Eric Umansky

Back in Slack

The beach was good to me. (The air travel, not so much.) Thanks to Zathras for the fine, non-lefty posting during my leave.

And by the way, I'll take my ten bucks now -- thank you.

33 Years Later, Another Shuttle?

An interesting editorial yesterday in the Jewish daily Forward (hat tip to Steve Clemons) compares the situation in the Middle East after Nasrallah's War to the one in the region during the fall of 1973.

Then as now Israel's military had performed less well in battle than expected; then as now doubts abounded as to whether peace in the area had any chance:

But there is another, more hopeful parallel between 1973 and now, for those willing to see it. Back then, the mixed results of the war reshuffled the strategic balance in the Middle East, opening the way for a diplomatic flurry — tirelessly orchestrated by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger — that ultimately led to a peace treaty with Egypt, Israel’s most powerful Arab foe. This week, growing numbers of Israeli strategists are speaking of a similar opening arising from the latest war. They see an opportunity for Israel to reach out to moderate Arab and Muslim states, a chance to forge a common front against the extremist threat from Iran and Hezbollah. The price of admission: a regional peace accord, including a resolution of the Palestinian issue and genuine Arab recognition of Israel, that enables the moderates to unite and thus isolates the extremists.

I'm not sure it's just a question of being "willing to see it," but optimism about this subject shouldn't just be dismissed.  It is not, in fact, in the interest of the Arab states bordering Israel to be fighting Israel; they have nothing to gain by it.  Israel for its part does not need additional Arab territory, though some of its political parties remain dedicated to holding on to every West Bank settlement it has now.  The United States, having no interests itself tied up in who governs what land on the West Bank, has abundant reason to prefer a resumption of some kind of Arab-Israeli negotiations about that subject to the indefinite continuation of a status quo in which Islamist extremists of various kinds are manipulated by Iran (or vice versa).  Iran, like the Soviet Union in 1973, is the one country that has an interest in keeping the region in turmoil.

All these are hopeful signs.  On the other hand, they are also a list of what the various parties to potential negotiations do not want.  In 1973 Egypt's President Sadat knew he wanted Egyptian land back.  Israel knew it wanted to avoid another war with the one Arab nation large enough to potentially threaten its existence.  The United States knew that it wanted to minimize Soviet influence in the region.  And the Israeli and Egyptian publics, suspicious of each other thought they were, knew how costly the Yom Kippur War had been.  They were ready for peacemakers, who happened to be Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon.

The United States does not have Kissinger, let alone Nixon, now, as the Forward's editorialist points out.  They thought in terms of American interests, and saw these threatened by perpetual conflict in the Mideast.  The Bush administration has taken a different view, more sanguine about the outcome of conflict and committed to a "moral clarity" not easily distinguished from the message discipline so essential to President Bush's election campaigns.  As a practical matter this has meant the administration has identified American policy not just with that of Israel's Olmert government but with its most zealous American supporters.  I doubt Richard Nixon's observations about this could have been printed in a family blog.

But if America does not have a Kissinger or Nixon today, there is no Sadat on the Arab side either -- certainly not among the Palestinians.  Nor is it clear that either Olmert or any of his potential successors know what they want, and what they are willing to give up, for peace with the Palestinians.  Finally Arab public opinion at the moment seems more easily influenced by groups like Hezbollah committed to conflict with Israel than by Arab leaders willing to reach some kind of settlement with the Jewish state.  This may change in the coming months, but Arab public opinion probably matters more now than it did in 1973.

So the obstacles to the Forward's more hopeful vision are formidable.  We should not assume they are insuperable, though, and the administration would be well advised to seek opportunities to re-engage in negotiations with a senior diplomat -- not Secretary of State Rice -- at an early moment.

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This concludes my stint as Eric's guest-blogger.  He will be returning from vacation shortly, and will resume his sadly misguided but much pithier posting then.  I thank him for lending me this fine platform, and thank as well the discerning audience he has built for their indulgence this past week.

Joseph Britt ("Zathras")

Government By Commission? No, Thanks

I ought to sympathize with former Senators Bob Kerrey and Warren Rudman.  I share their  concern about the federal deficit, large now and likely to grow in the near future; I agree that neither party in Congress is prepared to address the issue responsibly. 

Their solution is that hardy Washington standby, a commission.  I like commissions, too; more precisely I think they can often be useful in defining issues or conducting investigations.  But after listing some boilerplate conditions for the success of a federal deficit commission (it must be "truly bipartisan," "all options must be on the table," etc.), the Rudman-Kerry proposal adds one final condition:

Fifth, the commission's recommendations should be given an up-or-down vote in Congress, allowing for amendments that would not reduce the total savings. Absent that, the report would likely join many others on a shelf.

Indeed it would.  That happens sometimes to legislative programs without political support.  It would be nice to be able to bypass the troublesome legislative process and substitute one that would involve no risk for elected officials -- and no demands either for retired Senators to put something beside their ghostwritten newspaper columns on the line for their views.

Twenty years ago, a Republican Senate faced a midterm election in which control of the body was at stake.  It managed to enact an overhaul of the entire federal tax code and the command structure of the Department of Defense.  Today the same body takes votes on a Constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning.  There isn't any question that federal legislators today, both Republicans and Democrats, are more interested in the permanent campaign than in passing legislation, especially unpopular legislation, and no question either that this will continue to have negative consequences for the country.  One of them is the temptation to bypass political risk and controversy by letting Congress's decisions be made for it -- by the executive, by the judiciary, by former officials wanting to make policy without dirtying themselves with politics.  It is generally wise to resist this temptation.  Indeed it is pretty much what someone who believes in the Constitution has to do -- perhaps not on relatively minor matters like closing superfluous military bases, but certainly on setting the budget and raising federal revenues.

JEB

Never Say Never Again

Darfur's nightmare was always bound to end in some way. 

It could end in a peace agreement honored by all sides in the conflict that began in early 2003, or through the intervention of a strong peacekeeping force from the civilized countries.  Or, it could end with the civilian population of Darfur being mostly wiped out, either killed or starved or driven into permanent exile.  The United States gave the first possibility its best shot last year, and failed; it is now calling, more than a little ineffectually, for the second.  But the third is more likely at this point.

Eric Reeves explains why, per usual for him at great length and in great detail.  His account nonetheless deserves to be read in full:

All evidence suggests that the international community is prepared to acquiesce before the military onslaught Khartoum’s National Islamic Front is preparing for North Darfur, an offensive that will target both rebel military forces and non-Arab civilians who do not support the deeply flawed “Darfur Peace Agreement” (May 5, 2006, Abuja, Nigeria). Fighting in North Darfur over the past two months has increasingly involved collaboration between the forces of Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) faction leader Minni Minawi (a member of the Zaghawa tribe and the only Darfuri signatory to the Abuja agreement) and Khartoum’s regular military. This collaboration has produced attacks that have focused primarily on Fur villages. As Refugees International President Kenneth Bacon reports in a July 21, 2006 letter to President Bush (following an eleven-day assessment mission to Darfur):

“Minawi’s forces are attacking Fur villages in North Darfur. According to the United Nations, some of these attacks show the same signs of genocidal intent demonstrated by the government-back Janjaweed militia---the targeted killing of young men.”

Who decides that this should continue?  The government in Khartoum does.  How can one government, ruling a weak and deeply divided country, wield such authority?  Because it is not isolated and left to face the international community (where human rights are concerned "the international community" essentially means the North American, European, and Pacific democracies plus a scattered few other countries) alone.  China has evidently placed its UN Security Council veto at Khartoum's disposal should a resolution calling for UN peacekeepers in Darfur come to a vote, but China would not so exert itself about a conflict in Africa for the sake of just one government there.

The fact is that Sudan, a member of the Arab League, has the unquestioning support of the League and of every Arab government for anything it chooses to do in Darfur.  The same governments and Arab media that wail piteously about the suffering of Arabs at the hands of Westerners and Israelis are fine with genocide sponsored by an Arab government. 

That is the root of the matter; that is why Khartoum is able to call on China to support its refusal to allow a UN peacekeeping force in Darfur, though UN peacekeepers already monitor the peace agreement between Sudan's government and former rebels in the south of the country.  The government responsible for genocide knows, as Beijing does as well, that in standing up for murdering large numbers of Africans it will be seen in Arab countries as standing up for Arab dignity.

Arab voices outside of government seem to know it too, something that drew comment as long as two years ago in one Arab publication.  A few months ago an al-Arabiya editor suggested in a Washington Post forum that pressure from Khartoum was responsible for the paucity of Darfur coverage in Arab media.  The whole situation has grim implications for the Mideast democratization strategy so beloved of President Bush -- how does it help us or anyone else if people tolerant of genocide get to vote in free elections?

That aside, though, now would be a good time to decide if we mean to let Sudan complete its final solution to the Darfur problem without doing anything at all.  The least that ought to be done is to push the Anglo-American resolution calling for a UN peacekeeping force in Darfur to a vote in the Security Council.  If China and the Arab governments are going to come out in support of mass murder and gang rape as weapons of warfare they might as well be forced to do so in the plain light of day.

After the Rwandan genocide of 1994 any number of people in Europe and America promised each other "never again."  Well, "again" has happened at least three times since; a government-imposed famine in North Korea in the late 1990s and the maelstrom that has enveloped Congo for the last several years were the first two.  Darfur is the third.  It is possible to find fault with American and Western policy toward this massive ongoing human disaster in several respects, but perhaps the most important is that so little effort has been made to isolate a government recklessly pursuing a vicious policy that benefits no one else.  Too much time has passed for there to be anything like a good resolution to the situation in Darfur, but as Eric Reeves demonstrates we know what will happen soon if nothing is done.  Perhaps a more forceful Western effort in the Security Council will accomplish no more than putting genocide's enablers on record.  That's not much, but it's not nothing, and we'll never know if more is possible if the effort is not made.

JEB

Still On The Straight Talk Express

Glenn Frankel has a long pre-campaign campaign profile of John McCain in this Sunday's Washington Post.  It's generally favorable, as most newspaper stories about McCain are, and incidentally dwells on the main reason they are:  the access McCain gives media types and the amount of good copy he provides.  I've always thought that one reason press stories about heavily scripted politicians like George Bush, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry are so dull to read is that the people writing them are bored half to death with their subjects.

Frankel discusses McCain's conversion from a candidate against Bush in 2000 to a prospective candidate positioning himself to be Bush's heir in 2008.  McCain himself is candid about the political calculation:

"...[W]hat's changed since 2000? someone in the audience asks McCain.

"My personality has improved significantly," quips the senator from Arizona. "I took a Dale Carnegie course."

Then, more seriously: "I think it's very clear that then-Gov. Bush had the support of the Republican establishment. He worked hard for it, and he gained it, and he deserved it."

While Frankel goes a little light on the potential obstacles to McCain's doing the same thing in the next couple of years, he does nail perhaps the biggest one, noting that his 2002 campaign finance reform measure "...has probably done McCain the most damage with Republican-dominated interest groups such as the National Rifle Association and the antiabortion movement, which contend it has hurt their fundraising operations..."  This is worth noting because the mainstream media so often discusses issues like gun control, abortion, and the environment at their face value, ignoring the institutional imperatives of the interest groups organized around such issues.  Of these the most important, always, is their need to keep the money coming in, a need that must be assumed to influence every position they take.  If groups like the NRA or Americans for Tax Reform dislike McCain, this is the main reason; his positions on the issues they nominally care about are hardly more than convenient pretexts.

Frankel gets two things wrong, from my point of view.  The most important is that he never asks McCain directly why a man who will be 72 in 2008 is not too old to be President.  He also can't resist throwing in an anonymous quote from someone who says nothing meriting a grant of anonymity:

"You're dealing with people who are professionals," says a senior Republican official with close ties to the president. "Everybody in Bush world understands the most important legacy this president will leave is in dealing with the war on terror with moral clarity. And there's been no more steadfast and articulate proponent of that central policy goal than John McCain."

Spinning for the old guy:  check.  Sucking up to the likely new guy:  check.  I understand why the anonymous source, probably one of the many oily electioneering hands the President has placed on the public payroll, would say things like this; I'll never get why any reporter would mar a perfectly good profile by quoting a source like this without naming him.

JEB

Right Wing Friday Catblogging

Kevin Drum is known among bloggers for posting photos of his cats on Fridays, though I notice he hasn't done as much of it lately.  I am not much of a cat person at all, but I do get a charge out of this site, run by a private game reserve in South Africa.

The photography aside, one can get lost in the narrative supplied by the reserve's rangers of animals' lives as they are observed from day to day.  It's like a very elaborate soap opera, only with less goofy dialog.  Or like following the politics of the Middle East, except that when someone dies the reasons for it usually make sense.  Lion prides change leadership; once dominant male leopards grow old and lose their territories; cubs are born and grow into adulthood -- or not.  Even though my personal favorite character in the drama, the famous Rock Drift Male leopard, has aged and is rarely encountered anymore, it's all strangely compelling

...As Long as You're Sincere

Charles M. Schultz was probably thinking of something other than foreign policy when he put this in one of his "Peanuts" cartoons, so we have no way to know what he would have said about the emerging "progressive" critique of the Bush administration's foreign policy.

This holds that there is nothing wrong with President Bush's oft-declared faith in democracy promotion as the centerpiece of American foreign policy, except that he's not really sincere about it.  He went and overthrew Saddam Hussein by force -- a big no-no in the world of our modern "progressives" unless it's popular -- and started proclaiming liberty throughout the Middle East.  But he didn't really mean it; Bush always placed the cooperation of repressive Arab governments against terrorism above the reform, and eventually the overthrow, of those governments.  What we need is to back up the truck, be reasonable about accepting a certain amount of risk from terrorists, and show we are true to our values and sincere about promoting democracy everywhere, all the time, and before all else.

Is this a foreign policy program or a campaign theme?  Well, mostly it's a campaign theme.  Democrats lately haven't made any bones about wanting to reclaim the standing their party lost on national security issues with the McGovern candidacy almost 35 years ago.  President Bush's political strength could conceivably weaken to the point that Democrats would win that victory by default, but calls to American idealism -- including those by Bush himself -- have long been a staple of campaign rhetoric, and the emerging "progressive" foreign policy consensus practically overflows with them.

Shadi Hamid provides one example on The American Prospect site:

A progressive foreign policy would elevate democracy promotion as its primary component -- not only because it is right, but because it is necessary. For a movement and a political party that continue to grope for “big ideas,” a focus on democracy would transform a set of seemingly unrelated policies into a cohesive vision that can inspire and reassure Americans. We do indeed have a story to tell, and it is this: America will close, finally, the long-standing gap between words and deeds; we will, today, wage a war on the twin perils of tyranny and terrorism; and we will not stop until we have won....

America, in its finest hour, has been distinguished by its moral ambition. Progressives must begin to appreciate and harness what Michael Signer refers to as the “enormous latent authority in America’s almost congenital idealism.” If they don't, progressives in power, while likely proving to be competent managers of an interdependent world, will fail to inspire it. No doubt, they will also fail to inspire Americans.

My personal threshold of inspiration is rather high, and I try to keep whatever congenital idealism I have restrained by a sense of proportion.  Having viewed the Bush administration's rhetorical binges in the foreign policy area with distaste, I am not inclined to look kindly on people promising a purer commitment to the same ends using different means.  Above all I am wary of people deeply sincere about their own idealism and convinced it will not only revolutionize American foreign policy but win American votes.

The truth is that most American administrations will not have the privilege of transforming the world, and the ones that do will succeed not through the purity of their intentions but through their skill and judgment.  They will recognize that democracy is a demanding enough political system that many countries and cultures will not be able to sustain it no matter how hard we wish them to.  They will understand the risks of assuming that the reasons some Americans disapprove of our foreign policy and those motivating foreign audiences are the same.  They will not confuse the urgent with the important, as for example Hamid does in his American Prospect piece -- he lays out five key foreign policy objectives, three of which involve Arab countries exclusively and two that pertain mostly to them and a few other Muslim countries.

I have no problem with the advocacy of American values anywhere in the world, but the priority of our foreign policy must be the pursuit of American interests.  It is remarkable to me how completely the Bush administration shares with its "progressive" critics the delusion that these two things are really the same. 

Starting from this false premise they do indeed diverge in their approaches to foreign policy, with the administration insisting that we must show resolve in whatever courses of action it committed us to years ago and its liberal critics demanding that we instead modify our policies to eliminate inconsistencies with our rhetoric.  I rather think the rhetoric is itself one of our greatest foreign policy problems.  Crafted to appeal to American voters, it obscures and even attempts to deny that America like all countries pursues its interests -- something we have always done and always will. 

The dominance of the permanent campaign over the business of government in this country is now so complete that the problem of rhetoric ill-matched to policy may actually get worse before it gets better, as politicians seek desperately to "inspire" before the election and save worries about actually making policy for later.  That they are so often abetted by bloggers and columnists seeking to double as foreign policy advisers and campaign consultants may not in the end be that big a deal, but it can't possibly help.

JEB

No To Hitler!

An old Bob Newhart routine has him discussing a man he dislikes.  "But I don't hate him.  Hate is like, Hitler.  This guy is more like...Mussolini."

I was just wondering idly why a variety of commentators started referring to Islamofascists instead of Islamonazis.  Think about it; run-of-the-mill European fascists produced a number of more or less repellent dictatorships that were mostly overrun by Allied armies by 1945, but in a few cases (Spain being the most important) escaped to age into a kind of decayed somnolence, not entirely unlike some Arab governments today.  The people called Islamofascists want to overthrow those governments, or most of them, suggesting that either they are grossly deluded or that the term is wrong.

On the other hand European fascists, while they nursed ancient prejudices against Jews, didn't generally take them to the extreme the German Nazis did -- officially, I mean, as a matter of party ideology.  You could be a fascist without wanting to kill Jews, but not a Nazi.  So why wouldn't Hasan Nasrallah be an Islamonazi instead of an Islamofascist?

Then there is that third hand, on which al Qaeda types pretty much have it in for everyone and want to spread Islamist revolution to all sorts of places whether they seem ready for it or not.  Wouldn't this make al Qaeda an Islamotrotskyist organization?  Clearly there is a difference between al Qaeda and the Iranian President, who only wants to stir up trouble in specific places and is mostly preoccupied with his own country's power.  An Islamoleninist, or an Islamobrehznevist?  You could do a whole symposium on that topic alone.

There is no telling what additional contributions I might make to the subject of terrorist taxomony if it weren't so late and I didn't have a pile of work waiting for me tomorrow.  All I'd really meant to observe  was that even those ideologically-minded pundits searching for an appropriately pejorative-sounding adjective for terrorists seem to have recognized the modern rule of debate holding that you've lost if you start comparing people to Hitler and the Nazis.  Even terrorists.  Or Mike Nolan.

JEB

Psyches and Numbers

What makes spin and message discipline effective in election campaigns is the campaigns' limited duration.  A candidate's message may be only just barely plausible, but he only has to sell it until the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November.

We are way past that with the Iraq war, now almost three and one-half years old, and the Bush White House's legendary skill at spin and message discipline is starting to appear inadequate.  The Times/CBS numbers look just brutal for the GOP as it approaches crucial midterm elections:  36% Presidential approval, 62% saying things are going badly in Iraq, 51% doubting the link between the war on Iraq and the fight against terrorism.  The latter is a particularly bad number for the White House, not only because the President has tried so hard to describe Iraq as integral to anti-terrorism efforts but because now that the public has started to doubt this an unpopular President is less able to reassure them.  In other words this number is not going to come down.

It certainly won't come down in response to statements like this:

These are challenging times, and they're difficult times, and they're straining the psyche of our country. I understand that. You know, nobody likes to see innocent people die. Nobody wants to turn on their TV on a daily basis and see havoc wrought by terrorists. And our question is, do we have the capacity and the desire to spread peace by confronting these terrorists, and supporting those who want to live in liberty? That's the question. And my answer to that question is, we must. We owe it to future generations to do so.

You can approach a statement like this in so many ways.  Americans have rather a good history of being able to face "challenging times" when they have confidence in their leadership; they don't now.  Among the things we owe future generations is an explanation of why transforming one, mid-sized Arab country is more important than any other task in the whole field of American foreign policy, indeed more important than all the others put together; such an explanation is lacking at the moment.

America's psyche would not be comforted by some other numbers, numbers which help define the things our government will not be able to do in the future because of the commitment in Iraq:

*     $437 billion appropriated by Congress from 9/11/01 through the end of Fiscal Year 2006 (which ends on the last day of September) for military operations in addition to the regular Pentagon budget, of which some $319 billion (73%) has been spent on the Iraq war.

*     $6.4 billion in estimated average monthly Department of Defense spending on the Iraq war in the last full Fiscal Year (2005), an estimated 28% increase over FY2004.

*     $8.0 billion in estimated average monthly DoD spending on Iraq in the current fiscal year.

This does not include funding for operations in FY2007 and later; it does not include funding for replacing equipment destroyed, damaged, or worn out through intensive use in the last three-plus years.  We know there will be plenty of funding required for the first, because the President has told us so, and we know there will be plenty of money spent on the second.  The thing is, most of the money we have spent already has been borrowed.  Running up still more debt to the Chinese central bank is an expensive way to show resolve.

My psyche would be a little less strained if one member of our elite White House press corps could have refrained from repeating a question about whether the President was "frustrated" and asked about this instead.  Not that numbers, other than polling numbers, are all that exciting.  It's just that I have this feeling these particular numbers might turn out to be important.

John McCain and a Cast of Thousands

Bloggers, including Dan Drezner and Greg Djerejian, are all over a John Broder story in Monday's New York Times about Sen. McCain's efforts to, as Dan says, "...monopolize GOP operatives and policy wonks in preparation for 2008."  Because of the high value I place on conformity I thought I should say something about it too.

Greg wants to know who will end up advising candidate McCain, and/or President McCain, on foreign policy, there being a good chance that Brent Scowcroft and William Kristol will advocate diametrically opposed positions that no one man could adopt at the same time.  Dan is more interested in whether McCain, once he draws so many established Republican figures into his orbit, will become vulnerable to an insurgent challenge as George Bush briefly was in 2000.  Such an insurgent would "...inevitably be painted as an authentic straight-shooter who is somehow more "authentic" than McCain."

I'm not sure there is anything inevitable about 2008.  I don't know that Dan's prediction is even close to being right -- such earlier Republican insurgent candidates as Pat Robertson and Steve Forbes embraced specific constituencies, not an image of "authenticity" -- and Greg's question sounds to me like one McCain is at least a year away from answering in any but the most preliminary way.  In such a large group of advisers -- an alert Belgravia Dispatch reader found an even longer list on an Arizona site -- there must be a substantial number of people trying to get in good with the early front runner, for reasons among which helping to direct the ship of state may not rank high.

But there is something else about this that is very peculiar to me.  I respect and admire John McCain; I supported his candidacy in 2000 and thought its failure a national misfortune.  I also thought he ran in 2000 fully expecting to either win or start preparing for retirement.  Instead he found the show ended with the lights still on and the crowd wanting more.  So he's running again, and looks to be both better organized and better funded, with many influential Republicans who went with the frontrunner Bush in 2000 prepared to back him as the frontrunner now.

But now McCain is 70.  He will be 72 during the next Presidential campaign, older than any successful candidate for the Oval Office except Reagan in 1984.  This is a very significant weakness.  So is McCain's enthusiastic support of the administration's war policy in Iraq, a policy that grows daily more unpopular.  And McCain's efforts to mend fences with President Bush risk alienating voters who have come to distrust the President without winning McCain the loyalty of Bush's most devoted supporters.

I don't agree with McCain about Iraq, and think his embrace of Bush tactically unwise.  But my strongest reservation about him is also my simplest:  I'm not convinced he isn't too old for the Presidency.  That great cloud of advisers and consultants doesn't do anything to quell my doubts on this score.  McCain's appeal is the same as it was in 2000, but he is not the same. 

I do not see anyone clearly better among likely Republican candidates in 2008, disturbing commentary by itself on the impoverishment of the GOP in the last few years.  But an old candidate is likely to end up being a weak candidate, and an old President to have troubles as Reagan did in his second term.  Desperate to fill the political vacuum opening up as President Bush nears retirement without having done anything to prepare a successor, Republican powers past and present are placing big early bets on a candidate with the substance and campaign skills to keep the GOP on top.  If only he were ten years younger.