped to write the editorial.) Jim had been one of the biggest members of the mainstream commentatoriat beating the drums for the war back in 2002. Now, here’s what he wrote today:

The bloody chaos of Iraq under U.S. occupation is shaking Western governments into sobering reassessments of that conflict and of war itself. More urgently, some of these governments have launched tightly held contingency planning for the consequences of a possible American failure in Iraq.

He wrote of,

the gathering sense at home and abroad that the administration is belatedly engaged in a search for a political-economic exit strategy. Such a strategy would quickly reduce the role of U.S. combat troops in Iraq and gradually increase the economic involvement of other countries, including Iraq’s neighbors.

He gives no clue, of course, as to how you get the “neighbors” to start picking up the economic costs of running Iraq without also giving them a share of the political/diplomatic decisionmaking. But maybe this is the way Hoagie and his friends in the administration might be hoping to “package” a move to involve the neighbors in Iraq-related consultations, for the benefit of a US audience? I doubt that Iran, Syria, and other Iraqi neighbors who have been systematically belittled and in many cases outright opposed by Bush for the past 6 years would be ahappy to participate in this project on quite those terms.
Then, he writes this:

military leaders and diplomats in Western capitals are not waiting for the Baker and U.N.-sponsored efforts to conclude before they assess the mistakes, poor strategy and changing conditions of warfare that have brought U.S. forces face to face with the bitter prospect of having to withdraw, mission unaccomplished…
The need for changes in practice and doctrine was reinforced by Israel’s inconclusive July-August war in Lebanon against Hezbollah, a classic guerrilla force that also possesses a strategic missile arsenal capable of damaging and shutting down entire Israeli cities…

Oh, I have to say that it is fine spectator sport to watch Hoagie squirming as he starts to come to terms with some of these harsh (for him) political and strategic realities.
Then, right under him, we have veteran (paleo-)conservative George Will posing some questions that he thinks Jim Baker’s Iraq “Study” Group ought to be asking the Bushites. The first of them is this:

* What are 140,000 U.S. forces achieving in Iraq that could not be achieved by 40,000?
* If the answer to the first question is “creating Iraqi security forces,” a second question is: Is there an Iraqi government? In “State of Denial,” Bob Woodward quotes Colin Powell, after leaving the administration, telling the president that strengthening Iraq’s military and police forces is crucial but that “if you don’t have a government that you can connect these forces to, then, Mr. President, you’re not building up forces, you’re building up militias.” And making matters worse.

Precisely. I couldn’t have put it better myself.
Will concludes with this:

On Sept. 19 Hamilton said that “the next three months are critical.” On Oct. 5 Sen. John Warner, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said that the next “two or three months” are critical. If only the worsening insurgency were, as the president suggested Wednesday, akin to North Vietnam’s 1968 Tet Offensive. The insurgency is worse: Tet was a military defeat for North Vietnam. [But a political victory… ~HC] The president says the war in Iraq will be “just a comma” in history books, but by Nov. 26, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, with the Study Group’s recommendations due, the comma will have lasted as long as U.S. involvement in World War II.

And so, as the Democrats continue to edge closer and closer to looking able to take one or both houses on Congress on November 7, we should ask, will the Democrats’ policy on Iraq be any better?
A first answer to this would, honestly, have to be “No.”
On that same op-ed page, veteran WaPo political commentator David Broder writes about a conference call that Democratic Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Jack Reed of Rhode Island, both longtime members of the Armed Services Committee, held recently with a number of reporters.
He wrote:

Reed, who has made many trips to Iraq and returned just weeks ago from his most recent visit, described the “very, very difficult situation” he found there. “We have to begin to work toward redeployment without setting a timetable,” he said. “We have to start laying out some red lines for the Iraqis . . . give them some clear goals we want them to achieve.” They need to set plans for disarming militias, conducting elections at the provincial level and spending some of the funds being hoarded in Baghdad on better services for the people, he said.
Implicit in their comments is a belief, based on their firsthand observations, that the current rulers in Baghdad have a different agenda for themselves than the Bush administration’s bland assurances suggest. As Levin put it, “Our only leverage for change is to force the politicians in Iraq to realize we’re not there as their security blanket. When they recognize that reality, they’re more likely to make the necessary compromises on sharing of oil revenues and sharing power. The prospect of losing us as their personal security blanket will focus their minds.”

This is extremely close to where the administration’s current policy is– if not identical with it. Today’s news pages are all full of reports that the Bushites have decided to establish “benchmarks” and whatever for the Maliki government to live up to in Iraq… This is nearly all, at this stage of how bad things are in Iraq, meaningless posturing before the US voters. (And quite likely to backfire badly with Maliki and others who might consider this as a quite unwarranted form of US bullying, not to mention unwarranted intervention in Iraq’s internal affairs…)
Also, at one level, it’s a hilariously misdirected “threat”. “Look here, Maliki, you better do as we tell you, or otherwise we’ll– well, we’ll do just exactly what you, your party, and the vast majority of Iraqis want us to do.”
Monty Python does the governance of Iraq.
But Broder continues with the crux of why these two senior Democratic good ol’ boys are so disappointing:

When the senators were asked if a Democratic majority in the House or Senate would force the issue in Iraq by threatening to cut off funds for the war, they quickly ruled out any such action. Levin said that a simple resolution recommending to the president that he set a date to begin redeployment might do the trick.

Cutting off the funding for the war in Vietnam was, of course, the only way that Congress was able, back in the day, to end the militaristic madness there. And these guys want to “quickly rule out any such action” even before they’ve even come anywhere near any taste of real Congressional power?
Almost beyond belief.
So am I still motivated to help elect this bunch of Democratic Party rascals to office? Yes, I am. The most important thing is still to send a strong anti-war message to the Bushites. After that we can get to work on these lily-livered Democrats– and some Dems, actually, have positions that are far better than those articulated by Levin and Reed.
Plus, if the Democrats get control of even one of the houses of Congress, they can start to win some real form of accountability from the administration by holding authoritative hearings into so many different aspects of the administration’s policy at home and abroad.
What is intensely noticeable to me, meanwhile, is that even in the absence of any decent leadership on the war issue from our so-called “opposition” party here, the zeitgeist in the country has been turning so strongly against the war over the past few weeks.

There’s been some public buzz generated recently by this “Iraq Study Group”, convened by the U.S. Institute of Peace and co-chaired by Bush I’s longtime consigliere and fixer James Baker and veteran Democratic wiseman Lee Hamilton.
Steve Weisman has a pretty good article on the ISG in today’s NYT. The key quote in the deadwood version I just read has for some reason been omitted from the web version. It is this:

The one hallmark of Mr. Baker’s efforts, associates said, is that he would not undertake a project destined to sit on a shelf and be ignored. His modus operandi is to use the Iraq Study Group not so much to “study” the problem as to work out a solution behind the scenes that is acceptable to a broad spectrum of people, most of all the president.

My own best source in the ISG’s entourage agrees with this characterization of its role.
From this point of view, Hamilton’s function as co-chair is more or less– for now– one of window dressing. But of course if the Dems win control of one or both houses of Congress come November 7 then winning bipartisan support for “the Baker plan” will become much, much more important. So any negotiations that go on among the ISG’s members over the content of its final report will have to wait till after the post-election balance of political power is known; and thus, delaying its report till December or January, which has all along been the plan, makes a lot of US-political sense. (Regardless of whether this will prolong or exacerbate the agony of the Iraqis. But colonial/imperial self-referentialism was ever thus…)
Meanwhile, the group’s members are not really “studying” anything at all, but mainly spinning their wheels… But still, even while it’s not doing much of anything right now, the ISG still has– from the President point of view– an important role to play: This is is simply to be there, in a Chance Gardener-ish kind of way, so that when asked searching questions about the unraveling debacle in Iraq, the President can say “I have Mr. Baker and others of the nation’s finest minds working on this problem.”
Meanwhile, though, Baker is also– as it happens– flacking his latest book, “amusingly” titled Work Hard, Study Hard, and Keep out of Politics! No shrinking violet he. He was on the Jon Stewart show the other night– and I have to say he turned in an excellent performance to that tough, Generation Y-ish new York audience. So as he goes around promoting his book he’s been getting asked lots of questions about the ISG, and he’s been throwing out just enough hints to make it seem as though the group’s eventual report might be recommending some “bold” changes.
As Weisman writes:

Mr. Baker has declared that neither Mr. Bush’s “stay the course” message nor what the White House calls the “cut and run” approach of critics offers a way out.
“There are other options other than just those two,” Mr. Baker said recently on National Public Radio while promoting his new book… His group’s proposals, Mr. Baker added, will probably not please the administration or its foes.

What a consummate Washington player the guy is.
—-
By the way, over at the Guardian I see that Julian Borger has also been writing about the ISG (hat-tip to Frank.) Borger also lays out what he describes as “eight options [for Iraq] that Washngton and London are discussing.” My own quick first reaction there is that not all of the options are mutually incompatible. Indeed, No.5 “Iraqi Strongman” (a possible plan to replace PM Maliki with a strongman like former thug Ayad Allawi) actually has no other substantive content of its own and requires one of the other “options” to give it substance. Interesting that that proposal should have been lifted onto the list at all though, really. Part of the Bushites’ on-again-off-again psywar against Maliki, I assume?
But more fundamentally than that, Borger makes no mention of what I see as an absolutely essential antecedent discussion between the two “allies”– the one on the broader strategic issue of how to manage the intense strategic challenges now arising within both Afghanistan and Iraq… Such as I attempted a first assay of here, yesterday.

Maybe I’ve been engaging in unsuspected age-ism all along? I just kind of assumed that everyone else regarded 83-year-old Henry Kissinger, as I did, as an out-of-it, barely articulate old guy whose days of exercizing any real power or influence were long behind him.
So Bob Woodward is now here, in the first exceprt of his new book to be carried by the WaPo (Sunday), telling me that I under-estimated Kissinger’s role completely:

A powerful, largely invisible influence on Bush’s Iraq policy was former secretary of state Kissinger.
“Of the outside people that I talk to in this job,” Vice President Cheney told me in the summer of 2005, “I probably talk to Henry Kissinger more than I talk to anybody else. He just comes by and, I guess at least once a month, Scooter [his then-chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby] and I sit down with him.”
The president also met privately with Kissinger every couple of months, making him the most regular and frequent outside adviser to Bush on foreign affairs.
Kissinger sensed wobbliness everywhere on Iraq, and he increasingly saw it through the prism of the Vietnam War. For Kissinger, the overriding lesson of Vietnam is to stick it out.
In his writing, speeches and private comments, Kissinger claimed that the United States had essentially won the war in 1972, only to lose it because of the weakened resolve of the public and Congress.
In a column in The Washington Post on Aug. 12, 2005, titled “Lessons for an Exit Strategy,” Kissinger wrote, “Victory over the insurgency is the only meaningful exit strategy.”
He delivered the same message directly to Bush, Cheney and Hadley at the White House.
Victory had to be the goal, he told all. Don’t let it happen again. Don’t give an inch, or else the media, the Congress and the American culture of avoiding hardship will walk you back.
He also said that the eventual outcome in Iraq was more important than Vietnam had been. A radical Islamic or Taliban-style government in Iraq would be a model that could challenge the internal stability of the key countries in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Kissinger told Rice that in Vietnam they didn’t have the time, focus, energy or support at home to get the politics in place. That’s why it had collapsed like a house of cards. He urged that the Bush administration get the politics right, both in Iraq and on the home front. Partially withdrawing troops had its own dangers. Even entertaining the idea of withdrawing any troops could create momentum for an exit that was less than victory.
In a meeting with presidential speechwriter Michael Gerson in early September 2005, Kissinger was more explicit: Bush needed to resist the pressure to withdraw American troops. He repeated his axiom that the only meaningful exit strategy was victory.
“The president can’t be talking about troop reductions as a centerpiece,” Kissinger said. “You may want to reduce troops,” but troop reduction should not be the objective. “This is not where you put the emphasis.”
To emphasize his point, he gave Gerson a copy of a memo he had written to President Richard M. Nixon, dated Sept. 10, 1969.
“Withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public; the more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded,” he wrote.
The policy of “Vietnamization,” turning the fight over to the South Vietnamese military, Kissinger wrote, might increase pressure to end the war because the American public wanted a quick resolution. Troop withdrawals would only encourage the enemy. “It will become harder and harder to maintain the morale of those who remain, not to speak of their mothers.”
Two months after Gerson’s meeting, the administration issued a 35-page “National Strategy for Victory in Iraq.” It was right out of the Kissinger playbook. The only meaningful exit strategy would be victory.

There is a little bit in this excerpt about the infighting among top Bush advisors that was featured in the NYT stories about the book Friday and Saturday.
The other notable thing in the WaPo excerpt was the account of a meeting this past March between Centcom commander Jean Abizaid and the courageous Rep. John Murtha, who’s been calling openly for a quick withdrawal from Iraq.
Woodward wrote:

Abizaid was in Washington to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He painted a careful but upbeat picture of the situation in Iraq.
Afterward, he went over to see Rep. John P. Murtha…
“The war in Iraq is not going as advertised,” Murtha had said. “It is a flawed policy wrapped in illusion.”
Now, sitting at the round dark-wood table in the congressman’s office, Abizaid, the one uniformed military commander who had been intimately involved in Iraq from the beginning and who was still at it, indicated he wanted to speak frankly. According to Murtha, Abizaid raised his hand for emphasis, held his thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch from each other and said, “We’re that far apart.”

Woodie doesn’t tell us, of course, what Abizaid plans to do about that…
Anyway, those are the best bits so far.

Last Wednesday, I went to a 90-minute panel discussion at the U.S. Institute
of Peace titled “How to handle Hamas and Hezbollah”.  One of the main
reasons I went was because my old friend and colleague Ziad Abu Amr
was listed as on the panel.  In the end, though, he “appeared” only
via a slightly dysfunctional speakerphone.  The other speakers
were Mark Perry and Alastair Crooke from an organization called
Conflicts Forum , and Fred Hof a smart and experienced guy from Armitage Associates– that’s the private
consulting firm founded a whole back by the high-profile former Under Secretary
of State Rich Armitage.

It was too bad Ziad wasn’t there.  I think he was speaking from his
home in Gaza, and it sounded as though he was up to his ears in the very long-drawn-out,
on-again-off-again negotiations between Abu Mazen and the Hamas leaders.
 Basically, he expressed the hope that the Palestinians could find a
way to put together a National Unity Government, and that the international
community would then find a way to deal with it.  One observatiopn he
made was that Hamas’s brush with the exercize of governmental power in the
PA– brief and strictly limited though it has been– has already been enough
to corrupt what he had previously seen as the “internal discipline” of their
decision-making process.  (This may or may not ba a bit of an exaggeration.
 What is clear to me is that the current circumstances of tight siege
make it very hard for Hamas’s far-flung leadership to be able
to conduct rational internal communications. This no doubt hampers their internal decisionamking considerably.)  He also said,
“Hamas’s relationship with Iran might turn out not to be a strategic
one for them.”  He made a strong pitch for the superior effectiveness
of “local” mediators between Hamas and Fateh, over regional and internatinal
ones.

Next up was Mark Perry of Conflicts Forum.  (Perry is an interesting guy: a former
journo and historian, he has published a number of well-received books about
US history.  Back in 1994, he published
A fire in Zion: The Israeli-Palestinian Search for Peace
.)  He noted that CF had been involved in dialogue with Hamas for the
past 2.5 years.  He said that Hamas had indeed played by the rules of
the electoral game over that period– but that then the US government had
imposed the three additional requirements on it.  “The Hamas people
say to me, ‘If we do everything the Americans ask of us upfront, then what
is there left to negotiate with the Israelis about?'” he said. He added that
the Hamas leaders indicate fairly strongly that they would be prepared to
meet the three conditions at the end of of a negotiation, but not at the beginning.
 “The Damascus leadership of Hamas has said this, too, ” he said. (Check
my own reporting on these questions, from my trip to Gaza, the West Bank,
and Israel earlier this year,
here.)

Continue reading “Dialogue between west and Hamas, Hizbullah?”

Thomas Jefferson, the fourth president of the USA and the principal framer of our Declaration of Independence, is something of a local icon here in Charlottesville, his hometown. Today, my esteemed friend and colleague R.K. Ramazani, a professor emeritus of government and foreign affairs at the University of Virginia (which was founded by TJ) had a very timely op-ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer titled What would Jefferson say about Iraq?
The main points there:

In contrast to Bush, Thomas Jefferson, the intellectual father of America, decried what today are called “wars of choice.” He clearly considered the one war for which he was U.S. commander in chief, the war against the Barbary Pirates, a defensive war. He said he banished “the legitimacy of war to dark ages” and in 1797 said, “I abhor war and view it as the greatest scourge of mankind.” While Jefferson would have seen U.S. military operations in Afghanistan as justified after 9/11, he would not have advocated a so-called preventive attack on Iraq…
Jefferson would have opposed the imposition of democracy on any society by military action for several reasons. He believed that coercion is incompatible with liberty and that a society must undergo an evolutionary process before it will embrace democracy and the liberal values of justice, public education and a free press necessary for it to function. Jefferson would have faulted the Bush administration’s launch of democratization in Iraq without regard to the realities of Iraqi society, in which most people still have higher loyalties to family, religion and tribe than to the nation-state…
Instead, if asked how best to spread democracy, Jefferson would have suggested three alternative and peaceful methods. First among these would be America’s own example of liberal democratic practices. In 1801, he wrote: “A just and solid republican government here will be a standing monument and example for the aim and imitation of people of other countries.”
Second would be effective use of what we now call public diplomacy… He wrote in 1810: “No one more sincerely wishes the spread of information among mankind than I do, and none has greater confidence in its supporting free and good government.”
Third, and most important… he would have advocated expanding American educational initiatives…. In his memorable words: “Enlighten the people generally, and tyranny and oppression of body and mind will vanish like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
And regarding the treatment of prisoners of war, Jefferson would have insisted on upholding the principles of international law in general, and the Geneva Conventions in particular… More than 200 years ago, Jefferson urged that Americans should endeavor “as far as possible to alleviate the inevitable miseries of war by treating captives as humanity and national honor requires.”

Having provided us all with some great insights into how this important Founding Father of US democracy would have viewed the 43rd president’s actions in Iraq today, Ramazani concludes thus:

Jefferson would have been appalled by Bush’s misguided policy in the Middle East as tactically shortsighted, strategically ineffective, and above all, dishonorable. He would have … endorsed the efforts of Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) and other congressional leaders to put the brakes on Bush’s foreign policy and redirect the country, even in these difficult times, to a path that preserves the morals of our founders: duty, justice and national honor.
Otherwise, what are we defending?

Well written!