By Glenn Kessler Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, April 8, 2010; A08
Senior Obama administration officials have discussed whether President Obama should propose his own solution to the intractable conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, including in a recent meeting between the president and seven former and current national security advisers, U.S. officials said Wednesday.
But officials, confirming a report Wednesday on the March 24 session by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, said there has been no decision to offer such a plan, either in the coming months or later this year. Officials said a presidential peace plan -- as opposed to "bridging proposals" that would be offered during peace talks between the two sides -- has long been considered an option for Obama. But they said the administration, now locked in tense talks with Israel about making confidence-building overtures to the Palestinians, is focused on arranging indirect talks between the two sides.
Some officials said the notion that Obama could offer his own plan might undercut those nascent efforts, because it could lead to a backlash among Israel's supporters and encourage the Palestinians not to make any concessions to Israel. Israeli officials have long opposed the introduction of an unilateral American plan, while Arab officials have pressed hard for one, saying it is the only way to break the impasse.
Jordan's King Abdullah II, who will visit Washington next week, recently told the Wall Street Journal that he will push Obama to offer his own plan because "tremendous tension" in the region over the failure to resolve the conflict has resulted in a "tinderbox that could go off at any time."
Still, it is notable that Obama would attend a discussion of such a concept with outside advisers. The president had popped into a meeting that national security adviser James L. Jones regularly holds with six of his predecessors at the White House when the subject turned to the Middle East. Brent Scowcroft, a national security adviser to Presidents Gerald R. Ford and George H.W. Bush, made the case for an American-designed proposal and was supported by other participants in the room, including Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, and Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, national security adviser to President Bill Clinton.
Obama, however, did not tip his hand on whether he supported the idea, participants said.
The basic parameters of a peace deal are well known and would probably closely resemble the "Clinton parameters," offered by Clinton 10 years ago in the waning days of his presidency: land swaps to compensate the Palestinians for much of the land taken by Jewish settlements in the West Bank; billions of dollars in compensation to the Palestinians for giving up the right to return to their homes in Israel; an Israeli capital in West Jerusalem and a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, with an agreement on oversight of religious sites in the Old City.
Advocates of an American plan say the two parties are incapable of making such concessions themselves; the current Israeli government, for instance, won't halt Jewish construction in East Jerusalem despite intense U.S. pressure. But detractors say such a plan is only a recipe for putting pressure on Israel, while even some supporters caution that the timing must be right -- such as in the midst of viable peace talks -- or else the impact of the gesture might be wasted.
A major stumbling block to any peace plan is that 1.5 million people -- almost 40 percent of the Palestinian population -- live in the Gaza Strip, now controlled by the Hamas militant group, which rejects any peace talks as well as the very existence of Israel. That was not the situation when Clinton offered his proposal, which envisioned a Palestinian state consisting of Gaza and the West Bank, joined by highways.
I recently asked several senior administration officials, separately, to name a foreign leader with whom Barack Obama has forged a strong personal relationship during his first year in office. A lot of hemming and hawing ensued.
One official mentioned French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is scheduled to bring his glamorous wife to the White House residence this month for a couples dinner with Barack and Michelle Obama. But in France, Sarkozy's bitterness toward Obama, the product of several perceived snubs, is an open secret, reported widely in the French press. In a speech at the U.N. General Assembly in September Sarkozy appeared to mock Obama's signature disarmament initiative, saying "we are living in a real world, not a virtual world."
Angela Merkel's name also came up: Obama and the German chancellor, I was told, share a down-to-business pragmatism. But Merkel, too, has been conspicuously cool toward Obama ever since he made Berlin a stop on his 2008 election campaign. She stopped him then from appearing at the Brandenburg Gate and was said to be miffed last November when Obama didn't show for ceremonies celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. Anyway, diplomats say that Merkel has a much warmer relationship with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
No one named Gordon Brown. That's fairly remarkable: The relationship between the sitting British prime minister and U.S. president has been consistently close over the past 30 years. Think Reagan and Thatcher, Clinton and Blair, Bush and Blair. But Obama has been portrayed as dissing Brown ever since he presented him with a set of DVDs as a gift during their first meeting in Washington a year ago. Last fall the British press reported that the White House had turned down five requests for Obama to meet Brown one-on-one at the United Nations or the G-20 summit.
Finally, I was offered a name I didn't expect: Dmitry Medvedev. Obama, I was assured, has built a solid relationship with the Russian president during their several bilateral meetings, which have focused in part on a new nuclear arms control agreement that both could count as a distinctive achievement. But the deal hasn't been clinched -- maybe because Vladimir Putin, whom Obama has held at arm's length, doesn't like it. And could it really be that an American president has found his closest foreign partner in the Kremlin?
The paradox here is that Obama remains hugely popular abroad -- from Germany and France to countries where anti-Americanism has recently been a problem, such as Turkey and Indonesia. His following means that, in democratic countries at least, leaders have a strong incentive to befriend him. And yet this president appears, so far, to have no genuine foreign friends. In this he is the opposite of George W. Bush, who was reviled among the foreign masses but who forged close ties with a host of leaders -- Aznar of Spain, Uribe of Colombia, Sharon and Olmert of Israel, Koizumi of Japan.
Jealousy or political rivalry may play a part -- Sarkozy is one of several Europeans who have wanted to assume the role of Obama's closest ally and reacted poorly when he didn't respond. But another big cause seems to be lack of interest on Obama's part. Focused intently on his domestic agenda, the president is said to be reluctant to take time to build relationships with foreign leaders. If something has needed to be done or decided, he has readily picked up the phone. If not, he generally hasn't been available.
An argument can be made that none of this matters. Bush, after all, was often criticized for depending too heavily on personal relationships -- remember how he looked into Putin's soul? -- and his pals didn't save his administration from being universally condemned as "unilateralist." The Obama administration, in contrast, can argue that it has done pretty well in lining up European support on key matters such as Afghanistan and Iran. And Obama's personal popularity continues to provide leverage with leaders around the world, whether they hit it off with him or not.
Still, it's worth wondering: Would Sarkozy have fought French public opinion and sent more troops to Afghanistan (he has refused) if he had been cultivated more by Obama? Would Israel's Netanyahu be willing to take more risks in the (moribund) Middle East peace process if he believed he could count on this U.S. president? Would Karzai cooperate more closely with U.S. commanders in the field if Obama had embraced him?
The answers seem obvious. In foreign as well as domestic affairs, coolness has its cost.
By Karen DeYoung Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, March 7, 2010; A01
As Obama administration officials tried in recent weeks to anticipate what could go wrong in Sunday's elections in Iraq, they realized with some relief that they are largely powerless to control what happens.
In twice-daily meetings leading up to the vote and in a final preelection videoconference Thursday with the U.S. ambassador and military commander on the ground, officials contemplated the possibilities. Violence, intimidation or fraud might limit turnout or mar the legitimacy of the vote. Post-election political jockeying could delay the formation of a government for months and leave a dangerous power vacuum. Iran could create mischief, or worse.
But beneath the last-minute activity in Washington, officials have recognized that the electoral contest and its aftermath are in the hands of the Iraqis. Nearly seven years after U.S.-led troops took over Iraq, the administration appears content with its changing role there.
Committed to halving the contingent of nearly 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq by summer's end as he escalates a red-hot war in Afghanistan, President Obama has set a high bar for intervening -- or even acknowledging serious concern about the future.
In a briefing at the White House last week, senior advisers who spoke on the condition of anonymity hammered home two messages: "We can't and we will not tell them how to conduct their affairs," an official said of the Iraqis. "That's up to them." In addition, he said, "we see nothing that would divert us from the track we're on . . . to end the combat mission in August," even in the face of sectarian violence.
Iraq's last national elections, in December 2005, took place under U.S. occupation; political discord and a five-month delay in forming a government led to an explosion of sectarian violence and a surge in American troop levels that then-Sens. Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. opposed. Two years later, the George W. Bush administration began negotiations with the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on agreements to gradually withdraw all U.S. forces and establish a long-term strategic relationship.
The pullout agreements -- including a July 2009 deadline for turning urban security over to the Iraqi military and the departure of all U.S. military forces by December 2011 -- were signed two months before Obama's inauguration. In one of his first major foreign policy decisions, Obama inserted an interim withdrawal date, pledging to remove all designated U.S. "combat" forces by August this year, with 50,000 troops remaining to carry out training, diplomatic security and select counterinsurgency missions with Iraqi counterparts for 16 months.
Democrats and Republicans alike have a vested interest in declaring today's Iraq a democratic success unprecedented in the region and claiming credit for it. "This could be one of the great achievements of this administration," Vice President Biden, Obama's designated point man in Iraq, said last month. "You're going to see a stable government in Iraq that is actually moving toward a representative government."
Former vice president Richard B. Cheney took issue with Biden's assertion, calling it "a little strange" because both Biden and Obama had opposed the troop surge. Any credit to Obama, Cheney said, "ought to go with a healthy dose of 'Thank you, George Bush.' "
Biden, who had the last word against Cheney in dueling, mid-February talk-show appearances, accused the Bush administration of leaving a "mess" in Iraq. The U.S. military may have succeeded in "settling things down," he said, but it was the Obama administration that developed a plan to guide the Iraqis toward true democracy.
In four trips there as vice president, Biden said, "I have met with every single solitary one of the players in Iraq -- Sunni, Shiite, Kurd, Christian. And we have been able to be a catalyst for them, moving . . . from the battlefield to the political arena" to settle their differences.
Although some U.S. officials, including Gen. Ray Odierno, the military commander in Iraq, have voiced concern about what they call Iranian dirty tricks and politically motivated violence, the dominant attitude has been laid-back: "That's just Iraq."
"Certainly there is a lot of wrangling over power and influence and who gets to do what," Odierno's predecessor, Gen. David H. Petraeus, told television interviewer Charlie Rose last week. "But again, some of that is Iraqi politics. It's 'Iraqracy,' we say sometimes."
Even if the elections proceed with minimal disruption, however, significant challenges lie ahead. Of the five major political groups participating, none is expected to win a majority, or perhaps even a plurality, of the vote. Getting a government in place will be arduous and time-consuming at best. The Iraqi constitution allows lengthy challenges to the vote count before the new parliament convenes to choose a president. After that, it could take months for a coalition to amass enough seats to form a government, which the parliament must approve.
Regardless of whether Maliki is reelected, his government will remain as caretaker during the transition, a time when the U.S. presence in Iraq will be shifting. The U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, already the largest in the world, will take over many functions now performed by the military, including training Iraq's police force.
Administration officials insist that the United States will retain significant influence with the new government, no matter who forms it. "Iraqis will continue to want our help in resolving their outstanding problems," including constitutional reform, disputes over internal boundaries and distribution of oil revenue, a senior administration official said in an interview.
"There are also things they want from us," the official noted. Under the Bush-era strategic agreement, the United States is committed to helping Iraq remove remaining U.N. restrictions on its oil revenue, as well as reparations to Kuwait for Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion, and to encouraging U.S. investment, trade and educational exchanges.
Despite the prospects of sectarian violence and Iranian influence, the administration is counting on Iraqis to pull back from potentially destructive detours out of self-interest. "If Iraq were to fall backward into some kind of chaos," the administration official said, "in the first instance it would be bad for the Iraqis."
"Given the huge investment that was made in troops and treasure over the years, I imagine some would say we need to do something to prevent it," he said, adding that there are contingency plans for slowing or reconfiguring the U.S. withdrawal. "But I don't think there'd be any great appetite for going back in."
—Secretary of State James Baker after his failed mission to Yugoslavia in 1991
1.
Now that independent war correspondents are nearly an extinct species and we fight wars with fewer and fewer images of destruction and carnage shown on television or in newspapers, it's worth recalling that there was a time when this wasn't so. Before the Pentagon established the policy of embedding reporters with our armed forces—thus restricting their movement and making it harder for images and reports that do not fit the official narrative to appear—war correspondents were more or less on their own in war-torn countries, reporting what they saw and drawing their own conclusions. It was an extremely dangerous line of work. Between 1991 and 2001, forty-three journalists died in the Balkans, which is fewer than in Iraq, where between 2003 and 2009, 145 were killed in crossfire, suicide bombings, and premeditated murders by various participants in the conflict who didn't want reporters poking their noses where they shouldn't.
Beginning with the 1987 election that was supposed to bring democracy to Haiti after the bloody reign of the Duvaliers, and which resulted in another bloodbath, Mark Danner chronicles the even more violent conflicts in Bosnia and Croatia in the early 1990s, the post-invasion violence in Iraq, the torture in our secret prisons around the world, and the various policy decisions in Washington that had either a dire or beneficial impact on the people of those countries. These lengthy, well-researched, and well-written pieces, many of which appeared in these pages, combine political analysis, historical background, and Danner's eyewitness reporting to convey the vast human suffering behind events that can often seem remote.
The title of the book comes from the former Haitian president Leslie Manigat, who took power from Duvalierist officers after they brutally aborted the 1987 election. He told Danner that political violence "strips bare the social body," allowing us to see beneath the surface to the real workings of a society. That is what makes this collection so fascinating to read. At the same time as we are being educated about these countries beset by violence, we are witnessing Danner's own education, his deepening understanding of the limits and unintended consequences of our military interventions.
Haiti was Danner's initiation. He arrived to cover the country's "transition to democracy" for The New Yorker in 1986, just after François "Papa Doc" Duvalier's son was flown to luxurious exile in France in an American military jet, courtesy of the Reagan administration. Danner naively expected, as he himself admits, that a freely held election and the popular government it would produce could break the cycle of military coups and dictators, in which a shy country doctor becomes a homicidal monster, a general with a stutter a drunken Caligula. He came to realize that
Violence is the motor of Haiti's politics, the means of regime change, the method of succession. The struggle for power is ongoing and endless, permeating all aspects of life and implicating any Haitian of wealth and reputation. "If a man does not go into politics," says the former president who gave me this book's title, "then politics itself comes to him." A professor, intellectual, and writer from an illustrious political family, he attained power thanks to the military after a bloody, aborted election, and lost it a few months later in a tumultuous coup d'etat.
History repeats itself in unhappy countries. The absence of respected institutions and well-established laws that a person can count on to protect him condemns these societies to reenact the same conflicts, make the same mistakes more than once, and bear the same horrific consequences of these acts. In Haiti, as a former finance minister told Danner, "The whole bloody business of repression, torture, and killing was developed to stay in office, in order to make money."
There are plenty of other places where this has been true and continues to be true, but such corruption is usually better concealed behind the veneer of law and order. In impoverished Haiti, with its sharp split between a small, educated ruling class that speaks French and the rest of the population who are illiterate and speak Creole (so they often do not understand what their president says to them), these harsh realities are, indeed, laid bare. The elder Duvalier, who ruled between 1957 and his death in 1971, believed there should be no boundaries in administering terror. One ought to kill not only one's enemies but also their friends, and in as spectacular and brutal a fashion as possible.
On Sunday, November 29, 1987, the day the election was aborted by General Henri Namphy, the head of the military junta that had ruled the country since the departure of the younger Duvalier, another stunning daylight massacre took place. Without a word of warning, soldiers opened fire on people waiting in line at polling places. The streets of Port-au-Prince were strewn with corpses of men, women, and children lying in pools of blood. In the countryside, it was the same. As a well-to-do woman told Danner over the phone, "'All this brings back Duvalier, the father.... You see,' she said after a pause, ' you think it was a massacre, but this was just a normal day under Duvalier.'"
American attempts to reshape politics in Haiti go back to 1915 when Marines were sent to put an end to the chaos of internal conflict. They stayed for nineteen years, declaring that the Haitian people were unfit to rule themselves. Americans seized land and created an army and police force that were supposed to prevent revolt and protect American capital. That was not the end. Papa Doc Duvalier received US military assistance during his first, bloodiest years. He got $40 million from Washington and the help of Marines to protect his regime from any popular movement that might threaten his rule.
In 1994, President Clinton ordered American forces to intervene to restore the elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, to power after he was overthrown, protect American interests, and stop the atrocities. "Even sending twenty thousand US troops," as Danner writes, "failed to alter the fundamental dynamic." US soldiers did not confront the militiamen who kept their weapons since they did not want to risk American casualties. As for Aristide, he was flown by US helicopter back to the Presidential Palace, from which he ruled erratically, only to be flown a decade later into exile again.
2.
The pros and cons of American intervention were to become a pressing issue once more during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, which Danner reported on a few years after his visit to Haiti. The Dayton agreement brought peace to Bosnia and Herzegovina in November 1995, and almost four years later the NATO intervention in Kosovo and the bombing of Serbia took place. Danner, who spent time in Bosnia during the war, was pondering not just his own experience there, but looking back at the events that led to the secession and recognition of various republics as independent nations, the wars that ensued, and the dissolution of a country that had been known as Yugoslavia since 1918.
What concerns him, as it does almost everyone who has written about these wars, is how it was possible for the international community, and in particular the United States, to do nothing in the face of the shelling of Sarajevo and the murder of unarmed people by the Serbian forces, which the whole world saw on TV. Why wasn't there a military intervention to counter Serbian ethnic cleansing? Why wasn't air cover provided to escort the surrounded and defenseless Bosnians in Srebrenica to safety? Some of the dithering by the United States and the European Union about what to do can be understood and even forgiven in retrospect, but not this atrocity for which there was plenty of advanced warning given to people who could do something about it and who then procrastinated until it was too late.
Danner chronicles the involvement of the United States, beginning with the first President Bush and the failed visit of Secretary Baker to Belgrade in June 1991. Baker tried to hold Yugoslavia together despite a recent CIA National Intelligence Estimate that, according to an unnamed source quoted in The New York Times, said prophetically that the old Yugoslav experiment had failed, that the country would break up, and that this likely would be accompanied by ethnic violence and unrest leading to civil war. "No one can prove that 'concrete threats' or even 'actions' (and one can conceive of many, short of all-out war) could have prevented the conflicts to come," Danner writes. Military intervention, however, was not considered, since the United States was busy elsewhere with the turmoil in the Soviet Union and the Middle East, and with the approaching presidential election.
Danner claims that with Slovenia and Croatia about to secede, Baker's warnings against a unilateral declaration of independence and against the use of force to hold the federation together seemed to sanction force by the Serbs. Still, it wasn't the Serbs but the Yugoslav army and the Yugoslav government—still in place—that naturally would have had some interest in preserving the union.
The situation, at least before the hostilities started, was not as clear-cut as Danner leads us to believe. Yugoslavia was a country that, despite what the ethnic nationalists trumpeted, was not an awful place to live for most of its population and especially for the people who were intermarried or lived as minorities in republics where another ethnic group dominated. They and many other Yugoslavs hoped for reason to prevail and some sort of looser confederation between the republics to emerge gradually. The European Community, however, put a stop to that by going on record to declare in March 1991 that the Yugoslav republics had the right to freely determine their own future. Germany pushed for Slovenia and Croatia to secede immediately, as did the United States a few months later with Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Without a thought for the consequences, they encouraged nationalist leaders and ethnic groups they found congenial to break up a multiethnic country at the expense of those who had no clear ethnic loyalties and those like the Serbs who, although the largest ethnic group in Yugoslavia, found themselves a large minority in Croatia and almost half the population in Bosnia-Herzegovina. None of the nationalist parties favored by the US, including the Slovenes, had any use for multicultural identity. The openly fascist features of Croatia's ruling HDZ party, with its anti-Serb rhetoric, were passed over as a matter of little importance. So was the Muslim triumphalism in Bosnia. Slobodan Milo evic would not have had such a free rein if Yugoslavia and its last government, including its multiethnic army, were not so precipitously forced out of existence.
In view of all that, it was understandable that Serbs would feel threatened when the entire international community not only sided with the secessionists, but instantly rewrote the history of Yugoslavia, making them the oppressors and everyone else victims despite the fact that the absolute ruler of Yugoslavia from 1945 till his death in 1980, Marshal Tito, was partly a Croat and that Slovenia and Croatia were the two most prosperous republics in the federation. The European Community also declared that the borders of republics could not be changed, so that, for instance, Croatia could secede, but not the Serbs in the region called Krajina who wanted to separate from Croatia, or, for that matter, the Albanians in Kosovo who wanted to secede from Serbia.
Of course, when in the autumn of 1991 Serb artillery and infantry encircled the Croatian city of Vukovar and Milo evic first revealed to the world his plan for defending Serbian national interests by destroying cities and shooting unarmed civilians, nobody cared to remember what led to the war or had any sympathy for the already demonized Serbs. Danner thinks force should have been used immediately, quoting with approval a US Army military planner who felt that a concentrated air attack on Serbian forces surrounding Vukovar would have halted the siege; but Danner also grudgingly admits the unlikelihood of any nation using its military at a moment's notice to break up a foreign conflict.
In his memoirs, the former US ambassador Walter Zimmerman, who encouraged the Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic to reject the plan at the time, states that Cutileiro's proposal would have probably worked out better for the Muslims than any subsequent plan, including the Dayton formula that ended the fighting in 1995. So why did the United States sabotage the Lisbon accord and then go on to recognize Bosnia and Herzegovina the very next day, when its intelligence agencies were unanimous in saying that after such recognition the place would blow up?
David N. Gibbs, in his excellent book about the destruction of Yugoslavia, First Do No Harm,[1] offers a credible explanation. The US was worried about European efforts to create an independent European foreign policy. In recognizing Bosnia, the US reaffirmed its leadership position and corrected its early lack of clear policy. In other words, considerations of realpolitik were behind the US decision.
Whatever the full story of that decision may be, what happened next was hell on earth. Approximately 100,000 people died in the next three years, both soldiers and civilians, with twice as many Muslims killed as Serbs. Danner's detailed account of the atrocities that culminated with Srebrenica makes a powerful indictment of the indecision of the international community and the savagery of the Serbs, who set out to slaughter and ethnically cleanse Muslims in a manner nearly identical to that used by Croatian fascists in eliminating Serbs fifty years earlier. Not that the Muslim and Croats were entirely blameless. John Deutch, then a Defense Department official, said, "One of the reasons it was so hard to have a good policy is how terrible all the sides were." In any case, the Bush White House and the generals were against intervention. Of the two tragedies going on in the world, they chose to intervene in Somalia over Bosnia, regarding the former as a low-risk, high-payoff operation.
Danner asks the hard question: What accounts for the extraordinary cruelty of the Serbs? He attributes it to the ideology connected with a belief in Greater Serbia (of which, by the way, I never heard a word before the fall of Yugoslavia), the near-hysterical sense of historical grievance, and the heightened rhetoric and paranoia about a coming genocide of Serbs (forgetting that the bloodbath carried out by Croatian fascists in World War II was still fresh in many minds).
Danner is closer to the truth when he lays the blame on ambitious and ruthless politicians; nevertheless, his portrait of Milo evic, whom he calls a dictator despite his having to deal with opposition parties and frequent demonstrators in the streets, is unconvincing. As is often the case with men who bring disaster to their own people, Milo evic was an opportunist and a manipulator without an ounce of common sense. His nationalist policy was not meant to solve any problems for his fellow Serbs, but existed solely to increase his personal power and to enrich his associates. Instead of protecting legitimate national interests, he behaved like a thug and managed to squander whatever international sympathy Serbs might have had.
As for his followers—80,000 of whom came out in Belgrade in 2006 to pay him their last respects, many of them ethnically cleansed from Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo—they clearly made no connection between his policies and their plight. What they remembered about him and what they still admired was his pigheadedness. He kept saying no to everybody even when it was against his own interests. Danner gives the impression that he was a kind of evil genius who had everything planned ahead. I don't see it that way. It was the Croatian leader General Franjo Tudjman who knew how to plan. He knew you needed to have powerful allies if you wanted to get away with ethnic cleansing.
In both Croatia and Bosnia a lot of what happened was about revenge. As Danner documents in his articles, the massacre in Srebrenica was revenge for the killings of Serbs by the Muslims who used the "safe area" to make nightly raids on the surrounding villages. In General Ratko Mladic's unforgiving, brutal mind, this gave him the right to massacre two to three times as many Muslims regardless of their individual responsibility for what happened to the Serbs. It's no wonder it took the international community almost four years to fully grasp what kind of demons Milo evic had let loose.
I share Danner's outrage that something was not done to halt the siege of Sarajevo and to prevent the mass killing in Srebrenica, but Europe and the United States were caught between two morally and practically contradictory policies: either deploy peacekeeping forces to stop the killing—which would have favored the Serbs, who by mid-1995 held almost 70 percent of Bosnian territory—or seek to reverse ethnic cleansing by bombing Serbs and letting Muslims and Croats, who were regarded as victims, ethnically cleanse them in turn.
Danner acknowledges that the latter course would have meant hundreds of thousands of additional Serb refugees. But he thinks it would have been preferable: instead of ethnic partition, it might have led, if the US had been willing to take on "the task and responsibility of building a new state," to "the reconstruction of some sort of integral Bosnia." This, he says, "might have brought to Bosnia a very different future from the grim 'cold peace'" of the Dayton accord, however idealistic and unlikely, in my view, that may have been. Also, I don't think he grasps the full implication of what he is suggesting. In order to restore justice we would have committed another monstrous injustice by treating all Bosnian Serbs as guilty. In the end, neither the United States nor the European Union could bring themselves to do that.
3.
Danner's pieces on Iraq, published in these pages between September 2003 and April 2009, and written after visits to witness key political events in the country, which I read and admired as they came out, seem even stronger now that they are collected together. With all the disadvantages of making political analysis and predictions on the spot, this is reporting at its best. His pictures of Baghdad torn by ethnic strife and hundreds of suicide bombings, its streets lined with twelve- or fifteen-foot-high blast barriers, and of Fallujah with its buildings reduced to near rubble by Marine artillery are terrifyingly vivid. As an opponent of the war, Danner is more skeptical of US government claims and more appreciative of the immense complexity of the situation on the ground than he was in Yugoslavia. He is good at showing the distance between a bleak reality—a country devastated by our occupation, civil war, huge political problems, and terrorism—and Bush administration officials with their confident view that truth is subservient to power and that they had the ability to make reality appear to be whatever they wanted it to be. The toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue, the waving of purple fingers after the first election, and other such carefully managed images are what they wanted us to see, and not the rest, which they believed ought to remain hidden from the eyes of Americans.
Both Danner and Ron Suskind, whose book The One Percent Doctrine he quotes from at length,[2] believe the invasion of Iraq was meant to make an example of Hussein in order to demonstrate what anyone with the temerity to acquire weapons of mass destruction—which in fact they did not possess—or in any way to flout the authority of the United States could expect from us. Henry Kissinger concurred; he supported the war, Danner quotes him as saying, "'Because Afghanistan was not enough.' The radical Islamists, he said, want to humiliate us. 'And we need to humiliate them.'" For the sake of American prestige and the credibility of American power, Danner writes, the image of "the burning, smoking towers collapsing into rubble" had to be supplanted by the scenes of "American tanks rumbling proudly down the streets of a vanquished Arab capital." This was to be a grand display of "shock and awe" unrestrained by the so-called weapons of the weak: the United Nations, the international laws and courts that the rest of the world uses to hobble American power.
In actual practice, what Danner describes in Iraq resembles what Barbara W. Tuchman called "the march of folly" far more than a demonstration of invincibility. In her famous book,[3] she studied historical figures who made catastrophic decisions contrary to the self-interest of their countries, decisions that were perceived as counter-productive even in their time and for which an alternative course of action was readily available.
To reread Danner's pieces today is to realize that there was nothing remotely resembling sober reflection prior to our invasion of Iraq. Our leaders were sure of themselves and refused to allow UN inspections to continue; they believed that weighing and calculating the risk would only inhibit action. What could careful deliberation, based on cause and effect, matter when one has the most powerful military, spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined? When, following the invasion of Iraq, looting broke out in government ministries in Baghdad, universities, hospitals, power stations, and factories, virtually destroying the country's infrastructure and with it whatever respect Iraqis might have had for our competence, the 140,000 American troops did nothing but watch the growing anarchy.
Similarly, when L. Paul Bremer, the US administrator of Iraq charged with overseeing the reconstruction of the country, made the decision to fire all Baathists from the government and disband the army—thus making 350,000 humiliated and suddenly unemployed people into enemies, and transforming what had been the Pentagon's plan for a quick victory and quick departure into a long-running occupation—no one on the National Security Council or in the State Department was warned beforehand. The systematic failure in Iraq, Danner makes clear in his book, resulted in large part from an almost willful determination of those who made decisions to cut themselves off from those in government who knew anything. As a historian remarked regarding the extraordinarily imprudent Philip II of Spain, "No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence."
The two most disturbing pieces in the book deal with torture and were published last April after Danner got hold of a secret report by the officials of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). In order to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise the treatment of prisoners, they traveled to Guantánamo and interviewed in private a number of inmates who divulged what kind of interrogations they'd been subjected to both at Guantánamo and in our secret global network of prisons where they had been held. They describe in detail, and independently of each other, what President Bush called the "alternative set of procedures" that indisputably, despite his vehement denials, are torture.
Borrowed from Soviet and Chinese Communists and other repressive regimes, both ancient and modern, these "techniques" were fine-tuned with the assistance of lawyers in the Department of Justice working with CIA officials, doctors, and psychologists. They not only revived the long-outlawed practices of inflicting pain and terror on human beings from the most shameful chapters of human history, but did so with the active participation of senior officials in government who insisted on being informed on an hourly basis about the progress of these "interrogations," and who micromanaged the application of waterboarding, sleep and sensory deprivation, and other barbaric methods on some of the more well-known prisoners.
Since international law (to which the United States is a signatory) prohibits cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, our practice of torture was obfuscated, excused, and pretty much dismissed, not only by the Bush administration and its apologists, but equally by Congress and now even by many Americans, more than half of whom support it according to the latest polls. What makes reading Danner's pieces on the ICRC report even more chilling is that they were written when we still had a reasonable hope that there would be some type of serious investigation and possibly eventual prosecution by the new administration.
That is not likely to happen. The Obama administration has taken steps to end torture and released documents showing official complicity in carrying it out, but it appears to have no interest in any kind of truth commission that would fully investigate what crimes our past leaders and high officials have committed. This is where Danner's book becomes so valuable. It ought to be read by those who still see our wars as moral crusades. They may learn from its pages why so many ungrateful beneficiaries of our largesse are willing to blow themselves up in order to do us harm, and why wars based on delusions only lead to more delusions and more wars.
Notes
[1]First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the Destruction of Yugoslavia (Vanderbilt University Press, 2009).
[2]The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11 (Simon and Schuster, 2006).
[3]The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (Knopf, 1984).
Think for a moment about which countries cause the most global consternation. Afghanistan. Iran. Venezuela. North Korea. Pakistan. Perhaps rising China. But India? Surely not. In the popular imagination, the world's largest democracy evokes Gandhi, Bollywood, and chicken tikka. In reality, however, it's India that often gives global governance the biggest headache.
Of course, India gets marvelous press. Feature stories from there typically bring to life Internet entrepreneurs, hospitality industry pioneers, and gurus keeping spiritual traditions alive while lovingly bridging Eastern and Western cultures.
But something is left out of the cheery picture. For all its business acumen and the extraordinary creativity unleashed in the service of growth, today's India is an international adolescent, a country of outsize ambition but anemic influence. India's colorful, stubborn loquaciousness, so enchanting on a personal level, turns out to be anything but when it comes to the country's international relations. On crucial matters of global concern, from climate change to multilateral trade, India all too often just says no.
India, first and foremost, believes that the world's rules don't apply to it. Bucking an international trend since the Cold War, successive Indian governments have refused to sign nuclear testing and nonproliferation agreements -- accelerating a nuclear arms race in South Asia. (India's second nuclear tests in 1998 led to Pakistan's decision to detonate its own nuclear weapons.)
Once the pious proponent of a nuclear-free world, New Delhi today maintains an attitude of "not now, not ever" when it comes to the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. As defense analyst Matthew Hoey recently wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "India's behavior has been comparable to other defiant nuclear states [and] will undoubtedly contribute to a deteriorating security environment in Asia."
Not only does India reject existing treaties, but it also deep-sixes international efforts to develop new ones. In 2008, India single-handedly foiled the last Doha round of global trade talks, an effort to nail together a global deal that almost nobody loved, but one that would have benefited developing countries most. "I reject everything," declared Kamal Nath, then the Indian commerce and industry minister, after grueling days and sleepless nights of negotiations in Geneva in the summer of 2008.
On climate change, India has been no less intransigent. In July, India's environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, pre-emptively told U.S. Secretary of StateHillary Clinton five months before the U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen that India, a fast-growing producer of greenhouse gases, would flat-out not accept binding carbon emissions targets.
India happily attacks individuals, as well as institutions and treaty talks. As ex-World Bank staffers have revealed in interviews with Indian media, India worked behind the scenes to help push Paul Wolfowitz out of the World Bank presidency, not because his relationship with a female official caused a public furor, but because he had turned his attention to Indian corruption and fraud in the diversion of bank funds.
By the time a broad investigation had ended -- and Robert Zoellick had become the new World Bank president -- a whopping $600 million had been diverted, as the Wall Street Journal reported, from projects that would have served the Indian poor through malaria, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, and drug-quality improvement programs. Calling the level of fraud "unacceptable," Zoellick later sent a flock of officials to New Delhi to work with the Indian government in investigating the accounts. In a 2009 interview with the weekly India Abroad, former bank employee Steve Berkman said the level of corruption among Indian officials was "no different than what I've seen in Africa and other places."
India certainly affords its citizens more freedoms than China, but it is hardly a liberal democratic paradise. India limits outside assistance to nongovernmental organizations and most educational institutions. It restricts the work of foreign scholars (and sometimes journalists) and bans books. Last fall, India refused to allow Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan journalists to attend a workshop on environmental journalism.
India also regularly refuses visas for international rights advocates. In 2003, India denied a visa to the head of Amnesty International, Irene Khan. Although no official reason was given, it was likely a punishment for Amnesty's critical stance on the government's handling of Hindu attacks that killed as many as 2,000 Muslims in Gujarat the previous year. Most recently, a delegation from the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a congressionally mandated body, was denied Indian visas. In the past, the commission had called attention to attacks on both Muslims and Christians in India.
Nor does New Delhi stand up for freedom abroad. In the U.N. General Assembly and the U.N. Human Rights Council, India votes regularly with human rights offenders, international scofflaws, and enemies of democracy. Just last year, after Sri Lanka had pounded civilians held hostage by the Tamil Tigers and then rounded up survivors of the carnage and put them in holding camps that have drawn universal opprobrium, India joined China and Russia in subverting a human rights resolution suggesting a war crimes investigation and instead backed a move that seemed to congratulate the Sri Lankans.
David Malone, Canada's high commissioner in New Delhi from 2006 to 2008 and author of a forthcoming book, Does the Elephant Dance? Contemporary Indian Foreign Policy, says that, when it comes to global negotiations, "There's a certain style of Indian diplomacy that alienates debating partners, allies, and opponents." And looking forward? India craves a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council, seeking greater authority in shaping the global agenda. But not a small number of other countries wonder what India would do with that power. Its petulant track record is the elephant in the room.
The foreign policy of U.S. President Barack Obama can be assessed most usefully in two parts: first, his goals and decision-making system and, second, his policies and their implementation. Although one can speak with some confidence about the former, the latter is still an unfolding process.
To his credit, Obama has undertaken a truly ambitious effort to redefine the United States' view of the world and to reconnect the United States with the emerging historical context of the twenty-first century. He has done this remarkably well. In less than a year, he has comprehensively reconceptualized U.S. foreign policy with respect to several centrally important geopolitical issues: • Islam is not an enemy, and the "global war on terror" does not define the United States' current role in the world; • the United States will be a fair-minded and assertive mediator when it comes to attaining lasting peace between Israel and Palestine; • the United States ought to pursue serious negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, as well as other issues; • the counterinsurgency campaign in the Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan should be part of a larger political undertaking, rather than a predominantly military one; • the United States should respect Latin America's cultural and historical sensitivities and expand its contacts with Cuba; • the United States ought to energize its commitment to significantly reducing its nuclear arsenal and embrace the eventual goal of a world free of nuclear weapons; • in coping with global problems, China should be treated not only as an economic partner but also as a geopolitical one; • improving U.S.-Russian relations is in the obvious interest of both sides, although this must be done in a manner that accepts, rather than seeks to undo, post-Cold War geopolitical realities; and • a truly collegial transatlantic partnership should be given deeper meaning, particularly in order to heal the rifts caused by the destructive controversies of the past few years.
For all that, he did deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Overall, Obama has demonstrated a genuine sense of strategic direction, a solid grasp of what today's world is all about, and an understanding of what the United States ought to be doing in it. Whether these convictions are a byproduct of his personal history, his studies, or his intuitive sense of history, they represent a strategically and historically coherent worldview. The new president, it should be added, has also been addressing the glaring social and environmental dilemmas that confront humanity and about which the United States has been indifferent for too long. But this appraisal focuses on his responses to the most urgent geopolitical challenges.
CHALLENGES TO WHITE HOUSE LEADERSHIP
Obama's overall perspective sets the tone for his foreign-policy-making team, which is firmly centered in the White House. The president relies on Vice President Joe Biden's broad experience in foreign affairs to explore ideas and engage in informal strategizing. National Security Adviser James Jones coordinates the translation of the president's strategic outlook into policy, while also having to manage the largest National Security Council in history -- its over-200-person staff is almost four times as large as the NSC staffs of Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush and almost ten times as large as John F. Kennedy's. The influence of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on national security strategy has been growing steadily. Gates' immediate task is to successfully conclude two wars, but his influence is also felt on matters pertaining to Iran and Russia. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who has the president's ear as well as his confidence, is likewise a key participant in foreign policy decisions and is the country's top diplomat. Her own engagement is focused more on the increasingly urgent global issues of the new century, rather than on the geopolitical ones of the recent past.
Finally, Obama's two trusted political advisers, David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel, who closely monitor the sensitive relationship between foreign and domestic politics, also participate in decision-making. (For example, both sat in on the president's critical September meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.) When appropriate, policy discussions also include two experienced negotiators, George Mitchell, who conducts the Middle East peace negotiations, and Richard Holbrooke, who coordinates the regional response to the challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In effect, they are an extension of the president's NSC-centered process.
On this team, Obama himself is the main source of the strategic direction, but, unavoidably, he is able to play this role on only a part-time basis. This is a weakness, because the conceptual initiator of a great power's foreign policy needs to be actively involved in supervising the design of the consequent strategic decisions, in overlooking their implementation, and in making timely adjustments. Yet Obama has had no choice but to spend much of his first year in office on domestic political affairs.
As a result, his grand redefinition of U.S. foreign policy is vulnerable to dilution or delay by upper-level officials who have the bureaucratic predisposition to favor caution over action and the familiar over the innovative. Some of them may even be unsympathetic to the president's priorities regarding the Middle East and Iran. It hardly needs to be added that officials who are not in sympathy with advocated policies rarely make good executors. Additionally, the president's domestic political advisers inevitably tend to be more sensitive to pressures from domestic interest groups. This usually fosters a reluctance to plan for a firm follow-through on bold presidential initiatives should they suddenly encounter a foreign rebuff reinforced by powerful domestic lobbies. Netanyahu's rejection of Obama's public demand that Israel halt the construction of settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem is a case in point.
It is still too early to make a firm assessment of the president's determination to pursue his priorities, as most of the large issues that Obama has personally addressed involve long-range problems that call for long-term management. But three urgent issues do pose, even in the short run, an immediate and difficult test of his ability and his resolve to significantly change U.S. policy: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iran's nuclear ambitions, and the Afghan-Pakistani challenge. Each of these also happens to be a sensitive issue at home.
THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONUNDRUM
The first urgent challenge is, of course, the Middle East peace process. Obama stated early on that he would take the initiative on this issue and aim for a settlement in the relative near term. That position is justified historically and is in keeping with the United States' national interest. Paralysis over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has lasted far too long, and leaving it unresolved has pernicious consequences for the Palestinians, for the region, and for the United States, and it will eventually harm Israel. It is not fashionable to say this, but it is demonstrably true that -- deservedly or not -- much of the current hostility toward the United States in the Middle East and the Islamic world as a whole has been generated by the bloodshed and suffering produced by this prolonged conflict. Osama bin Laden's self-serving justifications for 9/11 are a reminder that the United States itself is also a victim of the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum.
By now, after more than 40 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and 30 years of peace negotiations, it is quite evident that left to themselves, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians will resolve the conflict on their own. There are many reasons for this, but the bottom line is that the Palestinians are too divided and too weak to make the critical decisions necessary to push the peace process forward, and the Israelis are too divided and too strong to do the same. As a result, a firm external initiative defining the basic parameters of a final settlement is needed to jump-start serious negotiations between the two parties. And that can only come from the United States.
But the necessary outside stimulus has not yet been forthcoming in a fashion consistent with U.S. interests and potential. In raising the issue of the settlements in the spring of 2009 but then later backing off when rebuffed by the Israeli government, the administration strengthened the hard-line elements in Israel and undercut the more moderate elements on the Palestinian side. Then, an opportunity provided by the annual UN General Assembly meeting in September to identify the United States with the overwhelming global consensus about the basic parameters of a peace settlement was squandered. Instead of seizing it, Obama merely urged the Israelis and the Palestinians to negotiate in good faith.
Yet the existing global consensus could serve as a launching pad for serious negotiations on four basic points. First, Palestinian refugees should not be granted the right of return to what is now Israel, because Israel cannot be expected to commit suicide for the sake of peace. The refugees will have to be resettled within the Palestinian state, with compensation and maybe some expression of regret for their suffering. This will be very difficult for the Palestinian national movement to swallow, but there is no alternative.
Second, Jerusalem has to be shared, and shared genuinely. The Israeli capital, of course, would be in West Jerusalem, but East Jerusalem should be the capital of a Palestinian state, with the Old City shared under some international arrangement. If a genuine compromise on Jerusalem is not part of a settlement, resentment will persist throughout the West Bank and the Palestinians will reject the peace process. Although such a compromise will understandably be difficult for the Israelis to accept, without it there cannot be a peace of reconciliation.
Third, a settlement must be based on the 1967 lines, but with territorial swaps that would allow the large settlements to be incorporated into Israel without any further reduction of the territory of the Palestinian state. That means some territorial compensation for Palestine from parts of northern and southern Israel that border the West Bank. It is important to remember that although the Israeli and Palestinian populations are almost equal in number, under the 1967 lines the Palestinian territories account for only 22 percent of the old British mandate, whereas the Israeli territories account for 78 percent.
Fourth, the United States or NATO must make a commitment to station troops along the Jordan River. Such a move would reinforce Israel's security with strategic depth. It would reduce Israel's fears that an independent Palestine could some day serve as a springboard for a major Arab attack on Israel.
Had Obama embraced this internationally favored blueprint for peace when he addressed the UN in September, he would have exerted enormous influence on both the Israelis and the Palestinians and instantaneously gained global support. Failing to endorse this plan was a missed opportunity, especially since the two-state solution is beginning to lose some of its credibility as a viable formula for reconciliation between the Israelis and the Palestinians and within the region. Moreover, there are indications that the United States is already losing the goodwill and renewed confidence of the Arab world that Obama won with his speech in Cairo in June.
The next few months will be critical, and the time for decisive action is running out. Perhaps as a consolation to the Palestinians (and in spite of some opposition within the White House) or perhaps as a reaffirmation of his determination to continue pressing the parties to focus on the key issues, in his UN speech Obama called for final-status negotiations to begin soon and included on the agenda four items similar to these. He also made it explicitly clear that the talks' ultimate goal ought to be "a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967." It can be hoped that the president seized the moment offered by the Oslo ceremony at which the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded (which at the time of this writing had not yet occurred) to give more substance to his Middle East peace initiative. But so far, the Obama team has shown neither the tactical skill nor the strategic firmness needed to move the peace process forward.
THE IRANIAN CHALLENGE
Another urgent and potentially very dangerous challenge, with similarly huge stakes, is confronting Obama in Iran. It involves the true character of the Iranian nuclear program and Iran's role in the region. Obama has been determined to explore the path of serious negotiations with Iran despite domestic (and some foreign) agitation and even some opposition within the second echelon of his team. Without quite saying so, he has basically downgraded the U.S. military option, although it is still fashionable to say that "all options remain on the table." But the prospects for a successful negotiation are still quite uncertain.
Two fundamental questions complicate the situation. First, are the Iranians willing to negotiate -- or even capable of doing so -- seriously? The United States has to be realistic when discussing this aspect, since the clock cannot be turned back: the Iranians have the capability to enrich uranium, and they are not going to give it up. But it is still possible, perhaps through a more intrusive inspection regime, to fashion a reasonably credible arrangement that prevents weaponization. Nonetheless, even if the United States and its partners approach the negotiations with a constructive mindset, the Iranians themselves may scuttle any serious prospects for a positive outcome. Already, at the outset of the negotiating process, Iran's credibility was undermined by the convoluted manner in which Tehran complicated a promising compromise for a cooperative Iranian-Russian-French arrangement for processing its enriched uranium.
Second, is Washington willing to engage in negotiations with some degree of patience and with sensitivity to the mentality of the other side? It would not be conducive to serious negotiations if the United States were to persist in publicly labeling Iran as a terrorist state, as a state that is not to be trusted, as a state against which sanctions or even a military option should be prepared. Doing that would simply play into the hands of the most hard-line elements in Iran. It would facilitate their appeal to Iranian nationalism, and it would narrow the cleavage that has recently emerged in Iran between those who desire a more liberal regime and those who seek to perpetuate a fanatical dictatorship.
These points must be borne in mind if and when additional sanctions become necessary. Care should be taken to make certain that the sanctions are politically intelligent and that they isolate the regime rather than unify all Iranians. Sanctions must punish those in power -- not the Iranian middle class, as an embargo on gasoline would do. The unintended result of imposing indiscriminately crippling sanctions would likely be to give the Iranians the impression that the United States' real objective is to prevent their country from acquiring even a peaceful nuclear program -- and that, in turn, would fuel nationalism and outrage.
Moreover, even the adoption of politically discriminating sanctions is likely to be complicated by international constraints. China, given its dependence on Middle Eastern (and particularly Iranian) oil, fears the consequences of a sharpened crisis. The position of Russia is ambiguous since as a major energy supplier to Europe, it stands to benefit financially from a prolonged crisis in the Persian Gulf that would prevent the entrance of Iranian oil into the European market. Indeed, from the Russian geopolitical perspective, a steep rise in the price of oil as a result of a conflict in the Persian Gulf would be most economically damaging to the United States and China -- countries whose global preeminence Russia tends to resent and even fear -- and would make Europe even more dependent on Russian energy.
Throughout this complicated process, firm presidential leadership will be required. That is particularly so because of the presence of influential voices in the United States, both inside and outside the administration, in favor of a negotiating process that minimizes the possibility of a reasonable compromise. Prior to joining the administration, some senior second-level officials seemed to favor policies designed to force an early confrontation with Iran and even advocated joint military consultations with Israel regarding the use of force. The somewhat sensationalized manner in which the administration revealed in late September that it had been aware for months of the secret Iranian nuclear facility near Qom suggests internal disagreements over tactics.
Ultimately, a larger strategic question is at stake: Should the United States' long-term goal be the evolution of Iran into a stabilizing power in the Middle East? To state the issue even more sharply and simply: Should its policy be designed to encourage Iran to eventually become a partner of the United States again -- and even, as it was for three decades, of Israel? The wider the agenda -- one that addressed regional security issues, potential economic cooperation, and so on -- the greater the possibility of finding acceptable quid pro quos. Or should Iran be treated as if it is fated to remain a hostile and destabilizing power in an already vulnerable region?
As of this writing, an acceptable outcome to the negotiations is obviously still very much in doubt. Assuming they are not aborted, by early 2010 it may be possible to make a calmly calculated judgment as to whether the talks are worth continuing or whether there in fact is no room for reciprocal compromises. At that point, politically intelligent sanctions may become timely. So far, Obama has shown that he is aware of the need to combine strategic firmness with tactical flexibility; he is patiently exploring whether diplomacy can lead to an accommodation. He has avoided any explicit commitment to a precise deadline (unlike France's grandstanding in favor of a December date), and he has not engaged in explicit threats of military action.
Those advocating a tougher stance should remember that the United States would bear the brunt of the painful consequences in the event of an attack on Iran, whether the United States or Israel launched it. Iran would likely target U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, possibly destabilizing both countries; the Strait of Hormuz could become a blazing war zone; and Americans would again pay steep prices at the gas pump. Iran is an issue regarding which, above all, Obama must trust himself to lead and not to be led. So far, he has done so.
THE AFPAK QUAGMIRE
The third urgent and politically sensitive foreign policy issue is posed by the Afghan-Pakistani predicament. Obama has moved toward abandoning some of the more ambitious, even ideological, objectives that defined the United States' initial engagement in Afghanistan -- the creation of a modern democracy, for example. But the United States must be very careful lest its engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which still has primarily and most visibly a military dimension, comes to be viewed by the Afghans and the Pakistanis as yet another case of Western colonialism and elicits from them an increasingly militant response.
Some top U.S. generals have recently stated that the United States is not winning militarily, an appraisal that ominously suggests the conflict with the Taliban could become similar to the Soviet Union's earlier confrontation with Afghan resistance. A comprehensive strategic reassessment has thus become urgently needed. The proposal made in September by France, Germany, and the United Kingdom for an international conference on the subject was helpful and timely; the United States was wise to welcome it. But to be effective, any new strategy has to emphasize two key elements. First, the Afghan government and NATO should seek to engage locally in a limited process of accommodation with receptive elements of the Taliban. The Taliban are not a global revolutionary or terrorist movement, and although they are a broad alliance with a rather medieval vision of what Afghanistan ought to be, they do not directly threaten the West. Moreover, they are still very much a minority phenomenon that ultimately can be defeated only by other Afghans (helped economically and militarily by the United States and its NATO allies), a fact that demands a strategy that is more political than military.
Additionally, the United States needs to develop a policy for gaining the support of Pakistan, not just in denying the Taliban a sanctuary in Pakistan but also in pressuring the Taliban in Afghanistan to accommodate. Given that many Pakistanis may prefer a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to a secular Afghanistan that leans toward Pakistan's archrival, India, the United States needs to assuage Pakistan's security concerns in order to gain its full cooperation in the campaign against the irreconcilable elements of the Taliban. In this regard, the support of China could be helpful, particularly considering its geopolitical stake in regional stability and its traditionally close ties with Islamabad.
It is likely that before this appraisal hits the newsstands, Obama will have announced a more comprehensive strategy for attaining a politically acceptable outcome to the ongoing conflict -- and one that U.S. allies are also prepared to support. His approach so far has been deliberate. He has been careful to assess both the military and the political dimensions of the challenge and also to take into account the views of U.S. allies. Nothing would be worse for NATO than if one part of the alliance (western Europe) left the other part of the alliance (the United States) alone in Afghanistan. Such a fissure over NATO's first campaign initially based on Article 5, the collective defense provision, would probably spell the end of the alliance.
How Obama handles these three urgent and interrelated issues -- the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the Iranian dilemma, and the Afghan-Pakistani conflict -- will determine the United States' global role for the foreseeable future. The consequences of a failed peace process in the Middle East, a military collision with Iran, and an intensifying military engagement in Afghanistan and Pakistan all happening simultaneously could commit the United States for many years to a lonely and self-destructive conflict in a huge and volatile area. Eventually, that could spell the end of the United States' current global preeminence.
KEY STRATEGIC RELATIONSHIPS
The president, in addition to coping with these immediate challenges, has indicated his intent to improve three key geopolitical relationships of the United States: with Russia, with China, and with Europe. Each involves longer-term dilemmas but does not require crisis management now. Each has its own peculiarities: Russia is a former imperial power with revisionist ambitions but declining social capital; China is a rising world power that is modernizing itself at an astonishing pace but deliberately downplaying its ambitions; Europe is a global economic power devoid of either military clout or political will. Obama has rightly indicated that the United States needs to collaborate more closely with each of them.
Hence, the administration decided to "reset" the United States' relationship with Russia. But that slogan is confusing, and it is not yet clear that Washington's wishful thinking about Moscow's shared interests on such matters as Iran is fully justified. Nonetheless, the United States must think strategically about its long-term relationship with Russia and pursue a two-track policy: it has to cooperate with Russia whenever doing so is mutually beneficial, but in a way that is also responsive to historical reality. The age of closed empires is over, and Russia, for the sake of its own future, will eventually have to accept this.
Seeking to expand cooperation with Russia does not mean condoning Russia's subordination of Georgia (through which the vital Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline passes, providing Europe with access to Central Asian energy) or its intimidation of Ukraine (an industrial and agricultural heartland of the former Soviet Union). Either move would be a giant step backward. Each would intensify Russia's imperial nostalgia and central Europe's security fears, not to mention increase the possibility of armed conflicts. Yet so far, the Obama administration has been quite reluctant to provide even purely defensive arms to Georgia (in contrast to Russia's provision of offensive weaponry to Venezuela), nor has it been sufficiently active in encouraging the EU to be more responsive to Ukraine's European aspirations. Fortunately, Vice President Biden's fall 2009 visit to Poland, Romania, and the Czech Republic did reaffirm the United States' long-term interest in political pluralism within the former Soviet space and in a cooperative relationship with a truly postimperial Russia. And it should always be borne in mind that the survival of the former makes the latter more likely.
A longer-term effort to engage China in a more forthcoming approach to global problems is also needed. China is, as it has proclaimed, "rising peacefully," and unlike Russia, it is patiently self-confident. But one can also argue that China is rising somewhat selfishly and needs to be drawn more broadly into constructive cooperation on global economic, financial, and environmental decisions. It also has growing political influence over geopolitical issues that affect core U.S. interests: North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Thus, Obama's decision to develop a top-level bilateral U.S.-Chinese relationship has been timely. Cultivating at the presidential-summit level a de facto geopolitical G-2 (not to be confused with proposals for an economic G-2), highlighted by Obama's November visit to China, is helping develop an increasingly significant strategic dialogue. The leaders of the United States and China recognize that both countries have a major stake in an effectively functioning world system. And they appear to appreciate the historic potential and the respective national interests inherent in such a bilateral relationship.
Paradoxically, despite Obama's expressed desire, there seem to be fewer prospects in the near future for a strategically significant enhancement of the United States' relationship with its closest political, economic, and military partner: Europe. Obama's predecessor left a bitter legacy there, which Obama has greatly redressed in terms of public opinion. But genuine strategic cooperation on a global scale is not possible with a partner that not only has no defined and authoritative political leadership but also lacks an internal consensus regarding its world role.
Hence, Obama's intent to reignite the Atlantic partnership is necessarily limited to dialogues with the three key European states with genuine international clout: the United Kingdom, Germany, and France. But the utility of such dialogues is reduced by the personal and political differences among these countries' leaders -- not to mention the British prime minister's grim political prospects, the French president's preoccupation with personal celebrity, and the German chancellor's eastward gaze. The emergence of a unified and therefore influential European worldview, with which Obama could effectively engage, seems unlikely anytime soon.
DOMESTIC IMPEDIMENTS
What then, on balance, can be said of Obama's foreign policy? So far, it has generated more expectations than strategic breakthroughs. Nonetheless, Obama has significantly altered U.S. policies regarding the three most urgent challenges facing the country. But as a democracy, the United States has to base its foreign policy decisions on domestic political consent. And unfortunately for Obama, gaining that support is becoming more difficult because of three systemic weaknesses that impede the pursuit of an intelligent and decisive foreign policy in an increasingly complex global setting.
The first is that foreign policy lobbies have become more influential in U.S. politics. Thanks to their access to Congress, a variety of lobbies -- some financially well endowed, some backed by foreign interests -- have been promoting, to an unprecedented degree, legislative intervention in foreign-policy making. Now more than ever, Congress not only actively opposes foreign policy decisions but even imposes some on the president. (The pending legislation on sanctions against Iran is but one example.) Such congressional intervention, promoted by lobbies, is a serious handicap in shaping a foreign policy meant to be responsive to the ever-changing realities of global politics and makes it more difficult to ensure that U.S. -- not foreign -- interests are the point of departure.
The second, documented by a 2009 RAND study, pertains to the deepening ideological cleavage that is reducing the prospects for effective bipartisanship in foreign policy. The resulting polarization not only makes a bipartisan foreign policy less likely, but it also encourages the infusion of demagogy into policy conflicts. And it poisons the public discourse. Still worse, personal vilification and hateful, as well as potentially violent, rhetoric are becoming widespread in that realm of political debate that is subject to neither fact checking nor libel laws: the blogosphere.
Last but not least, of the large democratic countries, the United States has one of the least informed publics when it comes to global affairs. Many Americans, as various National Geographic surveys have shown, are not even familiar with basic global geography. Their knowledge of other countries' histories and cultures is not much better. How can a public unfamiliar with geography or foreign history have even an elementary grasp of, say, the geopolitical dilemmas that the United States faces in Afghanistan and Pakistan? With the accelerating decline in the circulation of newspapers and the trivialization of once genuinely informative television reporting, reliable and timely news about critical global issues is becoming less available to the general public. In that context, demagogically formulated solutions tend to become more appealing, especially in critical moments.
Together, these three systemic weaknesses are complicating efforts to gain public support for a rational foreign policy attuned to the complexity of the global dilemmas facing the United States. Obama's instinct is to lead by conciliation. That has been his political experience, and it has obviously been the key to his electoral success. Conciliation, backed by personal inspiration and the mass mobilization of populist hopes, is indeed the most important impetus for moving a policy agenda forward in a large democracy. In campaigning for the presidency, Obama proved that he was a master both of social conciliation and of political mobilization. But he has not yet made the transition from inspiring orator to compelling statesman. Advocating that something happen is not the same as making it happen.
In the tough realities of world affairs, leadership also requires an unrelenting firmness in overcoming foreign opposition, in winning the support of friends, in negotiating seriously when necessary with hostile states, and in gaining grudging respect even from those governments that the United States sometimes has an interest in intimidating. To these ends, the optimal moment for blending national aspirations with decisive leadership is when the personal authority of the president is at its highest -- usually during the first year in office. For President Obama, alas, that first year has been dominated by the economic crisis and the struggle over health-care reform. The next three years may thus be more difficult. For the United States' national interest, but also for humanity's sake, that makes it truly vital for Obama to pursue with tenacious audacity the soaring hopes he unleashed.
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