Niall Ferguson and The Victims of Imperialism

Dylan Matthews raised an important point - one needn’t recourse to Kissinger’s Jewishness or his continued prominence to find a good reason to utterly despise the man. One could simply look at his record. Specifically, Indonesia.

What’s utterly infuriating about Ferguson’s review is that he doesn’t mention “Indonesia”, “Suharto” or “East Timor” once. But considering that Ferguson is apparently unable to find a reason beside Kissinger’s ethnic background to explain the Left’s utter contempt for the man, it is worth remembering exactly what happened in East Timor.

To make it simple, in 1975, our loyal ally Suharto wanted to invade East Timor. In December of 75, he met with Ford and Kissinger, and they both made it clear that they supported the invasion. And it wasn’t just words, the United States was the main patron and arms supplier of Suharto and the Indonesian regime up until 1999, when Clinton finally halted arms sales. When Suharto cabled Ford to inform of the invasion, the Indonesian dictator said that “We want your understanding if we deem it necessary to take rapid or drastic action.” Despite the fact that Portugal intended East Timor to be autonomous, Ford replied that “We will understand and will not press you on the issue. We understand the problem you have and the intentions you have.” When they met in Jakarta, Kissinger’s only words of caution were that Suharto should invade after the President and Kissinger returned to Washington, so as to avoid embarrassment.  The Indonesians invaded East Timor the next day. In the first year of the occupation, somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 Timorese had been killed.  By 1979, 300,000 Timorese had been displaced and shipped into Indonesian military camps. By 1980, between 100,000 and 230,000 Timorese were dead as a result of the invasion and occupation. All of this murder and displacement had been sanctioned and materially supported by the US Government with the explicit approval of Ford and Kissinger.

The closest Ferguson gets to addressing the moral emptiness at the heart of Kissinger’s politics is talking about how the man was a “revolutionary” because he wanted to check Soviet influence in the third world. This, of course, meant supporting the odious, murderous regimes in Indonesia, Pakistan, Chile, South Africa and Argentina (just to give you an idea). For Ferguson, the murder and subjugation of East Timor can simply be explained by saying that “some unpleasant regimes had to be tolerated, and indeed supported” This, of course, is not the first time Ferguson has taken such a blasé attitude towards the massive death tolls that are the inevitable result of the imperialistic realpolitik that he admires so much in Kissinger. Ferguson is the biggest fan of the late British Empire, and has consistently obfuscated, minimized and otherwise excused the massive death tolls that were a direct result of British Imperial policy.

As Johann Hari documented, when Ferguson discusses imperial Kenya (his boyhood home) in The War of the World, there is literally no mention of the Mau Mau Rebellion, and the subsequent network of concentration camps built across Kenya to torture and detain some 300,000 Kenyans. Or of the 50,000 killed, due to the instruction to British soldiers to kill whomever they liked, “so long as he is black.” Ferguson also has a hard time coming to grips with how many Indians were killed by deliberate starvation and imperial negligence. When 29 million Indians died of famine in the 1870s and 1880s, Lord Lytton made it illegal for anyone to feed or assist those dying. Not only did he make relief illegal, he used the military to insist that India export grain to London, even as millions of Indians were dying of starvation. As Amartya Sen has consistently argued, famine did not exist in India before the British arrived, and since they left, there have been no famines on the same scale as the Bengal Famine of 1943 or other, earlier, famines.

But where do these Kenyans, Indonesians or Indians show up in Ferguson grand historical calculus? As usual, the benefits for the imperial powers are all important, while the matter of dead natives is quietly slept under the rug.

Indonesia Links:

George Washington University’s National Security Archive write up of recently released documents relating to the Ford administration’s Indonesia Policy

AFP story from 2001 about said documents.

India Links:

Johann Hari’s first and second articles reviewing Ferguson’s work.

Amartya Sen’s TNR essay on Ferguson British Imperialism in India.

Trashing Cirincione, Acquitting Bush

Gabriel Schoenfeld’s LA Times column denouncing the “theology of arms control” is very weird. He starts out talking about Obama’s pledge to renew America’s equipment to nuclear abolition and then abruptly transitions into how Joseph Cirincione, the president of the Plougshares Fund, an informal Obama advisor and one of the most respected nuclear wonks in the country, thought that Syria didn’t have a nuclear weapons program when it did. For Schoenfeld, the presence of a Syrian nuclear program - one that wasn’t especially close to actually acquiring a bomb - proves that the approach of using NPT style international treaties to halt proliferation combined with a committment by the nuclear countries to pursue abortion is dead. But is it the NPT’s fault that Syria is proliferating? When you consider that we have had eight years of a president who’s done his best to trash the nonproliferation approach that Shoenfeld criticizes, shouldn’t we we perhaps look to that radically new approach as the source of our problems?

It’s probably a good idea to review the nonproliferation lowlights of the current administration. After Bush petulantly withdrew form the Agreed Framework with North Korea, they developed more nuclear weapons than they ever did under Clinton. Also, his committment to unilateral military action as the primary means to deal with proliferation - despite the obvious fact that Iraq had no nuclear program - provided an incentive for every country on the US’s bad list to acquire a nuclear deterrent as soon as possible. And how could we forget the India Nuclear Deal, a blatant violation of the NPT that sent the message that the US would opt out of its nonproliferation treaty committments if it meant some short-term geopolitical advantage. And there’s also the serial trashing and attempted discrediting of the IAEA, despite (really, because) their being freakishly accurate about Iraq.

The only theology that’s been shattered recently is the hawkish adherence to the rule that the United States can make the world safe from the danger of nuclear violence by a doctrine of unilateral preemption.

Negotiations! Diplomacy! It Can Work

In what appears to be fantastic news, the Juntese Burma will accept “all aid workers”:

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, met the leader of Myanmar’s military junta, Senior Gen. Than Shwe, on Friday, and said the general had agreed to allow “all aid workers” to help survivors of the country’s devastating cyclone.

It was not immediately clear how much leeway international aid workers would have in visiting the most stricken areas of the Irrawaddy Delta, or, indeed, how the military authorities perceived the scope of their reported agreement to permit an expanded relief effort.

But, asked whether he believed the general’s reported agreement represented a breakthrough, Mr. Ban replied: “I think so,” news agencies reported from Naypyidaw, Myanmar’s remote new capital.

“He has agreed to allow all aid workers,” Mr. Ban was quoted as saying.

As the article makes abundantly clear, it’s still foggy exactly where aid workers will get to go and how much freedom of action they will have within Burma, but this is still a fantastic development. Of course, those who pushed for military action will likely take credit for this development by saying that the credible threat of intervention is what pushed the junta to compromise and accept the aid workers.  And although this may be at least partly true, it’s important to note that it was Ban Ki-Moon and the UN who ultimatley pushed Than Shwe and the generals to adjust their stance. So yeah, take that Fred Hiatt.

Why Does Michael Goldfarb Think That America Is So Weak

Goldfarb, predictably, paints Barack Obama as a blame America firster:

On Fox News yesterday, Obama, asked about Iran, said:

“The fact that we have not talked to them means that they have been developing nuclear weapons, funding Hamas, funding Hezbollah.”

This statement goes to the very heart of what’s wrong with Obama’s foreign policy view, and the leftward swing of the Democratic party back toward the orthodoxies of McGovern and Carter. The fact is, the Iranians have not been developing nuclear weapons and funding terrorist proxies across the Middle East because “we” won’t talk to them. They are doing these things because their country is run by a fanatical, revolutionary regime that wants to dominate the Middle East.

What Goldfarb gets wrong is that Iran being run by a “fanatical, revolutionary regime” isn’t exactly variant, it’s a fixed point as far as the Middle East goes. What isn’t fixed is our policy towards said regime. So yes, Iran is going to attempt to do certain things in the region, but if we’re anything close to the hegemon that the Weekly Standard et al think we are, then we have a certain amount of influence vis a vis Iran. Of course, we’ve been incredibly unwilling to actually use this influence with Iran, even when they opened up to us, so even if we don’t bear direct responsibility for Iranian proliferation and support for terrorism, we’re hardly doing everything we can to stop it. (Oh yeah, and invading Iraq certainly didn’t help).

Dignity Promotion Isn’t All It’s Stacked Up to Be, Part II

According to Spencer Ackerman, the concept of “dignity promotion is at the heart of Obama’s outlook on foreign policy.” Dignity promotion is the idea that if the US can drawn the swamp of misery in much of the developing world, it can greatly reduce anti-Americanism and allow “liberty, justice, and prosperity” to take root. This notion is supposed to counter the neoconservative idea that the roots of terrorism can be found in a lack of responsive, democratic governments in the Middle East.

As an example for why a dignity-based perspective is valuable, Ackerman points to the Muslim Brotherhood making gains in Jordan because the government is viewed as illegitimate and nonfunctioning as a result of the run up in food prices. And his argument makes intuitive sense: if we had more humane and sensible food/poverty policies, it would prevent Islamist extremists from being so popular in the Middle East:

And here’s where the choice really is between whether you want to win or lose a winnable fight against extremism. If you want to win, you’ll support what it takes to feed people. If you want to win, you’ll ask yourself who you want a poor family in Jordan to turn to in its hour of crisis: the U.S. or the Muslim Brotherhood. If you want to win, you’ll stand with the politician that wants the U.S. to be the ones that family turns to…And if you don’t want to win, you’ll say that what happens in Jordan is a Jordanian problem and we can’t feed the world and anyway poverty and terrorism are different issues.

At the risk of not wanting to win, I’ll say that while poverty in the developing world is a huge issue (actually, by many utilitarian reasonings, the hugest), it has very little to do with the fight against terror and extremism - and Spencer’s example proves it.

The problem with Ackerman/Power/Obama approach is that it adopts some of the crucial premises of the expansive, neoconservative approach to terrorism. Namely, it aggregates all extremist, Islamist and jihadi groups into one hulking terrorist mass. The approach necessitates this aggregation because the one terrorist group that actually has the capabilities and intentions of attacking the United States (with the exception of groups in Iraq) is Al Qaeda. And Al Qaeda has nothing to do with poverty or hunger.

If you look at the 9/11 hijackers or those who have attempted AQ attacks, they are hardly the wretched of the earth. Instead, they’re generally college educated and middle class. Al Qaeda, as opposed to the traditional guerilla/insurgent/political terrorist group, doesn’t actually depend on the type of grass roots support that such a group would generally need to survive. They, instead, depend on the donations and support of ideologically motivated types that want to bring about the global caliphate, get American troops out of the Holy Kingdom and generally hate the United States.

And so, the Muslim Brotherhood gaining power in Jordan, although a regrettable side-effect of our essentially taking on the British imperial mantle in the Middle East, probably doesn’t increase the risk of anti-American terrorism all that much. Especially in Jordan, where because of the 2005 Amman bombings, the public mood has turned decisvely against Al Qaeda. And although Jordan isn’t exactly the most pro-American place around, it’s hard to interpret their embrace of the Islamic Brotherhood - which, as Ackerman notes, is greatly opposed to Al Qaeda - as a sign that terrorist attacks against America are going to be launched from Jordan. If Jordanian public support for the US is important, than the dignity promotion agenda seems like an odd place to start.

That’s because, when you ask Arabs about why they don’t like the US, they point to policies that the US is currently engaging in - occupation of Iraq, one sided support for Israel etc - not the lack of development assistance or Peace Corps volunteers in their countries. Of course, Ackerman supports changing those policies, which would then lead to some change of Arab opinion of the US and help drain the swamp of anti-Americanism. But the effect of that real policy change is likely to be much, much greater than some vague committment to “dignity.”

And here’s my initial post looking at “dignity promotion.”

John Bolton Does Not Control the Uniqueness

John Bolton tells us in the WSJ that negotiation with Iran, a state supporter of terror, will confer upon them legitimacy, and thus allow them to expand their support for sundry forces:

When the U.S. negotiates with “terrorists and radicals,” it gives them legitimacy, a precious and tangible political asset. Thus, even Mr. Obama criticized former President Jimmy Carter for his recent meetings with Hamas leaders. Meeting with leaders of state sponsors of terrorism such as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong Il is also a mistake. State sponsors use others as surrogates, but they are just as much terrorists as those who actually carry out the dastardly acts. Legitimacy and international acceptability are qualities terrorists crave, and should therefore not be conferred casually, if at all.

Moreover, negotiations – especially those “without precondition” as Mr. Obama has specifically advocated – consume time, another precious asset that terrorists and rogue leaders prize. Here, President Bush’s reference to Hitler was particularly apt: While the diplomats of European democracies played with their umbrellas, the Nazis were rearming and expanding their industrial power.

In policy debate, there’s a concept called “controlling the uniqueness.” In simple terms, uniqueness is whether or not some bad chain of events is happening in the status quo or not. If it is not happening in the status quo, then one could argue that there of risk that implementing a policy could set off those bad chain of events. If, however, the advocates for the policy policy could prove that said chain of events is already happening in the status quo, then the risk of implementing that policy is not as great. This is exactly what Bolton gets wrong. Iran is already supporting terrorism in Lebanon and in Iraq, and our current “policy” - if you can even deign to call it that - isn’t doing that great a job of preventing Iranian support for terror.

What’s especially odd is that Iran does not support Al Qaeda style, purely ideological, global terrorism. Although, in the past, they’ve engaged in global terror (Salman Rushdie and support for Hezbollah airplane hijackings and attacks in Argentina), Iranian support for terror can mostly be interpreted as them promoting their interests in the Middle East. And such, they don’t really need more “time” or “international legitimacy” to engage in them. Bolton’s analysis makes especially little sense in the context where Iran is doing the most anti-American terrorism: Iraq. And where Iran’s support for terrorism concretely effects US interests in the region, we’ve had some sort of discussions or negotiations with Iran. There weren’t any concerns about granting legitimacy to Iran’s actions: instead, the military leaders in Iraq understood that it only made sense that Iran was meddling in Iraq, and that whether or not they had “legitimacy” wouldn’t effect the fact that a hostile global superpower was occupying their next-door neighbor.

Bolton also complains that there are opportunity costs in pursuing negotiations. He claims that we can draw a direct line between the Annapolis conference and the current breakdown of Lebanon. In Bolton-world, had the Bush administration not gotten around to devoting any sort of effort into the Peace Process in its final year in office, they could have done something about the current situation in Lebanon. What, exactly, could we have done to prevent Hezbollah from re-igniting the civil conflict that was prevented by Annapolis? Bolton doesn’t say. That’s because we don’t have all that many levers in Lebanon, which is a reality that uber-hawks like Bolton can’t really get their minds around. Of course, we could gain a lever in Lebanon through some sort of “grand bargain” with Iran, but that would require negotiations…

The UN and Burma

It seems like whenever something goes wrong in the developing world, it’s the UN’s fault. And, as usual, we hear this cascade of criticism from those who aren’t particularly interested in strengthening the institution and/or actually recognizing those areas in which it is effective (real peacekeeping, for instance).

Fred Hiatt seems to think that the UN has somehow abrogated the “responsibility to protect” in failing to get large amounts of aid into Burma:

Nearly three years ago, the United Nations announced an answer to that question: It would. At a summit celebrating the organization’s 60th birthday, 171 nations agreed that they would intervene, forcefully if necessary, if a state failed to protect its own people. The action was seen as both a sign of remorse for the failure to stop genocide in Rwanda and a rebuke to the United States and its unilateral ways.

…

Since then the United Nations has averted its gaze as Sudan’s government continues to ravage the people of Darfur. It has turned away as Zimbabwe’s rulers terrorize their own people. Now it is bowing to Burma’s sovereignty as that nation’s junta allows more than a million victims of Cyclone Nargis to face starvation, dehydration, cholera and other miseries rather than allow outsiders to offer aid on the scale that’s needed.

Although the actions of the junta are detestable, and I sure wouldn’t mind seeing some sort of indigenous regime change, Hiatt is seriously wrong when he says that the UN and the inernational community isn’t upholding the “responsibility to protect” by forcing aid into Burma.

That’s because the “responsibility to protect” as enshrined by the UN security council, explicitly does not apply in cases of negligence, no matter how large the scale. Instead, the R2P applies in four specific instances,”genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” Now one could argue from a theoretical, almost Sennian stand point, that the junta’s extreme negligence and seeming disregard for the welfare of its people is tantamount to a crime against humanity, but that is pointedly not what the R2P addresses.

And although the situation in Burma is depressingly dire and grim, one could imagine why the UN would not adopt an R2P for negligence in more structural issues like disaster preparedness or underdevelopment. Would it be good, for instance, if there was an obligation for the international community to forcibly intervene in China, where thousands have recently been killed by a massive earthquake, or in Iran when 26,000 were killed in a quake? Surely not.  It’s certainly disappointing that there’s no one-off solution to the tragedy in Burma, but that’s not the fault of the UN.

We’re The Only Ones That Matter!

Mike Goldfarb makes the argument that when you look at the fate of foreign leaders who’ve supported Bush, they haven’t fared too poorly electorally, and so all the stuff about rising anti-Americanism is bunk:

The left has long fancied the notion that friendship with Bush was political suicide for foreign leaders, but…

Berlusconi is back.

British PM Tony Blair stepped down after 10 years in power.

Australian PM John Howard was booted after more than ten years in office.

José María Aznar got booted after one term (but mostly because the Spanish gave in to terrorism).

As far as Bush’s enemies on the international stage, Chirac and Shroeder were replaced by the less hostile Sarko and Merkel. Conservatives were elected in Canada and Mexico. If Bush isn’t popular abroad, and he isn’t, it’s hard to see how that’s hurt the foreign leaders closest to him.

There are two problems with this analysis. The first is that it’s incredibly misleading. Tony Blair left office a disgraceful failure largely because of the war, which now both major parties have turned against, Aznar lost nearly entirely because of his hawkish approach to terrorism and Iraq, while Howard’s support for Bush was just one of the myriad things that made Australians realize they didn’t want a conservative dinosaur in office. There’s also the fact that Shroeder was able to engineer a come-from-behind victory in 2002 largely by running explicitly against Bush, the War and American foreign policy.

But the real reason that Goldfarb is wrong is that, contrary to what many neocons think, America is not the key issue in most elections. So while neocons always pick the conservative, pro-America candidate as their favorite and see elections as referendums on how much the people like America, the people actually voting tend not to see it that way. So grafting anything about America’s image into an Italian election, which are notable for how fickle their results are, isn’t very useful. Turns out that foreigners, just like Americans, are concerned about things like the economy and all that good stuff.

Ideology v Behavior

I get really confused when, on one hand, conservative hawks say that Iran is being all wiley and peddling influence in Iraq in an effort to cause us trouble there, while on the other hand, that they don’t operate like a normal state, and  instead think that, ““mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent factor, but rather an inducement.”

Noah Pollack - and everyone else who pushes this line of “country as suicide bomber” - does a really bad job of pointing to Iranian behavior which shows that they really don’t care about their own preservation. While he may be right that an Iranian bomb would give them freer reign to cause trouble in the Middle East, he still can not show - from the perspective of American interests in the region - that Iran is implementing a single policy that is reflexive of them actively courting a nuclear confrontation with the United States or Israel.

Although it may be true that the continued development of a nuclear program could bring on a strike from the US or Israel, it’s also true that not having a nuclear program could so as well. All in all, excluding Ahmadinejad’s public remarks, the idea that Iran is absolutely undeterrable, doesn’t act at all like a normal state, and views massively destructive war with its neighbors as either not that bad or even desirable is just not based in any observable reality I’m aware of.

Utterly Fascinating

How a Jersey-born barbecue joint owner became our best diplomat to North Korea. I’m not kidding. The Post has a long profile of Bobby Egan, who apart from owning and operating Cubby’s, also managed to convince North Korea’s UN ambassador to tell the TImes that they were willing to negotiate over their nuclear weapons program.

Just read the whole thing.

But They Wanted To!

Dana Goldstein captures a particularly inane bit of the hearings:

Sen. Lindsay Graham just asked Gen. Petraeus, “Why did they [Al Qaeda in Iraq] come to Iraq?”

Petraeus responded, “To establish a base in the heart of the Middle East.”

Okay, right. But why was that possible? Because we destabilized the region through the invasion and occupation of Iraq, giving terrorist groups a new foothold.

Dana’s obviously right - the key variable in Al Qaeda setting up shop in Iraq was not anything intrinsic to AQ, but instead the fact that we created a near perfect environment for them. Not only did we, as she said, destabilize the country and create a lawless zone in which they could fester - and even this isn’t entirely accurate as much of AQ wasn’t/isn’t foreign - we also gave Al Qaeda a chance to do their favorite thing: shoot at Americans and their allies! Graham’s logic, whereby Al Qaeda does what it wants and then we respond, is backwards: we enact policies and then Al Qaeda is able to act in our wake.

Al Qaeda and such are almost like parasites or viruses in the international system. They have very little agency and can’t just do what they want, when they want, in the same way that a state can. They instead depend on all sorts of conditions and circumstances to be right to implement their agenda. Look at, for example, the occupation of Saudi Arabia or the US funding of guerrillas in Afghanistan. Before that, plenty of people wanted to fight the Soviets with big guns, but couldn’t until we gave them said large guns. And while Bin Laden wasn’t a big fan of the US before the Gulf War, when we had troops in Saudi Arabia, he could make a convincing case that Americans were occupying the Arab world. Also, if you look at terrorist attacks in Europe, they probably wouldn’t have happened (Spain certainly) without the invasion of Iraq.

I think it’s more useful to look at the threat of transnational terror as an emergent property of the world order rather than some sort of exogenous force that is entirely independent of outside influence and is entirely self-directed. To use a comic books reference, transnational Islamic terrorism is not like the Phoenix Force - it’s not the “immortal and mutable manifestation of the prime universal force of life. Born of the void between states of being, a child of the universe…the nexus of all psionic energy which does, has, and ever will exist in all realities of the omniverse“

The problem with making this type of argument these days is that when you do, people claim you’re “blaming America first” or that you’re saying there’s “moral equivalence” between the West and Al Qaeda. To be very clear , I don’t “blame” the US for terrorism, clearly terrorists are responsible , I just want to point out how many of our policies and actions certainly don’t help reduce the threat of terrorism, and how many of them exacerbate it.

Extensive Al Qaeda Connections

Here’s a shocking new report showing that a repressive, dictatorial state has extensive financial and logistical ties with Al-Qaeda:

WASHINGTON —XXX remains the world’s leading source of money for Al Qaeda and other extremist networks and has failed to take key  steps requested by U.S. officials to stem the flow, the Bush administration’s top financial counter-terrorism official said Tuesday.

Stuart A. Levey, a Treasury undersecretary, told a Senate committee that the XXX government had not taken important steps to go after those who finance terrorist organizations or to prevent wealthy donors from bankrolling extremism through charitable contributions, sometimes unwittingly.

“XXX today remains the location where more money is going to terrorism, to Sunni terror groups and to the Taliban than any other place in the world,” Levey said under questioning.

Iraq pre-2003? No.  Iran today? No.  It is, of course, our long-time ally Saudi Arabia.

Some Types of Exceptionalism Are Bad, Others Are Not

David Rieff’s essay looking at Clinton and Obama’s fervent belief that the US is a special nation, or is exceptionally good, is very good at exposing that on perhaps the most basic foreign policy issue - whether the US is just another country, just a particularly powerful one, or some uniquely good country - Democrats and Republicans are in 100% agreement.  The quotes that Rieff dredges from Obama and Anne Marie-Slaughter are pretty noxious, especially when Obama says that America is the world’s “last best hope of humanity,” you see the very basic foundations for all the bad crap the Bush administration has done in the last seven years.   But Rieff contradicts himself, or at least makes his case considerably weaker, when he points out that when it comes to policy, Republicans and Democrats, and especially OBama, are pretty different when it comes to actual policy.  Obama, despite thinking that America is the world’s “last best hope,” isn’t some sort of violent messianist, and unless David Rieff could show that Obama would pursue a similar policy agenda to Bush, then the rhetorical similarities between the two are not all that meaningful.

Reengaging with the World

I hate to say it, but Glenn Reynolds is 100% right when he says that Obama or Clinton’s claims to reengage with the world are rendered slightly suspect when they are so revanchist on trade.  Especially because the renegotiation of something like NAFTA would be incredibly offensive to both Canada and Mexico, not to mention totally pointless.

As John Judis points out in his excellent article on the entire issue, NAFTA has had no signifigant effect on jobs or wages in the United States.  Compared to other sources of new foreign trade since it was signed as well as technological changes that have occured in the last decade, NAFTA is a drop in the bucket - not to mention other free trade agreements like SKFTA (south korea), CAFTA or the one we’re negotiating with Columbia.  Another thing that’s rarely mentioned in the fact-free, open demogogery zone that is most debate about trade agreements is that on the one thing that Obama and Clinton claim to want to do - renegotiate labor and environmental standards to make them stricter - is actually a pointless provocation of Canada and Mexico:

It’s hard to see how this would provide a big boost to American workers. Mexico’s–and Canada’s–labor laws are actually more progressive than U.S. laws. Mexico, for instance, has ratified 78 of the International Labor Organization’s core labor standards, while the United States has ratified only 14. Besides which, in an interview with Kevin Hall from the McClatchy newspapers, representatives from neither the Clinton nor the Obama campaign could name a single dispute in which tougher labor or environmental regulations would have benefited American workers and manufacturers.

If workers and jobs were actually streaming to Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, South Korea, Jordan or any country we’ve recently signed a trade agreement with, than maybe trying to punish Mexico by importing first world labor standards would make sense, but that’s just not happening, nor should it particularly. I can only hope that all this anti-trade bluster is just primary season pandering, and at best, we just won’t have any massive rollback on trade.  Remember how angry we were when Bush pulled out of the ABM treaty or when he completely disregard for Kyoto and the NPT?  I see no reason that, as far as increasing our soft power and international influence, trade agreements are any different.

Would The Obama Doctrine Look Like This?

In response to Spencer Ackerman’s Obama Doctrine article, I argued that OBama’s focus on human rights and development as a way to combat terrorism was a bad idea because a) underdevelopment and poverty are not the proximate causes of anti-Americanism or Islamic terrorism, in fact, it’s educated professional types who are the actual terrorists and b) it would probably hurt legitimate efforts to deal with poverty and disease in the developing world to put it under the guise of “national security” strategy because national security types are not public health officials or development economists, and if our efforts to, say, eradicate malaria are portrayed as part of our “defense policy”, then they are much less likely to gain the type of full spectrum, international cooperation that is needed to effectively implement large-scale development policy.

Dayo Olapade has a good post looking at  how much of our foreing aid budget has been channeled away from aid and diplomacy professionals - namely the State Department and USAID - and instead the money is going through Defense and the Army Corps of Engineers.  This just shows why the “foreign policification” of development aid is a bad idea.  The defense department aren’t aid pros, and because the money isn’t going through traditional channels, tons of money can go to horrendous human rights abusers like Uzbekistan and Pakistan without having to be “grilled under various rights-oriented provisions in US foreign-aid law.”  While I don’t think that the “Obama doctrine” will involve using foreign aid as a means of propping up dictators, aid would still be very much part of a larger foreign or defense policy.  And I worry that something similar could happen.  After all, if you’re using aid and development as the “anvil against which he can bring down the hammer on al-Qaeda” how do you prioritize which countries to give aid to?  What about countries that really have nothing to do with the War on Terror?  Would they receive less aid and attention.  Would countries like Ethiopia, who are our nominal allies in the War on Terror, get more aid?

I guess my point is that aid agencies should do aid, and their concern shouldn’t be US foreign policy or how countries perceive us, but instead with more mundane (and important stuff) like reducing death rates and improving quality of life.  The state department should do state department stuff.  To intermix the two would probably lead to the dilution of both.

Do We Need An Obama Doctrine?

Spencer Ackerman’s article on the “Obama Doctrine” is quite good at exploring what actually makes Obama different and gets at why I think Obama is a much better candidate than Clinton on the one area where the President has the most power to implement policy. But, and this may be the only time ever, I have to agree with Michael Goldfarb that Obama’s idea of “dignity promotion” and using development to drain the swamp for terrorism is a little shallow and misguided:

They envision a doctrine that first ends the politics of fear and then moves beyond a hollow, sloganeering “democracy promotion” agenda in favor of “dignity promotion,” to fix the conditions of misery that breed anti-Americanism and prevent liberty, justice, and prosperity from taking root. An inextricable part of that doctrine is a relentless and thorough destruction of al-Qaeda. Is this hawkish? Is this dovish? It’s both and neither — an overhaul not just of our foreign policy but of how we think about foreign policy. And it might just be the future of American global leadership.

I’m all for promoting “dignity” and economic development. I want more foreign aid, smarter spending on health care initiatives in the developing world and have us not deploy democracy promotion solely aginst regimes I don’t like. But the idea that addressing the issues of poverty and disease have much to do with terrorism is, sadly, just substituting the Bush Doctrine for the Obama Doctrine. Let me explain.

The connection between poverty - like, dire, one dollar a day, lethal poverty - and terrorism does not exist. Most anti-American terrorists come from middle class, professional, educated backgrounds. Hell, they are disproportionally engineers. Goldfarb is right to point out that if poverty was the root cause of terrorism, we’d see more terrorists from Burkino Faso and Congo. But no, we see them from Saudi Arabia and other parts of the Arab world. The idea that Africa is the next breeding ground for terrorism and anti Americanism, while a well intentioned way to get us to pay attention to a place where millions die of poverty and preventable diseases, is misguided. All the operational problems that plague terrorists groups today - funding, logistics, evading detection, law enforcement at the borders - would be well magnified for any hypothetical African terrorists. But even as I’m writing this, I’m still a little shocked that I have to disprove that there are really any substantial national security threats emanating from Africa. Unless Obama sees China’s resource competition as anything worth orienting our foreign policy around, then I do not really know what Scott Gration is getting at when he says:

“Look at Africa, with 900 million people, half of whom are under 18. I’m concerned that unless you start creating jobs and livelihoods we will have real big problems on our hands in ten to fifteen years.”

Sure, this will be a big problem for Africa, and since I’m a cosmopolitan utilitarian, I think the US should do something smart to help out, but to say that we ought to shift our foreign policy to deal with this challenge doesn’t make much sense. All the factors that brewed in the Middle East to create the threat of terrorism - history of imperialism, support for dictatorial regimes, frustrated opportunities for educated people, lots of money sloshing around, Salafi extremism - just aren’t present in Africa. To date, most of our military interventions there have just been failed attempts at extending the War on Terror to the Horn, just look at our boondoggle in Somalia.

But I’m not surprised that a team who wants to “end the mindset that brought us to war” is endorsing this type of development-cum-anti terrorism strategy. Because what I really think is that Obama ought to do is end the war on terror as some grand ideological/foreign policy project and pay attention to other pressing foreign policy issues - nonproliferation or public health in Africa. But we can’t do that in America, and much of our foreign policy apparatus is based around there being grand unifying themes for a presidency.

So when Obama wants to address these really substantial foreign policy issues, like disease and poverty in Africa, he can’t just say “we have to move because millions of people are dying,” instead, he has to say “these millions of poor people dying because they are poor is a threat to us.” It may well be true that the only way to mobilize around these types of issues is to “securitize” them and frame them in the context of a security/foreign policy, but there are worries that this could lead our military, diplomatic and foreign policy pros to not focus on issues in which they have real expertise, like nonproliferation, while at the same time confusing what should be humanitarianism with implementing the foreign policy goals of the US.

If Obama really wanted a paradigm shift in how we view foreign policy, he wouldn’t replace the Bush Doctrine with the Obama Doctrine, but instead question why we need to have such overarching foreign policy visions or doctrines in the first place. Good old liberal internationalism supplemented with an appreciation for counterinsurgency and humanitarianism would do just fine, thank you very much.

PS - This does not represent the entirety of my thought on the Obama foreign policy or this article. More is surely forthcoming as the election plays out.

Chickens Love Their Roost

One of the most obvious consequences of supporting an unpopular dictator prone to coups and jailing Supreme Court justices is that when he is out of power, the new leaders are not going to be very receptive to the United States.  This is a particularly unfortunate dynamic in Pakistan, where it turns out that we have rather compelling interests and don’t want a cold shoulder from the government.  But according to the Times, that’s just what we are getting.

Mr. Sharif and Mr. Zardari have both said that in order to stop the spate of suicide bombings in recent months, they intend to negotiate with the militants who are battling the Pakistan Army. Reports of American concerns over such overtures, as well as the Bush administration’s continued backing of Mr. Musharraf, despite the overwhelming rejection of his party by voters, have fueled a new level of Pakistani frustration with the United States.

The News, one of the country’s leading daily newspapers, published an editorial on Tuesday titled “Hands off please, Uncle Sam,” urging American leaders to “realize the need to give the democratic government in Pakistan time and space” to put in place a “thoughtful plan of action,” free of “any effort to intervene in their working or curtailing their right to independently decide what is best for Pakistan and its people.”

Now, Sharif and Zardari may be very well correct that our current anti-terror strategy in Pakistan isn’t working all that well for the Pakistani people, and so a relationship with this new government could still be productive.  But it’s worrying that all the bad stuff Musharraf did, with or without the encouragement or explicit sanction of the US, is now associated with us.

In Which I Sometimes Wish I Lived in Europe

What would happen if a major American newspaper ran an Op-Ed promoting a more dovish line in the war on terror in which the first and last paragraphs were a discussion of Foucault’s thoughts about “disciplines”?

Call me a fuddy-duddy American university humanities student (one day, maybe!) but I think the entire blogosphere kerfuffle about the “Foreign Policy Community” could have been illuminated if people used some basic Foucaldian terminiology and ideas.  Just a thought…

And oh yeah, everything Jonah Goldberg said in Liberal Fascism, Foucault wrote more than 30 years ago.  But more on that later…

What Would Happen If We Withdraw?

Mark Lynch has a very thoughtful and thorough look at the political consequences for the major factions in Iraq - green zone politicians, Sunni insurgents, Sadrites and Shiites and Al Qaeda.  There’s not a whole lot to add, except to note his strong opinion that what the Surge has accomplished - the weakening of the central government and the further factionalization of Iraq - does not make the prospects for withdrawal any rosier:

The single most important question shaping the possibility of US withdrawal is whether it takes place in the context of a relatively strong, competent and effectively sovereign Iraqi state.  US strategy should be oriented towards producing that core condition. The strategic failure of the “surge” has been that it has eroded the capacity and sovereignty of the Iraqi state by building up mutually hostile armed groups outside national institutions.  The US must work to strengthen state institutions, and to force the integration of the Awakening Councils into the national army and police in advance of its withdrawal in order to avoid sectarian warfare.  Despite the current American fashion in favor of decentralization, Iraqi support for a centralized Iraqi state remains strong: in last month’s BBC survey, 66% of Iraqis preferred a unified Iraq with a strong central government, while only 23% favored the federation of strong regional governments.

A withdrawal will be more likely to produce positive effects if it is preceded by building Iraqi national institutions and mobilizing regional support.  The  most vulnerable remaining populations should be protected as long as possible. Intra-communal power struggles will likely be increasingly significant flashpoints with or without a US withdrawal, but will likely intensify in anticipation of a withdrawal which would likely significantly weaken the current ruling elite.   I do not expect a withdrawal to proceed smoothly, given the legacy of five years of wrong paths, mismanagement, and sectarian violence.  But it is also not impossible, especially if steps are taken now to improve the odds, and it is made more likely by a  credible commitment to withdrawal.

This brings up the real question for a Democratic administration.  Are we too far down the road of a degraded Iraqi state and set of political institutions to hope that a change in US policy could every actually get us to a place where we our withdrawal would have fewer negative effects than it would now?  And, would it be worth the strategic oppurtunity costs and the loss of American life and treasure to try and reach this point?

While Lynch is hopeful that we could push towards centralization because large numbers of Iraqis support a strong centralized state, it’s worth noting that 34% don’t - much higher numbers than you’ll find in any well-ordered country. Also, Lynch’s conditions for a strong state that we could properly withdraw from with minimal negative consequences may be slightly fantastical.  For instance, he says that we have to “force the integration of the Awakening Councils into the national army and police in advance of its withdrawal in order to avoid sectarian warfare.”  At the moment, there seems to be little reason that the Shiites who largely dominate the police and army would want to accept the Sunni Awakening Councils or why the Councils would want to lose their autonomy and support by entering into an Army that is staffed by their enemies.  If this really is the “lynchpin” (haha) for achieving a “successful” withdrawal, then I think we should just withdraw now.  Our policies have gone too far in encouraging the dissolution of any sucessful Iraqi state and the only large enough shock to the system would actually be a credible plan for withdrawal, as Lynch himself says:

No Iraqi actor would scream more loudly or offer more dire warnings of impending doom than the current Green Zone elite – and, not coincidentally, these are the voices most often heard in Washington and by politicians on short visits to Baghdad.   But their warnings should be understood at least in part as expressions of their own political self-interest.   No Iraqi actor is more likely to quickly readjust its behavior and calculations should such a withdrawal be announced.  With the US set to depart, the whole range of national reconciliation initiatives which are currently seen as at best luxuries and at worst mortal threats would suddenly become a much more intense matter of self-interest.  The integration of the Sunni Awakenings, for instance, would move from a challenge to Shia hegemony over the security forces into the best possible way to pre-empt their military challenge.  The credible commitment to withdrawal would give the US much-needed leverage over the Green Zone leadership.

From reading this paragraph, it looks like planning for, and then executing, a withdrawal would hit two birds with one stone. For one, it would probably be the only move extreme enough to reverse the poor strategy of the surge and supporting the Anbar Awakening at the expense of centralization, and it would also get us out of Iraq.  This may seem tautalogical, but I think it’s still useful:  only a withdrawal can create the conditions that would allow for withdrawal.

Anti-Genocide, Anti-War, No Contradictions.

Michael Young’s most recent Reason column celebrates Samantha Power’s fall from grace, because apparently she’s a hypocrite for writing about America’s silence in the face of genocide and yet still advocating a withdrawal from Iraq:

Power’s sin was to be frank, as the debate over Iraq continues to be distorted by falsehood. What none of the Democratic candidates will admit to, even as they deftly contradict themselves to later justify an about-face, is that there is little prospect of the U.S. leaving Iraq without sectarian conflict ensuing. Allowing this outcome would indeed be the betrayal Obama warned against in Boston, before betraying his rejection of such a betrayal by issuing his promise of a timed pullout that he is again likely to betray.

What Young, and he’s hardly alone, gets wrong is his notion that sectarian conflict will just magically spring up as the US leaves. The problem with Iraq is that despite increased troop levels, all the ingredients for a bloody civil war are still there. Even as we’ve put in more troops, gotten Sadr to declare a ceasefire and bribed the Sunnis to turn against Al Qaeda, we have a weaker central government, more distrust between Sunnis and Shiites, no effective national army and generally, no steps towards political reconciliation. What this means is that when a troop draw down happens, as it inevitably will, a huge blow up is all but inevitable. There have already been hints that the (relative) respite in violence may be ending, like the car bomb that killed more than 40 people in Karbala. So it’s wrong for Young and his ilk to say that withdrawing from Iraq will inevitably lead to ethnic conflict and then just assuming that there’s anything current or any propose US policy can do to stop it. If the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that the US presence hasn’t done much to resolve the root causes of violence in Iraq, if anything, it has and will continually exasperate it.

What makes Young’s lame game of gotcha even less convincing is this quote he dregs up from Obama, which apparently proves that the “truth” of the War is that no one actually supports a quick withdrawal:

And that was nothing compared to what Obama said in 2004, the day after his keynote address at the Democratic national convention in Boston. Speaking at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, he had declared: “The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster. It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died…It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective.”

Young assumes that the exact same analysis could be made today. And, superficially, he’s correct. But notice one major difference. In 2004, there were 900-plus American war dead, today, there are over 4,000. What Obama has come to realize - and what Young hasn’t - is that our strategy there is futile. If another 3,000 dead has gotten us nowhere close to eventually being able to leave behind a stable Iraq, why are we to assume that the next 3000 dead will be able to accomplish anything more? What we’ve seen since 2004 is continual assurances from people like Young that the situation in Iraq is improving and that there will be horrible violence if we withdraw. What instead has happened is that the violence has remained and the underlying causes of the sectarian violence remain. To call Power and Obama hypocrites for trying to resolve our greatest strategic failure in generations is just galling. The hypocrites are those who, after five years of futile war and brutal occupation, think that the only answer is more war.