Tag: United States
Penny wise and pound foolish
While some may think the choice of Paul Ryan as his vice presidential candidate confirms Romney’s intention to focus on domestic rather than foreign policy, the selection still says a good deal about how the Republican ticket will approach national security issues. Josh Rogin wrote in March that Paul Ryan’s budget proposal
…would see the international affairs account slashed from $47.8 billion in fiscal 2012 to $43.1 billion in fiscal 2013, $40.1 billion in fiscal 2014, $38.3 billion in fiscal 2015, and $38.1 billion in fiscal 2016. The State Department and USAID wouldn’t see their budget get back to current levels until after 2022 if Ryan were to have his way.
The Ryan proposal also increases defense spending, as Romney has said he would like to do. Defense spends more than 10 times the State and USAID budgets combined.
This is not smart. What we’ve got here is a ticket determined to fund the most expensive tool of American national security–the military–and to shortchange the much more economical tools of diplomacy and development.
While many are predicting that foreign affairs will play little or no role in this election campaign, I anticipate something different. It is hard to argue for cuts in diplomacy and development assistance if the international issues you face come mainly from weak and failing states where terrorism, trafficking, instability, epidemics, corruption and other non-military threats thrive. Romney and Ryan are going to have to justify their choice of building up the military instrument at a moment when the United States faces no major foreign military threat. Iran and its nuclear program are handy, but they are going to need more. Russia as our prime geopolitical foe will not suffice.
I imagine they will start waving the China menace, ignoring the very real difference between U.S. and Chinese military capabilities. China will need decades even to begin to catch up. In the meanwhile, it is heavily dependent on the U.S. for export markets and the safety of its savings, which are heavily invested in American government debt. While these factors are often portrayed as limiting U.S. policy options with China, they are also constraints on Chinese policy options. There are already a lot of reasons for the U.S. and China not to go to war. By 2050, there will be a lot more.
I am not arguing for weakening the U.S. military, which has global responsibilities that cannot be ignored without endangering American security. We cannot be the world’s policeman, patrolling every continent. But we do need act as its fireman and put out conflagrations that might threaten our own peace and tranquility.
Nor am I arguing that the Obama administration has done what it recognized it should in the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review, which argued for a major increase in the civilian instruments of power. There is little sign of that.
Obama and Romney both need to recognize that insufficient funding for the State Department, USAID and associated institutions is unnecessarily increasing the burdens on the U.S. military (and on the national budget). That’s penny wise and pound foolish.
PS: For those who may think Ryan less than serious about his budget proposals (which include drastic reductions in Medicare and partial privatization of Social Security), read Ryan Lizza, who quotes Paul Ryan as saying
I think life is short. You’d better take advantage of it while you have it.
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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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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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The trick is to stay on course
Loyal readers will not be surprised by Libya’s smooth handover of power yesterday from its revolutionary Transitional National Council (NTC) to its General National Conference, the parliament elected in July. The July election went far better than many expected.
The Libyan revolution had many ways of going wrong. I wrote about them for the Council on Foreign Relations during the spring of 2010. My visit last September convinced me they had come down to just two: militias and Islamic extremism. Both have proved problematic, but they have not derailed a process that the NTC scoped out a year ago.
Why has Libya gone more right than wrong? There are many reasons. It is a geographically large but demographically small (6.4 million, more or less) country. It is rich. Even before the oil and gas started flowing, repatriated frozen assets provided ample resources. Libya is relatively homogeneous from an ethnic and sectarian perspective (compared to Iraq or Syria), though there are distinct groups, especially in the south, that have not yet fully accepted the revolution. The regional tensions are real, especially in the eastern province of Cyrenaica, but the revolution against Qaddafi gave Libyans a common cause, at least until now.
The role of the international community in Libya has been one of support, not direction. The United States and Europe, which were vital to the NATO operation that dislodged Qaddafi, had more important things on their minds once he was gone: Syria, Iran and the euro crisis. The United Nations and closely allied agencies (UNDP, IFES, etc.) provided assistance in organizing the July elections, but the Libyans were unequivocally in the lead. They have owned their revolution and its aftermath.
Now Libya faces its biggest challenges: deciding on how power is to be distributed and who will have it to start. A prime minister and new government is to be chosen within 30 days. When I left Libya last month, the clear intention of the biggest winner in the election, Mahmoud Jibril, was to form a broad, national unity government. If it can be done, this is smart. Bringing the Muslim Brotherhood and others with significant popular support in is a lot better than keeping them out.
The first and most important job of that new government is to decide how the committee to write the constitution is to be chosen. The original plan was for the GNC to somehow empower a committee. The TNC decided, in a last-minute move of dubious validity intended to encourage electoral participation in the east, that the committee should instead be elected on a regional basis.
However selected, the committee is to prepare a draft within 60 days that has to be submitted for approval by a 2/3 majority in a popular referendum. This is important: it guarantees that, however and by whomever written, the new constitution will have to have broad geographical and popular legitimacy. The time for preparation of the new constitution is far too short to allow serious public participation in the process. It would be wise for the GNC to give the process more time.
Once the constitution is approved, the GNC promulgates a new election law within 30 days and new elections are held with 180 days.
Many people are still worried about Libya’s once-revolutionary militias, which have not been fully demobilized or reintegrated, and about its Islamic extremists, who have been attacking the Red Cross (symbol of the crusaders of course) and trying to sow havoc. These are real and present dangers. Libya is still a long way from establishing law and order, even if the environment is already reasonably safe and secure most places most of the time.
Libya is on a good course. That is what counts. I am reminded of Zeno’s “dichotomy” paradox in its collegiate version: if you halve the distance between yourself and an attractive other at a constant rate, mathematicians say you’ll never arrive. But for all practical purposes, you do.
On its current course, Libya will arrive at something resembling a democracy, sooner or later. The trick is to stay on course.
PS: for another, well-informed, view see Christopher Blanchard’s Libya Transition and US Policy.
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Do museums mark the acme of power?
My wife and I spent half the day at the The National Museum of the Marine Corps not far from Washington, close by the Quantico Marine base. It’s worth more time, but I got hungry somewhere during World War I and hastened through the rest. The narrative seems to end with 9/11, which leaves out a lot of interesting stuff that happened thereafter in Iraq and Afghanistan. An addition is planned.
The museum is encyclopedic if not always 100% accurate. No, the emancipation proclamation did not free all the slaves, only those in states in rebellion. Slavery still existed in the Union until towards the end of 1865, when the 13th amendment was ratified. There are other small glitches.
But it is hard to complain. The Marines “live their history.” The museum catalogues not only the big wars but also what Rudyard Kipling called “the savage wars of peace,” which is an apt description of many of the things the U.S. Marines have been called on to do in Cuba, Haiti, the Philippines, Nicaragua…. The engagements are recounted with the kind of honor, commitment and courage you would expect of the Corps, answering a lot of questions along the way.
No African Americans served in the Marines from after the revolution until World War II. Yes, the Marine Corps engaged on the shores of Tripoli in the early 1800s, but those shores lay at Derna, almost 550 miles as the crow flies from Libya’s modern-day capital. The “Barbary” wars ended not with military victory but instead a negotiated release of American hostages. While the Marines traditionally vaunt their connection to naval power, it is apparent from the displays that their more recent history depends for much of its success on combined air/ground operations. Semper fidelis did not become the Corps’ motto until 1883.
Meant to evoke the famous photograph of Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima, the museum’s building is impressive, but not heart-warming. Dedicated in 2006, and presumably designed a few years earlier, the architecture reflects an America at the height of its 20th century power: soaring, inspirational and dominating. The central “mast” reads more like a sword pointing downwards than a flagpole pointing upwards. The bravura quotations in the main “Leatherneck” hall reflect the Marines’ can-do spirit:
The Marines have landed and the situation is well in hand.
The safest place in Korea was right behind a platoon of Marines. Lord, how they could fight!
The well-done introductory film shows lots of fighting and a few injured Marines (always being helped by comrades), but no dead ones. The emphasis is on winning through constancy and character, though the square jaws and PT exercises remind us that being a Marine is a physical as well as a spiritual pursuit.
It is a rich and powerful nation that can afford to honor its fighting men and women with a museum like this one. They deserve it, but I say that with trepidation, because it seems to me grand museums often mark the acme of power. Witness the spectacular museums of London, Berlin, Paris and Vienna. Is America at, or past, its peak?
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Sick and Sikh are both American
I didn’t even know until yesterday that white supremacist heavy metal rock bands existed. I was only slightly more aware of Sikhs, since their turbans and beards are hard to miss. But of this I am sure: what I am hearing from the Sikhs is far more to my liking than anything I will hear from white supremacists, heavy metal or not.
The Sikh community has got to be very angry. They are not only subjected to discrimination, racist violence and worse but have to suffer the colossal ignorance that identifies them as Muslim, which is a bit like treating Jews as if they were Buddhists or vice versa. People are entitled to their own identity, something white supremacists might even be expected to appreciate, since they so aggressively assert their own.
So what how are the Sikhs reacting? With great equanimity. Amardeep Singh of The Sikh Coalition offers:
…we have three core tenants for our daily lives. We believe in working hard and honestly. And in doing, we are respecting our creator. We believe in sharing our bounty with others. And then our third daily obligation is to remember God in everything we do.
The Sikhs are treating this as an opportunity to teach us something about their religion. I am grateful for the lesson.
Now I suppose that even in Sikh community there will be from time to time fallen angels who commit mayhem and even murder. But mayhem and even murder is the purpose of the white supremacists. Here’s a sample lyric:
Burn the tares in flames
Hang the traitors of our race
Judgment Day is here
The hand of God is in this place
Drive you out or cut you off
Your blood will surely flow
Avengers of the innocent
The Earth will soon now know
White Supremacy!
White Supremacy!
White Supremacy!
White Supremacy!
I can only imagine who is attracted to this tripe rather than the Sikh core tenants of their daily lives.
But they are among us: this great nation produces them, at the same time as it attracts the Sikhs. The one may be sick and the other Sikh, but they are both American. Time for a good hard look in the mirror.
PS: Need more on white power lyrics? Try this.
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