Trying KSM
by The National Interest
11.20.2009
In the Newspaper Roundup, The National Interest distills the day’s foreign-policy editorials.
Trying KSM (November 20)
Although all presidents have indulged in the Friday news dump, President Obama is partaking in it a little more often than his predecessors. And, as you have probably heard, last week’s was quite a doozy: Attorney General Eric Holder decided to put 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed (KSM) on trial. In New York. Although the decision provoked small storm in the conservative blogosphere and generated a few op-eds, it has finally spilled over onto the newspaper editorial pages in a big way in the form of a Charles Krauthammer column for the Washington Post.
As you might suspect, Krauthammer is not at all happy with Holder’s decision. To begin with, the entire idea of a trial is absurd. When asked by Senator Herb Kohl what would happen if KSM didn’t get convicted, Holder replied that “Failure is not an option.” Well, actually, says Krauthammer, it is:
Doesn’t the presumption of innocence, er, presume that prosecutorial failure—acquittal, hung jury—is an option? By undermining that presumption, Holder is undermining the fairness of the trial, the demonstration of which is the alleged rationale for putting on this show in the first place.
In addition, “everyone knows that whatever the outcome of the trial, KSM will never walk free. He will spend the rest of his natural life in U.S. custody.” Both these things combine to make the proceedings “a farcical show trial from the very beginning.”
And what a trial it will be. The courtroom is going to need a lot more security than usual, as it will become an instant target for any over-ambitious young jihadist. The defense is also sure to demand classified evidence on terror suspects that will then be put in the public domain—which al-Qaeda can easily get a hold of. And KSM can use the docket as a pulpit to enunciate his atrocious vision of global Islamic insurrection.
So, there are a lot of cons, to say the least, to putting KSM on trial. Why, then, is Holder so intent on doing this? Krauthammer finds his reasoning to be ridiculous. In his November 13 press conference announcing the decision, and congressional testimony this week, Holder seems to have come up with the following guidelines for terror suspects: “if you attack a civilian target, as in 9/11, you get a civilian trial; a military target like the [USS] Cole, and you get a military tribunal.” Krauthammer is appalled at this “perverse moral calculus.” Killing civilians is the exceptional crime, and should require a special court to deal with its heinous nature. Even worse, it gives an incentive to jihadists the world over: “Kill as many civilians as possible on American soil and Holder will give you Miranda rights, a lawyer, a propaganda platform—everything but your own blog.” Whatever way you add it up, this trial is set to be a disaster. Krauthammer closes by observing that Holder himself told the Post that KSM’s prosecution would be “‘the trial of the century.’” “The last such,” Krauthammer writes, “was the trial of O.J. Simpson.”
The Post apparently couldn’t get enough of KSM-trial discussion today, because two pages over from Krauthammer’s column is more commentary on the subject from Jim Comey and Jack Goldsmith. Both former Bush administration officials, Comey and Goldsmith think Republicans need to give Holder a bit of a break. Although they admit “reasonable minds can disagree about Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to prosecute Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four other alleged Sept. 11 perpetrators in a Manhattan federal court,” there are a few “prominent criticisms” that “are exaggerated” and need to be dispelled.
The argument that New York will suffer an increased risk of terrorist attack because of the trial is rather dubious. New York is already a target for al-Qaeda. If jihadists could hit it, they would. The fact that they haven’t is “a testament to our military intelligence and law enforcement responses since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.” Civilian courts are also perfectly able to convict terror suspects. The president’s conservative critics “appear to have forgotten that the Bush administration used civilian courts to put away dozens of terrorists” during its tenure.
Finally, the military commissions, where a lot of Republicans want to try KSM, are overrated. There’ve been a lot of “changes in constitutional, international, and military laws since they were last used,” producing “great uncertainty about the commissions’ validity.” It might even be possible that a military commission would produce a more lenient sentence than a federal judge, which no one would be happy with. In short, Holder’s doubters need to carefully examine their talking points, as they “do not help their case by understating the criminal justice system’s capacities, overstating the military system’s virtues and bumper-stickering a reasonable decision.”
Hope in Palestine (November 19)
When one thinks of the West Bank, “good governance,” “a solid economy,” or “safe” are not words that come to mind. But David Ignatius, who is writing his weekly Washington Post column from Ramallah, reports that the place seems oddly . . . normal. While looking around at the city, Ignatius says eventually all of Palestine could be like it if “folks got serious: The streets are clean, there’s construction in every direction and Palestinian soldiers line the roads.” This dramatic turnaround is the result of a “determined Palestinian effort, with U.S. and Israeli support, to begin creating the institutions of a viable Palestinian state.”
But even though things in Ramallah are looking a bit better, the wider peace process itself has tanked. President Obama is haplessly trying to restart negotiations, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “dragging his feet,” and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is threatening to resign. Everyone’s collective stalling puts all of Ramallah’s tenuous progress at risk, and, if it continues long enough, could cause the Holy Land to implode again in yet another round of violence. (For a primer on these issues, check out Khaili Shikaki’s cover story in the November/December issue of TNI.)
As such, Ignatius thinks the Obama administration should take a look at a peace plan devised by the man who helped make Ramallah a liveable city: Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority. He has thought up a process to “for a two-year transition to [Palestinian] statehood.” It’d be a good idea for Washington to “endorse this goal, explicitly, and call for an immediate start to negotiations about the details.”
Although Fayyad’s proposal is understandably vague on details, Ignatius believes it’s the best of a slate of bad options. It’s better than having the United Nations unilaterally declare Palestine a state (which is supported by Abbas’s allies), or “letting the problem fester,” which benefits Hamas.
Also, Fayyad has delivered on far-fetched-sounding promises before. The Palestinian economy has done quite well on his watch, and is currently “officially growing at 7 percent, and Fayyad reckons the real rate may be 11 percent.” And security in the West Bank has improved dramatically as the Palestinian Authority has gained a monopoly on force—thanks in part to an American-trained brigade of “2,000 well-disciplined troops.” Even the Israelis have been pleasantly surprised at Fayyad’s progress, and are even allowing Palestinian troops security “responsibility in West Bank cities.”
Ignatius, however, doesn’t want to sugarcoat things—the West Bank is still ragged and Gaza is still a disaster—but Fayyad’s various successes constitute real progress. Israelis and Palestinians should be hopeful about their future prospects. And they deserve to have their faith rewarded. Fayyad’s proposal is “the only ray of light [Ignatius] can see in the Palestinian morass,” and he thinks it “deserves American support.”
Human Capital (November 18)
The immigration debate in the United States almost always revolves around illegal aliens. But what about legal immigrants, who stand in line and wait their turn? Or foreign professionals who would like to work in the United States for a few years? In an editorial, the Wall Street Journal notes that U.S. immigration policy is “mishandling this important human resource.”
Our temporary-visa program, which allows highly skilled foreigners to work in our country, is understandably managed by a quota system. Under current law, “no more than 140,000 employment-based green cards are issued each year.” And temporary-visas are linked to green cards, which regulate all immigrants—from the Cal Tech rocket scientist to the janitor at your local public school. Due to bureaucratic inefficiency and reservations for “spouses and children of those workers,” the actual number of workers getting green cards is “much lower” than 140,000, and the percentage of highly skilled immigrants is probably even smaller still.
In addition, the green-card quota hasn’t been raised in twenty years, despite changing economic conditions. “Over the past two decades,” notes the Journal, “U.S. GDP has risen by 64%, and the demand for skilled workers, notably in technical fields populated by foreign-born professionals, has risen dramatically.” Students from abroad who come to the United States to study are routinely forced out of the country because of these restrictions. Seeing how we spend lots of money to educate these foreigners already, wouldn’t it make sense to let them stay and help pay us back by bolstering our economy?
The Journal thinks that problem extends to our entire immigration policy, which is horribly outdated. “Canada, Australia, the European Union and others have streamlined processes for hiring foreign workers to lure skilled immigrants away from the U.S.” Shouldn’t we change our approach so we can grab back some of these productive minds?
Unbalanced (November 17)
President Obama has emphasized the need to lessen our economic dependence on China, which produces much of our cheap manufactured goods and buys up a huge amount of our debt. Obama believes that a “rebalance” in the economic relationship between Beijing and Washington will involve more Chinese consumption, and less of the export frenzy that characterized our relationship with the Asian country for much of the past decade. That way, American consumers (and our government) won’t burden themselves with massive loads of debt—helping our economy recover by putting it on a more stable footing.
Good luck, says Robert Reich. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Reich argues that consumer spending is not going to make up much of China’s economy for a very long time. While the Chinese have made impressive gains in consumption as of late, their economy as a whole is moving in another direction. While Beijing’s
productive capacity keeps soaring . . . Chinese consumers are taking home a shrinking proportion of the total economy. Last year, personal consumption in China amounted to only 35% of the Chinese economy; 10 years ago consumption was almost 50%. Capital investment, by contrast, rose to 44% from 35% over the decade.
Instead of shifting income to consumers through paying higher wages, Chinese industry has devoted its considerable profit margins into building new factories and buying new equipment and technology. While this approach is helpful for maintaining China’s status as an export juggernaut, it isn’t improving living standards for Chinese people—which means that they won’t have excess money with which to buy consumer products.
This situation is no accident, says Reich. Due to its misguided population-control policies, China has a glut of underemployed (and unemployed) young men, and massive internal migration patterns from rural areas to urban ones. This isn’t a recipe for internal stability. As such, China’s elite has come up with a nifty policy: create more jobs (even if they don’t pay so well) to keep all these potentially unstable social elements occupied and quiet. Beijing’s export-intensive economic policy, then, is really a social policy—one that aims to preserve internal stability in China at the price of higher living standards for the Chinese people.
Viewed through this lens, Beijing’s actions make a lot more sense. The yuan has to stay pegged to the dollar, lest America (the world’s other manufacturing powerhouse) become a more attractive place to manufacture goods than China. With the yuan artificially low, depressing production costs, China retains its competitive advantage. Beijing’s “elite would much rather create export jobs, even at the cost of subsidizing foreign buyers, than allow the yuan to rise and thereby risk job shortages at home.” Thus, American calls for the Chinese to allow their currency to appreciate to its real value will almost certainly fall on deaf ears. This, of course, means that industrial jobs will continue to leave the United States en masse. And we’ll continue to go deeper and deeper into debt.
Reich thinks this should worry American policy makers. Both our country and China “are threatened by the disconnect between production and consumption. In China, the threat is civil unrest. In the U.S., it’s a prolonged jobs and earnings recession that, when combined with widening inequality, could create political backlash.”
Asian Markets (November 13)
President Obama is in Asia, addressing such weighty issues as the U.S.-Japan alliance, North Korea and human rights in oppressive countries like China and Burma. The Washington Post, however, wishes he would address an equally important subject that has a lot to do with our power in East Asia: trade. In an editorial, the Post observes that the Obama administration really doesn’t have much of a trade policy. And it also isn’t doing anything to stop China’s malicious scheme pegging “its currency to the declining dollar.” This “makes it more difficult for the United States and other Asian countries to claim their share of regional trade,” making Beijing a manufacturing behemoth with hordes of foreign reserves that it probably wouldn’t have otherwise.
In other economic arenas, the Obama’s performance has been equally lackluster. A free-trade agreement with South Korea, which would be a huge boon to American exports, has been languishing in the Democratic Congress for two years. Although the bill has the backing of “the vast majority of American businesses,” one group is opposed. The “United Auto Workers—along with Ford and Chrysler, but not General Motors,” criticized the treaty, “insisting on linkage between future U.S. tariff reductions and increased sales of U.S. cars in South Korea.” Never mind that Seoul is a staunch ally in the region and that American cars, which are generally better quality than South Korean ones, would probably sell well in the country without U.S. government assistance.
While we’ve allowed South Korea’s trade status to sit in the docket, other countries have been moving apace to embrace Seoul’s massive economy. South Korea recently “concluded an agreement with the European Union that will give E.U.-based companies and advantage over U.S. competitors in the trillion-dollar South Korean market.” So Obama’s inaction is costing us quite a lot, and handing gifts to other countries. In closing, the Post points out that “the Asia-Pacific region accounts for more than half of the world’s gross domestic product and 44 percent of all global trade,” and is “the destination of most U.S. exports.” These figures are certain to grow in the future. It would be incredibly foolish for America to sit on the sidelines and be left out of this rising tide—which is why President Obama needs to push Congress to ratify the South Korea free-trade treaty.
Hugo’s War (November 12)
Hugo Chavez’s buffoonery apparently knows no bounds. A Washington Post editorial notes that on his weekly television show, the caudillo was pressed to explain to befuddled Venezuelans why they will have to “limit themselves to three minute showers.” Apparently, one of the side effects of Chavez’s “twenty-first century socialism” is a massive water shortage. Unfortunately, this latest deprivation isn’t anything new in Venezuela, which has seen its economy and living conditions crumble under Mr. Chavez’s rule, while crime—particularly murder—has skyrocketed.
As any authoritarian leader knows, the best thing to do when presented with evidence that things have deteriorated under your watch is to change the subject. So, the Post relates, Chavez did—by appearing to “declare war on neighboring Colombia.” Despite Hugo’s bluster, no one really seemed to care all that much: most Venezuelans aren’t too keen on the idea and “according to a recent poll oppose conflict with Columbia by a margin of 4 to 1.” Bogotá’s response was “relatively low-key,” and involved the usual response of “appealing to the United Nations and the Organization of American States.” For its part, Foggy Bottom “blandly suggested ‘dialogue’ between the two countries.”
As such, the Post is willing to “accept that this is just another instance of Mr. Chavez’s buffoonery.” But the Venezuelan president has also been rather hostile as of late. “In the past few years,” the editorial notes, “he has spent more than $4 billion on arms purchases from Russia alone.” And he is also “cooperating with terrorist organizations that are trafficking drugs from Colombia through Venezuela.” These are bellicose signs that shouldn’t go unnoticed in Washington, even though “few believe that Mr. Chavez will start a war with Colombia.” Latin America is notorious for authoritarian governments that make blustery threats. But occasionally they deliver on them—no one believed “Leopoldo Galtieri, when he began threatening to take Argentina to war with Britain in 1982.” Seeing this, it’d be a good idea to take Chavez semi-seriously. In the beleaguered region, after all, “stranger things have happened.”
Veterans Day (November 11)
Today is Veterans Day, and the Washington Post has taken advantage of the occasion to publish an editorial honoring our armed forces. The Post notes that in 1944, Congress passed the GI Bill, which gave returning World War II veterans free (or nearly free) access to a college education. “Hundreds of thousands who had never expected to have this sort of education or training,” the Post writes, “were able to gain the skills needed to advance themselves and serve the country’s needs in the postwar years.” A sort of “domestic Marshall Plan,” the GI Bill did right by our veterans, honoring their service to our country by giving them a sterling opportunity to reintegrate into civilian life.
Unfortunately, America hasn’t always been so kind to our soldiers, as the editorial relates:
After the Civil War, maimed ex-soldiers were often seen selling pencils and shoestrings on city streets. When the Depression struck, World War I veterans marched on Washington demanding early payment of a promised bonus, and were dispersed, with bloodshed, by their own Army.
Oddly, the Post does not mention Vietnam veterans, who were treated with contempt by left-wing activists and whose mental-health needs were ignored by the federal government for many years. In any case, the paper is happy to say that “today veterans are much honored and better cared for than in the past.” Even so, problems remain—veterans have higher unemployment rates than society at large and “the difficulties of readjustment to everyday life still trouble many of them.” The Post asks both and “individuals and entire communities” to reach out to provide help to former soldiers when they need it, “with the hope being the same one that inspired creators of the GI Bill 65 years ago: providing veterans the opportunity to better themselves and their country.”
The New York Times’ editorial board is in much the same mind as the Post’s, and devotes an editorial to the continuing problem of homelessness among veterans. The paper reports that General Eric Shinseki, secretary of veteran’s affairs, is marshalling all the resources he can to eliminate “veteran homelessness in the next five years.” The sheer numbers of homeless veterans is astonishing—“About one-third of all adult homeless men are veterans, and an average night finds an estimated 131,000 of them from five decades bedding down on streets and in charity sanctuaries.” The Times wishes General Shinseki well in his mission and hopes that the “White House, Congress and communities across the country” will help Veterans Affairs achieve this worthy goal.
Freedom’s Cycle (November 10)
As this week is the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall, and thus, the fall of Communism, Fouad Ajami thinks it appropriate to compare America’s long struggle with that totalitarian doctrine to our current effort against another nefarious way of thinking—radical Islam. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Ajami takes us back to the 1970s, a miserable decade when “Soviet power seemed at its zenith.” While we were bogged down with stagflation and divided over Vietnam, “Soviet troops and their proxies were deployed in Vietnam, Cuba, Yemen, Angola, Mozambique, etc,” Iran fell to a sordid bunch of Islamist theocrats and our European allies succumbed to a “willful Euro-Communism” that “had resonance all its own.” It was all too easy for American critics, most of whom were on the Left, to throw in the towel and say that our international preeminence was finished.
Enter Ronald Reagan, who refused to accept this defeatist thinking and “recoiled from all the talk about America’s decline.” Instead, he decided to engage in bellicose rhetoric, bolster material support for the USSR’s enemies (the mujahideen in Afghanistan), and initiate a massive arms buildup with which Moscow could not keep pace.
Meanwhile, the people of Eastern Europe rebelled against their Soviet subjugators. The Hungarians, Czechs, Romanians and Poles bravely attempted to throw off the yoke of Communism in the 1980s, and, when Mikhail Gorbachev refused to put down their efforts with violence, succeeded in doing so. A decade after the Soviet Union seemed master of the world, it imploded in dramatic fashion, forever discrediting Communism and ending its existential threat to liberal democracy.
Now democratic states face another challenge from radical Islam. “The burning grounds of Islam,” Ajami cautions, “are altogether different than the Communist challenge. There is no Moscow that serves as the seat of Jihadist power.” Nonetheless, we shouldn’t be surprised if there’s a little repetition of history in the next few years. Like the America doubters of the 1970s, there’s now a new group of people “who see these furies of Islam as America’s comeuppance” and “those who think we have overreached and that we are riding into storms of our own making.” Well . . . we did arm the mujahideen who are now hell bent on killing our soldiers in Afghanistan. And we also put ourselves in a pickle by fighting two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—and the justification for the latter was quite dubious at best. Both these things would seem to suggest that, at least in some respects, we made our own bed with the current host of troubles now facing our country.
Unfortunately, Ajami doesn’t note these objections to his thinking, but he isn’t really concerned with these quibbles anyway. Ajami thinks the real question “can be squarely put” to the “peoples of Islam”: “Will they tear down their walls in the manner in which the people of Central and Eastern Europe tore down theirs?” America has tried to encourage Muslims to embrace freedom and democracy. The ball is now in their court.
Ending History? (November 9)
The fall of the Berlin wall twenty years ago today marked the end of the Cold War and the triumph of the West. Fitting for such a momentous occasion, the Washington Post, New York Times and Wall Street Journal have all included op-eds on the subject, but addressing disparate aspects of the anniversary’s meaning. Anthony Dolan’s essay for the Journal details the genesis of Ronald Reagan’s “Tear Down this Wall!” speech that recast the struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union in explicitly moral terms; the Post’s Anne Applebaum concerns herself with the economic and political success stories of former Communist states in central and Eastern Europe. But it is Ross Douthat’s column for the New York Times that is the most interesting of the three. (And it concerns an essay published in The National Interest, so your servant would be quite remiss to not bring it to your attention.)
Shortly after the fall of the wall, Francis Fukuyama wrote “The End of History” for this magazine, observing, as Douthat aptly summarizes, the “disappearance of any enduring, existential threat to liberal democracy and free-market capitalism.” Although this thesis has been argued over—and often—Douthat thinks it “holds up remarkably well.” In the twentieth century, democratic states faced threats from governments with aggressive competing ideologies (fascism and communism) that had the military force and power to conquer America—or at least kill many of our citizens. Now we face a rag-tag bunch of Islamist radicals who don’t have any chance of defeating our armed forces. Their ideology, if it can be termed that, also doesn’t hold a candle to ours. “Osama bin Laden is no Hitler, and Islamism isn’t in the same league as the last century’s totalitarianisms,” writes Douthat. “Marxism and fascism seduced the West’s elite; Islamic radicalism seduces men like the Fort Hood shooter.” Because our enemies are so weak and we are so “astonishingly strong,” they resort to terrorism to achieve their objectives.
So America and the West are in a pretty good place. But Douthat worries that “nobody seems quite willing to believe it.” Many of us are concerned that “liberal society is just as vulnerable as it was before the Berlin Wall came down.” Right-wingers bemoan the rise of new enemies, adopting a “persistent cold-war-style alarmism” against foreign states that are small potatoes compared to the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. Liberals are still entranced with “the pseudo-Marxist vision of global capitalism as an enormous Ponzi scheme,” which can and should collapse in the near future.
Domestically, things aren’t much better. Many on the Left thought George W. Bush to be the incarnation of all evil, a fascist and a theocrat to boot. And “too many” on the Right think “Barack Obama’s liberalism is a step removed from Leninism.” Douthat thinks these enduring paranoias “suggest a civilization that’s afraid to reckon with its own apparent permanence.” With few threats, we run the risk that we won’t be judged for our sins or punished for our intemperance. “Humankind fears judgment, of course,” Douthat writes,
But we depend on it as well. The possibility of dissolution lends a moral shape to history: we want our empires to fall as well as rise, and we expect decadence to be rewarded with destruction.
Not that we want to experience this destruction ourselves. But we want it to be at least a possibility—as a spur to virtue and as a punishment for sin.
During the Cold War, this was often how important political debates were couched. America had to end segregation, liberals argued, because its existence was a global propaganda coup for Communism. Neoconservatives told Americans to “repent of [their] hedonism and pacifism . . . or the West will go the way of Finland.” Although both sides certainly did not want the United States to be vanquished in the cold war, they wanted “to inhabit a world where America could lose, and pass into history, if we failed to live up to our ideals.”
Douthat thinks this is why we don’t make the anniversary of 1989 as big a deal “as we should.” The possibility of “real defeat” galvanized us to do great things. As such, “maybe we sense . . . that even the end of history needs to have an end.”
The Gulag Peninsula (November 6)
North Korea hasn’t been in the headlines very much recently, despite its ongoing effort to extort the world through its illicit nuclear-weapons program. Melanie Kirkpatrick, writing in the Wall Street Journal, thinks President Obama should focus on another aspect of Pyongyang’s nefarious regime: its blatant disregard (to say the least) of human rights. Kirkpatrick notes that a number of reports that have come out in recent weeks serve as a reminder of the brutality which Kim Jong-il’s regime treats its population. As of right now, “nearly nine million North Koreans—one third of the population—are suffering from lack of food,” according to Vitit Muntarbhorn, a UN official who monitors North Korea’s human-rights record. Because Pyongyang demanded labor for a “150-day battle” to boost industrial production, many North Koreans haven’t been able to tend their private plots of land, which provide a large percentage of the country’s food output. The North is no stranger to government-engineered famine: in the mid-1990s, the country suffered a food shortage that “killed one million people or more.”
Religious freedom is also nonexistent, and practitioners are regularly sent to prison camps or even executed for expressing their beliefs. And speaking of those prison camps—the government makes conditions as terrible as it can, with inmates “kept on starvation rations and forced to work at hard labor. Many die of malnutrition or disease. Few escape.” Sentencing is completely arbitrary, which only serves to “shore up the regime; and it extends the culture of corruption whereby security officials solicit bribes from offenders.”
North Korean exiles and human-rights campaigners were cheered when special representative Stephen Bosworth met with them in April, and were inspired by State Department spokesman Ian Kelly’s deeming of rights-issues as a “big priority” in our dealings with Pyongyang. Since then, however, the Obama administration has been largely silent on the issue. Kirkpatrick thinks the president’s upcoming trip to Seoul later this month serves as a perfect opportunity for him to blast Kim Jong-il’s government for its horrendous human-rights record. Obama could “meet with refugees and hear their horror stories of life in their homeland. Even better, he could visit the offices of Radio Free Asia . . .and broadcast a message of support to the North Korean people themselves.”
Iran’s Atomic Scam (November 5)
There were large protests in Iran yesterday, as opponents of the theocratic regime took advantage of a holiday to stage massive street rallies in Tehran and other cities. The latest civil unrest in the country demonstrates that tensions from the fraudulent presidential elections show little sign of healing. The American attitude to Iran’s internal problems has been largely muted, and seems to treat the disturbances as an annoyance. The White House said nearly as much in a Tuesday statement on the demonstrators. President Obama wants to focus instead on denuclearizing the regime.
Ray Takeyh, however, thinks separating the two issues is the wrong approach to take. Writing in the Washington Post, Takeyh argues that, among other things, Iran is using its nuclear program as a diversion. As the ongoing demonstrations go, the mullahs are rather weak. But they are quite keen on hanging on to power, and have proceeded apace to militarize their government so it can better oppress its people. “The leadership of the [Revolutionary] Guards and the paramilitary Basij force,” Takeyh writes, “have been integrated and are much more focused on vanquishing imaginary plots by a (nonexistent) fifth column.” And a cast of unscrupulous thugs have been promoted to leadership positions in both the Guards and Basij, as well as the state’s intelligence forces. There’s also been a lot of official nostalgia for the 1980s, when the new government of Ayatollah Khomeini brutally crushed all dissent against the newly established Islamic state. Takeyh thinks both these factors demonstrate that “the callow followers of the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, are mobilizing the machinery of the state for a ruthless purge of the system.”
While the regime prepares to destroy all internal opposition, it presents a happy face to the Western world as it engages in talks on Iran’s nascent nuclear program. Tehran intends to use the negotiations—which it will “seek to prolong . . . by accepting and then rejecting agreed-upon compacts and offering countless counterproposals”—to deflect Western attention from its egregious human-rights violations. In other words, the engagement is a bargaining tool in Iran’s diplomatic arsenal. If the United States decides to blast Tehran for murdering political opponents, the mullahs can pull out of the nuclear talks. Ever skilled at taking hostages, the Iranians seem to be holding America hostage with their atomic program.
As such, Takeyh thinks:
The persistent mistake that the West has made is to place the nuclear issue above all other concerns. The Iran problem is not limited to illicit nuclear activities, and it is somewhat incomprehensible that the United States and other nations can contemplate nuclear transactions with a regime that maintains links to a range of terrorist organizations and engages in brutal domestic repression. . . . Iran’s hard-liners need to know that should they launch their much-advertised crackdown, the price for such conduct may be termination of any dialogue with the West.
Such a strategy linking Iran’s domestic instability with its nuclear program would force further isolate Tehran and force the regime give it a choice: continued domestic oppression and likely crippling economic sanctions, or a more open government with the possibility of a rapprochement with the West. Unfortunately, given the aforementioned statement, it seems the Obama administration has bought hook, line and sinker into Iran’s diplomatic trickery.
Reform or Die (November 4)
Yesterday, we noted a New York Times editorial telling Afghan President Hamid Karzai what he needed to do to lead a responsible government. Today, David Ignatius weighs in on the same topic in his column for the Washington Post. Good governance, Ignatius thinks, is the key to winning the war in Afghanistan. If Kabul can provide services and protect its people, the Taliban will lose much of its appeal. But how exactly can the United States encourage Karzai to adopt reforms? It’s a tricky balancing process. If we are heavy handed in our efforts and force things on the Afghans, it could only “make matters worse—by offending Afghans and undermining the country’s frail efforts at self-government.” That’s very true, and Ignatius notes that Washington is a past master at screwing up these types of interventions, as “over the years we’ve gotten this wrong in Vietnam, the Middle East and Latin America.”
If we can’t force the Afghans to start reform, they’ll have to do so themselves. But are Karzai & Co. capable of performing such a task? Ignatius points out that Karzai and his minions comprise a “criminal enterprise with billions of dollars at stake in the status quo.” They’ll be loathe to give up the hefty profit margins they make from “skimming from the billions in military and economic aid,” stealing taxes and customs duties, and selling drugs.
As such, Ignatius thinks the best message to send to Karzai is “the truth: Unless he improves governance, the massive American effort won’t last more than another year.” And Karzai certainly can’t handle the Taliban and al-Qaeda on his own—if we leave, he’s up you-know-what creek without a paddle. Hopefully this would be an incentive for him to clean things up. It’d also give him a “brutally simple” choice: “reform or die.”
Karzai’s Problems (November 3)
In an editorial, the New York Times notes with disgust that Afghan President Hamid Karzai has coasted to a second term, after the withdrawal of opposition candidate Abdullah Abdullah from this month’s run-off election. Karzai’s list of achievements is quite short, which of course makes his to-do list quite long. “Now that Mr. Karzai has been re-elected by default,” intones the Times, “he is going to have to do everything in his power to persuade his people—and the rest of the world—that he is deserving of their trust.” And “after the last seven years of mismanagement and corruption, that will be a hard sell.”
To begin with, Karzai needs to get an entirely new cabinet that is competent and honest. The government departments themselves need to be reformed, especially “the interior ministry, which oversees the corruption-plagued Afghan national police.” Good governance is absolutely essential to our efforts in Afghanistan, as the Afghan people must see Kabul “working to protect them and improve their lives if they are going to risk their lives and resist the Taliban.”
After he’s accomplished this Herculean task, Karzai needs to get a new set of friends. He currently associates with a vicious crowd of warlords (General Abdul Rashid Dostum, “whose forces have been accused of killing thousands of Taliban prisoners of war”) and drug traffickers (his brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, “who, American officials say, is a big player in the opium trade”). Severing ties to both would go a long way in boosting his international legitimacy.
But putting his own presidential house in order is not the only thing Karzai has to do. Eventually, the Afghan president will need to “work with the Americans to come up with a strategy to try to woo midlevel Taliban leaders in from the cold.” Needless to say, all these things will take a long time. The problem is, Karzai has no time: “The Taliban’s military strength is growing by the day. American’s appetite for the Afghan war is evaporating nearly as quickly.”
Style & Substance (November 2)
The international community’s efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear-weapons program is not going very well. Instead of coming to a straightforward deal on the matter, the Iranians have played a North Korea-style negotiating game of counteroffers and diplomatic doublespeak that brings the West no closer to ending the mullahs’ atomic ambitions. After the reformist protest movement that swept the streets of Tehran this summer, it’s only natural to wonder if things would be different if Iran was under different leadership. Had the opposition movement succeeded and won power, would Iran be friendlier to the outside world? Or more willing to compromise on its budding nuclear abilities?
Jackson Diehl explores that thought experiment in today’s Washington Post. Last month, Diehl attended a conference put on by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which included a speech by Iranian politico Ataollah Mohajerani. Mohajerani currently works as “a spokesman in Europe for presidential candidate-turned-dissident Mehdi Karroubi,” one of the opposition candidates from the fraudulent June election. Given these bona fides, you’d think Mohajerani might have had some disparaging things to say about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s current government and its hostile stance toward the rest of the world. Indeed, the “mostly pro-Israel crowd” at the conference “was primed to cheer what they expected would be a harsh condemnation of Ahmadinejad and his bellicose rhetoric, and a promise of change by the green coalition.”
But things didn’t work out that way. Instead, Mohajerani blasted America’s involvement in the 1953 coup that deposed the government of Iranian nationalist Mohammed Mosaddeq, and “went on to echo much of Ahmadinejad’s rhetoric about the United States and the nuclear program.” Although he “distanced himself” from the current Iranian president’s Holocaust denials and vehement support for Palestine, Mohajerani complained that “the countries seeking to freeze Iran’s nuclear program themselves possess nuclear weapons, as does Israel,” and that “Ahmadinejad’s threats to destroy Israel were no different than what Hillary Clinton had said about Iran during her presidential campaign.” He also evinced little interest in human rights and “warned against ‘taking advantage’ of Ahmadinejad’s weak regime to strike a deal ‘that would not be in Iran’s interest.’” So, a friendly, pro-Western address it was not.
Although liberal Iranians at the conference reminded Diehl that “while Mohajerani might speak for Karroubi, he did not represent the vast numbers of younger Iranians who had joined the street protests,” Diehl thinks we shouldn’t necessarily be surprised by Mohajerani’s positions. Just because he was part of an opposition movement doesn’t mean that he is a proponent of human rights and multiparty democracy. He’s just angry about an election that was rigged against his boss. And, as an Iranian nationalist, it’s not as if he would take a pro-Western line on everything.
Diehl uses Mohajerani’s views to illustrate a larger point about the Green movement in Iran. If Karroubi and Mir Hossein Moussavi were able to “supplant Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the main changes in Iranian policy might be of style.” In other words, although lots of Americans got excited about Moussavi, his actual views on international matters may not be all that different than Ahmadinejad—which, of course, would not improve our situation. And it would be risky to assume that Moussavi and Karroubi are friends of the United States just because we share the same enemies.
11.20.09
The chief of the CIA makes a trip to Pakistan; Karzai makes Clinton happy; the administration takes on nuclear proliferators.
11.20.09
Why are American newspapers so bad at explaining foreign-policy issues?
11.19.09
09.09.09
Ken Pollack, in an interview with TNI, discusses whether we would’ve been better off with Saddam Hussein, if the American military is on the brink of being kicked out of Baghdad and what the Iraq War was about in the first place. Click here to see the video.
07.27.09
David Keene discusses the future of the Republican Party and whether (and how) the GOP can be resuscitated.
Click here to see the video.
07.16.09
Bruce Riedel discusses just how close Islamabad is to collapse and why we shouldn’t fool ourselves into thinking the situation is getting better there.
Click here to see the video.