Bolton to the Wire Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Yesterday Senator Voinovich sent a letter to the entire Senate stressing his concerns about the Bolton nomination, which may come to a vote as soon as this week (corrected based on this morning's news).  Steve Clemons prints the fulltext of the letter here.

Of note, Voinovich stresses the implications of the nomination for the U.S.'s public diplomacy efforts, a subject that's gotten lots of attention here in recent days, including in the latest memo of advice Heather Hurlburt kindly wrote for Karen Hughes. 

Concerns about how the Bolton choice would be received around the world aren't necessarily the most important of all the reasons to oppose Bolton (though it was written before the revelations on Bolton's efforts to oust underlings to probe into NSA intercepts and to run something close to a shadow foreign policy shop at odds with some of the Administration's stated positions, I still stand by #10 in that March post as the primary reason Bolton's the wrong choice), but the events of last week do bring worries about America's declining image to the forefront.  For the conclusions of SFRC Democrats based on their investigation of Bolton, check here. 

One question that glanced on in the responses to Michael's post yesterday is the extent to which this week's compromise on the filibuster will affect other votes, notably Bolton.   Some Democrats with serious reservations about the Bolton choice may think of reconsidering in the spirit of the Senate's newfound comity.   One hopes they keep their eye on the ball of what's best for U.S. policy and our UN diplomacy.

European Disunion Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Laura Rozen prints a few letters from European commentators talking about why the new EU constitution may be on the verge of being voted down in the Netherlands and France.  At some level its hard not to think it may do some good for the Europeans to be reminded how local politics, economic interests and popular fears can interfere with even the noblest geopolitical intentions.   

Memo to Karen Hughes Posted by Heather Hurlburt

I have been spending quite a bit of time looking at the state of US public diplomacy for various projects over the past couple of months.  And, in the helpful spirit of bipartisanship that we try to promote here at Democracy Arsenal, I have compiled a short memo of proposals for Ms. Hughes.  Most of them are easy enough that she should be able to get them going from Texas, or from the cell phone on the way to drop her son off at college.

5.  Start a youthquake.  I'm glad the State Department still has cultural ambassadors -- longterm, it's the idea of America, or the ideas of America, that are going to tilt hearts our way.  But given that the world median age is 26, according to the UN -- younger in the Islamic and developing worlds -- shouldn't we have some cultural ambassadors younger than Bernie Williams, b. 1968? (And no, I'm not picking on Bernie because I'm a BoSox fan; the next youngest appears to be Denyce Graves, who is coy about her age but graduated from Washington's Duke Ellington HS in 1981.)

4.  While you're at it, maybe some of those cultural ambassadors ought to be Muslim or of Middle Eastern and South Asian heritage?

3.  Put the Public back in Public Diplomacy.  Earlier this spring, the GAO put out a report calling on the Whit House to "fully implement the role mandated" for its Office of Global Communications.  Trouble was, the White House had quietly closed the office down shortly before.

2.  Keep the Free in Free Press.  Ex-Voice of America Director Sanford Ungar alleges in the new Foreign Affairs that the Administration is leaning heavily on VOA journalists to report the news the way they want it.  He can't resist, and neither can I, the comparison to Lyndon Johnson, who tried to get what he called "my own radio" to broadcast the news the way he wanted it.  We all know how that ended.

1.  Of course, all of these projects are deck chairs on the Titanic if we aren't sending out the right signals about what we stand for -- as opposed to what we say we stand for.  and to that end, the "Give that fan a contract" prize goes to Keith Reinhard, President of Business for Diplomatic Action, who said:

"As you know, the image of our country is a montage of our foreign policy, the brands we market, and the entertainment we export.  It could be referred to as a cocktail of "Rummy" and Coke with Madonna on the side."

 

Silence, Exile, Cunning: The Red Cross Posted by Heather Hurlburt

Last week, Suzanne posted on the Red Cross warning of mistreatment of the Koran and elicted a number of questions from our readers about why the Red Cross wouldn't give details.

As several folks suggested, the International Committee of the Red Cross does indeed have a policy of giving out little or no information about the situations it observes.  This is longstanding, and the rationale behind it is that, by maintaining discretion, they will be more likely to ensure continuing access and thus to help remedy bad situations. 

Readers with long memories will recall that the ICRC knew quite a bit about Abu Ghraib, and had been complaining to the US military about it, long before the photos hit the papers.  Indeed, Red Cross complaints were reported back to Washington, where fights broke out in the Administration about how seriously they should be taken.

The ICRC complains that its neutrality is called into question, and its safety compromised as a result, when militaries not only do humanitarian work, as in Afghanistan, but identify themselves with humanitarianism in their interventions.  I don't recall the ICRC making this complaint about Kosovo, or Somalia for that matter.  So the problem is less with the military doing relief work than with tactics that tend to blur the line between military and civilian relief workers on the one hand, and opponents who aren't interested in allowing civilians to be fed and prisoners to be visited on the other hand.

This is an area where progressives ought to be able to sit down and, regardless of how we felt about the war when it was started, have some real discussions about how Iraq and the larger "war on terror," the way the US is conducting it, must change our assumptions about how the world works and how we can work in it.

Field NGOs trying to be genuinely non-partisan, of course, don't have the luxury of wringing their hands.  Instead, they have two unpalatable choices:  leave or diminish their activities in war zones, as the ICRC did after an attack on its Baghdad headquarters in 2003; or become more partisan and seek protection from one side, as many NGOS have felt they had no choice but to do in Afghanistan.

One immediate consequence that is worth drawing is that declaring that the consequences of an "either you're with us or against us" policy include real harm to the innocent civilians whom we would like to be with us, if we can't find ways to have our policy respect (and even see the advantages of) the neutrality of the organizations that want to help them. 

In Praise of Constitutionalism Posted by Michael Signer

In a snotty WaPo article today, the writer talks about how self-congratulatory the Mod Squad was at the press conference announcing the filibuster compromise.

I find this grating and annoying.  I watched the press conference last night.  I thought it was one of the few moments in the last few years where Congress elevated itself to the kind of considered, statesmanlike conduct I, for one, grew up with as a default expectation for public servants.  And -- I'm not ashamed to say -- the deal made me proud to be an American, especially when critics like Vladimir Putin are attacking us as anti-democratic.

For several years, I was a doctoral student in political theory and, like any grad student, suffered through the agonies of the pre-dissertation, and then dissertating, life.  A lot of it was sheer drudgery, reading stuff you didn't want to read because nobody else wanted to read it, either. 

One of the exceptions, however, was work like Hannah Arendt's On Revolution, which provided me with some hope that there could be a practical politics that united thoughtfulness, progress, and vision.

Arendt thought that, as a general matter, politics was defined by pettiness and temporal spasms of partisanship.  However, times of constitution-making -- when nation-states are actually forged by real people, thinking and working together in real time -- draw out the best in us. 

One example was the American Constitution, of which she wrote:

[I]t was made by men in common deliberation and on the strength of mutual pledges.

So, I was watching the whole filibuster mess with some suspense:  would political, or historical, thinking win out?  If enough Senators decided that the nuclear option actually was a fundamental reworking of our constitutional design, statesmanship would emerge. 

But if enough -- like the rapacious, unprincipled Bill Frist -- convinced themselves that short-term political victories, and losses, were all that mattered, then statesmanship would stumble.

In the end, enough Senators feared a slippery slope toward simple majoritarian rule in the Senate -- and then a jumble of increasingly plebiscitary politics -- that the filibuster was saved. 

In this environment of tension, suspicion, and simply bad odds, I thought there was something existentially moving about the press conference.  I was struck by how many times the members of the Mod Squad used the word "trust" -- I think every single one did.  And they weren't sanctimonious about it. 

Just as Arendt observed about the Founders, who relied on "mutual pledges," these Senators had no choice but to depend on trust, an ethereal mixture of interaction and emotion, rather than parchment and law.  They were flying without a net. 

It must have been scary for them, actually -- each is worried about bucking the fundamentalist wings of their respective parties, and they all must know that the tenuous legalism of the deal -- filibusters are still allowed in "extraordinary" situations -- will not withstand a Supreme Court fight.

The evanescence of trust made their reliance on it all the more profound.  Because there was real risk there, there was courage, too.

Senator John Warner -- my Senator -- was instrumental in the victory, and his words contain everything:

"What would happen to the Senate if the nuclear option was done?"

This was brave, constitutional conduct.  It showed that our legislators, for a day at least, raised their heads above the smoke of battle, and tried to imagine the republic our children will inherit. 

Outsourcing Peacekeeping Posted by Suzanne Nossel

In response to my post yesterday on the beefing up of UN peacekeeping capabilities, Greg at Belgravia Dispatch raised the question of whether we would ever entrust missions "of utmost import to our national security" to a UN force.  A few quick thoughts:

- We may never hand something akin from a strategic perspective to Iraq over to the UN, but its easy to envision a mission in Darfur - provided the killings can be stopped - being handled by the world body.   If the UN frees up our troops to focus on a manageable set of priorities without leaving other hotspots around the world to simply burn, that's an enormous benefit. 

- The UN has played a key role in both Iraq and Afghanistan, though not as peacekeepers.  Could competent international peacekeepers be useful in both those situations, working alongside U.S. command?  Definitely. If US troops could be freed from - for example - guard duties (I am thinking about things like buildings, but its hard to keep prisons out of mind) and other security functions, that would unburden U.S. troops and potentially mitigate some of the sting of such U.S.-dominated operations.  The word competent is obviously a key here.

- Greg raises the question of whether the U.S. will allow the UN to build sufficiently robust capabilities to play these roles.  He suggests that until the organization is able to maintain a standing force, there will be inherent limitations to the strength that can be mustered on the fly for peacekeeping missions. 

I tend to agree that the time to reconsider a standing UN force has probably come.  For a long time such notions were a political no-go zone, for fear the a power-drunk world body would start deploying its forces willy-nilly around the world.  But that's why we have and will always insist on preserving the veto power.  There's a lot of thinking that would need to go into a standing UN force, and political attitudes among the membership might make it impossible to achieve in any way the U.S. would accept.   But given the scarcity of alternatives in places like Congo, it deserves a closer look. 

Fighting for Peace Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Interesting article today about how UN peacekeepers have gotten much more aggressive and willing to use force as they police hotspots like Congo. 

The cowering figures of UN peacekeepers at Srebrenica and elsewhere cast a very long shadow, coloring the organization's credibility for more than a decade.  The problem was two-fold: unwillingness of the Security Council to vote sufficiently robust peacekeeping mandates to allow for effective peace enforcement and engagement in conflicts where necessary, and inadequate training and equipment on the part of troops contributed for UN missions.  As an outgrowth of the 2000 Brahimi Report on peacekeeping reform, both issues are gradually being addressed. 

Its not by accident that peacekeeping ranks as one of the things the UN does well.  Its because a concerted push for change led to real reform.  Let the same be true in areas where the UN does poorly.   Apropos of question 3 below about whether the UN can ever truly become an effective foreign policy instrument, this is one area in which the organization's membership overcame inertia and the reification of sovereignty to strengthen the tools the UN has to do its job.

Weekly Top 10 List - Ten Reasons the Real Fallout from the Newsweek Story Is Just Beginning Posted by Suzanne Nossel

A vast amount of time and energy has gone into analysis and recriminations over the botched Newsweek story reporting that interrogators at Guantanamo Bay flushed a Koran down a toilet.  Newsweek's recantation, its new policy limiting the use of unsubstantiated sources, and its finding that the reporters in question followed established procedures and relied on a trustworthy source ought to put that matter mostly to bed. But here's what should keep us up at night:

1.  That similar stories that have been corroborated by credible sources. There are a number of serious reports of abuse at Guantanamo that have come to light in recent months, before and after the Newsweek report.  60 Minutes reported on female interrogators using sexual manipulation and fake menstrual blood to intimidate and discomfort Muslim detainees.  The ICRC has brought numerous instances of Koran desecration at Guantanamo to the Pentagon's attention.  This page details the concerns the ICRC has about conditions and treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo.  Now that we are on notice about what such practices can trigger, we'd better find out what's really going on and fast. 

2.  The underlying level of anti-American sentiment that allowed a single news report to trigger deadly riots throughout the Muslim world. This point is gradually being acknowledged in quarters that might have preferred to blame it all on Newsweek. The comments in response to Dan Drezner's post on the subject are illustrative. These riots are the most vivid, though hardly the only, evidence of just how precarious the U.S.'s standing is in the Muslim world.  Though aimed to counter anti-Americanism, Laura Bush's visit to the region triggered more protests last weekend. The sources of these attitudes ought to be a primary matter of U.S. concern.

3.   The related revelations of detainee abuse in Afghanistan that came to light this week. The religious insults that the ICRC documented at Guantanamo pale alongside the allegations of actual torture -- brutal beatings, chaining people to cell ceilings for days -- and homicide at the Bagram detention camp in Afghanistan reported by the New York Times this week.  Yet this shocking report got far less play than the Newsweek story.

4.  The military culture and policies that have allowed these abuses to happen. This is the larger issue at stake, and one that has not yet been thoroughly aired.  It seems clear that at least some of the detainees who have been victimized were not particularly valuable from an intelligence perspective.  Israel has for years been grappling with questions such as this: 

Suppose a bomb has been placed in a crowded building, and the state has custody of one who knows where it is. The bomb is set to go off in two hours. It is impossible to get the people out. What do I do in such a case?

No one has suggested so far that the U.S. soldiers involved in these cases faced anything close to such a dilemma. So what factors did give rise to torture and other forms of mistreatment? We'd better find out.

5.  The Pentagon's unwillingness to come to grips with the larger implications of the story. From what I can tell, the Pentagon's response to the riots two weeks ago was to fix the blame exclusively on Newsweek.   I haven't yet seen any Pentagon response quoted to the horrific revelations last week on Bagram. The Pentagon still seems to maintain that the scandals at Abu Ghraib were isolated incidents by relatively junior personnel run amok.  None of these problems will be corrected as long as a culture of denial continues to prevail.

Weighing Detention and Democracy Posted by Suzanne Nossel

The report in today's New York Times seems to make it official:  for all of the power of the American media, American products, the lure of democracy and the "public diplomacy" efforts made over the last few years, the U.S.'s image in the Muslim world is increasingly defined by the abuses at Guantanamo Bay and other U.S. detention facilities around the world.   One of the key points of proof cited is:

In one of Pakistan's most exclusive private schools for boys, the annual play this year was "Guantánamo," a docudrama based on testimonies of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay, the United States naval base in Cuba.

The play is not something Pakistani teachers dreamed up.  It was written by British dramatists Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo (the article does not mention that Gillian Slovo is the daughter of Joe Slovo - one of the most prominent leaders of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa; I believe Slovo was the highest ranking white person in the ANC). 

This is a good illustration of a point discussed here a week or so back:  that so-called liberal anti-Americanism -- the sort of righteous indignation of Germans, Canadians, Australians and even Brits - - can bleed over to influence attitudes in parts of the world where anti-Americanism can get violent.  So we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss our friends' distaste for what we do as minor spats between friends that will have no larger impact.

A series of events and revelations this week have laid bare the dark side of the inroads the U.S. has supposedly been making in the Arab and Muslim worlds.   Hamid Karzai has expressed shock over gory revelations in yesterday's Times about the torture that proceeded deaths of two Afghani prisoners in the notorious Bagram detention center maintained by U.S. troops in Afghanistan. 

Despite autopsy findings that the two men had died of homicide, army investigators originally proposed closing the cases without bringing any criminal charges.   It took two years for senior army personnel to get to the truth, leading to charges against seven soldiers.   From the sound of things, only when the New York Times got onto the case, did the army realize they wouldn't get away with utter inaction.

Karzai has said that the Afghan government now wants custody of all detainees held in-country.  Given the supposed intelligence value of these suspects and sources, its hard to imagine the U.S. military acceding.

The consensus now seems to be that Newsweek's retraction of the Koran flushing story had little impact, because it was accompanied by confirmation that, toilets aside, desecration of the holy book was one among many appalling violations to the rights and dignity of Guantanamo inmates.

I believe that some progress toward greater freedom is underway in the Middle East, and that this may eventually affect the broader Muslim world.    I say so based on the accounts of people from the region and people who know the region well and have traveled there recently.  Its this sort of statement, excerpted from a very interesting op-ed on enfolding Islamists into democracy written by Egyptian human rights activist, dissident and now presidential candidate Saad Eddin Ibrahim that convinces me:

Whether we are in fact seeing an "Arab spring" or a mirage depends on where you stand. Many in the Middle East, having been betrayed in the past, cannot be blamed for fearing that this is an illusion, and remembering other spring stirrings of democracy - like Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968 and Tiananmen Square in 1989 - that were brutally crushed while the world looked on.

For me, however, something about events of the past few months feels new and irreversible. Too many people in too many places - Egypt, Iran, Lebanon and elsewhere - are defying their oppressors and taking risks for freedom. Across the region the shouts of "Kifiya!" - "Enough!" - have become a rallying cry against dictators.

I find Fouad Ajami's assessments, in this April article and in a more recent Wall Street Journal op-ed likewise convincing.  Like Ajami, I believe the Bush Administration's policy - mainly ousting Saddam and freezing out Arafat - have played an important role in this.

But the revelations about egregious human rights violations being perpetrated and condoned or at least swept under a rug at U.S. detention facilities put all the progress at risk:

- They embolden radicals who hate the U.S. and make it easier for them to recruit and mobilize;

- They sow doubts among ordinary citizens about what many see as U.S. values - ideas like liberty and democracy become tainted by association with lawlessness, brutality, lack of respect for religion and human dignity and lack of accountability.

The question at this point is whether its two steps forward one step back, or the opposite.  Is the progress being made toward democracy ultimately more powerful than the impact of these revelations?  The Administration's answer is a resounding yes - how can anyone doubt that liberalization at long last in the Arab world matters more than a few bad apples at Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantanamo.

One part of the answer may lie in a concept introduced by Shibley Telhami.  It's the notion that each population must be understood through their "prism of pain."  The prism is the thing most compelling and distressing to them, and provides the lens through which they tend to view everything else.  For Jews the prism might be the Holocaust.  For African Americans perhaps slavery.  For many Arab Muslims the Israeli occupation.   For Americans in recent years, 9/11.

My suspicion is that the abuses at the U.S. led detention centers are viewed through a prism of pain tied to the experience of repression throughout the Muslim world.  All these peoples have lived under repressive governments, for which abuse of detainees was one among untold forms of human rights abuses.   

Through this lens, albeit perhaps distorted, acts of repression look much larger than acts of liberation.  Going on that theory, it may take a lot more than a few elections to undo the damage being inflicted by a group of army interrogators and those that give them their orders.

Red Cross in the Cross-Hairs Posted by Suzanne Nossel

So here's the question:  the International Committee of the Red Cross has now come forward and said that they alerted the Pentagon to various forms of desecration of the Koran occurring at Guantanamo.  They don't go into whether this included flushing the holy book down the toilet.  The spokesman cryptically states:

"We're basically referring in general terms to disrespect of the Quran, and that's where we leave it," Schorno told The Associated Press. "We believe that since, U.S. authorities have taken the corrective measures that we required in our interventions."

It's hard not to surmise that the vagueness may be driven by a concern that confirming the allegations reported by Newsweek might lead to more bloodshed.   Is it incumbent on the organization to come forward with specifics based on their investigations, or are they justified in simply alluding to the fact that abuses may have taken place?  Maybe they've concluded that a few weeks or months from now, once tempers have calmed, further details can safely emerge.

Assuming that Newsweek may have been able to corroborate their earlier, poorly sourced reporting on this subject, they could be left in the impossible position of either being blamed by some for the deaths that have occurred thus far, or coming forward with information that might lead to further mayhem and killings. 

Given the choice, will we and should we let truth be the casualty here?