Day: September 6, 2012

Taking the Romney critique seriously

Posted in Uncategorized - September 6, 2012 - 1 Comment
Friends will laugh at me, but I’ve decided to take the Lanhee Chen memorandum from the Romney campaign on “The Foreign Policy & National Security Failures Of President Obama” seriously and react in detail.   This is silly on my part for several reasons:
  1. If the Republicans really thought Obama had failed at foreign and national security policy, they would have mentioned it at their Tampa convention.
  2. The memo gives precious little detail on what Romney would do differently but instead blames Obama for the way the world turns.
  3. No one is paying attention to foreign and national security policy in an election focused on the domestic economy.

Still, it’s a thoughtful memo, even if harsh, and merits serious consideration.  Caveat emptor:  I am an Obamista, though I hope a thoughtful one.  The memorandum is long, so I am going to deal with it in pieces, over the next week or two (I hope).

Let’s start near the beginning:
President Obama’s failure on the economy has been so severe that it has overshadowed his manifold failures on foreign policy and national security.  An inventory of his record shows that by nearly all measures, President Obama has diminished American influence abroad and compromised our interests and values. In no region of the world is the U.S. position stronger than it was four years ago.
I know of no support for these sweeping denunciations.  The economic failure with the most severe impact happened before anything Obama could have done, unless you think the president has a magic wand that fixes things that happen before he takes office.  The recession started in December 2007, during George W. Bush’s third year in office.  The stimulus bill passed Congress in February 2009.  The recession officially ended in June 2009.  It has been recovery since then.  Relatively slow recovery, but faster than under George W. Bush for the private sector (it is public sector jobs that are lagging).

American influence abroad is hard to measure, but Pew polling shows popular “favorability” holding up well.  The big shift is in perceptions of whether the U.S. is the world’s economic leader, with China gaining significantly.  Whom you blame for that depends I guess on who was responsible for the recession.  That cannot be Obama, who wasn’t in office when the recession started.  But U.S. manufacturing and exports have begun a remarkable recovery during the Obama administration.  That bodes well for future influence.

The notion that the U.S. position in the world is no stronger than it was four years ago would be a big surprise to Muammar Qaddafi, Bashar al Asad, Osama bin Laden, what remains of al Qaeda, the Taliban, Ayatollah Khamenei, Kim Chong Eun…  With the end of the war in Iraq and impending withdrawal from Afghanistan, the U.S. military will regain the capacity to react to contingencies around the world, a capacity that has been severely strained since George W. Bush ordered the Iraq invasion in 2003.

Where American capacity to influence is lacking still is on the civilian side:  foreign assistance is severely constrained and skewed towards yesterday’s issues.  The American diplomatic presence is overly large in places we do not need it, and tiny in places that we do.  For the record:  I blame Obama for not doing more about that, though the problem predates him and Hillary Clinton.  It is not clear what the Congress will do with the State Department’s proposal to spend more than $700 million on Arab Spring countries, helping them complete their democratic transitions.  The Ryan budget slices USAID and State Department into the bone, reducing what were already small expenditures to levels not seen in decades.

Next up:  Failure #1: No Results In Slowing Or Stopping Iran’s Nuclear Weapons Program
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Sham will rise again!

Posted in Uncategorized - September 6, 2012 - 0 Comment

Time for me to ‘fess up:  I was away in Atlanta over the weekend and took the opportunity of a few days with elder son and daughter-in-law to neglect to blog for three days straight.  This was my longest hiatus in 22 months or so of publishing www.peacefare.net  It felt good.  Atlanta also looked good:

View from Perkins + Will, architects

This is not bad for a town that Union forces burned to the ground 150 years ago.  The “rising up” poster was for a show of the Hale Woodruff murals from Talladega College, one set of which portray the African mutiny on the Amistad, subsequent trial and return to Africa.  The other set portrays the founding of the college.  Both were forms of “rising up.”

View from Perkins + Will, architects

Some may consider my thinking convoluted, but Atlanta’s difficult path from the defeated confederacy to its current bustling self is the kind of thing I like to keep in mind when contemplating Syria.  However profound, and profoundly wrong, its current travails are, they will pass and the historical forces that made Damascus one of the world’s oldest cities (if not the oldest) will have an opportunity to reassert themselves.

Civil war is anything but civil.  We are now up around 200 Syrians per day killed.  Many more are being maimed and injured.  Hundreds of thousands have fled.  Millions are displaced.  How a ruler who claims to have the best interests of his people at heart can not only watch this happen but also cause it to happen is beyond me.

But as luck would have it, my airplane reading for the trip to and from Atlanta was Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Why Nations Fail.  They do a great job of explaining the phenomenon.  Nations fail, they say, because failure serves the exploitative interests of their rulers.  There is good reason why Atlanta’s renaissance occurred only after the fall of segregation and the establishment of inclusive, integrated institutions.

Bashar al Asad and his small coterie cannot survive in the kind of open, inclusive political competition his more democratically inclined opponents want to institute.  Even if they could survive, they would not be able to exploit the country to enrich themselves and enable their continuing hold on power.

These are not just personal questions, but institutional ones.  The institution of slavery, like the Asad regime, served the masters well.  Neither served the bulk of people well.  But the bulk of the people don’t count until they unite.  The Talladega murals pointedly illustrate the cooperation between blacks and whites (in particular the abolitionist American Missionary Society) both in defending the Amistad mutineers and in founding Talladega.

The problem in Syria today is not only that Bashar al Asad is using homicidal methods to try  to re-establish fear in the population, but also that the opposition is fracturing.  I quote it too often, but Ben Franklin’s aphorism is apt:

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.

Damascus has a long history of coups.  The victory of one or another of Syria’s many armed factions is unlikely to establish inclusive democratic institutions. When Syrians unite, Asad is finished.

Dixie rose again because it was no longer exploitative, segregated Dixie.  Ash-Sham [Damascus] will rise again when it is no longer al-Asad’s Sham.

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