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« February 17, 2008 - February 23, 2008 | Main | March 2, 2008 - March 8, 2008 »
Yesterday's Russia call was largely a success, but the fact that neither of our experts picked up on this indicator of Russia's rising global influence does give one reason to doubt their expertise.
I posted about the Marc Sageman book before finding Matt's post on the Marc Sageman book (silly me). I have a couple of answers about the challenge of reframing the terrorist threat. First, it's very plaiin and simple what we have to do about terrorists: find them, catch them, stop them. We have agencies, agents, and international partners to do this, and we need to keep doing it. But none of that work requires us to psyche ourselves up for a global generational struggle.
Meanwhile, we might notice that we have a lot of other international challenges. So here's the question, if we prevent terrorist attacks but fail to make progress on nuclear proliferation or global poverty, will we think our national security and foreign policy is succeeding? I raised this question in a Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel op-ed recently. (Note: there was a bit of clumsy editing. The section on nonpro was supposed to talk about the importance of a global taboo on nuclear weapons.)
In other words, counterterrorism is fairly straightforward, but we've noticed what has been happening with the rest of America's interests and values while we've been wrapped around the axle of the terrorist threat. All of which you can say without denying or downplaying the reality of the threat.
I have a question. How often do presidents make major foreign policy decisions on the spot, within a space of minutes? If the answer is not very often (or never), then if you lengthen the timeframe to hours or days doesn't it become much less an issue of a leader's ability to make snap judgments? I'd rather not get into the middle of the debate about experience; experience is good. I just want to clarify how we really see this aspect of the job descriptoin for POTUS.
NSN’s President Rand Beers testified before the Congressional Joint Economic Committee on the costs of Iraq to our national security. It’s worth a read.
On a related point, it seems like a pretty gross strategic miscalculation to me that Republicans are suddenly welcoming a debate on Iraq. In the last week Senate Republicans surprisingly decided to open up a debate on the issue, and John McCain went after Obama over AQI. The last time I remember Republicans welcoming a debate on Iraq was in June of 2006 where they thought they could label the Dems as “Cut and Run.” Instead 39 of 44 Democrats actually got behind the Levin-Reed Amendment, which became the basic outline of the Democratic Iraq plan in the 2006 election, while Republicans just repeated “cut and run” until they were blue in the face.
A debate on Iraq didn’t work then for Republicans and it won’t work now. I understand why they want to do it. They don’t have much choice. McCain was one of the faces of the surge. And on top of that they can’t run on the economy (in shambles), healthcare (no plan), energy (no plan and oil at $103 per barrel). Even yelling boogh boogah over terrorism seems to be losing some of its appeal as Democrats are standing up on FISA.
As Michael pointed out earlier this week, the public is completely against the war and that hasn’t changed. The Republicans seem to be banking on the fact that they can sell this reduction in violence, but the response is pretty obvious and it’s to put everything in the broader strategic context. Something along this line from Rand’s testimony:
The cost of the war in Iraq in terms of lives and treasure has been tremendous: nearly 4,000 American troops have been killed; 30,000 American serviceman and women have been wounded; and according to a report released by this committee, the American economy has already incurred $1.3 trillion dollars in costs - a sobering $16,500 per family of four.
What has that spending bought us? Diminishing respect for America around the globe; the reconstitution of our terrorist and extremist enemies; and the over-extension of our military and diplomatic capacity. In Pakistan and Afghanistan Al Qaeda and the Taliban have regained their strength and now operate with impunity. In the broader Middle East, Iran has been let out of its strategic box and now wields greater power. The war has severely overstretched and depleted our military, leaving us vulnerable and unable to respond effectively elsewhere. Freedom and democracy around the world have slid backwards, as American moral authority has been tarnished and our ability to mobilize others to meet global challenges and the needs of our citizens has been undermined.
So now we know that Prince Harry has been deployed to Afghanistan for ten weeks. The British press kept it quiet. It was American blogger Matt Drudge who blabbered. So much for loyalty and supporting the troops. Prince Harry was trained up and ready to go. Now he won't be able to apply his skills, have the experience, and help out where we all really need it.
Hey Matt, we need more troops in Afghanistan, remember? Every single one of them. We're begging NATO for more. We need EVERY SINGLE ONE of them. I know people will disagree with me about the press seeming to "cozy" with the government to keep information under wraps. blah blah blah. In my opinion, this is different. We elect leaders to make these calls, that's the risk you take when you choose who to vote for. This was a good decision and we blew it.
I actually don’t think Hillary’s new ad is very effective. It isn’t all that scary and I think that Democrats generally aren’t as susceptible to the fear card as the general electorate. But still there is something infuriating about this. I have spent a good deal of time over the past three years talking to gun shy Democratic candidates and members of Congress who are afraid to stand up on national security precisely because of the fear card. Now, that started to change in the run up to the 2006 election and Democrats are gaining more and more confidence on this issue (See the recent FISA debate).
But let’s face it the fear card is the tactic that George Bush has used to push through just about every single horrible foreign policy decision of the past 8 years. In 2002 it was the Cleeland-Osama ads. In 2004 we had wolves. In 2006 there were the scary 24 like ads with calls being made from Pakistan to NY, just to name a few.
Now, the tool is less effective then it used to be. But in the same way that progressive healthcare wonks hate “Harry and Louise”, and progressive social security wonks hate the word “crisis”, progressive national security wonks despise the fear card. It undermines everything we do. It just infuriates me when Democrats start using it against Democrats.
No idea why I'm on such a Dubai kick of late. It is fascinating to watch a city grow so quickly, not only for the aesthetic and innovative urban planning aspects, but also because Dubai and the other rich, small Gulf States represent a real oasis of geopolitical and strategic importance in the region. Their economic and socio-political models, while not directly transferable to the larger and more complex nations in the Middle East, do contain integral harbingers of hope for the region writ large. And while Americans remain apprehensive when nation-states like Dubai invest in the U.S., the latest being curiosity over Dubai World's (of the Dubai Ports World controversy) $2.7 billion investment in MGM's CityCenter project in Las Vegas, there is plenty of the reverse, American investment in Dubai, as well.
The latest comes from Anheuser-Busch, not in form of a brewery in the tightly regulated liquor world of the Emirates, but rather in the exportation of an even better commodity: Killer Whales. The beer empire plans on building, along with a subsidiary of Dubai World, "Worlds of Discovery — a complex that will include SeaWorld, Aquatica, Busch Gardens and Discovery Cove" located, where else, but on the second-largest man-made island shaped like a palm in the world! With tourism exploding in Dubai, with expectations of 15 million visitors per year when Shamu starts to do flips over the desert at SeaWorld Dubai in 2012, expect similar ventures from American companies in coming years.
You don't need to be Thomas Friedman to realize the tremendous upsides to all this cross-cultural, economically engineered integration. And as I've always said, America doesn't need more wars in the Middle East to help bring democracy, they just need more Orcas...
I found David Ignatius' column about a new book by former CIA officer Marc Sageman really helpful as I wrestle with the question of how to view terrorists. You can watch video of a New America Foundation event for Sageman's book Leaderless Jihad, but it's the following passages that sparked a thought:
...the new jihadists are a weird species of the Internet culture. Outraged by video images of Americans killing Muslims in Iraq, they gather in password-protected chat rooms and dare each other to take action.
Sageman's policy advice is to "take the glory and thrill out of terrorism." Jettison the rhetoric about Muslim extremism -- these leaderless jihadists are barely Muslims. Stop holding news conferences to announce the latest triumphs in the "global war on terror," which only glamorize the struggle. And reduce the U.S. military footprint in Iraq, which now fuels the Muslim world's sense of moral outrage.
So if we really want to pull the rug out from under these guys, we need to target their vanity. It's a longstanding concern of mine that we have been contributing to just the heroic legend the terrorists are trying to cultivate.
Don't get me wrong. These people are out there, and we need to keep looking for them and stopping them. What's excessive is the idea that we have to steel the national will to respond to an evil of such magnitude. No, we need to keep looking for them and stopping them. Otherwise, if their perverse ambitions to heroism are based on the idea that they are the vanguard of the clash of civilizations, why should we gratify their ambitions? Think of it this way, what if those who frequent the chat rooms found their cause disappearing from the headlines? What if they couldn't find themselves when they try to vanity google? What if they faded from being such a big part of our consciousness? Who would that really hurt -- us, or them?
Consider this my requisite political posting of the week, but I had to comment on this doozy from Bob Shrum today on MSNBC. When asked about problems in the Clinton campaign, Shrum said that top Clinton strategist, Mark Penn has a thin campaign track record, having only worked on President Clinton's 1996 campaign and in his words, "that wasn't exactly tough."
Yeah, but you know what Mark Penn won that campaign. How many presidential campaign has Bob Shrum won?
But more to the point, it's patently untrue to suggest that Clinton's 1996 campaign was an easy race. Indeed, Penn and his partner Doug Schoen were brought on board in the winter of 1994/1995, which wasn't exactly a good time for the Democratic Party. Over the next year, they (along with Dick Morris) brilliantly repositioned President Clinton as a centrist Democrat (with some help from Newt Gingrich).
Among some of the smart, strategic moves of that campaign were ads run by the DNC in swing states that extolled the President's record on crime; calling for a balanced budget in the Spring of 1995, which blunted GOP attacks on the White House (and were stridently opposed by Harold Ickes and others in the White house); focusing the government shutdown on GOP efforts to cut Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment and changing the national debate from GOP-friendly family values to one of public values (a move that I believe was Penn's creation).
The reason why the 1996 race was so easy was because Clinton and the people around him did such a good job in 1995 of changing the public perception of him from a big government liberal, to a true centrist Democrat. After the 1994 debacle, that wasn't an easy thing.
What's more, you know what should have been an easy campaign - Al Gore's 2000 run for the White House. Let's ask Bob Shrum how that one worked out.
Now I'm not going to defend Penn's track record on the 2008 campaign, but Bob Shrum has zero right to be criticizing any Democrat when it comes to running an effective presidential campaign.
Courtney Martin has an article well worth reading in yesterday's American Prospect. She poses the question
Why is it that we keep talking almost exclusively about suicide bombers and Orange Alerts, and totally ignoring the looming question of long term prevention? Why haven't we stopped to ask: What would enlightened national and even global security actually look like?
These are the right questions. But, unfortunately, her answers (or at least some of them) are off the mark. She makes the case for linking global economic insecurity and the war on terror, and hails Obama for his promises to cut extreme poverty in half within the next 7 years. It is unclear what this has to do with stopping terrorists from blowing things up. Yes, it is an intuitive thing to think that poverty is a main cause of terrorism - except, well, it isn't. In fact, extreme poverty probably has the opposite effect of actually making extremism and political violence less likely, all other things being equal. The poverty-terrorism hypothesis is well-meaning, but it clouds our understanding of what the fight against terrorism requires.
Extremism and terrorism have traditionally tended to be middle class and upper-middle class phenomenons. This was the case with communism, and it is the case today with Islamic radicalism. It's a complicated discussion, but, briefly, the main thing worth noting is that higher levels of education (a proxy for economic status) are linked to greater political awareness and perceived injustice at the state of affairs, which is what drives movements that require from their members a passionate commitment to a cause. It's not exactly an accident that universities are hotbeds of radicalism, and, sometimes, revolution.
The poor and destitute are consumed with the task of surviving on a day-to-day basis. A more comfortable economic situation makes it easier to to devote time to a political cause. (Again, it's not exactly an accident that the primary "producer" of terrorists-for-export in the Middle East is Saudi Arabia, which enjoys one of the highest GDPs per capita in the region). There are other reasons, and the ones listed here are probably not very well-articulated. So, for more on the matter, take a look at Alan Krueger and Jitka Maleckova's 2003 study on the roots of terror (as well as Alan Krueger's book What Makes a Terrorist?). Another excellent place to start is Peter Bergen and Michael Lind's article in Democracy.
Okay, Tim Russert, here's your chance to get more information about
Russia's upcoming 
presidential
election and what it means strategically for
U.S./Russian relations. NSN held a conference call today with two Russia
experts, Mark Brzezinski, Former Director for Russian/Eurasian affairs
on the National Security Council, and Mike McFaul, Director, Center on
Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law at Stanford University. Below
are some choice quotes, and the full audio:
Mark Brzezinski
"We should tell the Russians that it would be good if your neighbors feared you less."
"It’s possible that Putinism may be the last gasp of the old regime, and it may well be the case that within the next decade, the Putin-Medvedev government might be replaced by a new generation of Russians, many of them who are trained in the west…who are not products of the KGB and more open to the west."
Mike McFaul
"In my opinion it’s the least competitive election in Russia’s post communist history…Several years ago we had a debate about whether Russia was on an autocratic path or not. I think that debate is over in the West. Some people want to use adjectives, say it’s a weak autocracy, soft auto, but the word autocracy is the noun now rather than democracy being qualified."
"The overriding strategic objective of Russian foreign policy today is to balance against what they would call the American hegemon…It’s fundamentally different than it was you under Gorbachav and Yeltsin and the early years of Putin, which was integration with the West. I think its going to take a long time to change that."
This has not been a very good news day out of Iraq. First of all, we have more stories about the Sunni Awakening Forces losing patience with the United States.
U.S. efforts to manage this fast-growing movement of about 80,000 armed men are still largely effective, but in some key areas the control is fraying. The tensions are the most serious since the Awakening was launched in Anbar province in late 2006, according to Iraqi officials, U.S. commanders and 20 Awakening leaders across Iraq. Some U.S. military officials say they are growing concerned that the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq has infiltrated Awakening forces in some areas.
"Now, there is no cooperation with the Americans," said Haider Mustafa al-Kaisy, an Awakening commander in Baqubah, the capital of Diyala province, an insurgent stronghold that U.S. and Iraqi forces are still struggling to control. "We have stopped fighting al-Qaeda..."
In the past two months, he [a former commander in the Islamic Army, an insurgent group] said, 20 of his fighters have quit. Many felt their monthly salary was no longer worth the risk of fighting al-Qaeda in Iraq. His men also have not received their salaries in two months, he said. "We'll all be patient for another two months. If nothing changes, then we'll suspend and quit," Kassim said. "Then we'll go back to fighting the Americans."
If that isn't unnerving enough, we also find out that the provincial elections law was vetoed by the Presidential Council, which consists of the Shi'a Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi, Kurdish President Jalal Talabi and Sunni Vice President Tariq Al Hashemi. So now it goes back to Parliament. Many in American military and diplomatic circles have emphasized the importance of this law, and I agree that it's important (even though I have some reservations). But what I find tremendously important here is that the whole point of how the three legislative pieces that were passed a couple of weeks ago was a negotiation between the Kurds, Sunnis and Shi'a to push through three bills as one package that would appeal to each. If the Presidential Council is then going to cherry pick and send one of the three bills back while passing the other two, you'd imagine there would be some pretty unhappy people sitting in Parliament and that it will really undermine the Parliamentary process going forward.
The other confusing element here is that the person who actually had the strongest objection to the provincial powers was Abdul Mehdi - a member of ISCI, the largest Shi'a political party. Now ISCI is very much into a decentralized state with most of the power at the local level. And the reason for the veto was that the provincial powers law gave too much power to the central government. But, when the three bill compromise was worked out in parliament the provincial powers law was supposed to be the part that was meant to placate the Shi'a. I'm surprised. Why would they then veto it? Either there was something in the bill that they hadn't considered, or they were bargaining in bad faith. We'll have to wait and see.
Anyway, the clincher for the day was Prime Minister Maliki's view on Iraq these days.
National reconciliation among Iraqis has succeeded. We have succeeded in eliminating sectarianism.
Yup. Maliki must be taking his public speaking lessons from Bush. If you say it enough times - even if it has no basis in reality - it must be true.
As many of you are aware the New York Philharmonic performed yesterday in Pyongyang, North Korea. A beautifully written piece in the FT provides some fascinating detail to the event. It sure seems like it was a nice moment - but as for breaking down barriers between countries, well I'm sorry but I just don't see it.
I understand the argument that these types of cultural exchanges are good ways to open up closed societies, a la Ping Pong diplomacy with China in the 1970s. But, North Korea is the single most repressive regime in the world. How is this effort going to "open things up?" Forgive me for sounding so cynical but it seems like this diplomatic initiative will do more to provide international credibility to a terrible regime (probably the worst in the world) then do anything to open up North Korea to outsiders. I would imagine the goal of this whole exercise was to show North Korea's "openness" at a time when negotiations are ongoing regarding the country's nuclear program. As for providing the North Korean people with a taste of the outside world . . . well that sure seems a bit naive.
In a less repressive society, or if North Korea had eschewed foreign visitors in the past, I might see the benefits, but lest we forget North Korea hosted Madeleine Albright in 2000 and there was even some talk about President Clinton visiting the country. It seems to me that if a more diplomatically attuned administration was elected in the United States the potential for a face-to-face meeting between say President Obama and Kim Jong Il would be possible - the current visit by the Philharmonic notwithstanding.
Isn't this whole thing being blown a bit out of proportion. Take for example the comments of Philharmonic director, Lorin Maazel and the 1959 visit by the orchestra to the Soviet Union:
It showed Soviet citizens that they could have relations with foreign organizations and these organizations could come in the country freely," he said. "But what the Soviets didn't realize was, this was a two-edged sword."
"By allowing interactions between people from outside the country with people inside, eventually the people found themselves out of power."
Sure, 32 years later! Look, I don't mean to sound like a curmudgeon and I invite any and all DA bloggers and commentators to tell me why I'm wrong, but I really don't see how this event does anything to impact the terrible existence of the North Korean people. It seems instead to me as if the Philharmonic (well meaning as they certainly are) was played for a patsy.
Michael Signer has a great post below on the various blog responses to his op-ed in the Washington Post decrying the lack of effective news coverage of foreign affairs on the campaign trail. Allow me to weigh in here with a few thoughts.
I think part of the reason why the media does such a poor job of talking about foreign affairs is part of the problem that Ilan identified below - they don't know much about it. The type of reporters that cover campaign politics are raised on politics, not foreign affairs. So when they do bother to cover foreign issues, it tends to be through the prism of domestic politics.
But to be honest, how are domestic policy issues that much different? With all due respect to Michael, I think there are plenty of folks that work on domestic issues for the various candidates who would argue that the press does an abysmal job of covering their issues as well. I think the point raised by Signer is not restricted to foreign policy issues - it's indicative of virtually all political campaign coverage.
While I don't doubt that foreign affairs coverage is worse I was struck by the fact that in Tuesday's Ohio debate there were four questions on foreign affairs (Iraq, NAFTA, Russia, experience to be commander in chief) - that's as many as we got on domestic issues. So I'm just not sure that it's accurate to argue foreign policy is getting short thrift.
Also, after claiming that John Edwards foreign policy speeches got precious little coverage, Signer notes that
This isn't sour grapes from a losing campaign. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have faced the same indifference. Obama presented a wide-ranging foreign policy speech before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs last April, a speech on veterans' issues in August, an Iraq address in October. Clinton gave a national security address in June, one on Iraq in July, a veterans' speech in August. In every instance, the mainstream media were almost completely AWOL in providing thoughtful, analytical coverage.
I looked over the coverage of these speeches and it seems to me that they received the typical response that many campaign speeches get - a write up in the major dailies with some online analysis. No more and no less then you might expect from a domestic policy speech that doesn't break new ground. (Some like Obama's Chicago speech received particularly thoughtful coverage).
But I think it's fair to flag the speech Michael failed to reference: the one that Barack Obama gave in August on terrorism. That received wall-to-wall coverage.
This was due in no small measure to the fact that Obama mentioned the possibility of bombing Pakistan - a surefire way to garner news headlines. In the end, there was plenty of thoughtful coverage of the speech and it was an issue featured prominently in later Democratic debates - and continues to be raised on the campaign trail today.
I hope Michael won't take too much offense at this last statement, but I think part of the reason why John Edwards didn't get the coverage he deserved for his foreign policy speeches is well . . . because he's John Edwards and quite simply he received less coverage than the other prominent candidates. Again, my sense is that press coverage of foreign affairs has largely followed the same course as most media coverage during the campaign.
Part of the problem on foreign affairs has been the lack of substantive differences among Democrats and Republicans. Reporters love conflict; but if you look at the positions of the major candidates on Iraq, as one example, there is a startling similarity. When the candidates disagree the press has perked up; whether it was Obama's attack on Hillary for supporting a Senate resolution condemning Iran, or attacks on Obama for saying that he would meet with foreign leaders of enemy states. This is probably the same reason why on the Democratic side climate change and energy issues haven't received much traction (the candidates largely agree) and health care has (the candidates largely disagree).
Finally, I want to posit question to Michael. One of John Edwards most provocative campaign stances was opposition to increasing the size of the army. It's a position that I believe is correct and courageous and stands in stark contrast to Obama and Hillary both of whom support increasing the military. Why didn't Edwards raise this issue more pro-actively in the debates? Maybe he did earlier, but I don't remember catching it in the NH or SC debates. If Edwards wanted to differentiate his foreign policy views this seems like a good place to start and surely if he had raised it in either debate it would have received prominent coverage. Might that have helped Edwards get more attention for his foreign policy positions.
Thanks again Michael for weighing in and I look forward to you telling me why I'm wrong!
An essay I wrote in the Washington Post on Sunday about foreign policy coverage during this campaign has provoked a wide range of interesting and occasionally bewildering responses, from Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, AJ Rossmiller, Ilan Goldenberg, and Matt Stoller.
I will get to them in a moment, but first wanted to say that there was an extremely heartening sequence in the MSNBC debate in Cleveland last night. Tim Russert asked both candidates tough questions about Dmitri Medvedev, Vladimir Putin’s handpicked successor as president.
As I’m still involved in the race in some ways, I won’t comment on the particular merits of each answer, but the exercise proved my original point—when the media engage in a serious way in probing candidates on foreign policy, they can push the candidates to reveal ways they think and qualities they would manifest as commander-in-chief. I’ve included an excerpt at the end of this post.
Now, for the debate about coverage. Ezra, Matt, and A.J. all had approving, thoughtful posts both appraising the depth of this disaster and trying to explain its causes a little better. Ezra observed a lack of thoughtful, in-depth journalistic coverage of policy in general. Matt said we lack Krugman-esque journalists working on foreign policy.
This is exactly the constructive path we ought to take, and I just hope that some members of the MSM get in the game.
But then there were a couple of posts that took a different path—toward a blame-the-victim pattern that attempted to blame campaigns for the media’s failure to cover their foreign policy proposals. I'd like to talk about this because I think it's actually a really instructive pressure point in this debate, especially for the blogs who are supposed to be keeping the MSM honest.
There is a time when music becomes the best politics. From its lilting cadences and bursts of staccato to its heartrending twins of harmony and melody, music can be a truly transformative medium and a powerful instrument of human connection. Yesterday, The New York Philharmonic gave an unprecedented concert in Pyongyang, leaving many to question whether this moving musical occurrence could foster warmer ties between the nations. Can musical diplomacy usher in a new era between North Korea and the U.S.? Can the jazz of Gershwin and the culturally-poignant “Arirang” move our nations to a heightened level of diplomacy?
The concert, spanning both American and Korean musical traditions, elucidated the common ground between the countries – and its significance for both New York Philharmonic members and Korean listeners was echoed loudly, and tearfully. “This might just have pushed us over the top” in finding a way beyond past discord, said former U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry. Indeed, music may be exactly what we need to foster connection amidst the tumultuous times of our global community.
Culture matters: I’ve certainly seen it happen on the domestic scene, at a time when the political challenges were no less daunting. In Wilmington, Delaware, during the early days of the civil rights struggle, I worked in an all-white church located in the center of an African-American community. Instead of retreating to the comfort of their suburbs, these white congregants, amidst the upheaval of the early 1960’s, chose a direction for their church, and I’m proud to say they chose justice - making the church a beacon for civil rights activism. It wasn’t the easiest or most comfortable choice, but it was shepherded by the power and grace of music.
Congregants hired an astute political minister who knew how to change policy, but also how to change people’s hearts as a precursor. He hired my then-husband, a young and talented choral conductor, to use music as a means to get whites and blacks – who had not shared a church, a school, or a common culture – to come together. He taught them to sing Beethoven and the blues, pop songs about change and Bernstein’s West Side Story. Music built the foundation for very different groups of people of all ages to work on housing and jobs, education and equal rights. It was marching time, and these suburban whites and inner-city blacks marched in Wilmington and on Washington. They may not have shared dreams before, but now they stood together listening to the famous “I have a dream speech,” delivered by King and worked diligently at home to create a new vision of community.
The political power of music is still very much alive. This November, at the International Women Leaders Global Security Summit (a project of The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands, in partnership with The White House Project, the Council of Women World Leaders, and the Women Leaders Intercultural Forum) Gala, celebrated musician Angelique Kidjo not only enthralled listeners with her moving vocal and rhythmic performance, but she called upon the global audience to utilize the medium of music as an accompanying force for political change. Kidjo, who is known as the “galvanizing voice of sub-Saharan Africa”, was echoed by Kim Campbell, former Prime Minister of Canada, who asserted that track II diplomatic efforts require not only dialogue but unique means such as the arts to foster understanding, open communication, and successful diplomacy.
In the aftermath of the Summit, planning for a women’s track II diplomatic force has already begun, extending the use of current diplomatic missions which women leaders have already begun to undertake. These informal but essential connections between women world leaders, women working on the ground, and national decision-makers are critical in fostering peaceful solutions in areas of conflict, and they consistently use music and dance as part of that connective tissue towards change.
In looking at our failures in Iraq, and the tense tightrope we walk with North Korea, it is evident that our old formula of politics “from the head” is not working. That we have often acted without regard to differences in language or culture or history, and that (particularly in Iraq) this ignorance has fostered nothing short of devastation. In today’s New York Times, Philharmonic musical director Lorin Maazel hoped that Tuesday’s concert, which was broadcast to an audience of 200 million, might be important to “people who want relations to improve” – and yet the Bush administration was clear that as they see it, “a concert is only a concert.” This denial of possible positive diplomatic outcomes is one more example of the shortsightedness that has steered our country in such a poor direction.
But this week, The New York Philharmonic has reminded our city, North Korea, and hopefully the world, that the value of music cannot be discounted, as it speaks the common language of the heart. And if we can learn to incorporate this new “tongue” into our diplomatic dialects, perhaps it will illuminate possibilities previously unknown. Perhaps when we integrate this language of the heart, we can traverse bridges previously burned, and encourage the head to follow.
Last Wednesday, Khaled Hamza, an influential (although low-profile) moderate in the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, was arrested. Hamza is the editor-in-chief of Ikhwanweb, the Brotherhood’s official English website. I got to know Hamza in the summer of 2006, where we met numerous times over coffee at Groppi, a cavernous ice cream joint in Tahrir Square. He was incredibly helpful, putting me in touch with senior Brotherhood leaders, and pointing me to documents I needed for my research. I also got the chance to do something few Westerners ever do – I got to know him not just as a contact or an interviewee, but also as a person. We had long, fascinating discussions about the internal tensions within the Brotherhood and about the future of Egyptian democracy. In this man, I saw a microcosm of the struggle before Egypt, and before America – on one level a struggle within Islam, but also a struggle between reformers and the dictators who seek to silence them.
Sure enough, Hamza is an Islamist, but he is, most of all, a democrat. He didn’t care how many times a day you prayed, or whether you mixed with members of the opposite sex. He didn’t care if you called yourself a “secularist” or a “socialist.” He only cared if you were on the side of democracy. For him, Islam was a motivation, a point of reference; it was not, however, a strict, legal system, with limits and punishments to be inflicted. Inspired by Justice and Development Party in Turkey, he wanted to move the Brotherhood and the "Islamic project" beyond an obsession with shariah and toward a model that was unequivocally democratic.
More interestingly, as I got to know him, I could also tell that he had, in one sense, fallen in love not necessarily with America, but perhaps with the idea of America. Let me explain what I mean by this. Like nearly everyone in the Middle East, he viscerally opposed U.S. policies. But where many Brotherhood leaders I met seemed genuinely angry at America, Hamza expressed, instead, a deep sadness. It was almost as if he felt betrayed, because he believed – or wanted to believe – that America was capable of so much more. He saw what so many Americans themselves had forgotten, that we had the potential to aspire to something greater in our engagement with the Middle East, that we could, one day, align ourselves not with brutal dictators, but with the everyday Arabs who had suffered under them.
He believed it was still possible. That’s why he was so willing to meet and talk to me. He wanted to send a message to the U.S., asking us for help, imploring us to play a more constructive role. This, after all, was pretty much the point of the Brotherhood’s English-language website. It was an effort to build bridges with the West and to start a dialogue across the divide. He knew that most of the Brotherhood's senior leadership had little interest in reaching out. So he did what he could. He worked from within the organization, advocating for a more moderate, pragmatic approach. He knew he was in the minority and that the Brotherhood, at large, was still dominated by people who were thoroughly conservative and reluctant to adapt to a changing political environment.
So he began to work closely with the rising generation of young Brotherhood bloggers, most of them in their twenties, and another embattled center of moderation within the organization. What resulted was a kind of nexus of internet ventures and websites, a virtual presence of a new guard within the Brotherhood that couldn’t be ignored by the organization’s “elders” – many of whom were in their 70s and 80s and whose approach to politics was still colored by the scars of the 1950s and 60s, when they were tormented in Abdul Nasser’s dungeons.
Continue reading "A moderate Islamist is arrested in Egypt - and what it means for us" »
There has been a lot of reaction to Michael Signer’s piece in the Washington Post this weekend regarding the media’s inability to cover foreign policy responsibly. Stoller, Yglesias, Ezra and Drum all make fair points here. But as someone who works for an organization whose mission is to bring foreign policy wonks into the political debate, there are a couple of observations still worth making.
First, Stoller rips the foreign policy community a new one for its unwillingness to get involved in politics.
It's time that Signer look himself in the mirror and recognize that politics matters. If he or someone like him is not sitting in the room where the decisions about TV, direct mail, and organizing are made, then no one in the press will take his foreign policy addresses seriously. And you can blame the press if you want, but if 97% of a campaign budget is going towards something other than communicating foreign policy ideas to the public, then what exactly is being done to fix this problem?
I think this is fair. Too often foreign policy wonks are unwilling to engage in politics and that is something we are trying to change. But I don’t it’s fair to just blame the foreign policy community here. There are some structural problems that need to be addressed. Yglesias observes:
Not only are foreign policy issues very important, but the president's level of control over them is much, much, much higher.
Here I think is the core of the problem. Precisely what makes foreign policy so important at the national level is what guarantees that there is no political training ground for national security progressives until they are suddenly involved in national campaigns.
If you are someone who truly deeply cares about domestic policy then you might just decide to become a State Senator. Through that experience you learn that to get your agenda passed you have to be able to play politics and you learn how issues like trade, immigration, or healthcare play at the local level and how to use them politically. But if you are someone who wants to devote your career to foreign policy or national security, you are not going to start at the Iowa state legislature. You are going to come to Washington and probably work for the Executive Branch, where what matters is bureaucratic ability to push your agenda – not political ability. We don’t have national security experts working their way through the political system. Most of the strong Congressional Democrats with serious national security credentials never ran a campaign before running for national office (See Jim Webb or Joe Sestak). Or they have been in the Senate for so long that they have become experts on this issue (See Joe Biden or Carl Levin).
This problem also translates to the consultants. Consultants make their way up the ladder by first winning local races. So all those direct mailing skills that they learn about domestic issues just don’t apply to foreign policy and national security. Then they find themselves in national races and are not nearly as comfortable with the issue and prefer to fall back on domestic issues. Of course there is the traditional Democratic aversion to these issues, which traditionally have been a Republican strength.
So in short. Part of the problem is with the foreign policy wonks who need to play a more active role in politics and accept that fact. But part of the problem is also with progressive and Democratic politicians who haven’t always been comfortable with these issues. What needs to change here is that there needs to be some responsibility on the part of local politicians who aspire for national office to get interested in national security issues earlier. And there needs to be more work in the progressive community to build that kind of support system that helps these types of politicians and also trains more foreign policy wonks in the ways of politics. This is something that we have been working on here at NSN and I know there are a lot of others in the progressive community (including Matt Stoller) who have seen the need, and are doing good work.
Anyway, that’ my main point. A couple of other thoughts below the fold.
Sometimes it really seems we don’t know anything about the Middle East. Some people do, but most Americans are totally lost, including politicians, policymakers, and, yes, journalists who cover the Middle East. Except for the last group, that’s to be expected (it’s not like I know anything about India or China). But, it becomes a problem when the Associated Press is making blatant errors in its coverage of the region, even well after 9/11 made it frightfully abundant that we needed to address the knowledge gap. I’m not talking only about issues of bias, perception or misrepresentation. That’s really par from the course with Middle East coverage. I’m talking about things which are demonstrably, obviously factually wrong. So, with the advance warning that this post may be boring, I just want to go over one particularly bad article from November 21, 2007, which I stumbled yesterday while doing research on democratization in Jordan.
The first thing I’ll point to is an example of a factual error, while the second is the more usual type of analytical stupidity. Both, however, distort our understanding of issues which are quite relevant to U.S. foreign policy. It’s really unacceptable and it - if you aggregate all such examples - puts our country at risk. As background, the largest opposition party in Jordan today is the Islamic Action Front, or the IAF. As the name suggests, it's an Islamist party. The AP tells us:
In 1989, IAF nearly won a majority of parliamentary seats on promises to tackle poverty that affects nearly 25 percent of the population. But four years later, the group lost much of its clout because it failed to provide jobs and ease the burdens of poverty.
The IAF didn’t exist in 1989 (it was founded in 1992). Not only that, even in a theoretical, parallel universe, there’s no conceivable way it could have been founded then, because Jordan didn’t allow for legal parties until 1991. The group that they are referring to is actually called the Muslim Brotherhood (while they are closely associated with each other, the MB and IAF are different organizations with different functions. The former is a social movement, while the latter is a political party).
Maybe we can forgive this oversight, but then they compound it by making an error about an error. They say that this group (i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood) “nearly won a majority of parliamentary seats” in 1989. Not even close. The MB won 22 seats out of 80. Granted, I specialize in Jordanian domestic politics, but that’s neither here nor there. A cursory 5-minute google/wikipedia check would have clarified these two matters (I verified the founding date of the IAF in exactly 10 seconds. I typed "Islamic Action Front" in google and then was referred to the group's wikipedia page).
An otherwise well done Helene Cooper piece in the Sunday Times Week in Review echoed the shibboleth that the withdrawal of forces from Iraq will itself be an all-consuming operation:
Beyond that, the logistics of pulling out 130,000 troops from Iraq would be daunting, and it could take close to a year to get all the equipment out. Indeed, some military experts say that if the United States military was given a year to exit Iraq, it would be so consumed with the logistics that it wouldn’t be able to do anything else.
Well, last fall our own Max Bergmann -- together with Larry Korb and a couple of other Center for American Progress colleagues -- looked at just this issue in their "How to Redeploy" report, and they reached very different conclusions. Contrary to what Cooper's sources told her, during a phased year-ong pullout, those units being withdrawn in the later phases would still be able to perform ongoing missions. According to the CAP analyis, such movements of forces are one of the things our military does quite well. The only real variable in the equation is whether we are salvaging every latrine and shed we set up, some of which it only seems sensible to leave behind.
In the blogosphere and even in the august venue of the Washington Post op-ed page there has been a regular and occasionally nasty debate about the success or failure of the surge in Iraq. What is most striking about this conversation is that few pundits are taking into account the views of the American people. Here the results are far clearer and quite consistent - they're not buying the pro-surge argument.
Earlier this month, CNN asked Americans whether they favor or oppose the war in Iraq – 34% favor, 64% oppose. The same question was asked in June 2007, well before the security situation began to improve – and the numbers are exactly the same. Indeed, they have been remarkably consistent from month to month. One would imagine that with stories of improved security in Iraq and the conservative meme that success in Iraq is just around the corner these numbers would have seen a bump – but it simply hasn’t happened.
How about President Bush’s approval on Iraq. It was 28% in January 2007 when the surge was announced. Today, it stands at . . . 28%. Unchanged. Was it worth going into Iraq? Again unchanged from January 2007 to January 2008. And in probably the most important question as it relates to the 2008 election – should the US withdraw troops right away, within a year or should we stay in Iraq as long it takes to win the war. Again, unchanged. Overwhelmingly, the American people want the troops either out now or out within a year. Take a look at the views of just one swing state, Wisconsin. There 61% want the troops out in 6 months. That’s a state that John Kerry won in 2004 by a mere 11,000 votes.
What’s even more interesting is that Americans are quite aware of the improved security situation.Polls show that a modest number of Americans acknowledge that things are getting better in Iraq -- but they don’t really seem to care. Their basic opinions on the war remain unchanged. The American people have made up their minds. They think the war in Iraq was a mistake; they disapprove of the current policy and they want the troops to come home.
Indeed, people seem to forget that we already had a national referendum on the war. It came in 2006 when congressional Democrats ran on a platform of withdrawal from Iraq and Republicans accused Democrats of retreat and surrender. I think we remember how that worked out.
This is sort of a long way to saying that John “hundred years” McCain has a real problem. From a political perspective he couldn’t have asked for a better six months on Iraq – the security situation has improved, conservatives are breathlessly declaring the surge a success and Democrats remain consistent in their call for withdrawal (playing into the conservative narrative on Democratic weakness on national security issues). And yet public opinion remains unchanged. What makes anyone think that things will change between now and Election Day?
One would think that the notion of Middle East investment in alternative energy is a lot like McDonalds starting to trumpet Tofu BigMacs as the next big wave in fast food: bad for their bottom line (though it may be marginally better for America’s waist line). 
But incredibly, the region’s investment in renewable energy resources—especially Wind and Solar—is amongst the highest in the world. This is most apparent in Abu Dhabi, where the Masdar City initiative is the standard bearer for sustainable urban planning. The nearly $22 billion project would create a commercial and population center of nearly 50,000 with zero-emissions, powered by solar including a fully functioning eco-friendly waste
management system. And it should be aesthetically pleasing with Sir Norman Foster visionary design, though it might look a little like Logan's Run surrounded by sand.
Ironic that in this
oil-rich desert, you find one of the most forward thinking plans experimenting with what may be our post-oil energy future by the fourth largest OPEC producer. Of course the UAE has more money than they know what to do with —and will for sometime due to their massive sovereign wealth fund—as well as ample interest from outside investors in their infrastructure and long-term incentive to look past oil. But it’s a bit of energy-based geo-strategic taunting of the Western nation’s that depend on foreign oil and speak loudly about energy independence that they are the ones leading the charge. Whereas we are in greater need for investment in alternative energy resources for a variety of security, environmental, strategic and economic reasons, Middle Eastern investment should be a bit of a wakeup call that we need to catch up. It will be impossible for Arizona to be the Persian Gulf of Solar Energy if Persian Gulf nations already beat us to the power punch.
And after all, would a country that barely invests in basic infrastructure such as roads and bridges be serious about the radical infrastructural changes needed to make America truly energy independent?
