Day: August 10, 2012
No lipstick for this pig
Yesterday’s Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED)-hosted discussion about Iran’s Green Movement critiqued the movement’s leadership and condemned current US Iran policy as riddled with misconception and opportunism.
Allreza Nader, a Senior International Policy Analyst at the Rand Corporation, focused on the internal dynamics of the Green Movement. Since the unsuccessful 2009 protests, there is a widening schism between the movement’s leadership and the Iranian rank and file. Mousavi, Karroubi and Khatami (MK&K) have been effectively neutralized by the regime. The first two sit under house arrest, and Khatami does not represent what the Green Movement wanted. Many of the people who took to the streets seek an Iranian republic instead of an Islamic republic. MK&K don’t support this goal. They want to throw Khamenei out but keep the system enshrined by Khomeini. Khatami went so far as to deny a link between the Green Movement and other secular nationalist movements.
Iranians have lost faith in the Green Movement and in the reformist leadership, whom they don’t see as effective. Attitudes toward Khatami in particular have soured. People ask why he isn’t under house arrest. His advocacy of reform damages his reputation. People see him as belonging to the regime.
Most Iranians feel that the Islamic Republic is not reformable. They crave democracy and separation of religion from the state. This is the true Green Movement in Iran: not the leadership, but the rank and file who reject unreal reform and call for democratic norms to prevail.
Jamal Abdi, Policy Director at the National Iranian American Council, condemned Washington policymakers for forgetting the Green Revolution. Those who remember treat the revolution either as a nuisance or an opportunistic instrument to advance pre-conceived goals. The last time the Green Movement was invoked in the mainstream media, it was a Wall Street Journal article calling for more crippling sanctions on Iran. The thinking is that if we punish the Iranian people economically, they will join the movement.
This rhetoric, so common in Washington, shows a complete misunderstanding of the situation on the ground. The Green Revolution is not about angry bread mobs. It is about people demanding their civil rights. It is about the Iranian middle classes, fed up with eroding liberties. But the sanctions have weakened this same middle class, and distract them from demanding their civil rights. The net effect of US policy on Iran has been damaging. We can put lipstick on this “ugly failed policy” of sanctions, but it has eroded the very middle class that could bring about real change.
Suzanne Maloney, Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, echoed Jamal Abdi’s criticisms of the US and expressed confidence in Iran’s future as a functioning democracy. The fact that the event was not focused on nuclear war or sanctions against Iran makes it unique in Washington circles. Very few policymakers focus on what is going on inside Iran today. We are blind to the internal political realities. Our information is stale and limited. Inability to see what is going in Iran is a huge problem for good policy.
Why did the Green Movement fail? It was a historical moment, but it did not bring us the change we would like to see and that many Iranians would like to see. We need to understand what went wrong: why did Egyptians keep coming back to Tahrir square, but Iranians went to their homes? How does that change? How can Washington encourage that change?
The schism between the leadership and the rank and file is a good place to begin to understand what happened. Iranians want more radical change than people like Moussavi were willing to support. But the US doesn’t know how to advance real change in Iran any more, and the current nuclear-focused policy is opportunistic and doomed to failure.
Don’t just blame the Obama administration for this. It is doubtful that a Romney policy would be substantially different. Perhaps it would be worse. Perhaps the best thing the US can do in Iran is to recognize that we are not going to be the authors of change through sanctions or through any other policy mechanism. When change happens, we are probably not going to see it coming. Iran will become a functioning democracy long before almost all of its neighbors, but we can’t know when that will be.
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Socialism lives in Serbia
Milan Marinković continues his discussion of issues confronting the new Serbian government, which took office late last month:
The heads of two important institutions have been replaced since the new Serbian government was constituted. Dejan Šoškić is no longer the central bank (NBS) governor. He resigned four years before his term was to expire amid pressure from the governing coalition. His successor is Jorgovanka Tabaković, championed by President Tomislav Nikolić. She is a high-ranking official of Nikolić’s Serbian Progressive party (SNS).
Tabaković has a PhD in economy from the University of Novi Sad. She graduated from the faculty of economics in Priština at the age of 23 as the best student in her class. Such qualifications are respectable; whether they will be sufficient for the challenging central bank role remains to be seen. Just a couple of days ago Standard and Poor’s downgraded Serbia’s credit rating to BB minus, with a negative outlook.
More important is the new law on NBS, passed as a prelude to the change at the bank’s top. Some articles of the law seem controversial and likely to endanger the central bank’s presupposed independence from the government. The whole thing smacks of Prime minister Ivica Dačić’s determination to pursue his populist economic agenda despite persistent warnings from experts.
During the election campaign, Dačić and his Socialist party (SPS) frequently criticized then-governor Šoškić for his restrictive monetary policy, accusing him of thwarting Serbia’s economic growth. Šoškić explained that more expansive measures would be possible only after the government stabilized the economy through fiscal consolidation and other structural reforms; otherwise, it would result in high inflation and a serious slump in the value of the national currency.
Šoškić was right, but obviously to no avail. Even though Prime Minister Dačić’s party holds no economy-related ministry in the government, its impact on economic policy is already visible. Dačić likes to quote French socialist president Francois Hollande, whom he is apparently trying to emulate. But Dačić neglect two facts: Serbia and France are in completely different positions; Hollande’s economic program has yet to yield results.
The Serbian prime minister has also recently labeled the financial sector as “the biggest enemy to the Serbian people.” He was alluding primarily to the foreign-owned banks in Serbia, which are generally considered the healthiest setment of an otherwise weak economy. Although Dačić later downplayed the statement, saying that he was speaking metaphorically, potential investors have every reason to be nervous about his government’s future steps. It was not the first time that Dačić made such remarks, and it likely won’t be the last time, either.
Dačić and his partners need to begin thinking about what they can do to rein in Serbia’s public debt. The debt-to-GDP ratio has already exceeded by 10% the ceiling of 45% defined by law. Those opposing austerity measures argue that the ratio is much higher in the most developed countries, such as Germany and the United States. This may be true, but Serbia’s is by no means comparable with these far stronger economies.
Serbia is at the same time struggling with a large trade deficit, caused largely by poor export performance. Serbia’s weak industrial base and technological obsolescence mean that currency devaluation can hardly mitigate the problem, let alone solve it. Foreign investment would help, but Serbia is instead facing capital flight.
Many in Serbia fail to understand that the roots of Serbia’s economic troubles are much deeper than the global crisis. The downturn in the global economy only caused deficiencies long embedded in the country’s economic system to surface and suddenly become painfully evident to everyone. The Serbian economy desperately needs relief from state intervention, as well as thorough rationalization of the public sector. That would also help reduce corruption, which has reached epic proportions, by cutting out unnecessary bureaucratic procedures.
Dačić and his government are nevertheless planning to impose more burdens on entrepreneurs. Instead of announcing the needed urgent budget cuts, Minister of Economy and Finance Mlađan Dinkić has announced that pensioners who receive less than 15,000 dinars a month (approximately 125 euros/150 dollars) will get an extra (13th) pension of 20,000 dinars by the end of the year through four monthly installments, starting in September. The extra pension was promised in the election campaign by the Party of United Pensioners (PUPS), which is a member of the ruling coalition. Dinkić himself may be reluctant to fulfil this commitment, but seems to have little choice.
After more than a decade of post-Milošević transition, Serbia still appears locked into a socialist economy and, even more damaging, mentality.
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How we spend resources
Yesterday my wife and I took in the Newseum, which is an example of my thesis that creation of museums marks the acme of power. This extraordinarily lavish tribute to the news media dates from 2000, when the land for the half-billion dollar project was acquired (ground was broken in 2003). Oh, how the mighty newspapers and networks have fallen since then! Voting in the Newseum shows almost half its visitors get their news online, not on paper. Home delivery of the Times and Post is definitely an anachronism, but my spouse insists on it.
This is nonetheless a thoughtful and interesting museum (it had better be at the $21.95 admission price, $17.95 for oldsters). Its display of paper artifacts (mainly front pages) may be figuratively (and literally) dated, but it is really more interesting than the frequent and distracting videos showing hilarious episodes of Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart (both of whom I enjoy watching, but why not at home?). Who knew that W.E.B. Dubois died in the same week as the 1963 March on Washington? Nor did I know that the first two amendments to the U.S. constitution (on the size of Congress and its pay) were not approved by the states. I would not have been able to name the five freedoms specified in the first amendment that did pass: speech, press, religion, assembly and petition (Roosevelt’s four kept the first two but added freedom from want and freedom from fear).
When it comes to war and peace, the Newseum minces few words and presents a lot of pictures, without however quite capturing the horror of the enterprise. The memorial wall to slain journalists is tucked away outside the main flow of museum traffic, as is the introductory film that presents the “war and peace” theme quickly but well (along with life and death, love and hate and some others I can’t remember). You would know from this museum what bullets do to a Toyota pickup truck or a road sign but relatively little about what they do to human flesh. I suppose the Newseum knows its audience (me included).
There is a good deal more focus on human tragedy in the section devoted to 9/11. Its focus–part of the antenna on top of one of the World Trade Center buildings–is odd but somehow works, its twisted metal symbolizing the incredible physical, psychological and human toll of the event. The dramatic photography and film of that dreadful day heightens the impact, as does the timeline that surrounds the antenna.
The question is whether the nation that can afford such a spectacular tribute to freedom of expression still has the edge required to help others enjoy its benefits? The part of the Berlin wall that adorns the lower level with pastel graffiti is a stark reminder of the human costs that have been paid: 5000 Germans died trying to escape its confines. We rightly celebrate freedom and the wall’s fall, but could the process have been accelerated? How many of those 5000 might have been saved? How many more suffered without trying to escape, trapped in a system that ruined countless lives?
The questions are still with us: how many Syrians will die fighting the Asad dictatorship? We are up to something like 20,000. I am among those who doubt that intervention would improve the situation, but I never stop wondering. The privilege of living in a country that sports the Newseum comes with the responsibility to worry about how we expend our resources and what we might do better than we have done in the past.
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