Law As Inconvenience Posted by David Schanzer

Of all the harm the Bush Administration has inflicted on our global reputation, perhaps its greatest offense has been the damage caused to the respect other nations once had for our committment to the rule of law.

Maybe this is to be expected, coming from a presidency born of a Supreme Court case so lacking in principle the Court disavowed the case had any precedential value.  Still, the Administration's utter disdain of the law is simply staggering. 

Unhappy with a legal ruling on domestic spying from the Department of Justice, try to convince a recused, drugged up official to reverse it; fed up with prosecutors who won't use raw political power to influence elections, fire them and then lie about the reasons for the dismissals; inconvenienced by a civil service containing lawyers that don't share your political views, send a neophyte hack to prevent them from advancing their careers; longstanding treaty obligations get in the way of your favored interrogation techniques, ignore them and claim unlimited executive authority to do so; pesky courts preventing you from rushing accused war criminals through show trials, strip the courts of there centuries-old jurisdiction; pesky lawyers effectively asserting their clients' rights, intimidate their employers; Congress passes a law you don't like, claim authority to disregard it.

With the background of this record, the Administration then goes on to call on other countries to hold free and fair elections, establish independent courts, eliminate corruption, and abide by the rule of law.  It may take many, many years to reestablish our credibility on these most vital issues.    

Correction: Bashar al-Assad is not "A Nice Guy" Posted by Shadi Hamid

Things in Syria aren't looking too good: "One-by-one, non-violent Syrian advocates for change are falling victim to what observers call a blatant government campaign to decimate the country's long-embattled reform movement" (Via the POMED Wire).

A lot of my liberal friends were very excited when Nancy Pelosi took her April trip to Syria. The obvious problems with the visit aside, I suppose I agree, albeit somewhat reluctantly, that Pelosi should at least be commended for shaking things up, thumbing her nose at the Bushies, giving diplomacy a chance, and giving Arabs a reason to dislike us less. However, Democrats should not fall under the illusion that Bashar al-Assad is a friend, a would-be friend, or even a "nice guy" as a friend of mine once called him.

As adorable as Assad might appear to be to the untrained eye when discussing his IPod preferences, or his lovely wife, we cannot and should not avoid the simple fact that Syria is a brutal dictatorship. And we should be weary of indulging dictators, even when they profess admiration for Will Smith movies. Of course, the Republicans are the worst at this, despite their protestations to the contrary. The list autocratic countries the Bush administration has coddled or is in the process of coddling is as long as ever, and includes Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Tunisia, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, so on and so forth. Yes, and the Bush administration can claim responsbility for adding Libya to that long and illustrious list.

How Do We Talk About China Policy? Posted by Michael Fuchs

Debates over U.S. policy towards China can get heated. Mere words like "human rights", "democracy", "trade", "investment" and "stability" provoke endless conversations about China's present, its future, and what the U.S. should - or can - do to help shape that future. A recent exchange between David Lampton and James Mann on Foreign Policy's website exhibits the intensity of these debates. It also highlights some of the most fundamental questions swirling around U.S. policy considerations. Here's a taste.

Lampton:

It's Mann who is being naive. The truth is, U.S. policy toward the People's Republic of China has never been predicated on a false belief that China would move toward democracy soon, if at all. Seven consecutive U.S. presidents, backed by Congress and the American public, have weighed their options and decided that security and economic considerations rank above promoting Chinese democracy in the priority list. Mann wants to upend the ranking. Democratization promotes those other valid objectives, he believes. But that argument has not won the policy day thus far.

Mann:

I don't believe that's true. The first four presidents won congressional and public backing because the United States wanted China's cooperation against the Soviet Union. That indeed amounted to downplaying Chinese repression beneath the other interests of national security and combating Soviet repression. But after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the end of the Cold war, the dynamics changed. Since then, U.S. leaders have obtained congressional and public support by making the claim that their policies, especially on trade and investment, would help bring political change to China. Contrary to Lampton's assertion, there never has been a congressional vote (or election) in which Congress or the American public said it wanted to de-emphasize political repression in China.

My principal argument has been that political change in China is not inevitable - and that in fact China's one-party state is likely to persist for a long time. The claim that trade leads to political change was a rationalization used to line up support for U.S. economic policies that have proved beneficial, above all, to U.S. and multinational corporations. Now, Lampton is telling us to stop looking for far-reaching change, and to expect only more human governance from a one-party state that permits no organized opposition. That is truly sad.

The entire exchange is worth reading.

Is the supplemental debate for naught? Posted by Lorelei Kelly

Before tempers flare about the Democrats backing down from deadlines in the war supplemental (a story with dubious origins btw) the following makes one pause:

OMB Watch has just put out a report on a little-known law -the Feed and Forage Act- that seems to give the President broad powers to fund war efforts- even without an enacted appropriations bill.

So even if the negotiations over the war funding supplemental drag on, the President could meet the needs of the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Read it here.

Mr. Kerrey's Offensive WSJ Oped Posted by Shadi Hamid

I feel bad for picking on Edward Luttwak in my last two posts. His article was, for the most part, a harmless articulation of an idea that no rational person (I hope) would ever take seriously. More problematic and more worth our time, attention, and worry is this most recent attempt at impersonating Joe Lieberman - mixing the Connecticut senator's vapid self-righteousness, macho posturing, conservative suck-upping, and shocking ignorance of the Middle East into one oddly compelling, if dispiriting package. No such impersonation is complete in scope and offense unless it gets published in the Wall Street Journal, and gets a gold star from Kathryn Jean Lopez who, quite rightly, observed that Bob Kerrey is now her favorite democrat. The kiss of death, indeed.

For those of us interested in resuscitating the "liberal interventionist" tradition from the grips of death, then it is people like Bob Kerrey and opeds like the one he just published which make such an effort, however noble and urgent, all the more difficult.

Ok, so here goes:

Shirin Ebadi delivered our commencement address. This brave woman, who has been imprisoned for her criticism of the Iranian government, had many good and wise things to say to our graduates, which earned their applause. But one applause line troubled me. Ms. Ebadi said: "Democracy cannot be imposed with military force." What troubled me about this statement--a commonly heard criticism of U.S. involvement in Iraq--is that those who say such things seem to forget the good U.S. arms have done in imposing democracy on countries like Japan and Germany, or Bosnia more recently.

Yes, I suppose democracy “can” – at least in theory – be imposed by force. However, that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. It rarely is, particularly in a region where we had previously, shown little or no interest in encouraging democracy even through peaceful, gradualist means. Instead of democracy at gunpoint, which is a difficult sell in the Middle East, why don’t we start off by peacefully supporting Arab democracy by putting economic and political pressure on the dictators of Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar, etc, all of whom are our allies, and many of whom receive hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. in foreign assistance. Strange how we don’t see many republicans talking about that. In fact, when an amendment that would have reduced aid to Egypt by $100 million came up for a vote last year, Republicans voted overwhelmingly against it (while Democrats largely supported it).

Let me restate the case for this Iraq war from the U.S. point of view. The U.S. led an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein because Iraq was rightly seen as a threat following Sept. 11, 2001. For two decades we had suffered attacks by radical Islamic groups but were lulled into a false sense of complacency because all previous attacks were "over there." It was our nation and our people who had been identified by Osama bin Laden as the "head of the snake." But suddenly Middle Eastern radicals had demonstrated extraordinary capacity to reach our shores.

Try reading that a couple times and if it makes any sense to you, please tell me. Why exactly was Iraq more of a threat after 9/11? And what does Bin Laden have to do with this? Is Kerrey channelling Cheney?

A Contrarian Takes on The Middle East, Part III Posted by Shadi Hamid

Last week, I responded to Edward Luttwak's incredibly inane piece on "why the Middle East doesn't matter." In my initial post, I didn't get a chance to address the last couple grafs, which are important, if only because they represent a strain of thinking that has become increasingly prevalent on both left and right - the "Arabs are backward, so let's leave them alone" school of thought:

Softliners make exactly the same mistake in reverse. They keep arguing that if only this or that concession were made, if only their policies were followed through to the end and respect shown, or simulated, hostility would cease and a warm Mediterranean amity would emerge. Yet even the most thinly qualified of middle east experts must know that Islam, as with any other civilisation, comprehends the sum total of human life, and that unlike some others it promises superiority in all things for its believers, so that the scientific and technological and cultural backwardness of the lands of Islam generates a constantly renewed sense of humiliation and of civilisational defeat. That fully explains the ubiquity of Muslim violence, and reveals the futility of the palliatives urged by the softliners.

Luttwak gets the diagnosis more or less right, but gets the cure totally wrong. It is certainly true that Muslim extremism is fueled by what Tom Friedman refers to as the "poverty of dignity." So, yes, there is a pervasive sense of humiliation among Arabs and Muslims, but the real problem is that, because of the lack of democracy in the region, Arabs and Muslims have virtually no legitimate, peaceful outlets with which to express their indignation, anger, and frustration. Not surprisingly then, they end up taking refuge in extremism and conspiracy-theorizing, and resorting to political violence. Arabs have lost their ability to chart their own course, to ask their own questions, to form their own governments. They are, thus, passive recipients of what others decide for them. This humiliation is not a permanent feature. It can be ameliorated through democracy, insofar as democracy - by granting people the right and power to make their own choices - can restore dignity, moral authority, and political agency to those who wield its instruments.

Romney: They All Have Beards, Don't They? Posted by David Schanzer

One would think that with Iraq in shambles and Bush at 29 percent and dropping, those vying to suceed him might try to develop an approach to extremist Islamist terrorism that reflects some understanding of the complexity and, dare we say it, subtleties, that must be dealt with to develop a successful set of policies.  But no.  Here is some deep thinking from Mitt Romney from the most recent Republican presidential debate:

There is a global jihadist movement ... And they've come together as Shi'a and Sunni and Hezbollah and Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda with that intent.

Egad.  Where does one begin with this hash?

Shi'a and Sunni groups have not "come together."   al-Qaeda hates Iran (which is Shi'a), hates the Muslim Brotherhood (Sunni) for participating in elections in Egypt and elsewhere, and is a rival with Hezbollah (Shi'a) as well.  Hezbollah & Hamas are dangerous groups, but have an entirely different focus and set of objectives than al-Qaeda.  The Muslim Brotherhood is most certainly not on the United State's Christmas card list, but we ought to be exploiting differences between the Brotherhood and al Qaeda, not lumping them together.  All these groups pose significant threats to U.S. interests, but we need distinct policies to deal with the challenges each of them present. 

The longer we continue to view the Muslim world as monolithic, the deeper hole we will continue to be digging for ourselves.  If Romney endorses Bush's simplistic black & white view of the world, voters can expect that a President Romney would produce about the same success in the Middle East as his predecesor.    

Holding Mugabe to Account Posted by Suzanne Nossel

This is a piece I published at TNR.com on whether Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe ought to be offered immunity in exchange for a swifter exit.  Its the old "peace versus justice" dilemma, with the new wrinkle being that the culture of impugnity in Africa has finally showed some signs of fading, meaning that now is not the time to put aside principle and revert back to old ways.  One depressing aspect is that some of my earliest pieces for Democracy Arsenal more than two years ago (like here and here) were about Zimbabwe, and since then things have changed only for the worse.  Its almost enough to make you want to do a deal, any deal, to get rid of Mugabe . . .

At long last, we seem to be approaching--fitfully--global agreement than Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's elected dictator, must go. He is presiding over 80 percent unemployment, an inflation rate of 1,700 percent, and shortages of nearly all basic goods. In response to his troubles, Mugabe has attacked and injured opposition leaders, opened fire on protestors, and beaten those who resist arrest. In a comparison that is as harsh as it gets in southern Africa, clerics have equated his tyrannical tactics to the worst of Pretoria's apartheid regime.

And, since many of his critics now believe that toppling his regime--and getting a fresh start for Zimbabwe--is more important than holding him to account, there are increasing calls for Mugabe to be forgiven. Zimbabwe's opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai--whose skull was cracked open in police custody last month--has hinted that Mugabe should be offered immunity if he agrees to step down. The International Crisis Group, in a March report, likewise assumed that immunity would be part of the solution. It is widely surmised that, if current efforts by South African President Thabo Mbeki help end to Mugabe's rule, protection from prosecution may be part of the deal.

But, while immunity may seem a tempting solution--no worse than the way many other tyrants have left office--offering it to Mugabe now would represent a big step backward.