Time for the UN to Step Up to the Plate on Syria Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Having praised the UN for its tough-minded report on the Hariri assassination, its now time for the organization's supporters to call on the world body to follow up with action.  Tomorrow the Security Council will meet to consider next steps.  The US and France are reportedly united in pushing for a resolution that would require full Syrian government cooperation with the next phase of the investigation, including access to all witnesses and suspects, and backing those demands with the threat of sanctions.  The US is calling for a meeting of Foreign Ministers of all Security Council members as soon as this Friday.

That France is solidly on board and even fronting the issue bodes well, in that their bona fides in the Arab world are a lot stronger than ours right now.   This is not a case where the US is moving unilaterally or pursuing a self-serving agenda.  Recognizing that, the rest of the Security Council membership should rise to the occasion.   

There's reason for hope because:

1) Syria's actions do not raise the usual Chinese and Russian concerns about infringements on sovereignty - on the contrary, the assassination of Hariri was a grave insult to Lebanese sovereignty;

2) Syria's relatively isolated among the UNSC membership - while China and Syria have strengthened ties it won't get the level of protection that, for example, the Russians afford to Iran;

3) mercifully this issue sidesteps the quicksand of UN debates that pit developed versus developing countries - ordinary, disenfranchised people throughout the Middle East seem to get what happened to Hariri and want to see justice;

4) Syria's only strong ally among the UNSC membership would appear to be Algeria which has just 2 months left in its term;

5) Europeans and others on the Council can make a strong argument that in acting, the UN can prevent the US from taking measures against Syria on its own - after all that's gone down in relation to Iraq, that's got to have powerful appeal;

6) After flirting with the edge of irrelevancy after its failed September Summit on reform, the organization would benefit from proving its worth on an issue that matters to its host country and largest member state, the US.  This imperative won't be lost on the Council membership.

We can expect the usual to-and-fro over whether to include sanctions in an initial resolution, what the sanction triggers should be, and how far the measures should go.  But Russia, China and others ought to realize that for the sake of Lebanon, of the principle of sovereignty, of the stability of the Middle East and of the future of the UN, now is as good a time as any to prove that the world body is something more than a debating shop.

Oh, and a word to the Bush Administration:  there's plenty to blame Syria for right now, but John Bolton and colleagues had best not freight up an initial Hariri resolution with other US-specific hot-button issues that will only complicate the negotations and stand in the way of consensus.  After all, the Administration needs a success on this even more than the UN does.

The Pakistan Earthquake and Why We Need (a Competent) FEMA International Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Thanks to Katrina, Rita and even a weakened Wilma, this Fall has brought Americans a new appreciation of disasters and, in particular, of the human element that can turn natural calamities into first order political and social catastrophes.   

In the meantime, there are evidently about 10,000 children in Kashmir in imminent danger of freezing to death this winter as a result of the October 8 earthquake in India and Pakistan.  Large populations of survivors in remote areas have not yet been reached by any aid.  Temperatures are already dropping.  In scenes reminiscent of New Orleans, frightened helicopter drivers have turned around when faced by mobs of desperate survivors left waiting too long for food and water. 

Doctors and aid workers predict that a second massive wave of deaths is likely to occur as a result of untreated wounds and lack of shelter.  According to Kofi Annan, only a massive and to date unforthcoming infusion of international aid can stop this.  If it does happen, it will be inescapable that, alongside the earthquake itself, a second and more proximate cause of the deaths will have been the world's failure to mobilize and provide these trapped Pakistanis with the help they need.

While the news outlets have reported on the earthquake and its aftermath Americans, by and large, are taking a pass on this one.  Exhausted after Katrina and her successors, the US public = understandably yet no less tragically - has little appetite to get deeply engaged in the earthquake relief effort.  With the exception of Turkey, it appears that much of the rest of the world is following our lead and taking a pass on this one.

The needs are staggering.  Pakistan requires a half a million tents and an immediate helicopter mission on the order of the Berlin airlift to evacuate survivors.  NATO has volunteered 1000 troops but has rejected the UN's demand for a huge helicopter mobilization on grounds that it doesn't have enough of the vehicles to spare.   The US is sending just six helicopters, Britain four.   According to this article relief workers have "effectively admitted defeat - and issued a plea to the sick, wounded and dying to make their own hazardous journey across treacherous mountain passes on foot."

For a variety of reasons, the outpouring of concern and generosity that followed last January's tsunami has not been replicated in Kashmir.  The scope of the two disasters are not beyond compared.  The earthquake death toll is now at 79,000, compared to about 123,000 for the tsunami.  The UN has received only $57 million in pledges to meet what it calculates as a $312 million need.  By contrast, after the tsunami 80% of the funds needed were pledged within 10 days.   This article details the difficulties faced by the World Food Programme, one of the UN's best agencies, in meeting the needs without greater donor support.

[An related interesting side note that came up at the Princeton Conference some weeks back.  There's a big difference between the world's attitude toward the prospect large-scale deaths due to injury and exposure post-earthquake versus the risk of comparable loss of life due to a armed conflict. 

If tens of thousands of lives were hanging in the balance due to a murderous dictator, there would be calls for intervention to prevent genocide.  At the very least we'd see widespread hand-wringing.   Yet the lack of response to the earthquake has few Americans tied in knots.  Part of the reason for the distinction lies in the implications of killings (as opposed to deaths) for our social fabric.  Killings cause people to lose faith in one another, they unleash desires for revenge, they call into question the role and value of the state.  Yet, as Katrina illustrated, because of the high degree of human agency involved in responding to so-called "natural" calamities, deaths from these disasters can likewise tear apart a society.]

The glaring holes in the disaster response effort will have political ramifications:  analysts suggest that the army's failure to do more for survivors may weaken Musharraf's already shaky hold on power. 

Given the US's close ties to Musharraf and the demands its made on the Pakistani government as part of the fight against terror, its easy to foresee that already high levels of Pakistani anti-Americanism may only further intensify (the opposite happened in Indonesia after the tsunami, where the US's generosity led to sharply improved public attitudes toward us).  There are also reports that terrorist organizations have stepped into the void, viewing the chaos as a useful opportunity to win popular support and new recruits.

Why an International Version of FEMA is Needed . . .

It Took the UN to Get the World to Finger Syria for Hariri's Killing Posted by Suzanne Nossel

With all the uproar about UN investigator Detlev Mehlis' report implicating the highest levels of the Syrian government in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, we should not lose sight of the UN's accomplishment in carrying out the investigation and issuing the findings it did. 

The UN's legions of detractors include those who want the organization split into parts, dismantled, or kept out of global politics. 

But without a broadly mandated UN, how could the Hariri case have moved beyond finger pointing?  The Lebanese government could never have been trusted to investigate.  There's no way the US itself could have interfered.  The Arab League could not have been objective.  The EU would never have waded in.   The International Criminal Court would not have had jurisdiction.  Without the UN, its hard to envision how the investigation, particularly given its depth and breadth, could have been carried out. 

Despite the fracas over what may have been last-minute redactions of names from the report, Mehlis and Kofi Annan also deserve credit for not holding back on explosive and detailed findings.  Many complain that the UN is fundamentally flawed in that, as a membership organization, it cannot risk the ire of even outlaw Member States, but in this case that wasn't true.

It remains to be seen what the Security Council will do with Mehlis' report, but the people of Lebanon already feel some sense of satisfaction that the facts they all suspected have been brought to light by an objective source.

Here's another example of why - if we are ever shortsighted enough to abandon or significantly scale back the UN - we will find ourselves with the impossible task of having to recreate what we destroyed.

Publishing Classified Information Posted by Morton H. Halperin

As Washington braces for the expected indictment next week of one or more government officials in the Valerie Plame case, attention is understandably focused on its impact on the functioning of the White House and its likely impact on the future of the Bush Administration.  But along with the on-going AIPAC leak investigation, which I plan to discuss in another post, the Plame case will have far greater repercussions:  These cases could seriously impede the public's right to know what its government is doing.

This is because both investigations are proceeding on the misguided assumption that the World War I era "espionage" laws criminalize not just transfers of information relating to the national defense, foreign powers and their agents, but also leaks to the press.  If this were true, the United States would have an official secrets act -- one that is broken hundreds of times every day.  If enforced, such a law would deprive the public of information that is crucial to meaningful self-government.  This interpretation of the espionage laws would  render completely superfluous such acts as the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which are narrowly drawn to protect a specific category of information from disclosure in specific situations.   

Indeed, it is no small irony that the criminal statute which triggered the Plame investigation, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act,  was drafted with extraordinary attention to balancing the need to protect true government secrets with the critical role that a free press plays in our society.

Over several years the Congress enacted the Intelligence Identities Protection Act precisely because it recognized that the general espionage statutes were not intended to be used to cover disclosures to the press and, if they were, this would do great harm.   Congress recognized that there was massive over-classification of national defense information and that a statute that classified all such information would prevent the Congress and the public from gaining the information it needed to challenge government policies.

Indeed, enactment of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, with its myriad of safeguards, would make no sense if the espionage law, which makes it a crime for anyone to give national defense information to a person not entitled to receive it, applied to transfers of information to the press or from one reporter to another.  The definitive review of these statutes confirms that Congress had no such intention and that the Congress that drafted the Intelligence Identities Protection Act clearly agreed or it would not have gone to the trouble of carefully drafting that law.

In crafting this act, Congress recognized that even the disclosures of the identities of covert agents might be in the public interest and should not be criminalized except in specific situations.   The contrasts with the general Espionage Act are substantial and critical to understanding how the exchange of information between the Executive and the press now functions and how it must continue to function until we find a way to classify far less information.

The Espionage Act makes no distinction between government officials with authorized access to classified information and private citizens, including reporters who may acquire, or seek to acquire, such information.  All can be guilty of unauthorized possession, receipt, or transfer of such information.  By contrast, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act creates separate crimes for these two categories.  Those without authorized access, such as journalists,  are guilty of a crime only if they are engaged in a pattern of disclosures which harm the national interests.  Congress wanted to crack down on a small group who were regularly publishing lists of names of covert agents for the purpose of putting them out of business.  While successfully shutting down this effort, Congress took great care to insure that the reach of the crime would not extend to reporters who revealed the names of agents in the course of a legitimate news story.  It did not consider such actions to be crimes, but rather essential to public debate.  To underscore its concern that the actions of reporters not be chilled, Congress went the extra and unprecedented step of barring the use of the conspiracy laws to link a reporter to an unauthorized disclosure.   The history of this debate, in which I was deeply involved on behalf of the ACLU, suggests that Congress might well have barred Grand Jury subpoenas to reporters if it had considered the question.

Even in dealing with government officials the Congress legislated narrowly, covering only a very small category of information, the disclosure of which would clearly cause harm.  Congress also added a series of specific requirements, including the requirement that the official had knowledge that he or she was disclosing the identify of a covert agent whose  identity the government was trying to keep secret.

The Fitzgerald investigation has already done great harm by further undercutting the notion that reporters have a right to protect their sources without fearing jail time and that officials can speak to the press on background without fearing that they would be required to offer a blanket waiver of confidentiality to all of those to whom they speak on background. 

I was in the Defense Department in the 1960s when the public relied almost entirely on "unauthorized" leaks to learn about our Vietnam policy.  The notorious leak of the fact that the commander in Vietnam, General Westmoreland, had asked for 200,000  more troops triggered a debate which forced President Johnson to deny the request and announce that he was not running for re-election.   If all of us in the Pentagon and elsewhere who opposed the war could have been asked to relieve all reporters of their confidentiality agreements or be fired, there would have be no such leak or there would have been a large purge including most, if not all, of the skeptics of the war.

Those who take satisfaction from the fact that, in this case, those asked to sign the waivers were supporters of the war should understand that this demand will most often be made when there are leaks against administration policy.  Whistle blowers will think twice before talking to the press and will fear a demand that they release their sources from confidentiality.

The situation will be much worse if Fitzgerald indicts officials for violations of the Espionage Act or even conspiracy to violate the act with reporters.  Unauthorized releases of classified information occur daily and are the main way we learn what the government is doing or plans to do.  We learn about abuses of various kinds from such disclosures.  Indictments of senior government officials who may have leaked information to discredit a critic, no matter how reprehensible, would be a very small compensation for the vast chilling effect of such an indictment (or the successful pressing of a similar indictment in the AIPAC case).

For now, those who care about a free press and a robust debate about the government's national security policy can only hope that there will be no indictment or one which deals with a cover up and does not rest on an underlying premise that revealing classified information to the press is a crime. It is not and should not be.  For if it is, we will all pay a very heavy price. 

Tastes like Chicken Posted by Michael Signer

Amid news today that Canada is trying to quell public concern after finding three pigeons with avian flu antibodies, while there's a counterreaction among the press to the Bush Administration's panic-mongering, I'd like to sound a wholly uneducated cautionary note -- while at the same time making the improbable tesseract from this issue to the Administration's foreign policy (bear with me). 

So.  Let's begin at the beginning.  We've been told this is a crisis where millions of Americans could perish, if the virus leaps from birds to humans (which has happened) and mutates into a form transmittable between humans (which has not).  The government recently held a briefing where Representatives and their staff were told:

"This is a nation-busting event!" warned Tara O'Toole, CEO of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Center for Biosecurity. Speculating that 40 million Americans could die -- that's about one in eight -- she warned: "We must act now."

Yet one expert writes in WaPo:

Despite all the hysteria, there isn't a shred of evidence that a pandemic is actually on the way.

Given the disagreement, it's the politics of all this that's most interesting.  As the WaPo commentator notes, the Administration has used the flu to bolster its case that Posse Comitatus should be overruled:

The administration seems to want this epidemic-risk to capture the public's imagination, and to provide useful fodder for the repeal of the "posse comitatus" doctrine, which prevents the use of troops as domestic police. Bush has announced that, in effect, he wants troops to carry out the mass-slaughter and cleaning of most of the U.S. factory-farm bird population.

The reason to be skeptical -- even worried -- about the politicization of the flu is that it dizzyingly parallels in hubris and chutzpah the Administration's similar manufacture of crises in the past.  The evidence for their claims is quite simply poultry.  Consider:

1)  The Orange Alerts Crisis in 2004 (wherein the threat level to the country was jacked up repeatedly in advance of the Presidential general election)

2)  The Flu Vaccine Crisis in 2004 (wherein the President overheatedly announced a life-threatening shortage in flu vaccine, mysteriously strengthening his father-in-charge image at a time when he seemed to need it most -- though there never was a shortage).

3)  The Social Security Crisis in 2005 (wherein the President suggested that Social Security was in "crisis" -- though any fiscal problem was actually three to four decades away).

The Administration, as I have noted here, takes a strange, shameless pride in blurring the lines between ordinary and outrageous political conduct.  It's like they're playing chicken with the media! 

Hawks, Doves and Stoolpigeons Posted by Lorelei Kelly

Today I attended two events--both about security--which left me with two very different impressions about how to effectively put forward a progressive American vision of a secure future.  In the morning was a panel of Democratic leaders  discussing how to be "strong on defense"  To the credit of the organizers, the panel was representative of a range of  views on security, from progressive to centrist/DLC.  The afternoon gathering was on Capitol Hill, a briefing about potential crises in our oil-depleted future with a Swedish physicist named Dr. Aleklett from the University of Uppsala.

I left the morning event a little bit depressed--the last thing I heard was how the Democrats can only be seen as strong on defense if they protect themselves from the "activists".   Interestingly, the afternoon gathering included everyone from Greenpeace types to military.  Although the data was startling (Ex: The ratio of oil use to world population USA: 25% to 5%  China: 8% to 21% see more here.)   It was also exhilarating to hear the problem-solving views put forward by both the speaker and the audience.  It was matter of fact i.e. "we're going to run out of oil, what shall we do about this? We need everyone's creativity to get out of this bind."   The contrast between these two gatherings put into stark relief the  paucity of  "strong versus weak" argumentation when it comes to security.  Indeed,  seeing security as Hawks versus  Doves has turned much of our elected leadership into a flock of stool pigeons--the rhetoric is a decoy, a distraction for not facing the risks of real change.  And now Americans are getting killed because of it.  We have plenty of good ideas, but our leaders have not implemented our imagination.  The "activists" just may have been right all along.  Let's hope the new Contract for National Security mentioned by Heather and Suzanne  helps the Democrats bust through this deadweight rhetoric.

It can't come too soon. Let's look at the ongoing action on the Defense Appropriations bill. Despite one significant victory  (the committee cut $4.5 million that the Administration had requested  for the nuclear bunker buster weapon).  Full funding for missile defense was approved.   The measure also includes $50  billion as a fiscal year 2006 down payment for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are now costing about $5.6 billion a month.  See a full analysis here.   

One document that gives us language to move past the old frameworks is The Korb Report: A Realistic Defense for America.  This is a great piece of work by Larry Korb and Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities --founded by that  "activist" CEO Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's)  Korb lays out a plan to trim $60 billion from President Bush's 2006 Pentagon budget.  But in so doing, he gives us language to stay out of the hawks versus doves trap.  He makes trade-offs simple. For example, instead of just dismissing missile defense, distinguish the star wars fantasy up in Alaska (national missile defense) from the Patriot program (theater missile defense) which protects the troops in the field.  Another example, instead of griping about all those fancy fighter jets, offer instead an upgrade of the F-16 and continuation of the Joint Strike Fighter but get rid of the F-22.  In other words, give the "activists" something to say "yes" to. 

Here are some of the promised links from the Army conference reader I was given last month:

Iraqi Constitution Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Reader Lane Brody validly complains that we here have failed to opine on the Iraqi election.  Here's why I haven't dealt with the topic:

1.  It's impossible to judge whether the elections will prove a significant stride toward a stable Iraq or not.  I've read cogent arguments to the effect that the constitution advances the cause of a unified Iraq, and compelling claims that it will do just the opposite.

2.  Having sidestepped many of the most contentious issues, and because it is subject to further amendment, its hard to tell to what degree the constitution will entrench the principles it embodies into Iraqi culture and politics.

3.  Its not clear to what degree passage of the constitution will ease the US's dilemma.  That election day proceeded peacefully this time is certainly encouraging, but previous milestones including the end of the formal occupation and the January elections both failed to cramp the insurgency.

It would be great to think that the elections represent an important step toward establishing a viable democracy in Iraq.  To Lane's point, not only do we want the best for the Iraqi people, but we also believe that preventing Iraq from becoming a failed state is a vital US interest.  And its possible they might be.  But we've witnessed many hopeful turning points in Iraq thus far (Saddam Hussein's capture being top of mind today), only to see things sink backward into mayhem.

This is a small side issue, but I have a piece on the American Prospect website today about the failure to enlist international election monitors for Iraq. 

A footnote:  Matt Yglesias at TPM Cafe asks whether in fact it would have been possible to enlist foreign observers to put themselves in harm's way at Iraqi polling stations.  I honestly believe it would have.  I've done election monitoring in Bosnia and South Africa (in the latter I also did what we use to term "violence monitoring" - going out to situations in the townships like political funerals where violence was likely to occur in order to mediate, signal to the parties and authorities that they were being watched, etc.).   I always encountered people who were utterly passionate about this kind of work, fearless in the manner of war correspondents.  If given the chance, they would have gone to Iraq.

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More Contract for America Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Now I want to take Suzanne’s clever national security contract and, with a nod to the eloquent comments of devoted reader Dan Kervick, expand it beyond war on terror into five items that cover the waterfront of very salient issues that pop up in voters’ minds when they hear international affairs or national security.  I know, I hear you protesting already, lots of big-name types have said that progressives have to get over a credibility gap on “hard security” before we talk about anything else.  I think that’s true; hence my items 1, 2 and 3.  But I also believe, living as I do in a state which has seen two big local corporations (Delphi and Northwest) slip into bankruptcy in the last month and a third, big daddy General Motors, promise 25,000 job cuts in North America this week, that voters don’t differentiate between their vague angst about terrorism and their vague angst about vanishing jobs and overseas competition.  So smart progressives will address both.  (And as far behind as we are on national security, folks, we seem to be just as far behind on responses to economic issues.  Not to mention that we can't afford the military if we drive the economy into the ground.  So let’s at least start talking about them.)

1.  Fighting terror.

Something that is very clever about Suzanne's array of bills -- so clever it may go unremarked -- is that it evades the challenge of actually having a strategy on fighting terror, and fighting the Iraq war, that is different and better than the mess we currently have.  I would argue that progressives together need some shared principles, and individual candidates -- at least some of them -- are going to have to put ideas forward or be able to identify expert proposals they would support.  Suzanne's proposals point toward what those shared ideas should be:

We don't keep the American people in the dark;

We fight most effectively by keeping American high moral standards, not undermining them;

We fight most effectively by planning for the long-term, not ignoring it;

We fight most effectively by putting in place real crisis plans, not scare tactics, here at home.

I would add in some language about drawing down troops (because the Bush Admin is going to do it anyway) and some ideas about what we expect from Iraqis and what are interests there are, going forward. 

2.  Stopping the Spread of Dangerous Weapons

Much more can be done here, as Suzanne says -- as I pointed out in a previous post, privatization has its place, but not in nuclear policy. It's a little bit odd to see a Ted Turner-funded non-profit doing deals with the Kazakhs to neutralize nuclear fuel.  The Nuclear Threat Initiative, which brought you both the Kazakh deal and Fred Thompson's return to the small screen as the President of the United States, has an action agenda in its annual report, which is a good place to start.   

3.  Restoring the Military

Suzanne’s “Uncle S.A.M. Act” is one way to go on this one.  I would add to it a guarantee that the military will retain its role apart from our domestic politics – ie, no repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act, which every thoughtful military observer I've seen opposes.

4.  Energy Security

The public gets this -- they tell pollsters they want to reduce our dependence on foreign oil and develop clean energy sources (and both those polls were before Katrina).  Lots of good thinking is happening on this one – but it needs to coalesce into a public and legislative strategy.  Barack Obama is among others calling for a health-care-for-fuel-standards swap with the auto industry.  The Senate Democrats have a 2020 “energy independence” plan --  full of good ideas, but someone needs to tell them that there is no such thing as "energy independence" as long as oil is a globally-traded commodity.  Energy security, yes.  There are more good ideas for public-private partnerships and innovation jump-starters coming down the pike.  Of course, this also has a strong rhetorical tie-in to our security policy; move away from oil, Americans understand, and the Middle East is just one more messed-up spot on the map.

5.  Globalization Response

Ed Gresser over at the Progressive Policy Institute made a great point to me in an email – everyone remembers the Democrats’ Japan-bashing rhetoric from the 1980s, but, he argues, it didn’t really accomplish much for them.  Today, he says, left and right need to climb down from China- and India-bashing and ask ourselves what we could be doing better.  Among those items:  a trade policy that actually stimulates trade; commitment here at home to expand and standardize benefits for laid-off workers; renewed commitment to support for the basic science and research that yield technological and then business breakthroughs; reversals of cuts to community colleges and of the downward trend in funding for higher education.  In short, a policy that would enable US workers to compete.

The New German Government and Iraq Posted by Derek Chollet

Last week, Germany’s two major parties on the right (CDU) and left (SPD) agreed on a “grand coalition” to lead the country in an unusual power-sharing arrangement: the CDU’s leader, Angela Merkel, will become the new Chancellor, yet the SPD will retain the majority of the government ministries (8 to the CDU’s 6), including such crucial ministries as foreign, finance, and justice.  The SPD announced their choices for ministries last week, and Merkel unveiled her choices yesterday.  So Germany’s new government appears set.

With Germany in need of deep reforms (just to name a few challenges: it has a stagnant economy, aging population, crumbling education system, and serious immigration problems), this arrangement seems closer to a recipe for gridlock than dramatic change.  And after spending a few days in Berlin last week listening to German government officials and thinkers (I was there at a conference hosted by the SPD’s think tank, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung), it’s clear to me that no one really knows what the government agenda is going to look like – and that there is going to be a lot of debate about what kinds of changes Germany’s voters actually want.

The conventional wisdom is that with Merkel in power, Germany’s relationship with the U.S. will be smoother – her predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder, famously stoked anti-Americanism during his last election in 2002, and goes out of his way to remind people that Germany made the right call on Iraq.  Merkel has already met with Bush, and it was no secret that official Washington was rooting for her.  But while the tone might be better, few expect the substance of Germany’s policy towards important issues to change much.

This is especially true with Iraq – which is, not surprisingly, one of the starker contrasts I found between the debates in Berlin and Washington.  In Germany, the Iraq debate is still only about the past – why things went so wrong, why the U.S.-German relationship became so spoiled, and how we have to fix it.  The Germans don’t seem to have really clued into the dominant discussion here, which is how we are going to get out.

This is especially troubling because how we get out matters to them. German leaders are quick to say that what happens in Iraq is clearly in all of our interests – after all, Iraq is a lot closer to Europe than the U.S. – and they point out that they are providing modest help, such as debt relief and training.  But they know that it’s not much.  And even though they agree that Iraq’s future matters for them, they don’t seem to have much of an opinion about what to do about it – whether or when troops should leave, or how they could do more to ensure an outcome that is in their interests too.  It's  a combination of complacency and denial.

It seems to me that the Germans have leverage that they are not using.  Merkel could come to the U.S. say publicly something like: “we’ve disagreed about the war, but now we all need a solution in Iraq, and we’re willing to think of creative ways to help you – which of course helps us.”  That would certainly influence the debate here. Yet by refusing to engage on this issue, they are doing little to give the Bush team any reason to change its policies.

But more frustrating to me is that the U.S. is not using the leverage it has to encourage our European friends to do more.  They agree that it is in all our interests for Iraq to succeed, but we’re not really asking much of them, or including them in any discussion about Iraq’s future.  Even the conference I attended – whose purpose was to promote Transatlantic cooperation – failed to do this, focusing instead on other issues like immigration, China and India, and Turkey and the EU.  The American debate about when to withdraw is itself leverage – if the European’s believe that we about to get out, they will be forced to assess how this will impact their interests (right now, they seem to believe the Bush rhetoric that we will stay forever).

Of course, using leverage does not mean that it will succeed.  Maybe it is just naïve to think that the Bush team will be swayed by anything another country says or does, even a friendly leader like Merkel.  And it may simply be that, for reasons of both politics and competing priorities, countries like Germany simply can’t do more in Iraq, even if the outcome there -- good or bad -- matters a lot to them.  But it seems worth a try.