Friday, May 14, 2004
'Let Us Have Faith'
Why Rumsfeld must stay.
BY JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN Friday, May 14, 2004 12:01 a.m.
WASHINGTON--Watching the reels of pictures from the prison in Iraq was a jarring descent into a world without values or limits or law. I was appalled, of course, by the American guards' lack of any respect for the humanity of their prisoners. But I was also struck and saddened by their lack of respect, as seen in the pictures they took of themselves, for their own humanity, for their own inherent human dignity.
How could these deeds have been done by soldiers wearing the uniform of this country, which has always proudly defined itself by the values in our Declaration of Independence--that every man and woman is endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights, the very rights we are in Iraq to make real for the Iraqi people?
What caused these heinous acts? Was it just the latest example of the reality history reveals, that some soldiers crack under the stress of war? Was it the human weakness of guards exploiting the temporary power they hold over those in their control? Was it directed, encouraged, facilitated or tolerated by higher-ups in the chain of command? Was it somehow also the cumulative effect on a generation raised in an entertainment and Internet culture that has grown increasingly violent and pornographic?
I do not know enough yet to answer these important questions with sufficient confidence. They must be asked and answered. But I do know enough to reach the following conclusions:
First, we must aggressively and thoroughly investigate what was happening at Abu Ghraib prison and at every other American military prison. We must hold accountable anyone who was responsible for wrongdoing, which requires that we undertake the most independent and unfettered investigation possible. I have high hopes for the special investigative group composed of former defense secretaries James Schlesinger and Harold Brown, congresswoman Tillie Fowler, and general Charles Horner, which seems to have been given appropriately broad and independent authority, and the capacity to hire its own staff.
This investigation, and the justice it produces, should make clear to us and the world that we Americans will not tolerate such inhumanity, even in the treatment of those who are themselves wantonly inhumane to us. The beheading of Nick Berg just because he was an American made painfully clear how little our enemies value life. Prison abuse must not blur the enormous moral differences between us and those we fight in Iraq, and in the world-wide war on terrorism.
And that leads to my second conclusion. We cannot allow the prison scandal in Iraq to diminish our own American sense of national honor and purpose, or further erode support for our just and necessary cause in Iraq. American opponents of the war may try to do the latter, while foreign critics and enemies of the United States will try to do the former. The misdeeds of a few do not alter the character of our nation or the honor of the many who serve in our defense--and the world's--every day. Winning the war we are now fighting in Iraq against Saddam loyalists and jihadist terrorists remains critical to the security of the American people, the freedom of the Iraqi people, and the hopes of all the Middle East for stability and peace.
Most Democrats and Republicans, including President Bush and Sen. Kerry, agree that we must successfully finish what we have started in Iraq. Now is the time for all who share that goal to make our agreement publicly clear, to stress what unites us. Many argue that we can only rectify the wrongs done in the Iraqi prisons if Donald Rumsfeld resigns. I disagree. Unless there is clear evidence connecting him to the wrongdoing, it is neither sensible nor fair to force the resignation of the secretary of defense, who clearly retains the confidence of the commander in chief, in the midst of a war. I have yet to see such evidence. Secretary Rumsfeld's removal would delight foreign and domestic opponents of America's presence in Iraq.
But, as we are showing in our response to Abu Ghraib, we are a nation of laws, and therefore must punish only those who are proven guilty. The Iraqi prison scandal has been a nightmare at an already difficult moment in the war in Iraq. But our cause remains as critical as ever to our security and our values. We must therefore persist in it. With determination and confidence, we should recall President Lincoln's words at another difficult moment in American history in pursuit of another just cause: "Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us do our duty as we understand it."
Mr. Lieberman is a Democratic senator from Connecticut.
Why Rumsfeld must stay.
BY JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN Friday, May 14, 2004 12:01 a.m.
WASHINGTON--Watching the reels of pictures from the prison in Iraq was a jarring descent into a world without values or limits or law. I was appalled, of course, by the American guards' lack of any respect for the humanity of their prisoners. But I was also struck and saddened by their lack of respect, as seen in the pictures they took of themselves, for their own humanity, for their own inherent human dignity.
How could these deeds have been done by soldiers wearing the uniform of this country, which has always proudly defined itself by the values in our Declaration of Independence--that every man and woman is endowed by our Creator with inalienable rights, the very rights we are in Iraq to make real for the Iraqi people?
What caused these heinous acts? Was it just the latest example of the reality history reveals, that some soldiers crack under the stress of war? Was it the human weakness of guards exploiting the temporary power they hold over those in their control? Was it directed, encouraged, facilitated or tolerated by higher-ups in the chain of command? Was it somehow also the cumulative effect on a generation raised in an entertainment and Internet culture that has grown increasingly violent and pornographic?
I do not know enough yet to answer these important questions with sufficient confidence. They must be asked and answered. But I do know enough to reach the following conclusions:
First, we must aggressively and thoroughly investigate what was happening at Abu Ghraib prison and at every other American military prison. We must hold accountable anyone who was responsible for wrongdoing, which requires that we undertake the most independent and unfettered investigation possible. I have high hopes for the special investigative group composed of former defense secretaries James Schlesinger and Harold Brown, congresswoman Tillie Fowler, and general Charles Horner, which seems to have been given appropriately broad and independent authority, and the capacity to hire its own staff.
This investigation, and the justice it produces, should make clear to us and the world that we Americans will not tolerate such inhumanity, even in the treatment of those who are themselves wantonly inhumane to us. The beheading of Nick Berg just because he was an American made painfully clear how little our enemies value life. Prison abuse must not blur the enormous moral differences between us and those we fight in Iraq, and in the world-wide war on terrorism.
And that leads to my second conclusion. We cannot allow the prison scandal in Iraq to diminish our own American sense of national honor and purpose, or further erode support for our just and necessary cause in Iraq. American opponents of the war may try to do the latter, while foreign critics and enemies of the United States will try to do the former. The misdeeds of a few do not alter the character of our nation or the honor of the many who serve in our defense--and the world's--every day. Winning the war we are now fighting in Iraq against Saddam loyalists and jihadist terrorists remains critical to the security of the American people, the freedom of the Iraqi people, and the hopes of all the Middle East for stability and peace.
Most Democrats and Republicans, including President Bush and Sen. Kerry, agree that we must successfully finish what we have started in Iraq. Now is the time for all who share that goal to make our agreement publicly clear, to stress what unites us. Many argue that we can only rectify the wrongs done in the Iraqi prisons if Donald Rumsfeld resigns. I disagree. Unless there is clear evidence connecting him to the wrongdoing, it is neither sensible nor fair to force the resignation of the secretary of defense, who clearly retains the confidence of the commander in chief, in the midst of a war. I have yet to see such evidence. Secretary Rumsfeld's removal would delight foreign and domestic opponents of America's presence in Iraq.
But, as we are showing in our response to Abu Ghraib, we are a nation of laws, and therefore must punish only those who are proven guilty. The Iraqi prison scandal has been a nightmare at an already difficult moment in the war in Iraq. But our cause remains as critical as ever to our security and our values. We must therefore persist in it. With determination and confidence, we should recall President Lincoln's words at another difficult moment in American history in pursuit of another just cause: "Let us have faith that right makes might; and in that faith let us do our duty as we understand it."
Mr. Lieberman is a Democratic senator from Connecticut.
Learning to Live without Europe
By Thomas Donnelly
Posted: Thursday, May 13, 2004
Despite the best efforts to resurrect the transatlantic bonhomie of the Cold War era, the limitations of any strategic partnership between the United States and Europe are growing increasingly clear. This is not merely a function of fallout over Operation Iraqi Freedom or animosity toward the Bush administration per se. Rather, the split between Europe and the United States reflects a more fundamental clash of strategic cultures. While Americans have historically emphasized preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony in formulating their national security policies, Europeans have preferred balance of power realism. It is time for Washington to recognize that any “partnership” with Europe is as likely to retard as advance U.S. interests in the democratization and liberalization of the Greater Middle East.
I was recently asked by the Goethe Institut and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations to participate in a discussion on relations between the United States and Germany, asking the question whether, one year after the invasion of Iraq, transatlantic affairs were getting “back to normal.” It was just the sort of open-ended question apt to produce maximum bloviation by conference participants, but I suppose that was the purpose. And it does beg a really interesting question: what makes for a “normal” relationship between the United States and its European allies these days?
To be sure, many of the fundamentals of the relationship remain unaffected by 9/11, the war on terrorism, or Iraq: transatlantic trade flows more or less as freely and regularly as it did, as do social and cultural exchanges. But the strategic partnership between America and Europe is unquestionably in tatters, the old Cold War consensus--such as it was--buried in the same dustbin of history as the Soviet Union itself.
The abuse of prisoners at Abu Gharib has ripped open the Iraq wound yet again. Britain’s Guardian, as ever propelled by hatred of all things Bush, recruited Clinton administra-
tion propaganda minister Sidney Blumenthal to declare Abu Gharib part of a “new gulag” constructed for the war on terror.[1] The civilized version of this complaint is to call for “accountability”--and to imply that it requires the firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. To be sure, this interest in Iraq’s prison practices is a new concern for Europeans, not much in evidence during Saddam Hussein’s rule. Let’s hope, as long as they are excoriating the Pentagon for the abuses at Abu Gharib, they likewise offer a frank assessment of conditions in Iran, Libya, and Syria.
Yet strategic nostalgia persists, at least on the western side of the Atlantic. Arguably, the European political agenda--building the European Union--is more forward-looking than that of those U.S. “internationalists” who pine for French and German allies in Iraq. Not only are the internationalists reluctant to believe the European leaders and peoples who have been telling us consistently that they are not interested in “transforming” the region, but those whose lodestar is conventional wisdom seem to think that the measure of success lies in Paris or Berlin rather than in the Middle East itself.
Even the National Security Strategy of the United States, the notorious September 2002 articulation of the “Bush Doctrine” and its ramifications, reiterated the common wisdom that “[t]here is little of lasting consequence that the United States can accomplish in this world without the sustained cooperation of its allies and friends in . . . Europe.”[2] Almost two years on, it is hard to regard this assertion as anything other than the mindless repetition of a hoary but outdated principle.
Indeed, what evidence is there, at this point, that a “normal,” default-mode strategic partnership between Brussels and Washington even exists? It was, after all, George Washington himself who warned Americans of the unintended consequences of entangling European alliances. As historian John Lewis Gaddis has observed, U.S. strategy has traditionally favored unilateralism,
preemption, and hegemony.[3] Even the ultimate liberal “internationalist” Woodrow Wilson, on his quest to make the world safe for democracy, would not assent to be a World War I “ally,” insisting instead that the United States remain an “associated” power of England, France, and Russia. Only the exigencies of World War II--primarily, the need for the manpower of the Red Army and its ability to bleed the Wehrmacht--pushed Franklin Roosevelt to accept the idea of a long-term, legally structured partnership with Europe.
What Consensus?
Thus the stubborn Euro-centrism of American strategy is, nearly fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, proving to be the most pernicious piece of Cold War baggage. It is also yet another reminder of the strategic drift of the 1990s, and particularly the Clinton years. The Cold War was, at its heart, a competition for the future of Europe and particularly Germany, but it was more: it was also a competition for Pacific Asia and, in its later years, for the Middle East. Indeed, the bloodiest battles of the Cold War were on the Korean peninsula and the Indochinese littoral, half a world away from the Fulda Gap. The German plain was the central front, but from an American perspective it was a genuinely global struggle; we could not afford the luxury of laser-like focus on a single theater. Conversely, Europeans had little interest beyond their own backyard.
Curiously, the collapse of the Soviet Union made American leaders recoil from the uncertainty of a “post–Cold War world,” even though it represented an amazing--and amazingly peaceful--victory that opened huge opportunities for the spread of American political principles and the exercise of American power. The first Bush administration seemed to clutch at the familiar. Its boldness in pushing for German unification within NATO contrasts vividly with its timidity in the 1991 Gulf War and its response to the Tiananmen Square massacre. The administration’s reluctance to confront Slobodan Milosevic indicated how little it understood the changing landscape even within Europe itself. For all his expertise in the tactics of international politics, President George H. W. Bush had no interest in “the vision thing.”
But then, neither did Bill Clinton. Convinced that international politics was, in the magical globalizing economy, a subset of trade policy, the Clinton administration was content to flatter European great-power vanity—at least until the “hour of Europe” produced atrocities in the Balkans. Despite being goaded into action by British prime minister Tony Blair, Clinton remained a hesitant warrior, ever multilateral and mindful of French charges of “hyperpuissance.” Both the Bush and Clinton administrations acted as though the preponderance of American power was itself a dangerous thing. To them, “normalcy” in international behavior was measured in restraint, stability, and consensus.
The Power Gap
That there is a wide disparity in power--particularly, but not only, military power--between the United States and Europe has at last penetrated diplomatic consciousness--although Atlanticists, ever faithful to their creed, hope either that Europeans will somehow recover their interest in war or, alternatively, that Americans will lose theirs. Robert Kagan’s line that “Americans are from Mars while Europeans are from Venus” captures the moment perfectly.[4]
To be sure, Great Britain stands as the exception, as the brief history of the invasion and occupation of Iraq reveals; but for the Brits in Basra and in the initial attack, the United States would be providing all the militarily useful force in Iraq. Indeed, at an early point of planning, the British volunteered to lead the attack through Turkey into northern Iraq. It is not possible to imagine any other European military force--either individually or collectively--capable of seriously suggesting such a plan. But then, strategically, Great Britain remains deeply dubious of entanglement with continental Europe, as its most recent defense review reveals in its conclusion that, in the war on terrorism, the United States--Britain’s “closest ally”--will “be in the lead.”[5]
But the exception proves the rule, as Kagan writes in Of Paradise and Power:
[T]he 1990s witnessed not the rise of a European superpower but the further decline of a Europe into relative military weakness compared to the United States. The Balkan conflict at the beginning of the decade revealed European military incapacity and political disarray; the Kosovo conflict at decade’s end exposed a transatlantic gap in military technology and the ability to wage modern warfare that would only widen in subsequent years. Outside of Europe, by the close of the 1990s, the disparity was even more starkly apparent as it became clear that the ability and will of European powers, individually or collectively, to project decisive force into regions of conflict beyond the Continent were negligible. Europeans could provide peacekeeping forces in the Balkans--indeed, they eventually did provide the vast bulk of those forces in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia--and even in Afghan-istan and perhaps someday in Iraq. But they lacked the wherewithal to introduce and sustain a fight-ing force in potentially hostile territory, even in Europe. Under the best of circumstances, the European role was limited to filling out peacekeeping forces after the United States had, largely on its own, carried out the decisive phases of a military mission and stabilized the situation. As some Europeans put it, the real division of labor consisted of the United States “making the dinner” and the Europeans “doing the dishes.”[6]
Alas, Kagan is too kind, because even in peacekeeping, quality is not the same as quantity. In the Balkans, for example, none of the local factions regarded the European forces as fair interlocutors--not even the British. And in Afghanistan, widely publicized as a great triumph for NATO, the missions of the alliance force and the U.S.-led “coalition of the capable” could not be more different. It is not the NATO contingent that is chasing down Taliban fighters in the border provinces. In sum, of the more than 2.5 million personnel nominally under arms in Europe, at most 3 percent are deployable. Roughly 85 percent of U.S. forces are deployable--and sustainable--at any moment.
Clash of Strategic Cultures
But at this point the military power gap masks a more interesting question: given Europe’s great size and great wealth--the expanded EU economy is actually larger than the U.S. economy--why is Europe so weak?
This is a question that Kagan does not answer fully. He notes the distinctions between the American and European interpretations of the political philosophy of the Enlightenment, but still asserts that weak powers inherently view the use of force differently than strong powers. Yet the United States has set its sights on the Gaddis’s trinity of unilateralism, preemption, and hegemony since its founding, and indeed well before its founding.
This is paradoxical, to be sure: Americans have been mostly anti-colonial, but still unabashedly hegemonic; Europeans have been unabashedly colonial yet cannot understand power except as something to be balanced. And any explanation for the many reasons behind this paradox would be beyond the scope of this essay. Nonetheless, it is hard to avoid the conclusion, from a fair reading of history, that Americans and Europeans have almost always had divergent strategic cultures.
Thus it will be exceptionally difficult to join together what the course of history has put asunder. The circumstances of power have changed--Europe’s powers are no longer great; America’s power is now super. But the crucial difference is that the security situation in Europe no longer dominates American strategic considerations. The fundamental tendencies of American strategic culture are thus free to be re-expressed. At the same time, European strategy, to the degree that there is such a thing, is entirely self-referential. Europeans, one has to grant at this point, are not really that interested in “transforming the greater Middle East.”
That is hardly the end of the world--indeed, accepting this fact may be part of the beginning of strategic wisdom for U.S. policymakers. The task we have set ourselves is enormous. It is useful to have strategic partners--like the British--who share our goals and can make a serious military contribution. And it may be that continental Europeans can make other contributions, though it might be some time before that happens. A European Union reluctant to admit Turkey does not act like an organization devoted to the modernization of the Islamic world.
But the United States must learn how to make strategy without Europe. Our security depends upon it. Indeed, the two important challenges of the new century--the rise of China and the problems of the greater Middle East--have very little to do with Europe. Further, if the United States fails to address these two challenges, it may well prove that the peace of Europe won at such great cost over the last century will not last. The 2002 National Security Strategy has it exactly backwards on this point: trying to revive the Cold War model of cooperation with Europe will retard the American effort to accomplish its lasting purposes in the rest of the world.
By Thomas Donnelly
Posted: Thursday, May 13, 2004
Despite the best efforts to resurrect the transatlantic bonhomie of the Cold War era, the limitations of any strategic partnership between the United States and Europe are growing increasingly clear. This is not merely a function of fallout over Operation Iraqi Freedom or animosity toward the Bush administration per se. Rather, the split between Europe and the United States reflects a more fundamental clash of strategic cultures. While Americans have historically emphasized preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony in formulating their national security policies, Europeans have preferred balance of power realism. It is time for Washington to recognize that any “partnership” with Europe is as likely to retard as advance U.S. interests in the democratization and liberalization of the Greater Middle East.
I was recently asked by the Goethe Institut and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations to participate in a discussion on relations between the United States and Germany, asking the question whether, one year after the invasion of Iraq, transatlantic affairs were getting “back to normal.” It was just the sort of open-ended question apt to produce maximum bloviation by conference participants, but I suppose that was the purpose. And it does beg a really interesting question: what makes for a “normal” relationship between the United States and its European allies these days?
To be sure, many of the fundamentals of the relationship remain unaffected by 9/11, the war on terrorism, or Iraq: transatlantic trade flows more or less as freely and regularly as it did, as do social and cultural exchanges. But the strategic partnership between America and Europe is unquestionably in tatters, the old Cold War consensus--such as it was--buried in the same dustbin of history as the Soviet Union itself.
The abuse of prisoners at Abu Gharib has ripped open the Iraq wound yet again. Britain’s Guardian, as ever propelled by hatred of all things Bush, recruited Clinton administra-
tion propaganda minister Sidney Blumenthal to declare Abu Gharib part of a “new gulag” constructed for the war on terror.[1] The civilized version of this complaint is to call for “accountability”--and to imply that it requires the firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. To be sure, this interest in Iraq’s prison practices is a new concern for Europeans, not much in evidence during Saddam Hussein’s rule. Let’s hope, as long as they are excoriating the Pentagon for the abuses at Abu Gharib, they likewise offer a frank assessment of conditions in Iran, Libya, and Syria.
Yet strategic nostalgia persists, at least on the western side of the Atlantic. Arguably, the European political agenda--building the European Union--is more forward-looking than that of those U.S. “internationalists” who pine for French and German allies in Iraq. Not only are the internationalists reluctant to believe the European leaders and peoples who have been telling us consistently that they are not interested in “transforming” the region, but those whose lodestar is conventional wisdom seem to think that the measure of success lies in Paris or Berlin rather than in the Middle East itself.
Even the National Security Strategy of the United States, the notorious September 2002 articulation of the “Bush Doctrine” and its ramifications, reiterated the common wisdom that “[t]here is little of lasting consequence that the United States can accomplish in this world without the sustained cooperation of its allies and friends in . . . Europe.”[2] Almost two years on, it is hard to regard this assertion as anything other than the mindless repetition of a hoary but outdated principle.
Indeed, what evidence is there, at this point, that a “normal,” default-mode strategic partnership between Brussels and Washington even exists? It was, after all, George Washington himself who warned Americans of the unintended consequences of entangling European alliances. As historian John Lewis Gaddis has observed, U.S. strategy has traditionally favored unilateralism,
preemption, and hegemony.[3] Even the ultimate liberal “internationalist” Woodrow Wilson, on his quest to make the world safe for democracy, would not assent to be a World War I “ally,” insisting instead that the United States remain an “associated” power of England, France, and Russia. Only the exigencies of World War II--primarily, the need for the manpower of the Red Army and its ability to bleed the Wehrmacht--pushed Franklin Roosevelt to accept the idea of a long-term, legally structured partnership with Europe.
What Consensus?
Thus the stubborn Euro-centrism of American strategy is, nearly fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, proving to be the most pernicious piece of Cold War baggage. It is also yet another reminder of the strategic drift of the 1990s, and particularly the Clinton years. The Cold War was, at its heart, a competition for the future of Europe and particularly Germany, but it was more: it was also a competition for Pacific Asia and, in its later years, for the Middle East. Indeed, the bloodiest battles of the Cold War were on the Korean peninsula and the Indochinese littoral, half a world away from the Fulda Gap. The German plain was the central front, but from an American perspective it was a genuinely global struggle; we could not afford the luxury of laser-like focus on a single theater. Conversely, Europeans had little interest beyond their own backyard.
Curiously, the collapse of the Soviet Union made American leaders recoil from the uncertainty of a “post–Cold War world,” even though it represented an amazing--and amazingly peaceful--victory that opened huge opportunities for the spread of American political principles and the exercise of American power. The first Bush administration seemed to clutch at the familiar. Its boldness in pushing for German unification within NATO contrasts vividly with its timidity in the 1991 Gulf War and its response to the Tiananmen Square massacre. The administration’s reluctance to confront Slobodan Milosevic indicated how little it understood the changing landscape even within Europe itself. For all his expertise in the tactics of international politics, President George H. W. Bush had no interest in “the vision thing.”
But then, neither did Bill Clinton. Convinced that international politics was, in the magical globalizing economy, a subset of trade policy, the Clinton administration was content to flatter European great-power vanity—at least until the “hour of Europe” produced atrocities in the Balkans. Despite being goaded into action by British prime minister Tony Blair, Clinton remained a hesitant warrior, ever multilateral and mindful of French charges of “hyperpuissance.” Both the Bush and Clinton administrations acted as though the preponderance of American power was itself a dangerous thing. To them, “normalcy” in international behavior was measured in restraint, stability, and consensus.
The Power Gap
That there is a wide disparity in power--particularly, but not only, military power--between the United States and Europe has at last penetrated diplomatic consciousness--although Atlanticists, ever faithful to their creed, hope either that Europeans will somehow recover their interest in war or, alternatively, that Americans will lose theirs. Robert Kagan’s line that “Americans are from Mars while Europeans are from Venus” captures the moment perfectly.[4]
To be sure, Great Britain stands as the exception, as the brief history of the invasion and occupation of Iraq reveals; but for the Brits in Basra and in the initial attack, the United States would be providing all the militarily useful force in Iraq. Indeed, at an early point of planning, the British volunteered to lead the attack through Turkey into northern Iraq. It is not possible to imagine any other European military force--either individually or collectively--capable of seriously suggesting such a plan. But then, strategically, Great Britain remains deeply dubious of entanglement with continental Europe, as its most recent defense review reveals in its conclusion that, in the war on terrorism, the United States--Britain’s “closest ally”--will “be in the lead.”[5]
But the exception proves the rule, as Kagan writes in Of Paradise and Power:
[T]he 1990s witnessed not the rise of a European superpower but the further decline of a Europe into relative military weakness compared to the United States. The Balkan conflict at the beginning of the decade revealed European military incapacity and political disarray; the Kosovo conflict at decade’s end exposed a transatlantic gap in military technology and the ability to wage modern warfare that would only widen in subsequent years. Outside of Europe, by the close of the 1990s, the disparity was even more starkly apparent as it became clear that the ability and will of European powers, individually or collectively, to project decisive force into regions of conflict beyond the Continent were negligible. Europeans could provide peacekeeping forces in the Balkans--indeed, they eventually did provide the vast bulk of those forces in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia--and even in Afghan-istan and perhaps someday in Iraq. But they lacked the wherewithal to introduce and sustain a fight-ing force in potentially hostile territory, even in Europe. Under the best of circumstances, the European role was limited to filling out peacekeeping forces after the United States had, largely on its own, carried out the decisive phases of a military mission and stabilized the situation. As some Europeans put it, the real division of labor consisted of the United States “making the dinner” and the Europeans “doing the dishes.”[6]
Alas, Kagan is too kind, because even in peacekeeping, quality is not the same as quantity. In the Balkans, for example, none of the local factions regarded the European forces as fair interlocutors--not even the British. And in Afghanistan, widely publicized as a great triumph for NATO, the missions of the alliance force and the U.S.-led “coalition of the capable” could not be more different. It is not the NATO contingent that is chasing down Taliban fighters in the border provinces. In sum, of the more than 2.5 million personnel nominally under arms in Europe, at most 3 percent are deployable. Roughly 85 percent of U.S. forces are deployable--and sustainable--at any moment.
Clash of Strategic Cultures
But at this point the military power gap masks a more interesting question: given Europe’s great size and great wealth--the expanded EU economy is actually larger than the U.S. economy--why is Europe so weak?
This is a question that Kagan does not answer fully. He notes the distinctions between the American and European interpretations of the political philosophy of the Enlightenment, but still asserts that weak powers inherently view the use of force differently than strong powers. Yet the United States has set its sights on the Gaddis’s trinity of unilateralism, preemption, and hegemony since its founding, and indeed well before its founding.
This is paradoxical, to be sure: Americans have been mostly anti-colonial, but still unabashedly hegemonic; Europeans have been unabashedly colonial yet cannot understand power except as something to be balanced. And any explanation for the many reasons behind this paradox would be beyond the scope of this essay. Nonetheless, it is hard to avoid the conclusion, from a fair reading of history, that Americans and Europeans have almost always had divergent strategic cultures.
Thus it will be exceptionally difficult to join together what the course of history has put asunder. The circumstances of power have changed--Europe’s powers are no longer great; America’s power is now super. But the crucial difference is that the security situation in Europe no longer dominates American strategic considerations. The fundamental tendencies of American strategic culture are thus free to be re-expressed. At the same time, European strategy, to the degree that there is such a thing, is entirely self-referential. Europeans, one has to grant at this point, are not really that interested in “transforming the greater Middle East.”
That is hardly the end of the world--indeed, accepting this fact may be part of the beginning of strategic wisdom for U.S. policymakers. The task we have set ourselves is enormous. It is useful to have strategic partners--like the British--who share our goals and can make a serious military contribution. And it may be that continental Europeans can make other contributions, though it might be some time before that happens. A European Union reluctant to admit Turkey does not act like an organization devoted to the modernization of the Islamic world.
But the United States must learn how to make strategy without Europe. Our security depends upon it. Indeed, the two important challenges of the new century--the rise of China and the problems of the greater Middle East--have very little to do with Europe. Further, if the United States fails to address these two challenges, it may well prove that the peace of Europe won at such great cost over the last century will not last. The 2002 National Security Strategy has it exactly backwards on this point: trying to revive the Cold War model of cooperation with Europe will retard the American effort to accomplish its lasting purposes in the rest of the world.
Learning to Live without Europe
By Thomas Donnelly
Posted: Thursday, May 13, 2004
NATIONAL SECURITY OUTLOOK
AEI Online (Washington)
Publication Date: May 1, 2004
Available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format
Despite the best efforts to resurrect the transatlantic bonhomie of the Cold War era, the limitations of any strategic partnership between the United States and Europe are growing increasingly clear. This is not merely a function of fallout over Operation Iraqi Freedom or animosity toward the Bush administration per se. Rather, the split between Europe and the United States reflects a more fundamental clash of strategic cultures. While Americans have historically emphasized preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony in formulating their national security policies, Europeans have preferred balance of power realism. It is time for Washington to recognize that any “partnership” with Europe is as likely to retard as advance U.S. interests in the democratization and liberalization of the Greater Middle East.
I was recently asked by the Goethe Institut and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations to participate in a discussion on relations between the United States and Germany, asking the question whether, one year after the invasion of Iraq, transatlantic affairs were getting “back to normal.” It was just the sort of open-ended question apt to produce maximum bloviation by conference participants, but I suppose that was the purpose. And it does beg a really interesting question: what makes for a “normal” relationship between the United States and its European allies these days?
To be sure, many of the fundamentals of the relationship remain unaffected by 9/11, the war on terrorism, or Iraq: transatlantic trade flows more or less as freely and regularly as it did, as do social and cultural exchanges. But the strategic partnership between America and Europe is unquestionably in tatters, the old Cold War consensus--such as it was--buried in the same dustbin of history as the Soviet Union itself.
The abuse of prisoners at Abu Gharib has ripped open the Iraq wound yet again. Britain’s Guardian, as ever propelled by hatred of all things Bush, recruited Clinton administra-
tion propaganda minister Sidney Blumenthal to declare Abu Gharib part of a “new gulag” constructed for the war on terror.[1] The civilized version of this complaint is to call for “accountability”--and to imply that it requires the firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. To be sure, this interest in Iraq’s prison practices is a new concern for Europeans, not much in evidence during Saddam Hussein’s rule. Let’s hope, as long as they are excoriating the Pentagon for the abuses at Abu Gharib, they likewise offer a frank assessment of conditions in Iran, Libya, and Syria.
Yet strategic nostalgia persists, at least on the western side of the Atlantic. Arguably, the European political agenda--building the European Union--is more forward-looking than that of those U.S. “internationalists” who pine for French and German allies in Iraq. Not only are the internationalists reluctant to believe the European leaders and peoples who have been telling us consistently that they are not interested in “transforming” the region, but those whose lodestar is conventional wisdom seem to think that the measure of success lies in Paris or Berlin rather than in the Middle East itself.
Even the National Security Strategy of the United States, the notorious September 2002 articulation of the “Bush Doctrine” and its ramifications, reiterated the common wisdom that “[t]here is little of lasting consequence that the United States can accomplish in this world without the sustained cooperation of its allies and friends in . . . Europe.”[2] Almost two years on, it is hard to regard this assertion as anything other than the mindless repetition of a hoary but outdated principle.
Indeed, what evidence is there, at this point, that a “normal,” default-mode strategic partnership between Brussels and Washington even exists? It was, after all, George Washington himself who warned Americans of the unintended consequences of entangling European alliances. As historian John Lewis Gaddis has observed, U.S. strategy has traditionally favored unilateralism,
preemption, and hegemony.[3] Even the ultimate liberal “internationalist” Woodrow Wilson, on his quest to make the world safe for democracy, would not assent to be a World War I “ally,” insisting instead that the United States remain an “associated” power of England, France, and Russia. Only the exigencies of World War II--primarily, the need for the manpower of the Red Army and its ability to bleed the Wehrmacht--pushed Franklin Roosevelt to accept the idea of a long-term, legally structured partnership with Europe.
What Consensus?
Thus the stubborn Euro-centrism of American strategy is, nearly fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, proving to be the most pernicious piece of Cold War baggage. It is also yet another reminder of the strategic drift of the 1990s, and particularly the Clinton years. The Cold War was, at its heart, a competition for the future of Europe and particularly Germany, but it was more: it was also a competition for Pacific Asia and, in its later years, for the Middle East. Indeed, the bloodiest battles of the Cold War were on the Korean peninsula and the Indochinese littoral, half a world away from the Fulda Gap. The German plain was the central front, but from an American perspective it was a genuinely global struggle; we could not afford the luxury of laser-like focus on a single theater. Conversely, Europeans had little interest beyond their own backyard.
Curiously, the collapse of the Soviet Union made American leaders recoil from the uncertainty of a “post–Cold War world,” even though it represented an amazing--and amazingly peaceful--victory that opened huge opportunities for the spread of American political principles and the exercise of American power. The first Bush administration seemed to clutch at the familiar. Its boldness in pushing for German unification within NATO contrasts vividly with its timidity in the 1991 Gulf War and its response to the Tiananmen Square massacre. The administration’s reluctance to confront Slobodan Milosevic indicated how little it understood the changing landscape even within Europe itself. For all his expertise in the tactics of international politics, President George H. W. Bush had no interest in “the vision thing.”
But then, neither did Bill Clinton. Convinced that international politics was, in the magical globalizing economy, a subset of trade policy, the Clinton administration was content to flatter European great-power vanity—at least until the “hour of Europe” produced atrocities in the Balkans. Despite being goaded into action by British prime minister Tony Blair, Clinton remained a hesitant warrior, ever multilateral and mindful of French charges of “hyperpuissance.” Both the Bush and Clinton administrations acted as though the preponderance of American power was itself a dangerous thing. To them, “normalcy” in international behavior was measured in restraint, stability, and consensus.
The Power Gap
That there is a wide disparity in power--particularly, but not only, military power--between the United States and Europe has at last penetrated diplomatic consciousness--although Atlanticists, ever faithful to their creed, hope either that Europeans will somehow recover their interest in war or, alternatively, that Americans will lose theirs. Robert Kagan’s line that “Americans are from Mars while Europeans are from Venus” captures the moment perfectly.[4]
To be sure, Great Britain stands as the exception, as the brief history of the invasion and occupation of Iraq reveals; but for the Brits in Basra and in the initial attack, the United States would be providing all the militarily useful force in Iraq. Indeed, at an early point of planning, the British volunteered to lead the attack through Turkey into northern Iraq. It is not possible to imagine any other European military force--either individually or collectively--capable of seriously suggesting such a plan. But then, strategically, Great Britain remains deeply dubious of entanglement with continental Europe, as its most recent defense review reveals in its conclusion that, in the war on terrorism, the United States--Britain’s “closest ally”--will “be in the lead.”[5]
But the exception proves the rule, as Kagan writes in Of Paradise and Power:
[T]he 1990s witnessed not the rise of a European superpower but the further decline of a Europe into relative military weakness compared to the United States. The Balkan conflict at the beginning of the decade revealed European military incapacity and political disarray; the Kosovo conflict at decade’s end exposed a transatlantic gap in military technology and the ability to wage modern warfare that would only widen in subsequent years. Outside of Europe, by the close of the 1990s, the disparity was even more starkly apparent as it became clear that the ability and will of European powers, individually or collectively, to project decisive force into regions of conflict beyond the Continent were negligible. Europeans could provide peacekeeping forces in the Balkans--indeed, they eventually did provide the vast bulk of those forces in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia--and even in Afghan-istan and perhaps someday in Iraq. But they lacked the wherewithal to introduce and sustain a fight-ing force in potentially hostile territory, even in Europe. Under the best of circumstances, the European role was limited to filling out peacekeeping forces after the United States had, largely on its own, carried out the decisive phases of a military mission and stabilized the situation. As some Europeans put it, the real division of labor consisted of the United States “making the dinner” and the Europeans “doing the dishes.”[6]
Alas, Kagan is too kind, because even in peacekeeping, quality is not the same as quantity. In the Balkans, for example, none of the local factions regarded the European forces as fair interlocutors--not even the British. And in Afghanistan, widely publicized as a great triumph for NATO, the missions of the alliance force and the U.S.-led “coalition of the capable” could not be more different. It is not the NATO contingent that is chasing down Taliban fighters in the border provinces. In sum, of the more than 2.5 million personnel nominally under arms in Europe, at most 3 percent are deployable. Roughly 85 percent of U.S. forces are deployable--and sustainable--at any moment.
Clash of Strategic Cultures
But at this point the military power gap masks a more interesting question: given Europe’s great size and great wealth--the expanded EU economy is actually larger than the U.S. economy--why is Europe so weak?
This is a question that Kagan does not answer fully. He notes the distinctions between the American and European interpretations of the political philosophy of the Enlightenment, but still asserts that weak powers inherently view the use of force differently than strong powers. Yet the United States has set its sights on the Gaddis’s trinity of unilateralism, preemption, and hegemony since its founding, and indeed well before its founding.
This is paradoxical, to be sure: Americans have been mostly anti-colonial, but still unabashedly hegemonic; Europeans have been unabashedly colonial yet cannot understand power except as something to be balanced. And any explanation for the many reasons behind this paradox would be beyond the scope of this essay. Nonetheless, it is hard to avoid the conclusion, from a fair reading of history, that Americans and Europeans have almost always had divergent strategic cultures.
Thus it will be exceptionally difficult to join together what the course of history has put asunder. The circumstances of power have changed--Europe’s powers are no longer great; America’s power is now super. But the crucial difference is that the security situation in Europe no longer dominates American strategic considerations. The fundamental tendencies of American strategic culture are thus free to be re-expressed. At the same time, European strategy, to the degree that there is such a thing, is entirely self-referential. Europeans, one has to grant at this point, are not really that interested in “transforming the greater Middle East.”
That is hardly the end of the world--indeed, accepting this fact may be part of the beginning of strategic wisdom for U.S. policymakers. The task we have set ourselves is enormous. It is useful to have strategic partners--like the British--who share our goals and can make a serious military contribution. And it may be that continental Europeans can make other contributions, though it might be some time before that happens. A European Union reluctant to admit Turkey does not act like an organization devoted to the modernization of the Islamic world.
But the United States must learn how to make strategy without Europe. Our security depends upon it. Indeed, the two important challenges of the new century--the rise of China and the problems of the greater Middle East--have very little to do with Europe. Further, if the United States fails to address these two challenges, it may well prove that the peace of Europe won at such great cost over the last century will not last. The 2002 National Security Strategy has it exactly backwards on this point: trying to revive the Cold War model of cooperation with Europe will retard the American effort to accomplish its lasting purposes in the rest of the world.
By Thomas Donnelly
Posted: Thursday, May 13, 2004
NATIONAL SECURITY OUTLOOK
AEI Online (Washington)
Publication Date: May 1, 2004
Available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format
Despite the best efforts to resurrect the transatlantic bonhomie of the Cold War era, the limitations of any strategic partnership between the United States and Europe are growing increasingly clear. This is not merely a function of fallout over Operation Iraqi Freedom or animosity toward the Bush administration per se. Rather, the split between Europe and the United States reflects a more fundamental clash of strategic cultures. While Americans have historically emphasized preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony in formulating their national security policies, Europeans have preferred balance of power realism. It is time for Washington to recognize that any “partnership” with Europe is as likely to retard as advance U.S. interests in the democratization and liberalization of the Greater Middle East.
I was recently asked by the Goethe Institut and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations to participate in a discussion on relations between the United States and Germany, asking the question whether, one year after the invasion of Iraq, transatlantic affairs were getting “back to normal.” It was just the sort of open-ended question apt to produce maximum bloviation by conference participants, but I suppose that was the purpose. And it does beg a really interesting question: what makes for a “normal” relationship between the United States and its European allies these days?
To be sure, many of the fundamentals of the relationship remain unaffected by 9/11, the war on terrorism, or Iraq: transatlantic trade flows more or less as freely and regularly as it did, as do social and cultural exchanges. But the strategic partnership between America and Europe is unquestionably in tatters, the old Cold War consensus--such as it was--buried in the same dustbin of history as the Soviet Union itself.
The abuse of prisoners at Abu Gharib has ripped open the Iraq wound yet again. Britain’s Guardian, as ever propelled by hatred of all things Bush, recruited Clinton administra-
tion propaganda minister Sidney Blumenthal to declare Abu Gharib part of a “new gulag” constructed for the war on terror.[1] The civilized version of this complaint is to call for “accountability”--and to imply that it requires the firing of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. To be sure, this interest in Iraq’s prison practices is a new concern for Europeans, not much in evidence during Saddam Hussein’s rule. Let’s hope, as long as they are excoriating the Pentagon for the abuses at Abu Gharib, they likewise offer a frank assessment of conditions in Iran, Libya, and Syria.
Yet strategic nostalgia persists, at least on the western side of the Atlantic. Arguably, the European political agenda--building the European Union--is more forward-looking than that of those U.S. “internationalists” who pine for French and German allies in Iraq. Not only are the internationalists reluctant to believe the European leaders and peoples who have been telling us consistently that they are not interested in “transforming” the region, but those whose lodestar is conventional wisdom seem to think that the measure of success lies in Paris or Berlin rather than in the Middle East itself.
Even the National Security Strategy of the United States, the notorious September 2002 articulation of the “Bush Doctrine” and its ramifications, reiterated the common wisdom that “[t]here is little of lasting consequence that the United States can accomplish in this world without the sustained cooperation of its allies and friends in . . . Europe.”[2] Almost two years on, it is hard to regard this assertion as anything other than the mindless repetition of a hoary but outdated principle.
Indeed, what evidence is there, at this point, that a “normal,” default-mode strategic partnership between Brussels and Washington even exists? It was, after all, George Washington himself who warned Americans of the unintended consequences of entangling European alliances. As historian John Lewis Gaddis has observed, U.S. strategy has traditionally favored unilateralism,
preemption, and hegemony.[3] Even the ultimate liberal “internationalist” Woodrow Wilson, on his quest to make the world safe for democracy, would not assent to be a World War I “ally,” insisting instead that the United States remain an “associated” power of England, France, and Russia. Only the exigencies of World War II--primarily, the need for the manpower of the Red Army and its ability to bleed the Wehrmacht--pushed Franklin Roosevelt to accept the idea of a long-term, legally structured partnership with Europe.
What Consensus?
Thus the stubborn Euro-centrism of American strategy is, nearly fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, proving to be the most pernicious piece of Cold War baggage. It is also yet another reminder of the strategic drift of the 1990s, and particularly the Clinton years. The Cold War was, at its heart, a competition for the future of Europe and particularly Germany, but it was more: it was also a competition for Pacific Asia and, in its later years, for the Middle East. Indeed, the bloodiest battles of the Cold War were on the Korean peninsula and the Indochinese littoral, half a world away from the Fulda Gap. The German plain was the central front, but from an American perspective it was a genuinely global struggle; we could not afford the luxury of laser-like focus on a single theater. Conversely, Europeans had little interest beyond their own backyard.
Curiously, the collapse of the Soviet Union made American leaders recoil from the uncertainty of a “post–Cold War world,” even though it represented an amazing--and amazingly peaceful--victory that opened huge opportunities for the spread of American political principles and the exercise of American power. The first Bush administration seemed to clutch at the familiar. Its boldness in pushing for German unification within NATO contrasts vividly with its timidity in the 1991 Gulf War and its response to the Tiananmen Square massacre. The administration’s reluctance to confront Slobodan Milosevic indicated how little it understood the changing landscape even within Europe itself. For all his expertise in the tactics of international politics, President George H. W. Bush had no interest in “the vision thing.”
But then, neither did Bill Clinton. Convinced that international politics was, in the magical globalizing economy, a subset of trade policy, the Clinton administration was content to flatter European great-power vanity—at least until the “hour of Europe” produced atrocities in the Balkans. Despite being goaded into action by British prime minister Tony Blair, Clinton remained a hesitant warrior, ever multilateral and mindful of French charges of “hyperpuissance.” Both the Bush and Clinton administrations acted as though the preponderance of American power was itself a dangerous thing. To them, “normalcy” in international behavior was measured in restraint, stability, and consensus.
The Power Gap
That there is a wide disparity in power--particularly, but not only, military power--between the United States and Europe has at last penetrated diplomatic consciousness--although Atlanticists, ever faithful to their creed, hope either that Europeans will somehow recover their interest in war or, alternatively, that Americans will lose theirs. Robert Kagan’s line that “Americans are from Mars while Europeans are from Venus” captures the moment perfectly.[4]
To be sure, Great Britain stands as the exception, as the brief history of the invasion and occupation of Iraq reveals; but for the Brits in Basra and in the initial attack, the United States would be providing all the militarily useful force in Iraq. Indeed, at an early point of planning, the British volunteered to lead the attack through Turkey into northern Iraq. It is not possible to imagine any other European military force--either individually or collectively--capable of seriously suggesting such a plan. But then, strategically, Great Britain remains deeply dubious of entanglement with continental Europe, as its most recent defense review reveals in its conclusion that, in the war on terrorism, the United States--Britain’s “closest ally”--will “be in the lead.”[5]
But the exception proves the rule, as Kagan writes in Of Paradise and Power:
[T]he 1990s witnessed not the rise of a European superpower but the further decline of a Europe into relative military weakness compared to the United States. The Balkan conflict at the beginning of the decade revealed European military incapacity and political disarray; the Kosovo conflict at decade’s end exposed a transatlantic gap in military technology and the ability to wage modern warfare that would only widen in subsequent years. Outside of Europe, by the close of the 1990s, the disparity was even more starkly apparent as it became clear that the ability and will of European powers, individually or collectively, to project decisive force into regions of conflict beyond the Continent were negligible. Europeans could provide peacekeeping forces in the Balkans--indeed, they eventually did provide the vast bulk of those forces in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Macedonia--and even in Afghan-istan and perhaps someday in Iraq. But they lacked the wherewithal to introduce and sustain a fight-ing force in potentially hostile territory, even in Europe. Under the best of circumstances, the European role was limited to filling out peacekeeping forces after the United States had, largely on its own, carried out the decisive phases of a military mission and stabilized the situation. As some Europeans put it, the real division of labor consisted of the United States “making the dinner” and the Europeans “doing the dishes.”[6]
Alas, Kagan is too kind, because even in peacekeeping, quality is not the same as quantity. In the Balkans, for example, none of the local factions regarded the European forces as fair interlocutors--not even the British. And in Afghanistan, widely publicized as a great triumph for NATO, the missions of the alliance force and the U.S.-led “coalition of the capable” could not be more different. It is not the NATO contingent that is chasing down Taliban fighters in the border provinces. In sum, of the more than 2.5 million personnel nominally under arms in Europe, at most 3 percent are deployable. Roughly 85 percent of U.S. forces are deployable--and sustainable--at any moment.
Clash of Strategic Cultures
But at this point the military power gap masks a more interesting question: given Europe’s great size and great wealth--the expanded EU economy is actually larger than the U.S. economy--why is Europe so weak?
This is a question that Kagan does not answer fully. He notes the distinctions between the American and European interpretations of the political philosophy of the Enlightenment, but still asserts that weak powers inherently view the use of force differently than strong powers. Yet the United States has set its sights on the Gaddis’s trinity of unilateralism, preemption, and hegemony since its founding, and indeed well before its founding.
This is paradoxical, to be sure: Americans have been mostly anti-colonial, but still unabashedly hegemonic; Europeans have been unabashedly colonial yet cannot understand power except as something to be balanced. And any explanation for the many reasons behind this paradox would be beyond the scope of this essay. Nonetheless, it is hard to avoid the conclusion, from a fair reading of history, that Americans and Europeans have almost always had divergent strategic cultures.
Thus it will be exceptionally difficult to join together what the course of history has put asunder. The circumstances of power have changed--Europe’s powers are no longer great; America’s power is now super. But the crucial difference is that the security situation in Europe no longer dominates American strategic considerations. The fundamental tendencies of American strategic culture are thus free to be re-expressed. At the same time, European strategy, to the degree that there is such a thing, is entirely self-referential. Europeans, one has to grant at this point, are not really that interested in “transforming the greater Middle East.”
That is hardly the end of the world--indeed, accepting this fact may be part of the beginning of strategic wisdom for U.S. policymakers. The task we have set ourselves is enormous. It is useful to have strategic partners--like the British--who share our goals and can make a serious military contribution. And it may be that continental Europeans can make other contributions, though it might be some time before that happens. A European Union reluctant to admit Turkey does not act like an organization devoted to the modernization of the Islamic world.
But the United States must learn how to make strategy without Europe. Our security depends upon it. Indeed, the two important challenges of the new century--the rise of China and the problems of the greater Middle East--have very little to do with Europe. Further, if the United States fails to address these two challenges, it may well prove that the peace of Europe won at such great cost over the last century will not last. The 2002 National Security Strategy has it exactly backwards on this point: trying to revive the Cold War model of cooperation with Europe will retard the American effort to accomplish its lasting purposes in the rest of the world.
Thursday, May 13, 2004
Saturday, May 08, 2004A Brief Foray into an Internet Cafe
I won't be doing this too often, there aren't that many and I'm too old for their typical clientele.
Many thanks for all the good wishes, I am safe but there's too much activity around for me to use my normal link. Thanks for all the emails but please excuse the lack of reply, I'm sure you'll understand.
Anyway, I just had to come on air because of the latest piece of idiocy from our rulers. Forget what I ever said about Crown Prince Abdullah being relatively reasonable - he's completely lost the plot. Prince Nayif, on the other hand, has always lived in a mad world of his own.
We Are at War With Terrorists, Says Naif
JEDDAH, 8 May 2004 — Saudi Arabia is in a state of war with terrorism, Interior Minister Prince Naif declared yesterday. But he also said efforts at communicating with extremists had been effective in bringing a number of them back into the fold.
...................
...................
Speaking to top military and civilian officials in Jeddah last Saturday when four terrorists went on a shooting spree in Yanbu killing five Westerners and a National Guard officer, the crown prince said he believed Zionists were behind most terrorist attacks in the Kingdom. But in a press statement after the attack, Prince Naif blamed Al-Qaeda.
“I don’t see any contradiction in the two statements, because Al-Qaeda is backed by Israel and Zionism,” he said.
So there you have it. It's official, our Interior Minister says so. It's all the fault of the Jews, just like they teach us in school. Al Qaeeda is a front for the Mossad. Osama Bin Laden is really a Jewish kid from the Bronx, went out one day to buy some bagels but somehow ended up in Afghanistan where he led all those good Arab boys astray and got them to practice blowing things up with historic Buddha statues. But you have to admit that the Jews are clever, the way they threaten themselves with oblivion; there's nothing more deceptive than a double-bluff.
Anyway, it'll be easy to pick them up at the roadblocks. This is the photo of the man that all the cops will be looking out for.
Clearly it's only the US's spectacular PR disaster in Iraq that has prevented this getting more headlines. It typifies our two Arab diseases - self-denial of the blindingly obvious, and blaming everyone else. With attitudes like that permeating the highest levels of government, we can be assured that our War on Terrorism will continue to be a futile farce. We might as well save ourselves the bother, let's invite the Talibaan in right now, Mrs. A ought to stay in more anyway, my daughter would enjoy a break from school, and maybe our national soccer team will play better in full length pants.
I won't be doing this too often, there aren't that many and I'm too old for their typical clientele.
Many thanks for all the good wishes, I am safe but there's too much activity around for me to use my normal link. Thanks for all the emails but please excuse the lack of reply, I'm sure you'll understand.
Anyway, I just had to come on air because of the latest piece of idiocy from our rulers. Forget what I ever said about Crown Prince Abdullah being relatively reasonable - he's completely lost the plot. Prince Nayif, on the other hand, has always lived in a mad world of his own.
We Are at War With Terrorists, Says Naif
JEDDAH, 8 May 2004 — Saudi Arabia is in a state of war with terrorism, Interior Minister Prince Naif declared yesterday. But he also said efforts at communicating with extremists had been effective in bringing a number of them back into the fold.
...................
...................
Speaking to top military and civilian officials in Jeddah last Saturday when four terrorists went on a shooting spree in Yanbu killing five Westerners and a National Guard officer, the crown prince said he believed Zionists were behind most terrorist attacks in the Kingdom. But in a press statement after the attack, Prince Naif blamed Al-Qaeda.
“I don’t see any contradiction in the two statements, because Al-Qaeda is backed by Israel and Zionism,” he said.
So there you have it. It's official, our Interior Minister says so. It's all the fault of the Jews, just like they teach us in school. Al Qaeeda is a front for the Mossad. Osama Bin Laden is really a Jewish kid from the Bronx, went out one day to buy some bagels but somehow ended up in Afghanistan where he led all those good Arab boys astray and got them to practice blowing things up with historic Buddha statues. But you have to admit that the Jews are clever, the way they threaten themselves with oblivion; there's nothing more deceptive than a double-bluff.
Anyway, it'll be easy to pick them up at the roadblocks. This is the photo of the man that all the cops will be looking out for.
Clearly it's only the US's spectacular PR disaster in Iraq that has prevented this getting more headlines. It typifies our two Arab diseases - self-denial of the blindingly obvious, and blaming everyone else. With attitudes like that permeating the highest levels of government, we can be assured that our War on Terrorism will continue to be a futile farce. We might as well save ourselves the bother, let's invite the Talibaan in right now, Mrs. A ought to stay in more anyway, my daughter would enjoy a break from school, and maybe our national soccer team will play better in full length pants.
Sometimes, a War Saves People
We must be willing to bring the fight to those who would do evil.
BY JOSE RAMOS-HORTA
Thursday, May 13, 2004 12:01 a.m.
The new Socialist government in Spain has caved in to the terrorist threats and withdrawn its troops from Iraq. So have Honduras and the Dominican Republic. They are unlikely to be the last. With the security situation expected to worsen before it improves, we have to accept that a few more countries--which do not appreciate how much the world has at stake in building a free Iraq--will also cut and run.
No matter how the retreating governments try to spin it, every time a country pulls out of Iraq it is al Qaeda and other extremists who win. They draw the conclusion that the coalition of the willing is weak and that the more terrorist outrages, the more countries will withdraw.
As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonize over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I've never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That's why I supported Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot's regime, and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without U.N. or international approval--and in both cases they were right to do so.
Perhaps the French have forgotten how they, too, toppled one of the worst human-rights violators without U.N. approval. I applauded in the early '80s when French paratroopers landed in the dilapidated capital of the then Central African Empire and deposed "Emperor" Jean Bedel Bokassa, renowned for cannibalism. Almost two decades later, I applauded again as NATO intervened--without a U.N. mandate--to end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and liberate an oppressed European Muslim community from Serbian tyranny. And I rejoiced once more in 2001 after the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban liberated Afghanistan from one of the world's most barbaric regimes.
So why do some think Iraq should be any different? Only a year after his overthrow, they seem to have forgotten how hundreds of thousands perished during Saddam Hussein's tyranny, under a regime whose hallmark was terror, summary execution, torture and rape. Forgotten too is how the Kurds and Iraq's neighbors lived each day in fear, so long as Saddam remained in power.
Those who oppose the use of force at any cost may question why overthrowing Saddam was such a priority. Why not instead tackle Robert Mugabe, the junta in Myanmar, or Syria? But while Mugabe is a ruthless despot, he is hardly in the same league as Saddam--a tyrant who used chemical weapons on his own people, unleashed two catastrophic wars against his Muslim neighbors, and defied the U.N.
Saddam's overthrow offers a chance to build a new Iraq that is peaceful, tolerant and prosperous. That's why the stakes are so high, and why extremists from across the Muslim world are fighting to prevent it. They know that a free Iraq would fatally undermine their goal of purging all Western influence from the Muslim world, overthrowing the secular regimes in the region, and imposing Stone Age rule. They know that forcing Western countries to withdraw from Iraq would be a major step toward that goal, imperiling the existence of moderate regimes--from the Middle East to the Magreb and Southeast Asia.
If those regimes were to fall, hundreds of thousands of Muslims who today denounce the "evils" of Western imperialism would flock to Europe, the U.S., Canada and Australia, seeking refuge. As in Iran, Muslims might have to experience the reality of rule by ayatollahs before they realize how foolish they were not to oppose these religious zealots more vigorously.
Fortunately that remains a remote scenario. If we look beyond the TV coverage, there is hope that Washington's vision of transforming Iraq might still be realized. Credible opinion polls show that a large majority of Iraqis feel better off than a year ago. There is real freedom of the press with newspapers and radio stations mushrooming in the new Iraq. There is unhindered Internet access. NGOs covering everything from human rights to women's advocacy have emerged. In short, Iraq is experiencing real freedom for the first time in its history. And that is exactly what the religious fanatics fear.
Iraq's Shiite majority has acted with restraint in the face of provocation by extremist elements in the Sunni minority, Saddam loyalists and al Qaeda and other foreign mercenaries. The coalition authorities would be wise to cultivate responsible Shiite clerics more closely and ensure that their legitimate concerns are met. While a Shiite-dominated regime might not meet America's goal of a Western-style democracy, it is still far preferable to risking the return of Saddam's thugs. The U.S. must reiterate that building democracy will not marginalize Islam. Democracy and Islam coexist in Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh, while Israel offers an example of a state built on a single religion. That could be the case in Iraq, too, as long as it is led by wise clerics who are able to deliver freedom and good governance. The most probable contender to fill this role is Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has emerged as the national leader the country needs to keep it together. He may not be a democrat in the Western mold, but the U.S. needs to cultivate him, and provide whatever support is required to ensure that he emerges as ruler of the new Iraq.
The U.S. also needs to repair the damage done by the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners. While it's important to remember that those involved only represent a tiny fraction of U.S. servicemen in Iraq, the fact remains that the abuse was allowed to continue for many months after organizations such as the normally secretive Red Cross sounded alarm bells. Only thorough investigation, including action against those responsible, can restore U.S. standing in Iraq.
Now is the time for Washington to show leadership by ensuring that the U.N. plays the central role in building a new Iraq. As an East Timorese, I am well aware of the international body's limits, having seen first hand its impotence in the face of Indonesia's invasion of my country in 1975. The U.N. is the sum of our qualities and weaknesses, our selfish national interests and personal vanities. For all its shortcomings, it is the only international organization we all feel part of; it should be cherished rather than further weakened. While the U.S. will continue to play a critical role in ensuring security in Iraq, a U.N.-led peacekeeping force would enable many Arab and Muslim nations to join in and help isolate the extremists.
In almost 30 years of political life, I have supported the use of force on several occasions and sometimes wonder whether I am a worthy recipient of the Nobel Peace prize. Certainly I am not in the same category as Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu or Nelson Mandela. But Mr. Mandela, too, recognized the need to resort to violence in the struggle against white oppression. The consequences of doing nothing in the face of evil were demonstrated when the world did not stop the Rwandan genocide that killed almost a million people in 1994. Where were the peace protesters then? They were just as silent as they are today in the face of the barbaric behavior of religious fanatics.
Some may accuse me of being more of a warmonger than a Nobel laureate, but I stand ready to face my critics. It is always easier to say no to war, even at the price of appeasement. But being politically correct means leaving the innocent to suffer the world over, from Phnom Penh to Baghdad. And that is what those who would cut and run from Iraq risk doing.
Mr. Ramos-Horta, the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1996, is East Timor's senior minister for foreign affairs and cooperation.
We must be willing to bring the fight to those who would do evil.
BY JOSE RAMOS-HORTA
Thursday, May 13, 2004 12:01 a.m.
The new Socialist government in Spain has caved in to the terrorist threats and withdrawn its troops from Iraq. So have Honduras and the Dominican Republic. They are unlikely to be the last. With the security situation expected to worsen before it improves, we have to accept that a few more countries--which do not appreciate how much the world has at stake in building a free Iraq--will also cut and run.
No matter how the retreating governments try to spin it, every time a country pulls out of Iraq it is al Qaeda and other extremists who win. They draw the conclusion that the coalition of the willing is weak and that the more terrorist outrages, the more countries will withdraw.
As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonize over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I've never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That's why I supported Vietnam's 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot's regime, and Tanzania's invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without U.N. or international approval--and in both cases they were right to do so.
Perhaps the French have forgotten how they, too, toppled one of the worst human-rights violators without U.N. approval. I applauded in the early '80s when French paratroopers landed in the dilapidated capital of the then Central African Empire and deposed "Emperor" Jean Bedel Bokassa, renowned for cannibalism. Almost two decades later, I applauded again as NATO intervened--without a U.N. mandate--to end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and liberate an oppressed European Muslim community from Serbian tyranny. And I rejoiced once more in 2001 after the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban liberated Afghanistan from one of the world's most barbaric regimes.
So why do some think Iraq should be any different? Only a year after his overthrow, they seem to have forgotten how hundreds of thousands perished during Saddam Hussein's tyranny, under a regime whose hallmark was terror, summary execution, torture and rape. Forgotten too is how the Kurds and Iraq's neighbors lived each day in fear, so long as Saddam remained in power.
Those who oppose the use of force at any cost may question why overthrowing Saddam was such a priority. Why not instead tackle Robert Mugabe, the junta in Myanmar, or Syria? But while Mugabe is a ruthless despot, he is hardly in the same league as Saddam--a tyrant who used chemical weapons on his own people, unleashed two catastrophic wars against his Muslim neighbors, and defied the U.N.
Saddam's overthrow offers a chance to build a new Iraq that is peaceful, tolerant and prosperous. That's why the stakes are so high, and why extremists from across the Muslim world are fighting to prevent it. They know that a free Iraq would fatally undermine their goal of purging all Western influence from the Muslim world, overthrowing the secular regimes in the region, and imposing Stone Age rule. They know that forcing Western countries to withdraw from Iraq would be a major step toward that goal, imperiling the existence of moderate regimes--from the Middle East to the Magreb and Southeast Asia.
If those regimes were to fall, hundreds of thousands of Muslims who today denounce the "evils" of Western imperialism would flock to Europe, the U.S., Canada and Australia, seeking refuge. As in Iran, Muslims might have to experience the reality of rule by ayatollahs before they realize how foolish they were not to oppose these religious zealots more vigorously.
Fortunately that remains a remote scenario. If we look beyond the TV coverage, there is hope that Washington's vision of transforming Iraq might still be realized. Credible opinion polls show that a large majority of Iraqis feel better off than a year ago. There is real freedom of the press with newspapers and radio stations mushrooming in the new Iraq. There is unhindered Internet access. NGOs covering everything from human rights to women's advocacy have emerged. In short, Iraq is experiencing real freedom for the first time in its history. And that is exactly what the religious fanatics fear.
Iraq's Shiite majority has acted with restraint in the face of provocation by extremist elements in the Sunni minority, Saddam loyalists and al Qaeda and other foreign mercenaries. The coalition authorities would be wise to cultivate responsible Shiite clerics more closely and ensure that their legitimate concerns are met. While a Shiite-dominated regime might not meet America's goal of a Western-style democracy, it is still far preferable to risking the return of Saddam's thugs. The U.S. must reiterate that building democracy will not marginalize Islam. Democracy and Islam coexist in Indonesia, Malaysia and Bangladesh, while Israel offers an example of a state built on a single religion. That could be the case in Iraq, too, as long as it is led by wise clerics who are able to deliver freedom and good governance. The most probable contender to fill this role is Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has emerged as the national leader the country needs to keep it together. He may not be a democrat in the Western mold, but the U.S. needs to cultivate him, and provide whatever support is required to ensure that he emerges as ruler of the new Iraq.
The U.S. also needs to repair the damage done by the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners. While it's important to remember that those involved only represent a tiny fraction of U.S. servicemen in Iraq, the fact remains that the abuse was allowed to continue for many months after organizations such as the normally secretive Red Cross sounded alarm bells. Only thorough investigation, including action against those responsible, can restore U.S. standing in Iraq.
Now is the time for Washington to show leadership by ensuring that the U.N. plays the central role in building a new Iraq. As an East Timorese, I am well aware of the international body's limits, having seen first hand its impotence in the face of Indonesia's invasion of my country in 1975. The U.N. is the sum of our qualities and weaknesses, our selfish national interests and personal vanities. For all its shortcomings, it is the only international organization we all feel part of; it should be cherished rather than further weakened. While the U.S. will continue to play a critical role in ensuring security in Iraq, a U.N.-led peacekeeping force would enable many Arab and Muslim nations to join in and help isolate the extremists.
In almost 30 years of political life, I have supported the use of force on several occasions and sometimes wonder whether I am a worthy recipient of the Nobel Peace prize. Certainly I am not in the same category as Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu or Nelson Mandela. But Mr. Mandela, too, recognized the need to resort to violence in the struggle against white oppression. The consequences of doing nothing in the face of evil were demonstrated when the world did not stop the Rwandan genocide that killed almost a million people in 1994. Where were the peace protesters then? They were just as silent as they are today in the face of the barbaric behavior of religious fanatics.
Some may accuse me of being more of a warmonger than a Nobel laureate, but I stand ready to face my critics. It is always easier to say no to war, even at the price of appeasement. But being politically correct means leaving the innocent to suffer the world over, from Phnom Penh to Baghdad. And that is what those who would cut and run from Iraq risk doing.
Mr. Ramos-Horta, the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1996, is East Timor's senior minister for foreign affairs and cooperation.
Dancing Alone
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
It is time to ask this question: Do we have any chance of succeeding at regime change in Iraq without regime change here at home?
"Hey, Friedman, why are you bringing politics into this all of a sudden? You're the guy who always said that producing a decent outcome in Iraq was of such overriding importance to the country that it had to be kept above politics."
Yes, that's true. I still believe that. My mistake was thinking that the Bush team believed it, too. I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq — from prewar planning and putting in enough troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence — because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong. There is something even more important to the Bush crowd than getting Iraq right, and that's getting re-elected and staying loyal to the conservative base to do so. It has always been more important for the Bush folks to defeat liberals at home than Baathists abroad. That's why they spent more time studying U.S. polls than Iraqi history. That is why, I'll bet, Karl Rove has had more sway over this war than Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Bill Burns. Mr. Burns knew only what would play in the Middle East. Mr. Rove knew what would play in the Middle West.
I admit, I'm a little slow. Because I tried to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq, and the post- 9/11 world, in a nonpartisan fashion — as Joe Biden, John McCain and Dick Lugar did — I assumed the Bush officials were doing the same. I was wrong. They were always so slow to change course because confronting their mistakes didn't just involve confronting reality, but their own politics.
Why, in the face of rampant looting in the war's aftermath, which dug us into such a deep and costly hole, wouldn't Mr. Rumsfeld put more troops into Iraq? Politics. First of all, Rummy wanted to crush once and for all the Powell doctrine, which says you fight a war like this only with overwhelming force. I know this is hard to believe, but the Pentagon crew hated Colin Powell, and wanted to see him humiliated 10 times more than Saddam. Second, Rummy wanted to prove to all those U.S. generals whose Army he was intent on downsizing that a small, mobile, high-tech force was all you needed today to take over a country. Third, the White House always knew this was a war of choice — its choice — so it made sure that average Americans never had to pay any price or bear any burden. Thus, it couldn't call up too many reservists, let alone have a draft. Yes, there was a contradiction between the Bush war on taxes and the Bush war on terrorism. But it was resolved: the Bush team decided to lower taxes rather than raise troop levels.
Why, in the face of the Abu Ghraib travesty, wouldn't the administration make some uniquely American gesture? Because these folks have no clue how to export hope. They would never think of saying, "Let's close this prison immediately and reopen it in a month as the Abu Ghraib Technical College for Computer Training — with all the equipment donated by Dell, H.P. and Microsoft." Why didn't the administration ever use 9/11 as a spur to launch a Manhattan project for energy independence and conservation, so we could break out of our addiction to crude oil, slowly disengage from this region and speak truth to fundamentalist regimes, such as Saudi Arabia? (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.) Because that might have required a gas tax or a confrontation with the administration's oil moneymen. Why did the administration always — rightly — bash Yasir Arafat, but never lift a finger or utter a word to stop Ariel Sharon's massive building of illegal settlements in the West Bank? Because while that might have earned America credibility in the Middle East, it might have cost the Bush campaign Jewish votes in Florida.
And, of course, why did the president praise Mr. Rumsfeld rather than fire him? Because Karl Rove says to hold the conservative base, you must always appear to be strong, decisive and loyal. It is more important that the president appear to be true to his team than that America appear to be true to its principles. (Here's the new Rummy Defense: "I am accountable. But the little guys were responsible. I was just giving orders.")
Add it all up, and you see how we got so off track in Iraq, why we are dancing alone in the world — and why our president, who has a strong moral vision, has no moral influence.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
It is time to ask this question: Do we have any chance of succeeding at regime change in Iraq without regime change here at home?
"Hey, Friedman, why are you bringing politics into this all of a sudden? You're the guy who always said that producing a decent outcome in Iraq was of such overriding importance to the country that it had to be kept above politics."
Yes, that's true. I still believe that. My mistake was thinking that the Bush team believed it, too. I thought the administration would have to do the right things in Iraq — from prewar planning and putting in enough troops to dismissing the secretary of defense for incompetence — because surely this was the most important thing for the president and the country. But I was wrong. There is something even more important to the Bush crowd than getting Iraq right, and that's getting re-elected and staying loyal to the conservative base to do so. It has always been more important for the Bush folks to defeat liberals at home than Baathists abroad. That's why they spent more time studying U.S. polls than Iraqi history. That is why, I'll bet, Karl Rove has had more sway over this war than Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Bill Burns. Mr. Burns knew only what would play in the Middle East. Mr. Rove knew what would play in the Middle West.
I admit, I'm a little slow. Because I tried to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq, and the post- 9/11 world, in a nonpartisan fashion — as Joe Biden, John McCain and Dick Lugar did — I assumed the Bush officials were doing the same. I was wrong. They were always so slow to change course because confronting their mistakes didn't just involve confronting reality, but their own politics.
Why, in the face of rampant looting in the war's aftermath, which dug us into such a deep and costly hole, wouldn't Mr. Rumsfeld put more troops into Iraq? Politics. First of all, Rummy wanted to crush once and for all the Powell doctrine, which says you fight a war like this only with overwhelming force. I know this is hard to believe, but the Pentagon crew hated Colin Powell, and wanted to see him humiliated 10 times more than Saddam. Second, Rummy wanted to prove to all those U.S. generals whose Army he was intent on downsizing that a small, mobile, high-tech force was all you needed today to take over a country. Third, the White House always knew this was a war of choice — its choice — so it made sure that average Americans never had to pay any price or bear any burden. Thus, it couldn't call up too many reservists, let alone have a draft. Yes, there was a contradiction between the Bush war on taxes and the Bush war on terrorism. But it was resolved: the Bush team decided to lower taxes rather than raise troop levels.
Why, in the face of the Abu Ghraib travesty, wouldn't the administration make some uniquely American gesture? Because these folks have no clue how to export hope. They would never think of saying, "Let's close this prison immediately and reopen it in a month as the Abu Ghraib Technical College for Computer Training — with all the equipment donated by Dell, H.P. and Microsoft." Why didn't the administration ever use 9/11 as a spur to launch a Manhattan project for energy independence and conservation, so we could break out of our addiction to crude oil, slowly disengage from this region and speak truth to fundamentalist regimes, such as Saudi Arabia? (Addicts never tell the truth to their pushers.) Because that might have required a gas tax or a confrontation with the administration's oil moneymen. Why did the administration always — rightly — bash Yasir Arafat, but never lift a finger or utter a word to stop Ariel Sharon's massive building of illegal settlements in the West Bank? Because while that might have earned America credibility in the Middle East, it might have cost the Bush campaign Jewish votes in Florida.
And, of course, why did the president praise Mr. Rumsfeld rather than fire him? Because Karl Rove says to hold the conservative base, you must always appear to be strong, decisive and loyal. It is more important that the president appear to be true to his team than that America appear to be true to its principles. (Here's the new Rummy Defense: "I am accountable. But the little guys were responsible. I was just giving orders.")
Add it all up, and you see how we got so off track in Iraq, why we are dancing alone in the world — and why our president, who has a strong moral vision, has no moral influence.
Wednesday, May 12, 2004
Shock and confusion - Our dark hour
A day of confusion, as I find out from the " confessions " of Lynn England, one of the first US soldiers to be detained for the Iraqi prisoners' abuse affair, that all she did was to "follow orders". Sound familiar anyone?
I have been on the road for the last 3 days: France, Italy, Germany and Poland. For the first time I have felt humiliated by those looks European "intellectuals" secretly give you once they find out you are an American. Why has someone let this happen to us? Who is responsible for the careless atitude that has allowed acts of abuse to be committed and reiterated by fellow US citizens? Those who hate us ( and they are many more than we believe ) are now on the same level with us. The problem is, we're all in the gutter.
Time to get back up and work hard to re-establish our reputation.... 50 years of good behavior might do the trick!
A day of confusion, as I find out from the " confessions " of Lynn England, one of the first US soldiers to be detained for the Iraqi prisoners' abuse affair, that all she did was to "follow orders". Sound familiar anyone?
I have been on the road for the last 3 days: France, Italy, Germany and Poland. For the first time I have felt humiliated by those looks European "intellectuals" secretly give you once they find out you are an American. Why has someone let this happen to us? Who is responsible for the careless atitude that has allowed acts of abuse to be committed and reiterated by fellow US citizens? Those who hate us ( and they are many more than we believe ) are now on the same level with us. The problem is, we're all in the gutter.
Time to get back up and work hard to re-establish our reputation.... 50 years of good behavior might do the trick!
Prison Mutiny
What the torturers of Abu Ghraib have wrought.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, May 4, 2004, at 9:01 AM PT
The images from Abu Ghraib prison do not test one's convictions about the wrongness of torture. They test one's opinions about the wrongness of capital punishment. Just consider for a moment what this bunch of giggling sadists has done, with its happy snaps and recreational cruelties:
It has defiled one of the memorials of regime change. I was a visitor to Abu Ghraib last summer, and the stench of misery and evil was still palpable in those pits and cellars. It is as if British or American soldiers had not only executed German prisoners of war, but had force-marched them to Dachau in order to commit the atrocity.
It has been like a shot in the back to the many soldiers (active front-line duty, not safe-job prison guards) who were willing to take casualties rather than inflict them and who fought selectively and carefully. What are the chances of the next such soldier who is captured by some gang of Saddamists or Wahabbists or Khomeinists?
It seems, at least on its face, to have profaned the idea of women in the military. One does not have to concede anything to Islamist sexism in order to know what the impact of obscene female torturers will have in the wider society.
This is only the rehearsal for one's revulsion. One of two things must necessarily be true. Either these goons were acting on someone's authority, in which case there is a layer of mid- to high-level people who think that they are not bound by the laws and codes and standing orders. Or they were acting on their own authority, in which case they are the equivalent of mutineers, deserters, or traitors in the field. This is why one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military justice for them to be taken out and shot.
Probably everyone has wondered what they might do—or might allow to be done—in the case of the "ticking bomb" and the stubborn terrorist detainee. At least when I saw the movie, Sean Connery in The Untouchables got a rousing cheer when he shot a corpse in the head, in the thick of combat, to convince a mobster that he was deadly serious. But no such excuse will conceivably do in this case. Junk videos made by mediocre pick-nose pornographers are evidence of a complete indifference to intelligence. Who is going to dare claim that a car bomb outside a school was thwarted by such tactics? One has to remember the crucial objection to torture in the first place. Moral considerations apply, as they must. But the vice of the torturer is that he or she produces confessions by definition. And soon, the whole business of confession has become polluted with falsity and madness. Even the medieval church was smart enough to work this out and to drop the practice.
Another objection is that the torturers very swiftly become a law unto themselves, a ghoulish class with a private system. It takes no time at all for them to spread their poison and to implicate others in what they have done, if only by coverup. And the next thing you know is that torture victims have to be secretly murdered so that the news doesn't leak. One might also mention that what has been done is not forgiven, or forgotten, for generations.
If anyone wanted to argue that torture is a matter of routine in many of the countries whose official media now express such shock, they would have to argue by way of double standards. This case would collapse at once and of its own weight if the standard was to become a single one, or if one torturer became an excuse for another. This point doesn't completely apply to the media themselves, who have yet to show the video execution of an Italian civilian kidnapped by Iraqi jihadists, or indeed many other lurid atrocities. But there's no hypocrisy in holding self-proclaimed liberators to a higher standard.
*****
There it is in black and white in Bob Woodward's book, and we can be pretty sure that it's accurate, because we know that Colin Powell likes to talk to the composer of the first draft of blah. The secretary of state is quoted as saying that he often thinks our biggest problem in Iraq is Ahmad Chalabi. Just take a moment to roll that thought around your own cranium. Iraq … mass murder, looted economy, mass trauma, incipient warlordism, devastated ecology, foreign infiltrators, crazed mullahs … .you become a bit spoiled for choice when you select a main problem here. Picking Chalabi is presumably easier than picking a fight with Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz or even Bush.
It's a change, though, from the authorized smear and jeer of last year, which was that Chalabi was an American puppet. Since then he has called for an earlier transfer of sovereignty, earlier elections, and a sterner line on de-Baathification than the patrons of Abu Ghraib would like. He's said and done some other things that I'm not so sure about, and I don't know what happened in the Jordanian banking system many decades ago (and neither, dear reader, do you). But he's not a puppet, and anyone who thinks he is the problem is probably readying some puppets of his own whom you don't want to think about. Here one might also mention George Tenet's CIA, which doesn't have many recent successes to its credit, either in defending the homeland or in guessing right about enemies overseas, but which seems to have agents to spare to defame the Iraqi National Congress. Unpunished enemies, protected torturers, and punished friends … not a great week for the good old cause of regime change.
What the torturers of Abu Ghraib have wrought.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Tuesday, May 4, 2004, at 9:01 AM PT
The images from Abu Ghraib prison do not test one's convictions about the wrongness of torture. They test one's opinions about the wrongness of capital punishment. Just consider for a moment what this bunch of giggling sadists has done, with its happy snaps and recreational cruelties:
It has defiled one of the memorials of regime change. I was a visitor to Abu Ghraib last summer, and the stench of misery and evil was still palpable in those pits and cellars. It is as if British or American soldiers had not only executed German prisoners of war, but had force-marched them to Dachau in order to commit the atrocity.
It has been like a shot in the back to the many soldiers (active front-line duty, not safe-job prison guards) who were willing to take casualties rather than inflict them and who fought selectively and carefully. What are the chances of the next such soldier who is captured by some gang of Saddamists or Wahabbists or Khomeinists?
It seems, at least on its face, to have profaned the idea of women in the military. One does not have to concede anything to Islamist sexism in order to know what the impact of obscene female torturers will have in the wider society.
This is only the rehearsal for one's revulsion. One of two things must necessarily be true. Either these goons were acting on someone's authority, in which case there is a layer of mid- to high-level people who think that they are not bound by the laws and codes and standing orders. Or they were acting on their own authority, in which case they are the equivalent of mutineers, deserters, or traitors in the field. This is why one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military justice for them to be taken out and shot.
Probably everyone has wondered what they might do—or might allow to be done—in the case of the "ticking bomb" and the stubborn terrorist detainee. At least when I saw the movie, Sean Connery in The Untouchables got a rousing cheer when he shot a corpse in the head, in the thick of combat, to convince a mobster that he was deadly serious. But no such excuse will conceivably do in this case. Junk videos made by mediocre pick-nose pornographers are evidence of a complete indifference to intelligence. Who is going to dare claim that a car bomb outside a school was thwarted by such tactics? One has to remember the crucial objection to torture in the first place. Moral considerations apply, as they must. But the vice of the torturer is that he or she produces confessions by definition. And soon, the whole business of confession has become polluted with falsity and madness. Even the medieval church was smart enough to work this out and to drop the practice.
Another objection is that the torturers very swiftly become a law unto themselves, a ghoulish class with a private system. It takes no time at all for them to spread their poison and to implicate others in what they have done, if only by coverup. And the next thing you know is that torture victims have to be secretly murdered so that the news doesn't leak. One might also mention that what has been done is not forgiven, or forgotten, for generations.
If anyone wanted to argue that torture is a matter of routine in many of the countries whose official media now express such shock, they would have to argue by way of double standards. This case would collapse at once and of its own weight if the standard was to become a single one, or if one torturer became an excuse for another. This point doesn't completely apply to the media themselves, who have yet to show the video execution of an Italian civilian kidnapped by Iraqi jihadists, or indeed many other lurid atrocities. But there's no hypocrisy in holding self-proclaimed liberators to a higher standard.
*****
There it is in black and white in Bob Woodward's book, and we can be pretty sure that it's accurate, because we know that Colin Powell likes to talk to the composer of the first draft of blah. The secretary of state is quoted as saying that he often thinks our biggest problem in Iraq is Ahmad Chalabi. Just take a moment to roll that thought around your own cranium. Iraq … mass murder, looted economy, mass trauma, incipient warlordism, devastated ecology, foreign infiltrators, crazed mullahs … .you become a bit spoiled for choice when you select a main problem here. Picking Chalabi is presumably easier than picking a fight with Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz or even Bush.
It's a change, though, from the authorized smear and jeer of last year, which was that Chalabi was an American puppet. Since then he has called for an earlier transfer of sovereignty, earlier elections, and a sterner line on de-Baathification than the patrons of Abu Ghraib would like. He's said and done some other things that I'm not so sure about, and I don't know what happened in the Jordanian banking system many decades ago (and neither, dear reader, do you). But he's not a puppet, and anyone who thinks he is the problem is probably readying some puppets of his own whom you don't want to think about. Here one might also mention George Tenet's CIA, which doesn't have many recent successes to its credit, either in defending the homeland or in guessing right about enemies overseas, but which seems to have agents to spare to defame the Iraqi National Congress. Unpunished enemies, protected torturers, and punished friends … not a great week for the good old cause of regime change.
Monday, May 10, 2004
California's Accidental Governor
Here's one recipe for political success: Wealth, independently acquired. Enormous self-confidence. A brand of Republicanism coupling liberal social views with fiscal pragmatism. This mix has worked well for Michael Bloomberg, who, despite low popularity ratings, has turned out to be a productive and innovative New York City mayor. And it seems to be working even better for Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's governor. Six months into the job, the last action hero can seemingly do no wrong.
Of the two story lines, Mr. Schwarzenegger's is the more improbable. Though people questioned Mr. Bloomberg's political experience, nobody scoffed at him the way they scoffed at Mr. Schwarzenegger, who was variously derided as a Hollywood lightweight and as an accidental product of California's crazy recall system, a crippling economic crisis and the staggering unpopularity of the incumbent, Gray Davis.
This page was among the vocal doubters, but nobody's laughing now. Since ousting Mr. Davis last October, Mr. Schwarzenegger has ended years of paralysis in the California Legislature and delivered on a string of campaign promises, like winning public approval for a $15 billion bond issue and reforming the state's hugely expensive workers' compensation system. Last week, in an announcement barely noticed outside the state, the governor offered a comprehensive energy plan that dealt the final blow to the unfettered deregulation that helped cause a series of blackouts in 2000, bankrupted a major utility and marked the beginning of the end for Mr. Davis. He then flew off to Israel, Jordan and the troops in Germany.
Governor Schwarzenegger has had his stumbles. Given the fiscal crisis, it was surely a mistake to repeal $4 billion in automobile tax increases. His budget plan — which essentially involves issuing new debt to pay off old debt — could backfire if California's economy sours again. But at least things are beginning to happen. As Leon Panetta, a prominent California Democrat, said of the bond issue, adding to an already overburdened budget was the worst possible solution — except for all the others.
Celebrity helps a lot, as does wealth. Both provide protection against special interests. The governor's independence from the White House on issues like air pollution and global warming cannot hurt him in an environmentally conscious, largely Democratic state. As an executive, he is at once flexible and determined. He prevailed on the workers' compensation issue by agreeing to settle for less than he wanted while threatening to go directly to the voters if the Legislature did nothing at all. For good measure he gathered the negotiators in a windowless war room, where they survived on M&M's and the governor's special blend of trail mix.
Even his critics find him a hard man to dislike. This is a governor who bombs around the freeways with his old motorcycle buddies every weekend, who loves a crowd and whose favorite word is "fantastic." His wife is "fantastic." Gray Davis is "fantastic." He even described a $4 million judgment against him in a campaign finance case as a "fantastic" decision. Criticism bounces off like rubber bullets. When John Burton, the Democratic leader in the State Senate, accused him of "pontificating," the governor called him up and said: "That's funny! Pontificate. Like the pope!" "Nothing fazes him," Mr. Burton observed.
Right now Californians are giving him fantastic leeway — a 64 percent approval rating, including a majority of those describing themselves as liberals and Democrats, according to a recent Los Angeles Times poll. The poll also showed that if Mr. Schwarzenegger needed to renege on his no-new-taxes promise, most people would support him.
All this good feeling could evaporate. Colorful newcomers have a way of wilting, as Mr. Bloomberg's popularity did when hypothetical tax increases became real. But for now, the accidental governor, besides having a great time, is starting to seem almost inevitable.
Here's one recipe for political success: Wealth, independently acquired. Enormous self-confidence. A brand of Republicanism coupling liberal social views with fiscal pragmatism. This mix has worked well for Michael Bloomberg, who, despite low popularity ratings, has turned out to be a productive and innovative New York City mayor. And it seems to be working even better for Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's governor. Six months into the job, the last action hero can seemingly do no wrong.
Of the two story lines, Mr. Schwarzenegger's is the more improbable. Though people questioned Mr. Bloomberg's political experience, nobody scoffed at him the way they scoffed at Mr. Schwarzenegger, who was variously derided as a Hollywood lightweight and as an accidental product of California's crazy recall system, a crippling economic crisis and the staggering unpopularity of the incumbent, Gray Davis.
This page was among the vocal doubters, but nobody's laughing now. Since ousting Mr. Davis last October, Mr. Schwarzenegger has ended years of paralysis in the California Legislature and delivered on a string of campaign promises, like winning public approval for a $15 billion bond issue and reforming the state's hugely expensive workers' compensation system. Last week, in an announcement barely noticed outside the state, the governor offered a comprehensive energy plan that dealt the final blow to the unfettered deregulation that helped cause a series of blackouts in 2000, bankrupted a major utility and marked the beginning of the end for Mr. Davis. He then flew off to Israel, Jordan and the troops in Germany.
Governor Schwarzenegger has had his stumbles. Given the fiscal crisis, it was surely a mistake to repeal $4 billion in automobile tax increases. His budget plan — which essentially involves issuing new debt to pay off old debt — could backfire if California's economy sours again. But at least things are beginning to happen. As Leon Panetta, a prominent California Democrat, said of the bond issue, adding to an already overburdened budget was the worst possible solution — except for all the others.
Celebrity helps a lot, as does wealth. Both provide protection against special interests. The governor's independence from the White House on issues like air pollution and global warming cannot hurt him in an environmentally conscious, largely Democratic state. As an executive, he is at once flexible and determined. He prevailed on the workers' compensation issue by agreeing to settle for less than he wanted while threatening to go directly to the voters if the Legislature did nothing at all. For good measure he gathered the negotiators in a windowless war room, where they survived on M&M's and the governor's special blend of trail mix.
Even his critics find him a hard man to dislike. This is a governor who bombs around the freeways with his old motorcycle buddies every weekend, who loves a crowd and whose favorite word is "fantastic." His wife is "fantastic." Gray Davis is "fantastic." He even described a $4 million judgment against him in a campaign finance case as a "fantastic" decision. Criticism bounces off like rubber bullets. When John Burton, the Democratic leader in the State Senate, accused him of "pontificating," the governor called him up and said: "That's funny! Pontificate. Like the pope!" "Nothing fazes him," Mr. Burton observed.
Right now Californians are giving him fantastic leeway — a 64 percent approval rating, including a majority of those describing themselves as liberals and Democrats, according to a recent Los Angeles Times poll. The poll also showed that if Mr. Schwarzenegger needed to renege on his no-new-taxes promise, most people would support him.
All this good feeling could evaporate. Colorful newcomers have a way of wilting, as Mr. Bloomberg's popularity did when hypothetical tax increases became real. But for now, the accidental governor, besides having a great time, is starting to seem almost inevitable.
Cursed by Oil
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I visited the Japanese cellphone company DoCoMo in Tokyo 10 days ago. A robot made by Honda gave me part of the tour, even bowing in perfect Japanese fashion. My visit there coincided with yet another suicide bomb attack against U.S. forces in Iraq. I could not help thinking: Why are the Japanese making robots into humans, while Muslim suicide squads are making humans into robots?
The answer has to do in part with the interaction between culture and natural resources. Countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China have relatively few natural resources like oil. As a result, in the modern age, their first instinct is to look inward, assess their weaknesses, try to learn as much as they can from foreigners and then beat them at their own game. In order to beat the Westerners, they have even set aside many of their historical animosities so they can invest in each other's countries and get all the benefits of free trade.
The Arab world, alas, has been cursed with oil. For decades, too many Arab countries have opted to drill a sand dune for economic growth rather than drilling their own people — men and women — in order to tap their energy, creativity, intellect and entrepreneurship. Arab countries barely trade with one another, and unlike Korea and Japan, rarely invent or patent anything. But rather than looking inward, assessing their development deficits, absorbing the best in modern knowledge that their money can buy and then trying to beat the West at its own game, the Arab world in too many cases has cut itself off, blamed the enduring Palestine conflict or colonialism for delaying reform, or found dignity in Pyrrhic victories like Falluja.
To be sure, there are exceptions. Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, Dubai, Morocco and Tunisia are all engaged in real experiments with modernization, but the bigger states are really lost. A week ago we were treated again to absurd Saudi allegations that "Zionists" were behind the latest bombing in Saudi Arabia, because, said Saudi officials, "Zionists" clearly benefit from these acts. Someone ought to tell the Saudis this: Don't flatter yourselves. The only interest Israelis have in Saudi Arabia is flying over it to get to India and China — countries that actually trade and manufacture things other than hatred of "infidels."
The Bush team has made a mess in Iraq, but the pathologies of the Arab world have also contributed — and the sheer delight that some Arab media take in seeing Iraq go up in flames is evidence of that. It's time for the Arab world to grow up — to stop dancing on burning American jeeps and claiming that this is some victory for Islam.
One thing about countries like Singapore, Korea, Taiwan and Japan, they may not have deserts but they sure know the difference between the mirage and the oasis — between victories that come from educating your population to innovate and "victories" that come from a one-night stand by suicidal maniacs like 9/11.
As I said, the Bush team has made a mess in Iraq. And I know that Abu Ghraib will be a lasting stain on the Pentagon leadership. But here's what else I know from visiting Iraq: There were a million acts of kindness, generosity and good will also extended by individual U.S. soldiers this past year — acts motivated purely by a desire to give Iraqis the best chance they've ever had at decent government and a better future. There are plenty of Iraqis and Arabs who know that.
Yes, we Americans need to look in a mirror and ask why we've become so radioactive. But the Arabs need to look in a mirror too. "They are using our mistakes to avoid their own necessity to change, reform and modernize," says the Mideast expert Stephen P. Cohen.
A senior Iraqi politician told me that he recently received a group of visiting Iranian journalists in his home. As they were leaving, he said, two young Iranian women in the group whispered to him: "Succeed for our sake." Those Iranian women knew that if Iraqis could actually produce a decent, democratizing government it would pressure their own regime to start changing — which is why the Iranian, Syrian and Saudi regimes are all rooting for us to fail.
But you know what? Despite everything, we still have a chance to produce a decent outcome in Iraq, if we get our eye back on the ball. Of course, if we do fail, that will be our tragedy. But for the Arabs, it will be a huge lost opportunity — one that will only postpone their future another decade. Too bad so few of them have the courage to stand up and say that. I guess it must be another one of those "Zionist" plots.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
I visited the Japanese cellphone company DoCoMo in Tokyo 10 days ago. A robot made by Honda gave me part of the tour, even bowing in perfect Japanese fashion. My visit there coincided with yet another suicide bomb attack against U.S. forces in Iraq. I could not help thinking: Why are the Japanese making robots into humans, while Muslim suicide squads are making humans into robots?
The answer has to do in part with the interaction between culture and natural resources. Countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China have relatively few natural resources like oil. As a result, in the modern age, their first instinct is to look inward, assess their weaknesses, try to learn as much as they can from foreigners and then beat them at their own game. In order to beat the Westerners, they have even set aside many of their historical animosities so they can invest in each other's countries and get all the benefits of free trade.
The Arab world, alas, has been cursed with oil. For decades, too many Arab countries have opted to drill a sand dune for economic growth rather than drilling their own people — men and women — in order to tap their energy, creativity, intellect and entrepreneurship. Arab countries barely trade with one another, and unlike Korea and Japan, rarely invent or patent anything. But rather than looking inward, assessing their development deficits, absorbing the best in modern knowledge that their money can buy and then trying to beat the West at its own game, the Arab world in too many cases has cut itself off, blamed the enduring Palestine conflict or colonialism for delaying reform, or found dignity in Pyrrhic victories like Falluja.
To be sure, there are exceptions. Jordan, Qatar, Bahrain, Dubai, Morocco and Tunisia are all engaged in real experiments with modernization, but the bigger states are really lost. A week ago we were treated again to absurd Saudi allegations that "Zionists" were behind the latest bombing in Saudi Arabia, because, said Saudi officials, "Zionists" clearly benefit from these acts. Someone ought to tell the Saudis this: Don't flatter yourselves. The only interest Israelis have in Saudi Arabia is flying over it to get to India and China — countries that actually trade and manufacture things other than hatred of "infidels."
The Bush team has made a mess in Iraq, but the pathologies of the Arab world have also contributed — and the sheer delight that some Arab media take in seeing Iraq go up in flames is evidence of that. It's time for the Arab world to grow up — to stop dancing on burning American jeeps and claiming that this is some victory for Islam.
One thing about countries like Singapore, Korea, Taiwan and Japan, they may not have deserts but they sure know the difference between the mirage and the oasis — between victories that come from educating your population to innovate and "victories" that come from a one-night stand by suicidal maniacs like 9/11.
As I said, the Bush team has made a mess in Iraq. And I know that Abu Ghraib will be a lasting stain on the Pentagon leadership. But here's what else I know from visiting Iraq: There were a million acts of kindness, generosity and good will also extended by individual U.S. soldiers this past year — acts motivated purely by a desire to give Iraqis the best chance they've ever had at decent government and a better future. There are plenty of Iraqis and Arabs who know that.
Yes, we Americans need to look in a mirror and ask why we've become so radioactive. But the Arabs need to look in a mirror too. "They are using our mistakes to avoid their own necessity to change, reform and modernize," says the Mideast expert Stephen P. Cohen.
A senior Iraqi politician told me that he recently received a group of visiting Iranian journalists in his home. As they were leaving, he said, two young Iranian women in the group whispered to him: "Succeed for our sake." Those Iranian women knew that if Iraqis could actually produce a decent, democratizing government it would pressure their own regime to start changing — which is why the Iranian, Syrian and Saudi regimes are all rooting for us to fail.
But you know what? Despite everything, we still have a chance to produce a decent outcome in Iraq, if we get our eye back on the ball. Of course, if we do fail, that will be our tragedy. But for the Arabs, it will be a huge lost opportunity — one that will only postpone their future another decade. Too bad so few of them have the courage to stand up and say that. I guess it must be another one of those "Zionist" plots.
