Rashad Hussain, a Muslim and new U.S. envoy, is bridge between two worlds

By Scott Wilson
Monday, March 1, 2010; A19

Rashad Hussain, President Obama's new special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, was an avid high school debater in Plano, Tex., where he grew up.

His debate partner and best friend was a classmate named Josh Goldberg, meaning that at the end of many tournaments, the judge would announce "Goldberg-Hussain" as the cultural odd couple who had won the argument. "People got a kick out of it," Hussain said in a recent interview. "We joked that one day we would have the solution to the peace process." The two remain close friends.

In his new position, Hussain, who is both a Koran scholar and an ardent North Carolina Tar Heels basketball fan, will be responsible for helping to bridge another cultural divide -- the one in U.S. relations with Muslims inside and outside the nation's borders.

Since taking office, Obama has adopted an approach to broaden the ways in which the United States engages the Islamic world, moving from a policy focused mostly on counterterrorism to one that includes partnerships with Muslim countries and communities in education, health, science and commerce.

Hussain, 31, will be the face of that policy in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, where the Islamic Conference has it headquarters, and in the other capitals of its 56 member countries. His is an appropriately young face for an American representative to the world's 1.6 billion Muslims, the majority of whom are younger than he is.

At a time when the United States is fighting two wars in Muslim nations and defending itself against an enduring terrorist threat, changing perceptions will take time. "The challenge is to continue to communicate that this is a long-term process," Hussain said. "Sometimes the challenge becomes that people want to focus exclusively on the political issues, issues that this administration is working very diligently to solve."

Hussain's father, a mining engineer, moved from Bihar, India, to Wyoming in the late 1960s. A few years later, during a visit to India, he married Hussain's mother, now an obstetrician in Plano.

The family prayed regularly in a mosque not far from the church-heavy city. At about the time he began middle school, the Persian Gulf War began and, as he recalled, "it was not the easiest time to be named Hussain." But he said he encountered very little religious persecution during a childhood that featured study, prayer and basketball -- a passion he shares with the president. Hussain said it is his "dream" to play in one of Obama's pickup games.

He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, then enrolled at Harvard University to pursue a master's degree in Arabic and Islamic studies. An internship after his first year of graduate school with Rep. Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) cemented his interest in government, and he returned after completing his degree to work on the House Judiciary Committee and was there on the morning of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

"I experienced firsthand being evacuated from the building, not knowing what was going on, seeing the twin towers burning on TV as soon as I got into work, not knowing . . . whether there was a plane heading for the Capitol," he said. "I very much experienced the terror on that day myself."

In the following days, he said, he experienced a "whole set of feelings," from the initial fear of attack to worry about discrimination against American Muslims. He said he found that compassion, broader than the pockets of persecution, is often overlooked by Muslims here and abroad.

"A lot is made about American misperceptions about Muslim communities, but there's a lot of misperceptions that Muslim communities have about the United States," he said. To counter such misunderstandings of Muslim culture, Hussain cited his wife, whom he said "breaks down a lot of the misperceptions of women in Islam." Isra Bhatty, a Yale Law School student currently on a Rhodes scholarship, wears the hijab and is an epic Chicago Bears fan.

Hussain left Capitol Hill to attend Yale Law School. While there, he criticized the trial of Sami al-Arian, a University of South Florida professor, as "politically motivated persecution." Arian was accused of aiding the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. Hussain, who did not criticize the charges against Arian, was on a civil liberties panel with Arian's daughter when he made the comment. A jury acquitted Arian on some charges and deadlocked on others; he eventually pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy.

"My extensive writings on this topic make it clear that I condemn terrorism unequivocally in all its forms," Hussain said. "I'd be happy to put that against one sentence from 2004 that I believe was taken out of context."

After the 2008 election, Hussain was recruited to the White House counsel's office by Cassandra Butts, a fellow Tar Heel and Obama's former Harvard Law classmate. He has worked there on national security and new-media issues and helped inform the administration's Muslim outreach efforts.

Ben Rhodes, Obama's chief foreign policy speechwriter, sought Hussain's counsel last year as he drafted the president's Cairo address. Hussain said his advice concerned the contributions Muslims have made to American society and the context behind some of the religious passages. Hussain has memorized the Koran. He prays daily, often in a room in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building reserved for all faiths.

Hussain traveled in the Middle East after Obama announced his appointment during a Feb. 13 videoconference at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar. His approach, Hussain said, will be to emphasize to Muslim countries what "America stands for," including through the partnerships.

"It's clear that we're not going to agree on every single issue," Hussain said. "Our job will be to try to maximize our areas of agreement and work through our areas of disagreement and come to the best policy."

New Ukrainian president could disappoint supporters in the Kremlin

By Philip P. Pan
Monday, March 1, 2010; A08

MOSCOW -- The inauguration of Viktor Yanukovych as Ukraine's president was celebrated in Russian media last week as a long-sought victory for the Kremlin, which tried to put him in office five years ago, only to be thwarted by the mass protests known as the Orange Revolution.

Now that he has taken power, though, the man who had been Russia's preferred choice to govern the former Soviet republic could prove to be far less accommodating to Moscow's interests -- and more open to Washington's -- than the Kremlin would like.

Breaking with tradition, Yanukovych is scheduled to make his first official trip abroad Monday to Brussels, the seat of the European Union, instead of Moscow, which he will visit Friday. The decision follows a campaign in which he labored to shed his image as a Kremlin lackey and recast himself as a proponent of further integration with Europe as well as closer ties with Russia.

The line that Yanukovych and his advisers have used is that he will be a pro-Ukrainian president, not a pro-Russian or pro-Western one. In his inaugural address, he pledged that Ukraine would serve as a "bridge between East and West, an integral part of Europe and the former Soviet Union at the same time" and "a European state outside of any bloc."

How such rhetoric will be translated into policy, especially in Ukraine's strategically important energy sector, remains uncertain and will be the subject of close scrutiny in Yanukovych's meetings this week and in the months ahead.

Many analysts say Moscow is more likely than the West to be disappointed, if only because it wants much more from a Yanukovych presidency. In five years of bitter feuding with his predecessor, Viktor Yushchenko, the pro-West hero of the Orange Revolution, the Kremlin built up a substantial store of grievances that plunged relations between Russia and Ukraine to a low point.

Near the top of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's agenda is greater control over Ukrainian pipelines that transport much of the natural gas that Russia sells to Europe. Other goals include scaling back Ukraine's cooperation with NATO, extending basing rights for Russia's Black Sea fleet in the Ukrainian port of Sevastopol, and providing broader market access to Russian investors and businesses.

"I think that the elites here expect much more than Yanukovych could possibly give them," said Dmitry Oreshkin, an independent political analyst and scholar in Moscow, noting that the new president has been portrayed in Russian media as "a very pro-Russian politician."

In reality, though, Oreshkin said, Yanukovych is under pressure to broaden his political base, in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine, by winning over voters in western Ukraine who are wary of Russia and feel more strongly about integration with Europe.

Washington and its European allies, analysts said, have more limited expectations, in part because they have looked on with frustration for five years as Yushchenko bickered with other Orange Revolution leaders and failed to deliver on the promise of the pro-democracy uprising.

"If the West was disappointed with Ukraine for the last five years, I think now it's Russia's turn," said Samuel Charap, a scholar of the region at the D.C.-based Center for American Progress. "If you believe the Russian press, they arrived with a wish list . . . and I don't think they'll get everything."

Charap said Washington's goals will be modest in comparison. U.S. and European officials will urge Yanukovych to continue cooperation with NATO and adopt legislation authorizing joint exercises, he said. They will also push for economic measures that would unlock a suspended emergency loan from the International Monetary Fund.

But the Obama administration is also expected to continue pressing Ukraine to clean up its corrupt energy sector, which is considered a source of political instability and was singled out as a priority by Vice President Biden in his visit last summer. The business interests that backed Yanukovych, however, make significant progress on that front unlikely, analysts say.

Mikhail Gonchar, director of energy programs at the Ukraine-based Nomos Center, said a key early test will be the fate of proposed legislation to bring regulation of Ukraine's domestic gas market to European standards. Another will be whether Yanukovych can put off a Russian proposal for an international consortium to upgrade and manage Ukraine's gas pipelines -- a plan that makes little financial sense for Ukraine, Gonchar said.

He added that Yanukovych is considering Russian proposals to establish partnerships in uranium and nuclear fuel production that would push out the U.S.-based atomic giant Westinghouse. "He's under a high level of pressure from the Russian side in the energy sector," Gonchar said. "It's a serious challenge."

Irina Kobrinskaya, a scholar at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations in Moscow, said she expected "tough bargaining" on energy issues but an easing of bilateral tensions because Yanukovych will drop his predecessor's efforts to appeal to Ukrainian nationalism by rewriting history and taking "ideologically anti-Russian steps."

While the Kremlin endorsed Yanukovych five years ago and sent political operatives to help his campaign, it hedged its bets in the recently concluded race by signaling its willingness to work with Yanukovych's chief opponent, Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who lost by 3.5 percentage points.

Putin had praised her handling of a gas contract and said Russia was staying neutral because it had been let down by candidates in the past -- a remark widely read as an expression of disappointment in Yanukovych's ability to deliver for Moscow while serving as prime minister from August 2006 to the end of 2007.

How that snub will affect Yanukovych's view of Russia is complicated by the fact he still presides over a divided government, with Tymoshenko refusing his demand to resign as prime minister. To oust her, he will need to win over lawmakers in her coalition or call early parliamentary elections, and thus continue reaching out to western Ukraine.

Ivan Lozowy, president of the Institute of Statehood and Democracy in Kiev, warned that Yanukovych might also make an autocratic bid to consolidate power that triggers a confrontation with Ukrainian society. A similar authoritarian turn in the early 2000s alienated the West and strengthened Russia's influence in Ukraine.

Still, Lozowy said, Yanukovych is unlikely to embrace Russia immediately because the powerful businessmen who support him are more interested in Western markets -- and wary of Russian competition -- than they were five years ago. "Europe is what's exciting for them now," he said. "I don't expect Ukraine to be throwing itself into the Russian bear hug."

As Obama bets on Asia, regional players hedge

Image via Wikipedia

By Jim Hoagland

Friday, February 12, 2010;

NEW DELHI

Asia forms the crossroads of success or failure for Barack Obama's grandest foreign policy designs. This impression has crystallized over a year in which the president has shown himself indifferent to Europe, sentimental and somewhat conflicted about Africa, perplexed by the Middle East and largely oblivious to Latin America.

Obama's choices about China, India, Japan and Pakistan loom at least as large as the urgent challenges of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The president has outlined the need for the United States to shed burdens abroad to help repair the badly damaged American economy. That means that Obama must settle discarded U.S. burdens -- and power -- across a range of international organizations in which Asian nations are becoming increasingly influential.

The president consigned the Group of Eight industrial countries to leadership oblivion in his recent State of the Union message, omitting any mention of it while singling out the G-20 forum of developed and developed nations. This was no oversight: His administration hopes to shift climate change negotiations out of the unmanageable U.N. format that doomed the Copenhagen summit in December and place these talks in the G-20 process, according to U.S. officials.

Asia's giants, India and China, present differing and opposed models of international cooperation. A G-20 world needs at its center a dynamic U.S.-Indian relationship to help bridge that organization's divides between haves and have-nots and their different political systems. But here in New Delhi, Indian officials increasingly fear that the Obama team does not see it that way.

Indians are flattered that the only state dinner Obama hosted last year was given for Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose remarkable intelligence and gracious manner would make him a welcome guest anywhere. But they also detect an air of ambivalence blowing their way from Washington -- and are reacting by hedging against a quick U.S. pullout from Afghanistan that would bring greater U.S. reliance on China and Pakistan, at India's expense.

Romanced by the Bush administration to balance China's inexorable rise in military and economic power, India finds itself out of sync with the Obama administration on some key issues. There is no open conflict. But neither is there the air of excitement and innovation about the U.S. relationship that I found on my last trip here 18 months ago.

Since then, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has explicitly rejected balance-of-power politics as a relic of the past. Yet India, Japan and other Asian states fear that without a supportive U.S. hand on the scales, they will be swamped by China's growing military capabilities and its increasingly aggressive, and effective, diplomacy.

The somewhat fanciful notion of a G-2 directorate in which the United States and China collude to determine global economic and political direction is increasingly colliding with reality. Tensions over Taiwan, trade and Tibet make the G-2 unworkable, as recent events have again shown. But the specter lingers for Asians as well as Europeans that Obama will be tempted to try -- even though a failed G-2 would be the worst possible outcome for everyone.

"The G-2 carries the implication that the United States would leave Asia to China to run," says B.J. Panda, a rising young political star here. Adds another Indian strategist: "We have to balance the Chinese, irrespective of what the U.S. and others do."

Obama's emphasis on setting an initial date for withdrawal from Afghanistan in his Dec. 1 policy speech, even as he sent additional U.S. troops, stirred doubt here about U.S. strategic patience. So have the frequent U.S. military visits to and overblown praise for Pakistan's army leadership, despite credible evidence of high-level Pakistani involvement in cross-border terrorism directed at India.

The dominant impression from three days of informal conversations organized here by the Aspen Strategy Group with Indian officials and analysts is that Pakistan has become a second-tier problem for India, even as it increasingly preoccupies Washington. What one Indian analyst described as "Obama's nuclear alarmism" also gives Pakistan increased leverage over Washington.

India has recently moved troops away from the Pakistan frontier while increasing deployments into border areas that China is claiming in pugnacious and offensive rhetoric. In a break with its past opposition to foreign bases in the region, India has secured military transit and stationing rights at an airbase in Tajikistan. And Singh's government lavishly welcomed Japan's new prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, on a recent three-day visit that included publicity about plans for joint military maneuvers in the Indian Ocean.

These are clear signs of Indian hedging: seeking allies for worst-case scenarios while accommodating China on economic matters. The Obama administration's failure to reaffirm clearly that India's rise is in U.S. strategic interests has contributed to this hedging. That is a mistake the president should quickly correct, in the interests of his own vision of a new world order centered on the Pacific and Indian oceans.

The writer is a contributing editor to The Post.

Muscling Latin America

By Greg Grandin

This article appeared in the February 8, 2010 edition of The Nation.

January 21, 2010

LLOYD MILLER

In September Ecuador's president, Rafael Correa, delivered on an electoral promise and refused to renew Washington's decade-old, rent-free lease on an air base outside the Pacific coast town of Manta, which for the past ten years has served as the Pentagon's main South American outpost. The eviction was a serious effort to fulfill the call of Ecuador's new Constitution to promote "universal disarmament" and oppose the "imposition" of military bases of "some states in the territory of others." It was also one of the most important victories for the global demilitarization movement, loosely organized around the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases, since protests forced the US Navy to withdraw from Vieques, Puerto Rico, in 2003. Correa, though, couldn't resist an easy joke. "We'll renew the lease," he quipped, "if the US lets us set up a base in Miami."

Funny. Then Washington answered with a show of force: take away one, we'll grab seven. In late October the United States and Colombia signed an agreement granting the Pentagon use of seven military bases, along with an unlimited number of as yet unspecified "facilities and locations." They add to Washington's already considerable military presence in Colombia, as well as in Central America and the Caribbean.

Responding to criticism from South America on the Colombian deal, the White House insists it merely formalizes existing military cooperation between the two countries under Plan Colombia and will not increase the offensive capabilities of the US Southern Command (Southcom). The Pentagon says otherwise, writing in its 2009 budget request that it needed funds to upgrade one of the bases to conduct "full spectrum operations throughout South America" to counter, among other threats, "anti-U.S. governments" and to "expand expeditionary warfare capability." That ominous language, since scrubbed from the budget document, might be a case of hyping the threat to justify spending during austere times. But the Obama administration's decision to go forward with the bases does accelerate a dangerous trend in US hemispheric policy.

In recent years, Washington has experienced a fast erosion of its influence in South America, driven by the rise of Brazil, the region's left turn, the growing influence of China and Venezuela's use of oil revenue to promote a multipolar diplomacy. Broad social movements have challenged efforts by US- and Canadian-based companies to expand extractive industries like mining, biofuels, petroleum and logging. Last year in Peru, massive indigenous protests forced the repeal of laws aimed at opening large swaths of the Amazon to foreign timber, mining and oil corporations, and throughout the region similar activism continues to place Latin America in the vanguard of the anti-corporate and anti-militarist global democracy movement.

Such challenges to US authority have led the Council on Foreign Relations to pronounce the Monroe Doctrine "obsolete." But that doctrine, which for nearly two centuries has been used to justify intervention from Patagonia to the Rio Grande, has not expired so much as slimmed down, with Barack Obama's administration disappointing potential regional allies by continuing to promote a volatile mix of militarism and free-trade orthodoxy in a corridor running from Mexico to Colombia.

The anchor of this condensed Monroe Doctrine is Plan Colombia. Heading into the eleventh year of what was planned to phase out after five, Washington's multibillion-dollar military aid package has failed to stem the flow of illegal narcotics into the United States. More Andean coca was synthesized into cocaine in 2008 than in 1998, and the drug's retail price is significantly lower today, adjusted for inflation, than it was a decade ago.

But Plan Colombia is not really about drugs; it is the Latin American edition of GCOIN, or Global Counterinsurgency, the current term used by strategists to downplay the religious and ideological associations of George W. Bush's bungled "global war on terror" and focus on a more modest program of extending state rule over "lawless" or "ungoverned spaces," in GCOIN parlance.

Starting around 2006, with the occupation of Iraq going badly, Plan Colombia became the counterinsurgent marquee, celebrated by strategists as a successful application of the "clear, hold and build" sequence favored by theorists like Gen. David Petraeus. Its lessons have been incorporated into the curriculums of many US military colleges and cited by the Joint Chiefs of Staff as a model for Afghanistan. Not only did the Colombian military, with support from Washington, weaken the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), Latin America's oldest and strongest insurgency, but according to the Council on Foreign Relations, it secured a state presence in "many regions previously controlled by illegal armed groups, reestablishing elected governments, building and rebuilding public infrastructure, and affirming the rule of law." Plan Colombia, in other words, offered not just a road map to success but success itself. "Colombia is what Iraq should eventually look like," wrote Atlantic contributor Robert Kaplan, "in our best dreams."

Traditionally in most counterinsurgencies, the "clear" stage entails a plausibly deniable reliance on death-squad terror--think Operation Phoenix in Vietnam or the Mano Blanca in El Salvador. The Bush administration was in office by the time Plan Colombia became fully operational, and according to the Washington Post's Scott Wilson, it condoned the activities of right-wing paramilitaries, loosely organized as the United Self-Defense Forces, or AUC in Spanish. "The argument at the time, always made privately," Wilson writes, "was that the paramilitaries"--responsible for most of Colombia's political murders--"provided the force that the army did not yet have." This was followed by the "hold" phase, a massive paramilitary land grab. Fraud and force--"sell, or your widow will," goes many an opening bid--combined with indiscriminate fumigation, which poisoned farmlands, to turn millions of peasants into refugees. Paramilitaries, along with their narcotraficante allies, now control about 10 million acres, roughly half of the country's most fertile land.

After parts of the countryside had been pacified, it was time to "build" the state. Technically, the United States considers the AUC to be a terrorist organization, part of the narcoterrorist triptych, along with FARC and the narcos, that Southcom is pledged to fight. But Plan Colombia did not so much entail an assault on the paras--aside from the most recalcitrant and expendable--as create a venue through which, by defining public policy as perpetual war, they could become the state itself. Under the smokescreen of a government-brokered amnesty, condemned by national and international human rights groups for institutionalizing impunity, paras have taken control of hundreds of municipal governments, establishing what Colombian social scientist León Valencia calls "true local dictatorships," consolidating their property seizures and deepening their ties to narcos, landed elites and politicians. The country's sprawling intelligence apparatus is infiltrated by this death squad/narco combine, as is its judiciary and Congress, where more than forty deputies from the governing party are under investigation for ties to the AUC.

Plan Colombia, in other words, has financed the opposite of what is taking place in neighboring Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela, where progressive movements are fitfully trying to "refound" their societies along more inclusive lines. In place of the left's "participatory democracy," Colombian President Álvaro Uribe offers "democratic security," a social compact whereby those who submit to the new order are promised safe, even yuppified cities and secure highways, while oppositional civil society suffers intimidation and murder. Colombia remains the hands-down worst repressor in Latin America. More than 500 trade unionists have been executed since Uribe took office. In recent years 195 teachers have been assassinated, and not one arrest has been made for the killings. And the military stands accused of murdering more than 2,000 civilians and then dressing their bodies in guerrilla uniforms in order to prove progress against the FARC.

It also seems that many right-wing warriors are not cut out for the quiet life offered by the Paz Uribista. The Bogotá-based think tank Nuevo Arco Iris reports mini civil wars breaking out among "heirs of the AUC" for control of local spoils. Yet Plan Colombia continues to be hailed. Flying home from a recent Bogotá-hosted GCOIN conference, the former head of Southcom wrote on his blog that Colombia is a "must see" tourist spot, having "come a long, long way in controlling a deep-seated insurgency just over two hours flight from Miami--and we could learn a great deal from their success."

Seen in light of his escalation in Afghanistan, Obama's support for the Colombian base deal endorses the kind of elastic threat assessment that has turned the "long war" against radical Islam into a wide war where ultimate victory will be a world absent of crime--"counterinsurgen-
cies without end," as Andrew Bacevich recently put it.

Shortly after the fall of Baghdad, Washington tried to conscript all of Latin America in the fight. In October 2003 it pushed the Organization of American States to include corruption, undocumented migration, money laundering, natural and man-made disasters, AIDS, environmental degradation, poverty and computer hacking alongside terrorism and drugs as security threats. In 2004 an Army War College strategist proposed "exporting Plan Colombia" to all of Latin America, which Donald Rumsfeld tried to do later that year at a regional defense ministers meeting in Ecuador. He was rebuffed; countries like Chile and Brazil refuse to subordinate their militaries, as they did during the cold war, to US command.

So the United States retrenched, setting about to fight the wide war in a narrower place, creating a security corridor running from Colombia through Central America to Mexico. With a hodgepodge of treaties and projects, such as the International Law Enforcement Academy and the Merida Initiative, Obama is continuing the policies of his predecessors, spending millions to integrate the region's military, policy, intelligence and even, through Patriot Act-like legislation, judicial systems. This is best thought of as an effort to enlarge the radius of Plan Colombia to create a unified, supra-national counterinsurgent infrastructure. Since there is "fusion" among Latin American terrorists and criminals, goes a typical argument in a recent issue of the Pentagon's Joint Force Quarterly, "countering the threat will require fusion on our part."

At the same time, schemes like the Mesoamerican Integration and Development Project are using World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank financing to synchronize the highway, communication and energy networks of Mexico, Central America and Colombia, blending the North American and Central American free-trade treaties and, eventually, the pending Colombian Free Trade Agreement into a seamless whole. Thomas Shannon, Bush's top envoy to Latin America and Obama's ambassador to Brazil, called these initiatives "armoring NAFTA."

"Fusion" is a good word for this integration, since the melding of neoliberal economics and counterinsurgent diplomacy is explosive. One effect of Plan Colombia has been to diversify the violence and corruption endemic to the cocaine trade, with Central American and Mexican cartels and military factions taking over export of the drug to the United States. This cycle of violence is reinforced by the rapid spread of mining, hydroelectric, biofuel and petroleum operations, which wreak havoc on local ecosystems, poisoning land and water, and by the opening of national markets to US agroindustry, which destroys local economies. The ensuing displacement either creates the assorted criminal threats the wide war is waged to counter or provokes protest, which is dealt with by the avengers the wide war empowers.

Throughout Latin America, a new generation of community activists continues to advance the global democracy movement that was largely derailed in the United States by 9/11. They provide important leadership to US environmental, indigenous, religious and human rights organizations, working to develop a comprehensive and sustainable social-justice agenda. But in the Mexico-Colombia corridor, activists are confronting what might be called bio-paramilitarism, a revival of the old anticommunist death-squad/planter alliance, energized by the current intensification of extractive and agricultural industries. In Colombia, Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities fighting paras who have seized land to cultivate African palm for ethanol production have been evicted by mercenaries and the military [see Teo Ballvé, "The Dark Side of Plan Colombia," June 15, 2009]. From Panama to Mexico, rural protesters are likewise targeted. In the Salvadoran department of Cabañas, for instance, death squads have executed four leaders--three in December--who opposed the Vancouver-based Pacific Rim Mining Company's efforts to dig a gold mine in their community.

And in Honduras, human rights organizations say palm planters have recruited forty members of Colombia's AUC as private security following the June overthrow of President Manuel Zelaya. That coup was at least partly driven by Zelaya's alliance with liberation-theologian priests and other environmental activists protesting mining and biofuel-induced deforestation. Just a month before his overthrow, Zelaya--in response to an investigation that charged Goldcorp, another Vancouver-based company, with contaminating Honduras's Siria Valley--introduced a law that would have required community approval before new mining concessions were granted; it also banned open-pit mines and the use of cyanide and mercury. That legislation died with his ouster. Zelaya also tried to break the dependent relationship whereby the region exports oil to US refineries only to buy back gasoline and diesel at monopolistic prices; he joined Petrocaribe--the alliance that provides cheap Venezuelan oil to member countries--and signed a competitive contract with Conoco Phillips. This move earned him the ire of Exxon and Chevron, which dominate Central America's fuel market. Since the controversial November 29 presidential elections, Honduras has largely fallen off the media's radar, even as the pace of repression has accelerated. Since the State Department's recognition of that vote, about ten opposition leaders have been executed--roughly half of the number killed in the previous five months.

It didn't have to be this way. Latin America does not present a serious military danger. No country is trying to acquire a nuclear weapon or cut off access to vital resources. Venezuela continues to sell oil to the United States. Obama is popular in Latin America, and most governments, including those on the left, would have welcomed a demilitarized diplomacy that downplays terrorism and prioritizes reducing poverty and inequality--exactly the kind of "new multilateralism" Obama called for in his presidential campaign.

Yet because Latin America presents no real threat, there is no incentive to confront entrenched interests that oppose a modernization of hemispheric relations. "Obama," said a top-level Argentine diplomat despairingly, "has decided that Latin America isn't worth it. He gave it to the right."

The White House could have worked with the Organization of American States to restore democracy in Honduras. Instead, after months of mixed signals, Obama capitulated to Senate Republicans and endorsed a murderous regime. Washington could try to advance a new hemispheric economic policy, balancing Latin American calls for equity and development with corporate profits. But the Democratic Party remains Wall Street's party, and shortly after taking office Obama abandoned his pledge to renegotiate NAFTA. With Washington's blessing the IMF continues to push Latin American countries to liberalize their economies. In December Arturo Valenzuela, Obama's assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere, caused a scandal in Argentina when he urged the country to return to the investment climate of 1996--which would be something like Buenos Aires calling on the United States to reinflate the recent Greenspan bubble.

The Obama administration could reconsider Plan Colombia and the Pentagon's base agreement. But that would mean rethinking a longer, multi-decade, bipartisan, trillion-dollars-and-counting "war on drugs," and Obama has other wars to extricate himself from--or not, as the case may be.

Unable or unwilling to make concessions on these and other issues important to Latin America--normalizing relations with Cuba, for instance, or advancing immigration reform--the White House is adopting an increasingly antagonistic posture. Hillary Clinton, following a visit to Brazil by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, warned Latin Americans to "think twice" about "the consequences" of engagement with Iran. Bolivia denounced the comments as a threat, Brazil canceled a scheduled meeting between its foreign minister and Valenzuela, and even Argentina, no friend of Iran, grew irritated. As the Argentine diplomat quoted above told me, "The Obama administration would never talk to European countries like that."

Insiders report that high-level State Department officials are furious at Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who in recent months has been as steadfast as Venezuela's Hugo Chávez in opposing Washington's ongoing militarism, particularly the White House's attempt to legitimize the Honduran coup. Having successfully thwarted a similar destabilization campaign against Bolivian president Evo Morales in 2008, Brazil, according to Lula's top foreign-policy adviser, Marco Aurélio Garcia, is worried that Obama's Honduras policy is "introducing the 'theory of the preventive coup' in Latin America"--by which Garcia means an extension of Bush's preventive war doctrine.

In a region that has not seen a major interstate war for more than seventy years, Brazil is concerned that the Pentagon's Colombian base deal is escalating tensions between Colombia and Venezuela. The US media have focused on Chávez's warning that the "winds of war" were blowing through the region, but Brazil's foreign minister, Celso Amorim, places blame for the crisis squarely on Washington. Chávez, Amorim said, "had backed away from that statement. To talk about war--a word which should never be uttered--is one thing. Another is the practical and objective issues of the Colombian bases.... If Iran or Russia were to establish a base in Venezuela, that would also worry us."

There are also indications that the White House is hoping an upcoming round of presidential elections in South America will restore pliable governments. On a recent trip to Buenos Aires, for instance, Valenzuela met with a number of extreme right-wing politicians but not with moderate opposition leaders, drawing criticism from center-left President Cristina Fernández's government. In January a right-wing billionaire, Sebastián Piñera, was elected president of Chile. And if Lula's Workers Party loses Brazil's October presidential vote, as polls indicate is a possibility, the Andean left will be increasingly isolated, caught between the Colombia-Mexico security corridor to the north and administrations more willing to accommodate Washington's interests to the south. Twenty-first-century containment for twenty-first-century socialism. Fidel Castro, normally an optimist, has recently speculated that before Obama finishes his presidency, "there will be six to eight rightist governments in Latin America."

Until that happens, the United States is left with a rump Monroe Doctrine and an increasingly threatening stance toward a region it used to call its own.

About Greg Grandin

Greg Grandin teaches at New York University and is the author of Empire's Workshop and, most recently, of Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, a 2009 National Book Award finalist

Imposing Middle East Peace

By Henry Siegman

This article appeared in the January 25, 2010 edition of The Nation.

January 7, 2010

This article is based on a longer study commissioned by the Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre in Oslo.

PETER O. ZIERLEIN

Israel's relentless drive to establish "facts on the ground" in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that "achievement," one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from "the only democracy in the Middle East" to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.

The inevitability of such a transformation has been held out not by "Israel bashers" but by the country's own leaders. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon referred to that danger, as did Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who warned that Israel could not escape turning into an apartheid state if it did not relinquish "almost all the territories, if not all," including the Arab parts of East Jerusalem.

Olmert ridiculed Israeli defense strategists who, he said, had learned nothing from past experiences and were stuck in the mindset of the 1948 war of independence. "With them, it is all about tanks and land and controlling territories and controlled territories and this hilltop and that hilltop," he said. "All these things are worthless. Who thinks seriously that if we sit on another hilltop, on another hundred meters, that this is what will make the difference for the State of Israel's basic security?"

It is now widely recognized in most Israeli circles--although denied by Israel's government--that the settlements have become so widespread and so deeply implanted in the West Bank as to rule out the possibility of their removal (except for a few isolated and sparsely populated ones) by this or any future Israeli government unless compelled to do so by international intervention, an eventuality until now considered entirely unlikely.

It is not only the settlements' proliferation and size that have made their dismantlement impossible. Equally decisive have been the influence of Israel's settler-security-industrial complex, which conceived and implemented this policy; the recent disappearance of a viable pro-peace political party in Israel; and the infiltration by settlers and their supporters in the religious-national camp into key leadership positions in Israel's security and military establishments.

Olmert was mistaken in one respect, for he said Israel would turn into an apartheid state when the Arab population in Greater Israel outnumbers the Jewish population. But the relative size of the populations is not the decisive factor in such a transition. Rather, the turning point comes when a state denies national self-determination to a part of its population--even one that is in the minority--to which it has also denied the rights of citizenship.

When a state's denial of the individual and national rights of a large part of its population becomes permanent, it ceases to be a democracy. When the reason for that double disenfranchisement is that population's ethnic and religious identity, the state is practicing a form of apartheid, or racism, not much different from the one that characterized South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The democratic dispensation that Israel provides for its mostly Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. By definition, democracy reserved for privileged citizens--while all others are kept behind checkpoints, barbed-wire fences and separation walls commanded by the Israeli army--is not democracy but its opposite.

The Jewish settlements and their supporting infrastructure, which span the West Bank from east to west and north to south, are not a wild growth, like weeds in a garden. They have been carefully planned, financed and protected by successive Israeli governments and Israel's military. Their purpose has been to deny the Palestinian people independence and statehood--or to put it more precisely, to retain Israeli control of Palestine "from the river to the sea," an objective that precludes the existence of a viable and sovereign Palestinian state east of Israel's pre-1967 border.

A vivid recollection from the time I headed the American Jewish Congress is a helicopter trip over the West Bank on which I was taken by Ariel Sharon. With large, worn maps in hand, he pointed out to me strategic locations of present and future settlements on east-west and north-south axes that, Sharon assured me, would rule out a future Palestinian state.

Just one year after the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, then defense minister, described Israel's plan for the future of the territories as "the current reality." "The plan is being implemented in actual fact," he said. "What exists today must remain as a permanent arrangement in the West Bank." Ten years later, at a conference in Tel Aviv whose theme was finding a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, Dayan said: "The question is not, What is the solution? but, How do we live without a solution?"

Prime Minister Netanyahu's conditions for Palestinian statehood would leave under Israel's control Palestine's international borders and airspace, as well as the entire Jordan Valley; would leave most of the settlers in place; and would fragment the contiguity of the territory remaining for such a state. His conditions would also deny Palestinians even those parts of East Jerusalem that Israel unilaterally annexed to the city immediately following the 1967 war--land that had never been part of Jerusalem before the war. In other words, Netanyahu's conditions for Palestinian statehood would meet Dayan's goal of leaving Israel's de facto occupation in place.

From Dayan's prescription for the permanence of the status quo to Netanyahu's prescription for a two-state solution, Israel has lived "without a solution," not because of uncertainty or neglect but as a matter of deliberate policy, clandestinely driving settlement expansion to the point of irreversibility while pretending to search for "a Palestinian partner for peace."

Sooner or later the White House, Congress and the American public--not to speak of a Jewish establishment that is largely out of touch with the younger Jewish generation's changing perceptions of Israel's behavior--will have to face the fact that America's "special relationship" with Israel is sustaining a colonial enterprise.

President Barack Obama's capitulation to Netanyahu on the settlement freeze was widely seen as the collapse of the latest hope for achievement of a two-state agreement. It thoroughly discredited the notion that Palestinian moderation is the path to statehood, and therefore also discredited Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, moderation's leading Palestinian advocate, who announced his intention not to run in the coming presidential elections.

Netanyahu's "limited" freeze was described by the Obama administration as "unprecedented," even though the exceptions to it--3,000 housing units whose foundations had supposedly already been laid, public buildings and unlimited construction in East Jerusalem--brought total construction to where it would have been without a freeze. Indeed, Netanyahu assured the settler leadership and his cabinet that construction will resume after the ten-month freeze--according to minister Benny Begin, at a rate "faster and more than before"--even if Abbas agrees to return to talks. In fact, the Israeli press has reported that the freeze notwithstanding, new construction in the settlements is "booming." None of this has elicited the Obama administration's public rebuke, much less the kinds of sanctions imposed on Palestinians when they violate agreements.

But what is widely believed to have been the final blow to a two-state solution may in fact turn out to be the necessary condition for its eventual achievement. That condition is abandonment of the utterly wrongheaded idea that a Palestinian state can arise without forceful outside intervention. The international community has shown signs of exasperation with Israel's deceptions and stonewalling, and also with Washington's failure to demonstrate that there are consequences not only for Palestinian violations of agreements but for Israeli ones as well. The last thing many in the international community want is a resumption of predictably meaningless negotiations between Netanyahu and Abbas. Instead, they are focusing on forceful third-party intervention, a concept that is no longer taboo.

Ironically, it is Netanyahu who now insists on the resumption of peace talks. For him, a prolonged breakdown of talks risks exposing the irreversibility of the settlements, and therefore the loss of Israel's democratic character, and legitimizing outside intervention as the only alternative to an unstable and dangerous status quo. While the Obama administration may be reluctant to support such initiatives, it may no longer wish to block them.

These are not fanciful fears. Israeli chiefs of military intelligence, the Shin Bet and other defense officials told Netanyahu's security cabinet on December 9 that the stalled peace process has led to a dangerous vacuum "into which a number of different states are putting their own initiatives, none of which are in Israel's favor." They stressed that "the fact that the US has also reached a dead-end in its efforts only worsens the problem."

If these fears are realized and the international community abandons a moribund peace process in favor of determined third-party initiatives, a two-state outcome may yet be possible. A recent proposal by the Swedish presidency of the European Union is perhaps the first indication of the international community's determination to react more meaningfully to Netanyahu's intransigence. The proposal, adopted by the EU's foreign ministers on December 8, reaffirmed an earlier declaration of the European Council that the EU would not recognize unilateral Israeli changes in the pre-1967 borders. The resolution also opposes Israeli measures to deny a prospective Palestinian state any presence in Jerusalem. The statement's endorsement of PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's two-year institution-building initiative suggests a future willingness to act favorably on a Palestinian declaration of statehood following the initiative's projected completion. In her first pronouncement on the Israel-Palestine conflict as the EU's new high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Baroness Catherine Ashton declared, "We cannot and nor, I doubt, can the region tolerate another round of fruitless negotiations."

An imposed solution has risks, but these do not begin to compare with the risks of the conflict's unchecked continuation. Furthermore, since the adversaries are not being asked to accept anything they have not already committed themselves to in formal accords, the international community is not imposing its own ideas but insisting the parties live up to existing obligations. That kind of intervention, or "imposition," is hardly unprecedented; it is the daily fare of international diplomacy. It defines America's relations with allies and unfriendly countries alike.

It would not take extraordinary audacity for Obama to reaffirm the official position of every previous US administration--including that of George W. Bush--that no matter how desirable or necessary certain changes in the pre-1967 status may seem, they cannot be made unilaterally. Even Bush, celebrated in Israel as "the best American president Israel ever had," stated categorically that this inviolable principle applies even to the settlement blocs that Israel insists it will annex. Speaking of these blocs at a May 2005 press conference, Bush affirmed that "changes to the 1949 armistice lines must be mutually agreed to," a qualification largely ignored by Israeli governments (and by Bush himself). The next year Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was even more explicit. She stated that "the president did say that at the time of final status, it will be necessary to take into account new realities on the ground that have changed since 1967, but under no circumstances...should anyone try and do that in a pre-emptive or predetermined way, because these are issues for negotiation at final status."

Of course, Obama should leave no doubt that it is inconceivable for the United States not to be fully responsive to Israel's genuine security needs, no matter how displeased it may be with a particular Israeli government's policies. But he must also leave no doubt that it is equally inconceivable he would abandon America's core values or compromise its strategic interests to keep Netanyahu's government in power, particularly when support for this government means supporting a regime that would permanently disenfranchise and dispossess the Palestinian people.

In short, Middle East peacemaking efforts will continue to fail, and the possibility of a two-state solution will disappear, if US policy continues to ignore developments on the ground in the occupied territories and within Israel, which now can be reversed only through outside intervention. President Obama is uniquely positioned to help Israel reclaim Jewish and democratic ideals on which the state was founded--if he does not continue "politics as usual." But was it not his promise to reject just such a politics that swept Obama into the presidency and captured the amazement and respect of the entire world?

About Henry Siegman

Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.

Bill Clinton's World

The former president tells Foreign Policy what to read, who to watch, and why there really is a chance of Middle East peace in 2010.

DECEMBER 2009

If you wanted to know how Bill Clinton thought when he was president, you ignored the scripted set-piece speeches and instead went to listen to him talk off the cuff at an evening fundraiser. At night, he would ruminate extemporaneously on race, religion, science, and the nature of the human soul. His mind would roam widely and yet pull together disparate themes into a coherent narrative as no other politician of his generation. Today, the place to hear him think out loud is at the annual Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York, where he gathers hundreds of heads of state, business moguls, nonprofit executives, academics, and even Hollywood stars not just to talk about the world's problems but to do something about them.

Peter Baker, White House correspondent for the New York Times, and Susan Glasser, Foreign Policy's executive editor, caught up with Clinton there for an expansive conversation about identity, virtue, and riding the steppes with Genghis Khan. Below, the edited excerpts.

Foreign Policy: Last year we did not expect the economy to collapse quite the way it did. This year we did not think the people of Iran would take to the streets after the election. Looking ahead to 2010, what are the strategic surprises we ought to be looking for?

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The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers

They had the big ideas that shaped our world in 2009.

Bill Clinton: We should look around the world and see if there are any places where the political analogue of the financial crisis could occur. That is, what we know about all systems subject to a combination of stress and dynamism is that there are fractures and vulnerabilities that are not immediately apparent because people expect tomorrow to be a replica of yesterday and today. I always say, in a highly dynamic environment, it's obvious you should always be working for the best and preparing for the worst. That's easy to say, but how do you do that? And what are the warning signs? For example, could something go wrong in Nigeria as a result of a combination of economic and political conflict?

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Hear Audio

Bill Clinton on what to expect in 2010 and the world leaders he admires most.

On the flip side, which other places in the world could still surprise us by doing something really smart and good? I still think there is some chance the Israelis and the Hamas government and the Palestinian government could make a deal. Because I think that the long-term trend lines are bad for both sides that have the capacity to make a deal. Right now, Hamas is kind of discredited after the Gaza operation, and yet [the Palestinian Authority] is clearly increasing [its] capacity. They are in good shape right now, but if they are not able to deliver sustained economic and political advances, that's not good for them. The long-term trends for the Israelis are even more stark, because they will soon enough not be a majority. Then they will have to decide at that point whether they will continue to be a democracy and no longer be a Jewish state, or continue to be a Jewish state and no longer be a democracy. That's the great spur.

The other thing that has not been sufficiently appreciated is the inevitable arc of technological capacity that applies to military weaponry, like it does to pcs and video games and everything else. I know that these rockets drove the Israelis nuts, and I didn't blame them for being angry and frustrated -- it was maddening. But let's be candid: They were not very accurate. So it's only a question of time until they are de facto outfitted with GPS positioning systems. And when that happens and the casualty rates start to really mount, will that make it more difficult for the Palestinians to make peace instead of less? Because they will be even more pressed by the radical groups saying, "No, no, look, look, we are making eight out of 10 hits. Let's stay at this." I think one of the surprising things that might happen this year [2010] is you might get a substantial agreement. Nobody believes this will happen, and it probably won't, because of the political complexity of the Israeli government. But all I can tell you is, I spent a lot of time when I was president trying to make a distinction between the headlines and the trend lines. If there was ever a place where studying the trend lines would lead you to conclude that sooner is better than later for deal-making, it would be there.

FP: Who do you think is the smartest, most penetrating thinker you know (maybe other than your own family)? Are there people who should be on our list?

BC: Paul Krugman -- I don't always agree with him, but he is unfailingly good. David Brooks has been very good. Tom Friedman is our most gifted journalist at actually looking at what is happening in the world and figuring out its relevance to tomorrow and figuring out a clever way to say it that sticks in your mind-like "real men raise the gas tax." You know what I mean?

Malcolm Gladwell has become quite important. The Tipping Point was a very good observational book about what happened and how change occurred. But I think his last book, Outliers, is even more important for understanding how we all develop and for making the case that even for people we view as geniuses, life is more of a relay race than a one-night stand by a one-man band or a one-woman band. I thought it was a truly exceptional book.

Robert Wright, the guy who wrote The Evolution of God, The Moral Animal, and the book he wrote in the middle, which had a huge effect on me as the president, Nonzero. This book about God is just basically an extension of his argument in Nonzero, which is essentially that the world is growing together, not apart. And as you have wider and wider circles of interconnection -- that is, wider geographically, encompassing more people, and wider in bandwidth, encompassing more subject areas -- you begin with conflict and you end with some resolution, some merging. So he says there is not an inherent conflict between science and God, and he explains why. Wright says, no, no, no, the religious and scientific can mix in accommodation. In Nonzero he argues that ever since people came out of caves and formed clans, people have been bumping up against each other, requiring expansion of identity, subconscious identity. You move from conflict to cooperation in some form or fashion. And so far the struggle between conflict and cooperation has come out before humanity triggered its capacity for self-destruction. So that whole Nonzero idea has now been translated into his argument on God, and I think he is a very important guy.

Another person I think has written some very interesting books on the ultimate imperative of cooperation in the human and other species is Matt Ridley. The one that had a pretty good influence on me is The Origins of Virtue. And by virtue he doesn't mean, I never take a drink, even on Saturday night. He means civic virtue. How do we treat one another in ways that are constructive, and work together? I think that these are some of the many people. They are thinking about how the world works and how it might be at the same time. At this moment in history, we need people who have a unique understanding of both how the world works and how it might be better, might be more harmonious.

FP: The Cold War lasted about 40 years. Do you see this current struggle we are having with extremism, whatever you want to call it, the war on terror, do you see that lasting as long, or do you see that changing in some way over the next decade?

BC: How long it lasts depends on whether the places out of which really big, effective terrorist groups are operating remain essentially stateless. The territories in Pakistan and the border area with Afghanistan are not part of a centralized state. Robert Kaplan has written tons of books about what's going on in the modern world, and if you read The Ends of the Earth and these books that say we are de facto, no matter what the laws say, becoming nations of mega-city-states full of really poor, angry, uneducated, and highly vulnerable people, all over the world, we would have a lot of slumdog millionaires. If that's right, then terror -- meaning killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority and go beyond national borders -- could be around for a very long time. On the other hand, terrorism needs both anxiety and opportunity to flourish. So one of the things that the United States and others ought to be doing is trying to help the nation-state adjust to the realities of the 21st century and then succeed.

Resolving energy, ironically, could play a major role in reducing the appeal of terror because if we change the way we produce and consume energy all over the world, it would create opportunities for education, for entrepreneurs, for work, for involving women and girls in positive economic encounters, at every level of national income from the richest states to the poorest. Therefore, I think all of the creative energy thinkers need to be brought to bear on this because the world as it integrates has to have a source of new economic activity. In the poorer places just getting agriculture up to speed and putting all the kids in school, there is enough to keep going for a few years. But this energy thing could give us a decade of exhilarating self-discovery. Really smart energy thinkers, Amory Lovins, Paul Hawken, people who have been doing this for 30 years -- what they've always known, before this ever became a serious debate, is, you couldn't sell a clean green future unless you could prove it was good economics.

You should look at big thinkers on the question of identity. Samuel Huntington wrote the famous book The Clash of Civilizations. But we need an effort to explain and, if possible merge, theories of identity that are biological, psychological, social, and political, because it's obvious that in an age of interdependence, you want Wright's thesis, you want there to be more nonzero subsolutions. You want this thing to happen; you hope he is right that you can reconcile religion and science; you hope the president's speech in Cairo turns out to be right, that it's a walk in the park to reconcile religious differences. I gave a bunch of speeches on this after 9/11, saying that our religious and political differences could be reconciled. I think President Obama's word was that we had to respect doubt.

What I always said was that if you are religious it meant by definition there was such a thing as Truth, capital T. So to make it work in a world full of differences, you had to recognize that there was a big distinction between the existence of Truth, capital T, and the ability of any one human being to understand it completely and to translate it into political actions that were 100 percent consistent with it. That's what you had to do; all you had to do was accept human frailty. You can't tell people of faith to be relative about their faith. They believe there is a truth. But the question of whether they can know it and turn it into a political program is a very, very different thing. That is an act of arrogance.

I was influenced by Ken Wilber's book A Theory of Everything, because he tries to point out that throughout history we get connected to people who are different from us before our heads get around the implications of that, and then as soon as they do there is a parallel level of interconnectivity and we have to get our heads around that. All of the public intellectuals in the world need to be thinking quite a bit about this question of identity and need to recognize that in view of the findings of the human genome about the similarities of all of us, even the husband and wife who at the minimum are 99.5 percent the same -- it's pretty spooky, isn't it?

FP: Lightning round: What are the three books you've been reading recently?

BC: I am reading H.W. Brands's book on FDR. I am reading the new biography of Gabriel García Márquez, and I just finished Joshua Cooper Ramo's book, which I thought was actually quite good, but I think he should write another one and think about the practical applications of the strategic insights and the theoretical insights.

FP: Top three leaders that people should pay attention to, other than Obama.

BC: The prime minister of Australia, Kevin Michael Rudd -- he is really smart. He has a thirst to know and figure out how to do things.

I think people should study what Paul Kagame did in Rwanda. It is the only country in the world that has more women than men in Parliament (obviously part of the demographic is from the genocide). It may not be perfect, but Rwanda has the greatest capacity of any developing country I have seen to accept outside help and make use of it. It's hard to accept help. They've done that. And how in God's name does he get every adult in the country to spend one Saturday every month cleaning the streets? And what has the psychological impact of that been? The identity impact? The president says it's not embarrassing, it's not menial work, it's a way of expressing your loyalty to and your pride in your country. How do you change your attitudes about something that you think you know what it means? How did he pull that off?

There are lots of fascinating leaders in Latin America worth studying. But I think it's worth looking at Colombia. How has Medellín been given back to the people of Colombia? We all know President Uribe has faced criticism in the U.S., but how did Medellín go from being the drug capital of the world, one of the most dangerous places on Earth, to the host city of the 50th anniversary of the Inter-American Development Bank? I would look at that.

I would look at another guy, José Ramos-Horta, the president of the first country in the 21st century, East Timor. Is it too small to be a nation? Can you get too small? Can your courageous fight for independence and freedom lead you to an economic unit that is not going to have a population or a geographic base big enough to take care of your folks? How are the Kosovars going to avoid that?

FP: Is there any country you haven't been to yet that you want to go to?

BC: I want to go to Mongolia and ride a horse across the steppes and pretend I am in Genghis Khan's horde -- but I'm not hurting anybody! I want to go to Antarctica. There are places where I have been where I have only been working. I would like to take Hillary to climb Kilimanjaro, while there is still snow up there.

VICTORIA WILL

Frictions between nations rise over struggle of getting aid to Haiti

Image by audra k. via Flickr

By Mary Beth Sheridan and Michael E. Ruane
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 17, 2010; A13

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI -- Food and water trickled to the stricken people of Haiti on Saturday, as a global aid operation struggled with frictions and confusion over who was in charge to bring relief to this crumbled, earthquake-ravaged city.

Four days after the 7.0-magnitude quake brought much of Port-au-Prince down on its residents Tuesday, a few signs of national survival flickered, even as some Haitians began an exodus out of the devastated capital and into the countryside.

But there were growing tensions over which country's planes were allowed to land here first, with each nation insisting its aid flight was a priority, according to an official involved in the relief operation.

France, Brazil and Italy were said to be upset, and the Red Cross said one of its planes was diverted to Santo Domingo, the capital of neighboring Dominican Republic.

The French government became so annoyed when a plane with an emergency field hospital was turned back Friday that foreign minister Bernard Kouchner lodged a protest with the State Department, according to the French ambassador to Haiti, Didier Le Bret.

Image by audra k. via Flickr

Le Bret said that the Port-au-Prince airport has become "not an airport for the international community. It is an annex of Washington."

"We were told it was an extreme emergency, there was a need for a field hospital," the ambassador said. "We might be able to make a difference and save lives."

At the same time, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton flew in for a visit with Haitian President Rene Preval, as the Haitian government worked to maintain a presence amid the ruins of Port-au-Prince.

The nearly collapsed Haitian government is at least nominally in charge of the relief effort, even though it has ceded air traffic control at the airport to the U.S. military.

Image by M_Eriksson via Flickr

With their offices heavily damaged, the president and his cabinet are now working out of a cramped, low-slung Haitian judicial police headquarters near the airport. International aid workers consider the building so fragile -- it has small cracks from the earthquake -- that they hold meetings with the officials on plastic chairs on the patio outside.

Adding to the confusion, the top two leaders of the U.N. mission in Haiti, who normally would coordinate an aid response, are presumed dead. They disappeared after the quake destroyed the building in which they were meeting.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Clinton, while en route to Haiti, took note of the layers of authority in Haiti, which include the Brazilian-led U.N. security force.

"We are working to back them up, but not to supplant them," she said. "They have been there for years."

Clinton said the Haitian government has given the United States and others some leeway to meet emergency needs. The Haitian "government says the highest priority is to save lives," she said.

Haiti's government has reportedly recovered 20,000 bodies from the rubble. Estimates are that the death toll could reach 50,000 to 100,000.

Image by DFID - UK Department for International Development via Flickr

Despite the friction at the airport, conditions on the ground there Saturday seemed to be improving.

U.S. soldiers had taken over security at the entrance. What had been a mob of screaming Haitians pressing against the doors of the facility, hoping to catch flights abroad, was now an orderly line in roped-off rows.

Large pallets piled chest-high with orange juice, bottled water, canned chickpeas, military-style prepared meals, diapers, water, medicine and blankets appeared along the runway. Gradually, they were loaded on helicopters and the limited supply of trucks. A giant plane carrying USAID prepared meals sat on the runway.

SH-60 Seahawk helicopters from the USS Carl Vinson clattered over the city Saturday, full of cases of bottled water bound for isolated neighborhoods. Despite crowds mobbing some landing zones, Capt. John Kirby, a spokesman for the U.S. military's Joint Task Force assisting Haiti, said helicopter crews were "finding good clean sites to land."

Image by simminch via Flickr

On Saturday, the helicopters were picking up pallets of water from other organizations at the airport and dropping them around the city. "We're grabbing them, no matter where they come from," Kirby said.

But there was rising frustration -- and scattered looting -- among the desperate Haitian population. On Friday, the World Food Program had to suspend distribution of high-energy biscuits near the destroyed national palace when a crowd revolted, complaining that they were not getting better food.

"We're hungry. We're hungry," a group of boys on the side of the road implored a passing journalist on Saturday.

Image by simminch via Flickr

Much of the population of the city continues to sleep outside, with parks, streets, car lots and other sites turned into open-air dormitories. But other groups of people were seen trekking out of what one resident described as the "hell" of Port-au-Prince to friends, relatives and security in the countryside.

In Washington, meanwhile, former presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush pledged to lead a long-term fundraising effort on behalf of Haitian relief as they stood with President Obama in the White House Rose Garden Saturday morning.

And before she left here Saturday evening, after her meeting with Preval, Hillary Rodham Clinton told the Haitian people:

"We will be here today, tomorrow and for the time ahead. You have been severely tested. But I believe that Haiti can come back even stronger and better in the future."

Ruane reported from Washington. Staff writers Glenn Kessler and Michael Shear contributed to this report.

The Cambodia-Thailand Conflict: A Test for ASEAN

Image via Wikipedia

by Sokbunthoeun So

Asia Pacific Bulletin, No. 44

Publisher: Washington, D.C.: East-West Center in Washington
Publication Date: December 10, 2009
Binding: electronic
Pages: 2
Free Download: PDF

Abstract

The current conflict between Cambodia and Thailand, both members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), provides a test case for ASEAN to act as a key player in resolving disputes among its members. A failure by ASEAN to do so would reduce its credibility and impede the realization of an ASEAN community by 2015. Sokbunthoeun So discusses the Cambodian-Thai conflict and the implications for ASEAN.

An Interim Assessment of Evolving U.S.-Burma/Myanmar Relations

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http://vimeo.com/8443859 (video)

December 17, 2009, Professor David I. Steinberg

(Click to enlarge) Professor David I. Steinberg discusses U.S.-Burma relations.

(Washington D.C.) December 17– Though a U.S. policy review has led to new engagement between the United States and Burma, there are still many issues to tackle if relations between the two countries are to improve. In an East-West Center in Washington Asia Pacific Security Seminar co-hosted by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA, Dr. David I. Steinberg, distinguished professor of Asian Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, introduced his new book, Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know, and discussed the current state of U.S.-Burma relations and the prospects for the future.

In February 2009, the United States announced a review of its policy toward Burma, leading to new engagement between the two countries. In the spring, tentative steps were made to open up communication between the two governments, leading to a series of meetings at the official level. The U.S. policy review on Burma was extensive, leading some human rights commentators to worry that the United States might eliminate sanctions or soften its stance on human rights issues in order to achieve greater cooperation with Burma. However, the result of this review is a new period of “pragmatic engagement” in which the United States will continue its sanctions while at the same time maintaining dialogue with Burma at a high level.

Dr. Steinberg explained that it is difficult to say what Burma’s response to U.S. engagement will be. Nationalism, Dr. Steinberg noted, will play a key factor in Burmese decision-making as it engages with the United States. He explained that the fear that the United States will invade Burma is alive and well in the country, and this impedes the relationship. He also noted that Burma is an issue that is of great concern to groups in the United States, who will continue to call for U.S. action to protect human rights issues in Burma regardless of the state of the negotiations between the two countries.

Certainly the Burmese government is concerned about the upcoming scheduled elections, especially with U.S. and world attention being so closely fixed on the country. While the United States has expressed a desire that these elections be “free and fair,” Dr. Steinberg worried that Burmese and U.S. perceptions over what this means may be quite different. Though we cannot predict how the elections will be run or what the results of the elections will be, Dr. Steinberg argued that post-election Burma will still be controlled, in part, by the military due to the active role that the new constitution ensures for them. New political parties will develop that are peopled by former members of the military and, at the same time, Dr. Steinberg suggested that we can expect new opposition parties to develop. Whether the voices of these opposition parties will be heard in the domestic press, however, is difficult to determine. Further, he pointed out that the military leadership has already called for a hiatus in international NGO activities in the country during the campaigning and election period, indicating a concern that international groups will try to influence the elections in some way.

Another important issue facing the U.S.-Burma relationship is that of human rights issues, including the continued imprisonment of Aung San Suu Kyi and the status of the minority groups in Burma that have long been in conflict with the military government. Dr. Steinberg noted that, in the past, the military government had insisted on the disarmament of all rebel groups among the minorities as a precondition of cease-fire agreements. However, he explained that in recent months discussions have begun for the creation of “border guard” forces which would allow rebel groups in the minority areas to keep their arms as long as they would incorporate Burmese military units into their organizations, an act which Dr. Steinberg argues would destroy the minority organizations. Whether the minority groups will agree to this offer is a serious issue that will have important consequences for the upcoming elections. He explained that countries like China and India, which are worried about instability along their borders, will continue to carefully monitor the situation as deadlines for reaching agreements with minority groups continue to be delayed.

Whatever the outcome of this new engagement, the process must be slow and deliberate. As the two countries move forward, Dr. Steinberg explained that there are several key things that the United States could do to keep the ball rolling. He suggested that it may be time to welcome a Burmese ambassador back to the United States as a gesture of good will. Further, he pointed to the importance of the role of NGOs in U.S. engagement with Burma, and noted that the U.S. government could do more to interact with this community. Burma, on the other hand, could indicate its commitment to the new engagement by releasing the many political prisoners held in its prisons and allowing freedom of the press. Dr. Steinberg explained that these two activities would signal that Burma is indeed working toward improved relations with the international community.

David I. Steinberg is distinguished professor of Asian Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, where he was director of the Asian Studies Program for ten years. He is the author of thirteen books and monographs, six of which are on Burma/Myanmar, and some 100 articles/chapters, of which about 50 are on that subject. He also writes extensively on Korean affairs. As a member of the Senior Foreign Service, USAID, Department of State, he was Director of Technical Assistance for Asia and the Middle East and Director for Philippines, Thailand, and Burma Affairs. He was a representative of The Asia Foundation in Burma, Hong Kong, Korea, and Washington, D.C., and President of the Mansfield Center for Pacific Affairs. Professor Steinberg was educated at Dartmouth College, Lingnan University (China), Harvard University, and the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, where he studied Burmese and Southeast Asia. His latest volume is Burma/Myanmar: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press. 2009). Other volumes include: Turmoil in Burma: Contested Legitimacies in Myanmar (2007), and Burma: The State of Myanmar (2001).