Category: US foreign policy

So now, according to this
AP report from Nick Wadhams at the UN, the Bush administration
might be readying itself yet again to veto a Security Council
resolution that criticises a dramatic Israeli escalation of violence
against its neighbors…

We can just imagine how that is going to affect public views of the US
in the 95% of countries whose people don’t automatically kowtow to
every whim  from the Israeli government…  Especially, of
course, among people in the Muslim world with which the US is now so
closely entangled.  (And guess what?  Muslims are people with
feelings and sensibilities, including a sense of group solidarity– and
the right to have such feelings– just as much as anyone else is. 
Is this such a hard concept to understand?)

Wadhams writes:

Acting on behalf of Arab nations, Qatar
circulated a draft U.N. Security Council resolution Thursday demanding
Israel end its offensive in the Gaza Strip and release the Palestinian
officials it has arrested.

The
draft faced immediate opposition from the United States and France,
which called it unbalanced in its criticism of Israel. The document
does not condemn the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian
militants and makes no mention of Palestinian rocket attacks on
southern Israel this week.

France’s ambassador said he would offer
changes, but U.S. Ambassador
John Bolton suggested that Washington opposed the resolution entirely.

That raised the possibility that the
United States, as a permanent
member of the Security Council, would veto it. It has done so in the
past when it believed resolutions condemning Israeli action did not
include criticism of Palestinian actions.

Experts from the 15 Security Council
nations were to meet later in
the day to discuss the draft, but Bolton was not optimistic.

“I’m not sure there are amendments that
we could propose that would
make it into an acceptable resolution,” he said.

Israel launched the offensive last week
in response to the June 25
capture of an Israeli soldier, 19-year-old Cpl. Gilad Shalit.

The resolution calls on Israel to
“scrupulously abide by its
obligations and responsibilities under the Geneva Convention,” and
expresses its “grave concern about the dire humanitarian situation of
the Palestinian people.

It demands that Israel “cease its
aggression against the Palestinian
civilian population” in Gaza, and also demands that Israel withdraw its
forces immediately.

It expresses appreciation for efforts to
find a diplomatic solution
and release all prisoners, including Shalit.

Meanwhile, in Geneva, on Thursday the UN’s new Human Rights Council voted
29-11, with five abstentions, for a resolution that “deplored
Israel’s military operations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip as
breaching international humanitarian law and voted to send a
fact-finding mission to the region.”

That AP report, by Alexander Higgins, noted that,

Continue reading “Bushites poised for anti-Palestinian veto?”

On June 21st, President Bush appeared before the press in Vienna, Austria, during his meeting with EU leaders. The President’s remarks resulted in at least four curious media headlines. The following quotes are from the White House transcript of the event.
1. On Gitmo:

I’d like to end Guantanamo. I’d like it to be over with. One of the things we will do is we’ll send people back to their home countries…. Of course, there’s international pressure not to send them back. But, hopefully, we’ll be able to resolve that when they go back to their own country.
There are some who need to be tried in U.S. courts. They’re cold-blooded killers. They will murder somebody if they’re let out on the street. And yet, we believe there’s a — there ought to be a way forward in a court of law, and I’m waiting for the Supreme Court of the United States to determine the proper venue in which these people can be tried.
So I understand the concerns of… the European leaders and the European people about what Guantanamo says. I also shared with them my deep desire to end this program, but also I assured them that we will — I’m not going to let people out on the street that will do you harm. And so we’re working through the issue.

Interesting, the President apparently has been briefed by someone about “what Guantanamo says.” So if not for the right reasons, he wants to close Gitmo. But he can’t send them back to their homes, because of “international pressure” – e.g., the concerns that they might be treated even worse in the tender care of our “friends” in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Egypt. I’m delighted that the President, for once, seems to give a hoot about international opinion. (but see below, #4)
As for those we must detain for trial, he’s not going to do so until the American Courts tell him how? Say again?He’s trying to share the blame for a policy and public relations disaster of his own making on the Courts? This is rich. Best of all, he won’t hurry the process to close Gitmo because he’s concerned the released may cause our allies harm. How considerate.
2. Elsewhere, the President stated that he “fully understood” that America and Europe had “our differences on Iraq, and I can understand the differences. People have strong opinions on the subject. But what’s past is past, and what’s ahead is a hopeful democracy in the Middle East.”
I remember a day when traditional conservatives routinely would trot out George Santayana’s famous quote about the past. “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”
But for this George, the past is an undiscovered country, one too difficult to even bother fighting anymore – at least before foreign audiences.

Continue reading “Bush on Gitmo, “the past,” and those “absurd” public opinion polls.”

If you stay around Charlottesville long enough, you are vulnerable to catching the Thomas Jefferson “bug.” Happened to me too. As a result, I will be a Jefferson Fellow at Monticello’s International Center for Jefferson Studies this fall, aiming to discern just what “Mr. Jefferson” meant by “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” in the opening sentence of the American Declaration of Independence. More on that in an essay for July 4th.
As such, I may be a tad sensitive to how our political leaders invoke Jeffersonian quotes, images, and presumed legacies for their own purposes. Secretary of State Rice has me especially puzzled. Consider the Jefferson references in her speech on 14 June before the Southern Baptist Convention. Speaking almost of a global American “Manifest Destiny,” the Secretary proclaimed,

If America does not serve great purposes, if we do not rally other nations to fight intolerance and to support peace and to defend freedom, and to help give all hope who suffer oppression, then our world will drift toward tragedy. The strong will do what they please. The weak will suffer most of all and inevitably, sooner or later the threats of our world will strike once again at the very heart of our nation. So together, let us continue on our present course. Let us reaffirm our belief that in the words of Thomas Jefferson “The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time…”

Reportedly, the speech received multiple standing ovations from the enraptured Baptist audience. I too found parts of the speech quite interesting, especially the insights on Secretary Rice’s personal narrative, moving from being raised in a church – literally – to her present leadership role. I can also appreciate her emphasis on the ideal of religious freedom, as we have come to enjoy it – and still fight over it – here in America.
But I suspect the speech will grate on many ears around the world – including Jefferson buffs. While Secretary Rice may well invoke Jefferson to support the view that human freedom and dignity are divinely ordained and intertwined, it is far more of a stretch to imagine what Jefferson would have thought of the self-serving notion that God had somehow uniquely anointed America to spread “freedom” by force and occupation to other nations. No matter how piously couched, the strategy to impose “American exceptionalism” stands sharply in tension with the ideals of human dignity and freedom.
More inconvenient for the Secretary, the very 1774 Jefferson quote she cites about, “The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time;…” was but the first half of a sentence that closed with, “the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them.” Put differently, the American revolution was not just about “freedom;” it was as much, if not more, about “independence” for the new nation to find its own way.
That may be too fine a point for Secretary Rice. After all, at least three times this year, Rice has erroneously referred to Jefferson as author of the American Constitution, including in her January speech introducing her strategy of “transformational diplomacy.” In last week’s Baptist Convention speech, it came up in the following context:

“America will lead the cause of freedom in our world, not because we think ourselves perfect. To the contrary, we cherish democracy and champion its ideals because we know ourselves to be imperfect. With a long history of failures and false starts that testify to our own fallibility, after all, when our Founding Fathers said “We the people”, they didn’t mean me. My ancestors in Mr. Jefferson’s Constitution were three-fifths of a man. And it’s only in my lifetime that America has guaranteed the right to vote for all our citizens. But we have made progress and we are striving toward a more perfect union.”

One wonders if Rice and her 26 year-old speechwriter skipped American History 101. Jefferson of course had little to do with writing the Constitution; he was US Ambassador to France at that time.
Ironically, Jefferson did have a few things to say about the draft American Constitution about which Secretary Rice might not wish to know. Writing on 31 July 1788 to his friend James Madison – the leading hand among many in drafting the Constitution – Ambassador Jefferson was concerned that a Bill of Rights should be adopted quickly. He also specifically objected to what became Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, which forbids Congress from suspending “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus…, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.” Jefferson asked,

“Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions? The parties who may be arrested, may be charged instantly with a well-defined crime; of course, the judge will remand them. If the public safety requires that the government should have a man imprisoned on less probable testimony, in those than in other emergencies, let him be taken and tried, retaken and retried, while the necessity continues, only giving him redress against the government, for damages. Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the suspension of the habeas corpus law, have been worthy of that suspension. They have been either real treason, wherein the parties might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that operation is now become habitual, and the -minds of the nation almost prepared to live under its constant suspension

In her January speech, Secretary Rice waxed rhetorically about what Jefferson would have thought of the Bush Administration’s foreign policies. Indeed.
One wonders what Jefferson would have thought of Guantanamo Bay. Would he have been willing to suspend habeas corpus indefinitely for the mystery detainees? What would he have thought of our politicians, media, and citizenry who so quickly kow-tow to “George III” for fear of being branded terrorist sympathizers should they contend there’s something fundamentally “un-American” (un-Jeffersonian) about holding faceless prisoners captive and without charge on a foreign soil?
Would Jefferson have waited for the Supreme Court to give him a ruling permitting him to shut Guantanamo down? Or might a “decent respect for the opinions of mankind” suggest that a different course of action was urgently needed?

Relevant to what I wrote here a couple of days ago– about the politics of the reaction to Bush’s overture to Iran– the sage, well-informed Israeli journalist Ori Nir has an intriguing piece in today’sNew York Forward titled: Bush Overture To Iran Splits Israel, Neocons. The sub-title there is: “Olmert Asks Groups To Keep Low Profile.” “Groups” there meaning “pro-Israeli groups within the US political system.”
Nir writes:

Neoconservative analysts are blasting the administration, saying that holding talks with the Islamic regime would serve only to embolden it and undermine the anti-fundamentalist opposition in Iran. They argue that America’s ultimate goal should be to change Tehran’s theocratic regime.
… Israeli officials and several influential Jewish groups, meanwhile, have refrained from criticizing the new American approach — which some experts are depicting as the most dramatic foreign policy shift of the Bush presidency — saying that they support more pragmatic ways to block Iran’s apparent dash toward a nuclear weapon. For Israel and Jewish groups — despite Iranian calls for Israel’s destruction — the fundamental goal is not regime change, but to block Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Iam prepared to accept there’s some validity to Nir’s argument that there is some divergence between the longer-term goals of, on the one hand, Israel and its allies, and on the other, many or perhaps most of the neocons.
However, he also signals that there is another (less public) issue at stake in this disagreement, and that is the visibility of the pro-Israeli propaganda effort within the US discourse.
(Hey, have you wondered why the ardent pro-Israeli propagandists “David/Davis” and “Neal” have been so quiet on our comments boards here recently? I assure you it’s not because I’ve banned them. But mainly, they’re just keeping a low profile these days… It almost makes me miss them… Okay, not terrifically much… )
Anyway, here’s what Nir– who’s a good, generally strong-valued reporter– writes on the topic:

The Walt-Mearsheimer paper has triggered an escalating debate on the influence of Israel and Jewish organizations that has spilled over onto the opinion pages of major publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post.
Recently, with such scrutiny mounting, Israeli leaders asked American Jewish organizations to lower their profile on the Iran issue, the Forward has learned.
In one notable example, a delegation of leaders from the American Jewish Congress met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert shortly before returning to the United States. When asked how he thinks Jewish groups should pursue the Iran issue, Olmert reportedly implied that he would prefer a low profile, according to one source familiar with the proceedings.
“We don’t want it to be about Israel,” Olmert is said to have replied, explaining that although Iran’s president focuses his belligerent rhetoric on Israel, both Jerusalem and Washington have an interest in convincing the international community that a nuclear armed Iran would be a menace to the region and to the entire world.

Here’s what Nir wrote about the effectiveness of Olmert’s plea to the(Jewish) pro-Israel lobbyists inside the US:

Israel’s support for Rice [on Iran] and Olmert’s request for Jewish groups to take a lower profile [on Iran] are being well received by many Jewish groups. Already, some Jewish groups had been asking the White House to stop suggesting that American efforts to block Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons are motivated primarily by a desire to protect Israel.

I think I’ve noted here before how pathetically craven and ideologically dependent most of these groups are… and how ready they are, as a result, to shift their positions by 180 degrees the moment their lords and masters in Israel tell ’em too. Why, they make the West European communist parties of the 1930s look like deeply principled, locally rooted rooted organizations in comparison…
Nir again:

Jewish organizations have no interest in becoming “the lobby for war with Iran,” one communal official said.
… [W]hile some Jewish groups are uncomfortable with the administration’s shift on direct talks with Iran, only the right-of-center Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs openly criticized the move.

Oh, antediluvian old JINSA. Don’t you gotta love ’em? (Irony alert!!)
But there you have it, in a nutshell: “Jewish organizations have no interest in becoming ‘the lobby for war with Iran'”, as the anonymous offical of one of the US’s many generously funded and politically very powerful Jewish “community organizations” is quoted there as saying.
You betcha. Because if these Jewish-American organizations become labeled as ‘the lobby for war with Iran’, then what about the explanation for those 2,492 US force members who’ve been killed as a result of the US invasion of Iraq? Let’s please ask no questions in that very sensitive regard!
I should note that there are a number of Jewish-American community organizations that provide good social services to Jewish Americans (who as a result are generally not a particularly needy social group these days), or who work actively in support of social justice issues here in the US, in Israel/Palestine, or elsewhere in the world. However, the general rubric of “Jewish Community Federation” of whatever, which used to be federation of such philanthropic groups, has in many cases been hijacked by the ultra-Zionist, Israel-uber-alles crowd, to the point that it’s sometimes hard these days even to identify the Jewish-American groups that are sincerely working for a world without oppression, and which actually buy to some degree or another into the arguments of the territorial maximalists within Israel… (Here’s one that in my view, does great work on the basis of upholding the equality of all human persons: Brit Tzedek v’shalom.. Let’s hope that my identifying it as such doesn’t give the kiss of death to its fundraising effort.s.. )
Well anyway, big thanks to Ori Nir for his sterling reporting there. And to the Forward, which is a modern-day, English-language version of an old Yiddish-language socialst newspaper in New York, for the support it gives to good reporting like Nir’s.
I just add, a propos of nothing in particular here, that there have been strategic thinkers in Israel who’ve made the argument that Iran’s nuclear program is not such a big deal even if it has military aspects… because basically, if Israel and Iran both end up with nuclear weapons (or the capability for ’em), then that could even bring a degree of strategic stability to the Middle East…
But I gess that’s an entirely different area of discussion.

My longish article on the broader implications of the US’s still-unfolding strategic defeat in Iraq is up on the Salon.com website today. The title and sub-title that the editors gave it were:

The incredible shrinking U.S.
Despite the death of Zarqawi, Bush’s huge gamble in Iraq has failed. As a result, the U.S. is weaker everywhere in the world — and that’s not all bad.

(If you’re not a “Salon Premium” member or whatever, you have to sit through a short advertisement before you can read the whole text there.)
Luckily, I did get the chance yesterday to work with my editor to put in a new lead mentioning the Zarqawi killing and the Iraqi PM’s completion of his cabinet. My broader judgment regarding the failure of the Bushites’ “big roll of the dice” in Iraq still stands, though.
The editor, Gary Kamiya, made me work hard on the piece! He pushed me to address several areas of the topic that I hadn’t done in my first draft… so the word length came in ways over the 2,000 words he’d originally suggested. But the points he made were very intelligent ones; I actually enjoyed working with him… and more to the point I like the way the piece came out in the end.
Talking of ends, here’s how the piece concludes:

I realize there are many Americans who are not as ready as I am to welcome the prospect of a diminishment (or, as I would say, a rectification) of the disproportionate amount of power our nation has been able to wield in world affairs over the past 60 years. Many Americans today — like many British or French citizens 80 years ago — think it is somehow “natural” that their nation intervene in the doings of other nations around the world and act as the crucial arbiter in international affairs. (And yes, throughout history nearly all such interventions have always come dressed in “salvationist” garb: Very few nations ever knowingly undertake a war or any other foreign intervention that its people clearly understand to be unjust at the time. If such understanding comes at all, it does so only later.)
Why does U.S. hegemonism in the world seem “natural” to so many Americans? Plumbing the roots of that particular wrinkle on the broader conceit of American exceptionalism would take a long time! Suffice it to note here that after 9/11 the attacks of that day laid their own potent overlay of shock, fear and anger onto the bedrock of those older American attitudes. For roughly 30 months after 9/11, feelings of vengefulness, and of the righteousness of American anger (and of all the actions that flowed therefrom), seemed still to dominate the consciousness of a broad political elite in the U.S. It was only after the revelations of Abu Ghraib in April 2004 that the country’s mainstream discourse on the war, and on what their vengefulness had caused the U.S. to become, became more self-aware and open to self-criticism.
Today, a clear majority of Americans judge that invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do. A similarly clear majority say the administration should set a timetable for withdrawal. This willingness to challenge the Bush people’s spin on the situation in Iraq is a welcome sign of increased public understanding, but it does not signal any automatic readiness to challenge the principle of U.S. exceptionalism more broadly. Grappling with that issue is, I believe, our next great challenge as a citizenry; and it is a challenge that the events of the next few years will almost certainly force us to confront head-on.

So here’s the rough history of this piece. Exactly two weeks ago today I pitched four story ideas to Gary: three of them were on topics related to the failure of the Bushite project in Iraq. It took him almost a week to get back to me, to tell me this was the one he wanted to run with. Meantime, I’d used some of the material from the suggested topic “How will we remember this war?” in this Memorial Day post here at JWN.
Last weekend and through to early Tuesday morning I worked hard on my first draft. (I was also doing a bunch of other important things in that time… It felt extremely fraught.) Then Gary and I went to and fro on it a bit, and it finally got up onto the site early this morning.
Today I need to work on the page proofs on my Africa book. Print publishing feels very arduous indeed these days. But worth it, I think.