Who’s Got the Power?

Posted on February 24, 2008 by Tony

The Times is a new daily news venture edited by Ray Hartley, who consistently provides some of the best commentary on where South Africa is headed. They asked me to do a three-part series on the changing global power balance and its implications. This is part two, which appeared last Monday (The first installment, Honey I Shrank the Superpower, was posted here last week.)

President George W. Bush could be forgiven for underestimating China: He had spent some months there in the mid-1970s, when his father was U.S. Ambassador to Beijing. His firsthand experience of a largely pre-industrial colossus could hardly have prepared him for dealing with the China of today — a China to which the U.S. owes some $1.5 trillion and counting, and to which America’s beleaguered banks turn for the multibillion dollar loans required to keep them afloat.

By the time Bush took office, of course America was well aware of China’s growing economic significance — its ability to produce quality goods at lower prices for U.S. corporations had already largely gutted the U.S. manufacturing sector, and American politicians routinely complained about Chinese currency policy and the ballooning the U.S. trade deficit. (Less is said, of course, about the Chinese credit that allows Americans to consume way beyond their means — by one estimate, Beijing has loaned an equivalent of $4,000 to every person in the U.S. over the past decade alone.)

But on the geopolitical plane, the incoming Bush Administration would have pictured China as focused on economic growth and social stability, its strategic ambitions limited to the recovery of breakaway Taiwan. China’s military capacity to project power beyond its borders remains very limited, and Beijing has studiously avoided confrontation. Even when a U.S. spy-plane collided with a Chinese fighter off Hainan two months into Bush’s tenure, both sides moved quickly to contain the damage.

Yet, just seven years later, the cases of North Korea and Iran demonstrate an an unprecedented willingness by Beijing to thwart Washington when its foreign policy objectives clash with China’s national interests — interests that include the maintenance and expansion of supplies of the key resources (energy, first and foremost) to feed the voracious appetites of its booming economy, and the restriction of influence by foreign powers in its immediate neighborhood.

Having trashed the Clinton policy of offering North Korea political and economic incentives to refrain from building nuclear weapons, President Bush left no doubt that he’d prefer to oust its regime. China and South Korea were not prepared to risk the chaos of North Korea collapsing, nor was Beijing about to let the U.S. decide the fate of a regime on its border. And, six years later, despite North Korea having successfully tested a nuclear weapon, Bush is now offering political and economic incentives for it to end its nuclear weapons program. The U.S. simply had no plausible alternative to the diplomatic solution brokered by China.

On Iran, also designated for regime-change by Washington’s hawks, U.S. policy directly threatened China’s energy supplies. Beijing already consumes the largest share of Iran’s oil exports, and it plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars
in new Iranian oil and gas fields. That’s why China has effectively blocked any sanctions that would seriously threaten the Tehran regime or put its energy exports off limits. Iran has been able to largely ignore the wrist-slap sanctions adopted by the UN, knowing that Chinese investment and Russian nuclear fuel (and air defense systems) will continue to pour in.

Where Russia and China had been Cold War adversaries whose rivalry had been skillfully exploited by the U.S., Moscow and Beijing are closer than ever (albeit with Russia the junior partner in their new capitalist comradeship). Their relationship will deepen as China’s share grows of the energy exports that have revived Moscow’s fortunes and allowed it to begin to reverse what Russians see as widespread U.S. encroachment during the Yeltsin years of penury. While doing most of their business in the West, Beijing and Moscow share an enmity towards U.S. political influence in their own neighborhoods, and they have begun to work consciously to restrict it — most notably in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, envisaged as a NATO-style security umbrella body created by Russia and China and including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgystan and Tajikistan — the oil pipeline nations assiduously courted by the U.S. Washington is simply not invited, although India, Pakistan and Iran have observer status.

But Beijing, whose riches are held predominantly in U.S. dollars, certainly recognizes the intimate connection between the fate of its own economy and that of the United States, the world’s leading consumer nation. China’s rise does not signal the emergence of a new bipolar order dividing the world into rival camps as the Cold War once did. Beijing’s influence may be growing at U.S. expense not only in Asia but also in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, but it is nowhere close to being a peer competitor to the U.S. — nor is its objective the dominant global position of the sort enjoyed by the U.S. since World War II. China is simply increasing its own strategic influence, in proportion to its growing share of the global economy, and that inevitably involves displacing the influence of the superpower that has defined its own national interests as extending across five continents.

Beijing will be one of a number of different power centers that emerge amid the decline of U.S. global hegemony, in a geopolitical order more akin to that of the late 19th century than that of the last one. Viewed in the big sweep of history, the current moment will be read simply as the completion of the Cold War era, laying to rest the fantasy of that contest’s sole surviving power dominating a global capitalist order in perpetuity. And it may also be remembered as a moment in which emerging regional players such as India, Brazil, Turkey, the Gulf States and yes, even South Africa, suddenly found themselves offered unprecedented opportunity to advance their own interests in a global arena where the price of admission was the tutelage of a single power center.

Posted in Situation Report | 7 Comments

The Guilty Pleasure of Fidel Castro

Posted on February 20, 2008 by Tony


There’s been predictably little interesting discussion in the United States of Fidel Castro’s retirement as Cuba’s commandante en jefe, maximo etc. That’s because in the U.S. political mainstream, Cuba policy has for a generation been grotesquely disfigured by a collective kow-towing — yes, collective, it was that craven Mr. Clinton who signed into law the Draconian Helms-Burton act that made it infinitely more difficult for any U.S. president to actually lift the embargo, and the equally craven Mrs. Clinton appears to pandering to the same crowd — to the Cuban-American Ahmed Chalabi figures of Miami, still fantasizing about a day when they’ll regain their plantations and poor people of color will once again know their place. But let’s not for a moment forget the mirror-image of that view so common on the left, where Castro’s patent fear of his own people and reluctance to trust them to debate ideas and options (much less hold competitive elections that, in all probability, he’d have easily won) is strenuously rationalized on the basis of the CIA’s repeated efforts to kill him. (Sure, they repeatedly tried to kill Castro, and Washington might like to manipulate Cuba’s politics given half a chance, but those are not sound reasons to imprison economists or avoid discussing policy options even within the Communist Party.)

What fascinates me, however, is the guilty pleasure with which so many millions of people around the world revere Fidel Castro — revere him, but wouldn’t dream of emulating his approach to economics or governance. People, in other words, who would not be comfortable actually living in Castro’s Cuba, much as they like the idea of him sticking it the arrogant yanqui, his physical and political survival a sure sign that Washington’s awesome power has limits — and can therefore be challenged.

Nelson Mandela is a perfect example of the guilty pleasure phenomenon: A dyed-in-the-wool democrat with an exaggerated fondness for British institutions, Mandela is nonetheless a warm friend and admirer of the Cuban leader. The same would be true for almost all of the current generation of ANC leaders in South Africa, not only those who jump and prance while singing about machine guns, but also those with impeccable credentials in Washington and on Wall Street. When the guests were being welcomed at Nelson Mandela’s presidential inauguration in 1994, the announcement of Hillary Clinton’s presence, representing her husband’s administration, elicited polite applause. When Fidel Castro was announced, the assembled political class of the new order went into raptures of ecstasy. Sure, Fidel had earned their loyalty not only by being a firm supporter of the ANC when Washington wasn’t interested, but more importantly, by sending his own men to fight and die on African soil to defend Angolan independence from the machinations of the U.S. and the apartheid regime, and their Angolan proxies. But equally important was what Fidel represented to the global south — not a model of governance and economic management (after all, the very ANC leaders who cheered him to the heavens were embarked upon a diametrically different political and economic path to Castro’s — whose revolution, by the way, looked as if it was on its last legs in 1994, having lost the massive Soviet subsidy that had enabled a quality of life for poor people unrivaled in the developing world). No, what Fidel represented to South Africa’s new leaders was a symbol of independence, of casting off colonial and neo-colonial overlords and defending your sovereignty, against Quixotic odds, from an arrogant power.

Take a survey among today’s Latin American leaders on Fidel Castro, and he’ll get a huge popularity rating. For the likes of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, he has, rather unfortunately, been a role model in every sense; for the more sober and pragmatic social democrats of the Lula-Bachelet-Kirschner variety, Fidel nonetheless represents an inspiration that opened the way for their generation to cut their own path and stand up to the U.S.-backed dictators that imprisoned and tortured their ilk. In Latin America, Castro personifies nothing as much as defiance of the Monroe Doctrine, by which the U.S. had defined the continent as its backyard, reserving the right to veto, by force, anything it didn’t like. Get a Mexican conservative politician drunk in a discreet setting, and you’ll probably discover a closet Castro fan.

Castro appeals not only to socialists, but to nationalists everywhere. And, of course, the Cuban leader himself was a radical nationalist, rather than a communist, when he seized power in 1959, and the U.S. response to his moves to nationalize the sugar industry were part of what drove him to make common cause with the Soviets.

At the same time, of course, it is not simply nationalism, but his revolution’s social achievements, that account for his popularity at home. Back in 2000, when the Miami Chalabis were desperately trying to prevent the traumatized Elian Gonzales from being reunited with his father, they insisted that any Cuban given the choice would flee to the United States, and that Elian’s father was being coerced. Nonsense, said the CIA — actually, more than 90% of the population would rather stay on the island. And the regime could count on the support of the majority of them should it come under external attack. (It was also a relatively safe bet that were multiparty elections to be held, Castro’s party would have won.)

And it’s not hard to see why. Visiting Cuba in 1994, I had been all geared up to write the sort of cynical ex-leftie P.J. O’Rourke-style political epitaph, but what I discovered — even at the height of the Special Period, when the sudden disappearance of the Soviet subsidy that had given Havana more than $800 a year for every Cuban had left them literally starving — was something far more nuanced and challenging. Typical of the experience was a young curator at an art museum, who I shall call simply Antonio. The twentysomething Afro-Cuban had a master’s degree in art history, and loved his work with a passion. But the rest of his life was hell: His breakfast consisted of a couple of glasses of water sweetened with sugar. That was all. He worked all day without lunch. And then, at night, in his darkened apartment (Havana was constantly in darkness due to power cuts), he’d consume his meal of the day — a plate of rice and beans. And then sleep, for there was nothing else to do.

That Antonio was frustrated and deepy depressed was beyond question. Did he want things to change in Cuba? Very much so, he wanted more openness, more discussion of ways out of the destitution that seemed to be staring Cuba in the face. But despite his despair, he remained intensely loyal to Castro and his revolution.

Why? Antonio’s parents had been cane-cutters on a plantation before the revolution. Not only his grandparents, but his parents. Descendants of African slaves, they weren’t that much better off. But here, 55 years later, Antonio’s brother was an electrical engineer with a master’s degree and a good job, and his sister was a science lecturer at a university in Havana. Antonio’s parents were cane-cutters; their children were university educated intellectuals. And they hadn’t won a lottery — their social mobility had been enabled by Cuba’s social system, the education and health and other programs designed to lift up the impoverished majority had transformed their life possibilities within a generation. Antonio understood all too well what his life would have been had the revolution not triumphed in 1959. And he was sticking by it, no matter how bad things got.

With a few exceptions, most of the people I encountered represented a similar ambiguity. Many people were angry and frustrated by Castro’s stubborness — the former seminarian man had an almost theological attachment to a bankrupt economic model. But they weren’t about to turn their backs on the whole social system he’d created. And then there was the race question, which was never formally acknowledged either in pre-revolutionary Cuba, or in the color-blind communism of the Castro era. Close to two thirds of Cubans are people of color — African and mulatto. The old regime protected the interests of an almost exclusively white elite, and it was that same elite that ran the Chalabi operation in Miami. Castro’s own government, of course, was also overwhelmingly white, but its social policies and official ideology championed the interests (and also the story) of the majority.

The problem, of course, was the extent to which Fidel Castro had made his own personality indistinguishable and inseparable from the social system he’d created — a classic cult of the personality regime, built in no small part on the highly militarized approach to political organization that has been the legacy of Leninism. He hints at the problem in his statement announcing his decision to stand down: “Preparing the people for my psychological and political absence was my primary obligation after so many years of struggle.” His “psychological absence” is, of course, a recognition of the fact that many of his most loyal supporters and party cadres will feel, quite literally, orphaned by his departure from the scene. And it is this problem that he appears to be seeking to address, albeit very late in the game, by phasing his withdrawal from politics rather than dying in power and setting off a national trauma of the type that followed Stalin’s death. I can’t help but recall Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s horrific account of being in the crowd at his funeral: “Tens of thousands of people jammed against one another … in a white cloud…at that moment I felt I was treading on something soft. It was a human body. I picked my feet up under me and was carried along by the crowd. For a long time I was afraid to put my feet down again. I was saved by my height. Short people were smothered alive, falling and perishing.” More than 150 mourners were trampled to death, in an event that Yevtushenko saw as emblematic of a political culture that had stripped its citizens of all agency and subjectivity. Belatedly, perhaps, Castro appears to be seeking to avoid the same.

I suspect he has a lot of catching up to do. Back in 1994, a visitor came to the house where I was staying in Havana to make sure I was given the “correct” perspective — he was a little concerned that my host, his son-in-law, was an enfant terrible, with insufficient reverence for Fidel and an inclination to entertain problematic ideas. The old man, let’s call him Edgardo, was a marvelous interlocutor, who entertained me with hilarious and hair-raising stories from the 50s and 60s. I enjoyed the opportunity to ask a party cadre just what Cuba was going to do to dig itself out of the hole into which it appeared to have fallen. “You mark my words,” Edgardo said indignantly. “They can talk all they want about Fidel, but one day the imperialists will be forced to have a drink with him.” (For Edgardo, it was all about respect and acknowledgment.) Fair enough. But what was Cuba going to do to keep its economy going in the mean time? “You mark my words, they will sit down with Fidel…” Okay. But what are you guys thinking about how to proceed now that the Soviet subsidy has gone. Will you follow the Chinese route? “We will never buckle before the imperialists. Fidel will find a way…” And so it went on. Clearly, despite the economic crisis, the party cadres had not been engaged in any discussion over how Cuba was going to respond. It was all about Fidel, an omnipotent, ominscient Fidel, who would find a way.

My suspicion of the paucity of discussion even within the Party were confirmed a few days later when a man came to the door selling homemade wine. Everybody in Cuba in 1994 was selling something, hoping to raise a little cash to buy food on the black market. And like everybody in Cuba, he was all too keen to talk, and share his story. He’d been a nuclear engineer, working at the now-mothballed atomic energy plant at Cienfuegos. He’d been studying in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s at the height of Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika initiatives, and had returned home to Cuba fired up to begin discussing how the Soviet reform and democratization process applied to Cuba. He had been an active party member, and simply assumed that his comrades back home would in the same state of ideological ferment that he’s witnessed in the Soviet Union. No such luck. That reform stuff, he was told, was for the frozen-over socialism of Moscow; “Here we don’t need this because we have sunshine socialism.” There was simply no discussion. The man from Cienfuegos had been bitterly disappointed. The problem in the Cuban party, he said, was that no serious debate or discussion was tolerated. Debate was seen as threatening. It offered an opportunity to “the enemy” to create divisions and undermine the revolution. Best leave the decision making to the leadership — to Fidel, more precisely. He’ll know what to do…

The nuclear engineer from Cienfuegos seemed, to me, to personify the tragedy of Castro’s legacy. However much the aging revolutionary has done for his people, he refused ever to trust them — to openly debate political questions, and to choose wisely in a genuinely competitive political system. Instead, it was Father knows best, on an epic scale. Whether he manages to belatedly repair the damage remains an open question.

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Honey, I Shrank the Superpower

Posted on February 18, 2008 by Tony

The Times is a new daily news venture edited by Ray Hartley, who consistently provides some of the best commentary on where South Africa is headed. They asked me to do a three-part series on the changing global power balance and its implications. This is part one, which appeared last Monday.

In a snide reference to Bill Clinton’s 1992 promise to “build a bridge into the 21st century,” Barack Obama recently quipped that what Hillary Clinton really offers is a bridge back into the 20th century. Yet, a bridge back into the last century may be what all the major candidates are offering when they promise to restore the American leadership and primacy. The Republicans promise to restore American power by staying the course in Iraq, threatening Iran, and staring down “radical Islamic terrorism,” which John McCain calls “the transcendent issue of the 21st century.” The Democrats envisage turning the clock back eight years, restoring post-Cold War American primacy simply by adopting a more sober and consensus-based style. The problem, of course, is that while Bush’s
reckless forays into the Middle East have accelerated the decline of America’s strategic influence, there’s little reason to believe that this decline can be reversed either by more of the same, or by a less abrasive tenant in the Oval Office.

The gangster movie Miller’s Crossing offered a profound mediation on the nature of power in one petty thug’s warning to his boss: “You only run this town because people think you run this town.” Bush’s catastrophic mistakes have inadvertently revealed the limits of U.S. power, making it abundantly clear to both friend
and foe that Washington is no longer in charge.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Middle East, where most of the Bush Administration’s exertions have been focused. The U.S. remains mired in Iraq for the foreseeable future, its recent troop surge — utilizing the maximum combat capability currently available to its military – achieving tactical gains but failing to resolve the
political conflict that drives the violence there. Other designated bad guys such as Syria, and particularly Iran, have actually grown in strength and influence as a result of an Iraq invasion designed to intimidate them into surrender. Tehran has cocked a snoot at
U.S.-led efforts to pressure it over its nuclear program, buoyed both by America’s need for Iranian goodwill in Iraq and also the ascendancy of non-Western players, particularly China and Russia, as economic and geopolitical partners.

Bush has failed to exorcise Hizballah and Syrian influence from Lebanon, and his efforts to marginalize Hamas in Palestinian politics have also clearly floundered.

These and other failures have demonstrated even to longtime U.S. allies in the region such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia that Washington currently has neither the muscle nor the vision to secure their common interests, prompting both to rebuff U.S. policies they deem
dysfunctional, such as the efforts to isolate Iran and Hamas.

The picture is no more encouraging on other fronts of Bush’s “war on terror.” Afghanistan — six years after the U.S. scattered the Taliban regime — is a failing state whose main export is opium, and where the Taliban now operates openly in more than half of the
country. The Taliban’s comeback is helped by the sanctuary it enjoys in Pakistan, whose military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, has mastered the art of taking the piss out of his Washington, even as it proclaims him a vital ally against terrorism. (Never mind his
political manipulations, Musharraf won’t even allow the Americans to interrogate A.Q. Khan, the scientist who supplied nuclear weapons technology to all and sundry.)

The fading of Pax Americana in the wider Middle East is partly a product of Bush’s over-reach and over-reliance on force and the threat of force. But it is also a symptom of epic, economically-driven shifts — the rise of China and India, Russia’s resurgence and
Europe’s steady expansion, to name a few — that have redefined the global power equation. Viewed in this wider context, McCain’s suggestion that Islamist radicalism is the “transcendent issue of the 21st century” is a reminder of just how obsessively distracted Washington has been by the provocation of 9/11. John Kerry, may have been a poor
presidential candidate, but he was right about terrorism: ”We have to get back to the place … where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance,” he said on the campaign trail in 2004. Like organized crime, he said, terrorism could not be eliminated, but the challenge was to keep it at levels where “it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.” The “war on terror,” as Kerry seemed to grasp in that much pilloried and quickly retracted statement, had distracted the American political class from reckoning with the impact of profound changes underway in the global order. But even in waging that war on radical Islamist challengers, the relative decline of U.S. power is unmistakable. Working creatively within those limits will be challenge facing the next president.

Posted in Annals of Globalization, Featured Analysis | 14 Comments

Israel’s Self-Defeating ‘Liquidation’

Posted on February 16, 2008 by Tony


Guest Column: Uri Avnery, the doyen of Israeli peace campaigners, has seen it all before. With last week’s killing of Hizballah commander Imad Mughniyeh, Israel once again demonstrated an unrivaled capacity to pull off difficult assassinations, and then went into a frenzy of self-congratulation over its prowess. After last year’s failed Lebanon war, Israel’s political-military leadership certainly felt the need to offer its public a psychological pick-me-up. But at what cost? Avnery explores the history of such “liquidations,” as the Israeli establishment calls them, to show that they tend to actually strengthen resistance organizations, while raising the danger to the civilian population of those who carry them out.

Although he wouldn’t know it, Uri Avnery played an important part in my journey from Zionism. On Yom Kippur in 1979, as an increasingly skeptical young activist of Habonim, I didn’t bother going to shul; instead I stayed home and read Avnery’s Israel Without Zionism. It was the first time I had encountered an Israeli Jew challenging the fundamentals of the nationalist ideology of “Jewish Statehood,” and I was moved by the fact that, as a participant in those events, he was more than willing to reveal the violent process of Palestinian dispossession in 1948, puncturing the mythology of a “miracle” by which the Palestinians had simply upped and left in response to Arab radio broadcasts. Avnery helped “reassure” me back then, as an uncertain 18-year-old, that it was okay to be Jewish and question Zionism. I’m honored to have him as a guest contributor.

Blood and Champagne

By Uri Avnery

Every people elevates the profession in which it excels.

If a person in the street were asked to name the area of enterprise in which we Israelis excel, his answer would probably be: Hi-Tech. And indeed, in this area we have recorded some impressive achievements. It seems as if hardly a day passes without an Israeli start-up company that was born in a garage being sold for hundreds of millions. Little Israel is one of the major hi-tech powers in the world.
But the profession in which Israel is not only one of the biggest, but the unchallenged Numero Uno is: liquidations.

This week this was proven once again. The Hebrew verb “lekhassel” – liquidate – in all its grammatical forms, currently dominates our public discourse. Respected professors debate with academic solemnity when to “liquidate” and whom. Used generals discuss with professional zeal the technicalities of “liquidation”, its rules and methods. Shrewd politicians compete with each other about the number and status of the candidates for “liquidation”.

Indeed, for a long time now there has not been such an orgy of jubilation and self-congratulation in the Israeli media as there was this week. Every reporter, every commentator, every political hack, every transient celeb interviewed on TV, on the radio and in the newspapers, was radiant with pride. We have done it! We have succeeded! We have “liquidated” Imad Mughniyeh!

He was a “terrorist”. And not just a terrorist, a master terrorist! An arch-terrorist! The very king of terrorists! From hour to hour his stature grew, reaching gigantic proportions. Compared to him, Osama Bin-Laden is a mere beginner. The list of his exploits grew from news report to news report, from headline to headline.
There is and never has been anyone like him. For years he has kept out of sight. But our good boys – many, many good boys – have not neglected him for a moment. They worked day and night, weeks and months, years and decades, in order to trace him. They “knew him better than his friends, better than he knew himself” (verbatim quote from a respected Haaretz commentator, gloating like all his colleagues).

True, one killjoy Western commentator argued on Aljazeera that Mughniyeh had dropped from sight because he had ceased to be important, that his great days as a terrorist were in the 80s and 90s, when he hijacked a plane and brought down the Marine headquarters in Beirut and Israeli institutions abroad. Since Hizbullah has turned into a state-within-the-state, with a kind of regular army, he had – according to this version – outlived his usefulness.

But what the hell. Mughniyeh-the-person has disappeared, and Mughniyeh-the-legend has taken his place, a world-embracing mythological terrorist, who has long been marked as “a Son of Death” (i.e. a person to be killed) as declared on TV by another out-of-use general. His “liquidation” was a huge, almost supra-natural, achievement, much more important than Lebanon War II, in which we were not so very successful. The “liquidation” equals at least the glorious Entebbe exploit, if not more.

True, the Holy Book enjoins us: “Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth / Lest the Lord see it and it displeases him.” (Proverbs 24:17) But this was not just any enemy, it was a super-super-enemy, and therefore the Lord will certainly excuse us for dancing with joy from talk-show to talk-show, from issue to issue, from speech to speech, as long as we do not distribute candies in the street – even if the Israeli government denies feebly that we were the ones who “liquidated” the man.

As chance would have it, the “liquidation” was carried out only a few days after I wrote an article about the inability of occupying powers to understand the inner logic of resistance organizations. Mughniyeh’s “liquidation” is an outstanding example of this. (Of course, Israel gave up its occupation of South Lebanon some years ago, but the relationship between the parties has remained as it was.)

In the eyes of the Israeli leadership, the “liquidation” was a huge success. We have “cut off the head of the serpent” (another headline from Haaretz). We have inflicted on Hizbullah immense damage, so much that it cannot be repaired. “This is not revenge but prevention”, as another of the guided reporters (Haaretz again) declared. This is such an important achievement, that it outweighs the inevitable revenge, whatever the number of victims-to-be.

In the eyes of Hizbullah, thing look quite different. The organization has acquired another precious asset: a national hero, whose name fills the air from Iran to Morocco. The “liquidated” Mughniyeh is worth more than the live Mughniyeh, irrespective of what his real status may have been at the end of his life.

Enough to remember what happened here in 1942, when the British “liquidated” Abraham Stern (a.k.a. Ya’ir): from his blood the Lehi organization (a.k.a. Stern Gang) was born and became perhaps the most efficient terrorist organization of the 20th century.

Therefore, Hizbullah has no interest at all in belittling the status of the liquidatee. On the contrary, Hassan Nasrallah, exactly like Ehud Olmert, has every interest in blowing up his stature to huge proportions.

If Hizbullah has lately been far from the all-Arab spotlight, it is now back with a bang. Almost every Arab station devoted hours to “the brother the martyr the commander Imad Mughniyeh al-Hajj Raduan”.

In the struggle for Lebanon – the main battle that occupies Nasrallah – the organization has scored a great advantage. Multitudes joined the funeral, overshadowing the almost simultaneous memorial parade for his adversary, Rafiq al-Hariri. In his speech, Nasrallah described his opponents contemptuously as accomplices to the murder of the hero, despicable collaborators of Israel and the United States, and called upon them to leave the house and move to Tel Aviv or New York. He has gone up another notch in his struggle for domination of the Land of the Cedars.

And the main thing: the anger about the murder and the pride in the martyr will inspire another generation of youngsters, who will be ready to die for Allah and Nasrallah. The more Israeli propaganda enlarges the proportions of Mughniyeh, the more young Shiites will be inspired to follow his example.

The career of the man himself is interesting in this respect. When he was born in a Shiite village in South Lebanon, the Shiites there were a despised, downtrodden and impotent community. He joined the Palestinian Fatah organization, which dominated South Lebanon at the time, eventually becoming one of Yasser Arafat’s bodyguards (I may even have seen him when I met Arafat in Beirut). But when Israel succeeded in driving the Fatah forces out of South Lebanon, Mughniyeh stayed behind and joined Hizbullah, the new fighting force that had sprung up as a direct result of the Israeli occupation.

Israel now resembles the person whose neighbor overhead has dropped one boot on the floor, and who is waiting for the second boot to fall.

Everybody knows that there will be revenge. Nasrallah has promised this, adding that it could take place anywhere in the world. For a long time already, people in Israel believe Nasrallah much more than Olmert.

Israeli security organs are issuing dire warnings for people going abroad – to be on guard at every moment, not to be conspicuous, not to congregate with other Israelis, not to accept unusual invitations, etc. The media have magnified these warnings to the point of hysteria. In the Israeli embassies, security has been tightened. On the Northern border, too, an alert has been sounded – just a few days after Olmert boasted in the Knesset that, as a result of the war, the Northern border is now quieter than ever before.

Such worries are far from baseless. All the past “liquidations” of this kind have brought with them dire consequences:

— The classic example is, of course, the “liquidation” of Nasrallah’s predecessor, Abbas Mussawi. He was killed in South Lebanon in 1992 by Apache gunships. All of Israel rejoiced. Then, too, the Champagne was flowing. In revenge, Hizbullah blew up the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, as well as the Jewish community center there. The planner was, it is now alleged, Imad Mughniyeh. More than a hundred people perished. The main result: instead of the rather grey Mussawi, the sophisticated, masterly Nasrallah took over.

— Before that, Golda Meir ordered a series of “liquidations” to revenge the tragedy of the Israeli athletes in Munich (most of whom were actually killed by the inept German police trying to prevent their being flown to Algeria as hostages). Not one of the “liquidated” had anything to do with the outrage itself. They were PLO diplomatic representatives, sitting ducks in their offices. The matter is described at length in Stephen Spielberg’s kitschy film “Munich”. The result: the PLO became stronger and turned into a state-in-the-making, Yasser Arafat eventually returned to Palestine.

— The “liquidation” of Yahyah Ayyash in Gaza in 1996 resembles the Mughniyeh affair. It was carried out by means of a booby-trapped cellular telephone. Ayyash’s dimensions, too, were blown up to giant proportions, so that he had become a legend already in his own lifetime. The nickname “the engineer” was attached to him because he prepared the explosive devices used by Hamas. Shimon Peres, who had succeeded to the Prime Ministership after the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, believed that the “liquidation” would lend him huge popularity and get him re-elected. The opposite happened: Hamas reacted with a series of sensational suicide-bombings and brought Binyamin Netanyahu to power.

— Fathi Shikaki, head of Islamic Jihad, was “liquidated” in 1995 by a bicyclist who shot him down in a Malta street. The small organization was not eradicated, but on the contrary grew through its revenge actions. Today it is the group which is launching the Qassams at Sderot.

— Hamas leader Khaled Mash’al was actually being “liquidated” in a street in Amman by the injection of poison. The act was exposed and its perpetrators identified and a furious King Hussein compelled Israel to provide the antidote that saved his life. The “liquidators” were allowed to go home in return for the release of Hamas founder Sheik Ahmad Yassin from Israeli prison. As a result, Mash’al was promoted and is now the senior political leader of Hamas.

— Sheik Yassin himself, a paraplegic, was “liquidated” by attack helicopters while leaving a mosque after prayer. A previous attempt by bombing his home had failed. The sheik became a martyr in the eyes of the entire Arab world, and has served since as an inspiration for hundreds of Hamas attacks.

The common denominator of all these and many other actions is that they did not harm the organizations of the “liquidatees”, but boomeranged. And all of them brought in their wake grievous revenge attacks.

The decision to carry out a “liquidation” resembles the decision that was taken to start the Second Lebanon War: not one of the deciders gives a damn for the suffering of the civilian population that inevitably falls victim to the revenge.

Why, then, are the “liquidations” carried out?

The response of one of the generals who was asked this question: “There is no unequivocal answer to this.”

These words are dripping with Chutzpa: how can one decide on such an action when there is no unequivocal answer to the question of its being worth the price?
I suspect that the real reason is both political and psychological. Political, because it is always popular. After every “liquidation”, there is much jubilation. When the revenge arrives, the public (and the media) do not see the connection between the”liquidation” and the response. Each is seen separately. Few people have the time and the inclination to think about it, when everybody is burning with fury about the latest murderous attack.

In the present situation, there is an additional political motivation: the army has no answer to the Qassams, nor has it any desire to get enmeshed in the re-occupation of the Gaza Strip, with all the expected casualties. A sensational “liquidation” is a simple alternative.

The psychological reason is also clear: it is satisfying. True, the “liquidation” – as the word shows – is more appropriate for the underworld than for the security organs of a state. But it is a challenging and complex task, as in a Mafia film, which gives much satisfaction to the “liquidators”. Ehud Barak, for example, was a liquidator from the start of his military career. When the “liquidation” ends in success, the executioners can raise glasses of champagne.

A mixture of blood, champagne and folly is an intoxicating but toxic cocktail.

Posted in Guest Columns, Situation Report | 21 Comments

The Fish is in the Mail

Posted on February 15, 2008 by Tony


You’d think that avowed Christians would have remembered that Biblical lesson about the difference between giving a poor man a fish, and giving him a fishing pole — or a job on a snoek boat, or a deepwater hake factory ship, you know what I’m getting at. Nope, when President Bush hands out $1.5 trillion with the approval of the Democratic Congress, it’s going to be all fish. Checks mailed out in the spring, $600 or $1200, on the bizarre assumption that these will somehow be serve as a defibrillator on the flagging economy.

Now, it’s a safe bet that the working poor and the unemployed will spend those checks, a much-needed supplement to help them buy basics and pay their utility bills. Hell, if you’re hungry, a fish is going to bring relief. It’s about time the U.S. government rediscovered it’s reponsibility — and its just plain basic human decency — to ensure all the citizens of the world’s richest country are able to eat, stay warm, get health care and a decent education. There are still people living in trailers two years after Hurricane Katrina, and being told by the government that they’re probably being poisoned by formaldehyde.

But we all know this handout is a one-off. And the idea that all those poor people buying beans and pasta and heating oil and gasoline is somehow going to stimulate the economy and create jobs is just daft.

Middle class people will use their rebate checks to pay down some of their personal stake in the massive debt this country owes to China (who will, effectively, fund the “stimulus package” which is, after all, deficit spending). Or sock it away in anticipation of that pink slip that’s becoming all too common right now. And the rich? Are the rich going to use their tax rebates to open new factories and invest in new ventures? Of course not, because with the economy turning down, there’s nothing in it for them.

I’m no economist (that much ought to be clear), but it would seem blindingly obvious that to stimulate the economy, the government needs to invest — in activities that create jobs, while addressing urgent needs of the economy and society. Spend that $1.5 trillion upgrading America’s crumbling infrastructure, and you’d be doing both. You know, public works programs. Commission engineering firms to build new roads and bridges, or (heaven forbid) create a 21st century rail network to replace the current 19th century affair, and you’d create quality jobs up and down the country, and generate domestic demand and its multiplier effects.

But I guess they can’t do that, because that would be socialism.

Have a nice recession.

Posted in 99c Blogging, Situation Report | 15 Comments

Learning From Arab Jews

Posted on February 13, 2008 by Tony

Guest Column: David Shasha, the founder and director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, New York, is one of my favorite weekly email reads. (You can subscribe, too, by contacting him directly.) Arab and Jew are not mutually exclusive categories. Quite the contrary. Anyone who tells you, as so many “pundits” do in this society when trying to explain the Middle East, that “Jews and Arabs have been fighting for thousands of years,” is speaking from ignorance. The idea of a conflict between “Jews” and “Arabs” is really only as old as modern political Zionism, and really only took on a generalized form in the second half of the 20th century amid the trauma that accompanied the creation of the State of Israel. Jews and Arabs had, in fact, lived together for hundreds of years in the Muslim world, and many Jews have always considered themselves Arab.

David Shasha makes the case that this branch of Judaism, what he calls the “Levantine Option”, is tragically silenced and excluded from the mainstream Ashkenazi and Zionist narrative that dominates discussion of the Jewish experience. He argues that while the Ashkenazi tradition was both heavily influenced by Western Christian traditions and also, because of persecution, evolved a far more narrow, insular “shtetl” outlook on Jewish identity. By contrast, he argues, the Sephardic experience, in the “convivienca” of Moorish Spain and the Arab lands in the Islamic golden age actually has much more to offer Jews looking for an expansive, universalist version of their identity in a multi-cultural, cosmopolitan world. It’s fascinating stuff: Read on!

A Jewish Voice Left Silent: Trying to Articulate “The Levantine Option”
By: David Shasha

Jewish ethnicity breaks down into two basic groups: Sephardic Jews, from Arab-Islamic lands in the Southern Mediterranean; and Ashkenazic Jews, from Christian Europe in the North. Occidental Jews have taken on many of the traits of Western culture, while the Oriental Jews, many of whom continued to speak Arabic and partake of a common Middle Eastern culture until the mass dispersions of Jews from Arab countries after 1948, have preserved many of the folkways and traits of Arab civilization.

The movement of Jews out of the Arab world has greatly disrupted the bearings of Sephardic Jewry. A combination of anti-Arab sentiment propounded in Zionism and the shift in Jewish ethnicity in the United States away from the first American Jews — who were Sephardic, but who gave way to the successive waves of Ashkenazi immigrants beginning in the late 19th century — has eclipsed the rich culture and civilization of the Sephardim to the point where it is currently unknown and inaccessible.

Such a state of affairs is a great shame because this culture, what I have called “The Levantine Option,” could speak in a sophisticated and humane manner to many of the issues that we now face as American Jews; issues of assimilation, cultural alienation and a general sense of malaise and dysfunction.

America remains an open and pluralistic culture much as medieval Arab civilization was – a place where people are free to worship and believe as they wish. As licit members of Muslim society Jews were once free to adapt their culture to the Arabic model as articulated in the first centuries of Islam.

Prominent Sephardic rabbis, such as Moses Maimonides (1135-1204) and Abraham ibn Ezra (1089-1164), disdained clericalism while espousing humanism and science, tying parochially Jewish concerns to a wider universalistic understanding of Man and the World.

Sephardic rabbis were not merely religious functionaries; they were poets, philosophers, astronomers, doctors, lawyers, accountants, linguists, merchants, architects, civic leaders and much else. Samuel the Nagid (993-1056), the famous polymath of Granada, even led military troops into battle in 11th century Andalusia.

While Ashkenazi Jews in the post-Enlightenment period broke off into bitter and acrimonious factions over how to deal with Modernity, Sephardim, true to “The Levantine Option,” remained united rather than let doctrine asphyxiate them and tear their communities apart as had been the case in Europe. A Jewish Reformation never took place in the Sephardic world because the Sephardim continued to maintain fidelity to their traditions while absorbing and adapting the ideas and trends of the world they lived in.
Sephardic Judaism was founded on the brilliant idea of Religious Humanism, a conception of Jewish civilization that integrated Jewish ritual practice with the humanistic legacy of Greco-Roman civilization. Religious Humanism is not a forced grafting of two incompatible ways of seeing, or a questioning of Jewish tradition, but an organic union of the human sciences with the sacred traditions of Judaism.

“The Levantine Option” was brought to the United States at the very inception of the republic: Jews living in Charleston, South Carolina, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, New York City, Newport, Rhode Island and various other port cities linked Jews to one another along the Atlantic coast(s) under the rubric of a shared civilization centuries old.
It was this connectivity that animated the first decades of Jewish life in America along the lines of the Sephardic model until the later Eastern European immigration took place at the beginning of the 20th century.

Arthur Kiron has described this now-forgotten Sephardic “Haskalah” in his eye-opening article “An Atlantic Jewish Republic of Letters” (Jewish History issue 20 (2006), pp. 171-211):
<blockquote>
A circum-Atlantic network of Jewish publishers, authors and translators living in three port cities, London, Philadelphia, and Kingston, Jamaica became increasingly visible during the 1840s articulating these rhetorical strategies in print. This group can be considered a distinct sub-culture distinguished by the following features. The main actors were printers and preachers, merchants and professionals. They adopted English as their primary language of communication.

Sephardic history informed their self-understandings and manner of worship. They defended the binding character of rabbinic tradition, the oral law, and Jewish ritual observances (proscriptive dietary regulations, the keeping of the Sabbath, and other holiday festivals and customs).

They actively opposed Jewish religious reformers and Christian missionaries. They were involved in the emancipation arguments of their respective lands of relative political toleration and social inclusion. In short, they produced and circulated vernacular reading materials to promote a Victorian version of “Jewish enlightenment in an English key,” as David Ruderman has recently called it.

These individuals and their collective efforts fashioned a new, refined version of enlightened observant Jewish existence that comported with the English-speaking Victorian cultural orbit in which they lived.</blockquote>

Central to the development of this Sephardic Levantine Judaism was the figure of Rabbi Sabato Morais of Philadelphia (1823-1897), the founder of the original Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City, who was a towering but now sadly forgotten figure in the changing orbit of American Jewry.

Morais exemplified in his demeanor and his teachings the values of thrift, humility, devotion, justice, integrity and many other important ethical concepts – particularly what Morais called in his native Italian <i>abnegazione,</i> the sense of self-sacrifice that we all recall from our Mediterranean grandparents, an innate and intense part of the Levantine heritage. All these traits Morais inherited from his Sephardi forbears.
Not for Morais the starkly doctrinal polemics of the Ashkenazim who sought to eviscerate the traditions of Sephardic Humanism from two diametrically opposed poles: There was on the one hand the development of a Reform Judaism which sought to gut the entire ritual framework of Judaism by establishing a new form of Judaism aiming to abandon the actual praxis of the traditional Jewish rituals seeking in vain to maintain the core meaning of those rituals. At the other extreme there was the development of a new Jewish fundamentalism along the lines of the famous pronouncements of the Hatam Sofer (1762-1839) which continue to animate the polemical spirit of American Jewish Orthodoxy that saw any signs of innovation as anathema. Sofer quoted the Talmudic dictum “He-hadash asur min ha-Torah” – the Torah prohibits the new – to justify his reactionary posture.

What if the future of the American Judaism lay in the amicable interaction of Judaism with its surrounding culture in a symbiotic formation that lays out commonalities with the host culture rather than the deep-seated differences that are rooted in the Ashkenazi experience?

If such a symbiosis were desirable, the memory of Moorish Spain where the three monotheistic religions were able to coexist and produce a civilization of great worth, would surely take prominence. The Sephardic voice would be central in articulating what was termed <i>Convivencia,</i> the creative cultural dynamic that fired medieval Spanish civilization, until its collapse in 1492.

“The Levantine Option” would help collapse the alienating cult of persecution harbored in classical Zionist thought and omnipresent in the various internal conflicts that continue to divide American Jews. In many ways American Jewish Orthodoxy has continued to articulate the values of European Judaism’s sense of the <i> Shtetl </i>mentality with a majority of American Jews simply turning off to this alienating approach to Jewish tradition and history.

Until we develop ways to understand Jewish tradition in such an enlightened and civilized way – from within a shared cultural space that exists for those of us who still espouse “The Levantine Option” – it is altogether possible that American Judaism will continue to be fragmented and divided among its sects. “The Levantine Option” is a means for Jews to reintegrate themselves into a harmony that would strengthen Jewish life and its relationship to its surrounding environment

Posted in A Wondering Jew, Guest Columns, Situation Report | Tagged , , , , , | 27 Comments

Olmert: His Own Shlemiel, or Bush’s?

Posted on January 31, 2008 by Tony

While Israel’s Winograd Commission has certainly pulled no punches in excoriating the Israeli military and political leadership for their botched war in Lebanon last summer, there appears to be a massive lacuna in its conclusions. (I’m not even going to get into the question of cluster bombs and other military actions by Israel in that conflict that contravene international law.) Israel clearly went to war in haste without a considered plan, without weighing alternatives, without establishing clear objectives and without an exit strategy. That much Winograd was prepared to say bluntly. But what he doesn’t explain is why things played out in this way.

And here, I think, he’s avoiding the elephant in the room: the very clear sense, throughout the Lebanon misadventure, that Israel was coordinating its actions with Washington to an extent that the Bush Administration’s own decisions had a decisive impact on how Israel waged its campaign. Once Israel had launche its initial air raids, the U.S. quickly moved to define the objectives of the war in terms far more expansive than Israel had ever intended, using its diplomatic veto to block a ceasefire that the Israeli leadership had, in fact, been counting on when they began. I had previously written about how in order to truly understand the brutal botchup of Lebanon, the commission would have to probe the U.S. role in Israel’s decision making — the war was one in which I believe Israeli leaders ceded an unprecedented level of control over Israeli decisions to the United States.

It was clear, at the time, that the neophyte Olmert was outsourcing his decision-making to Condi Rice. I wrote at the time of the sense that Israel was waging a proxy war for the Bush Administration — a sense confirmed at the time by the hawkish dean of Israeli military correspondents, Ze’ev Schiff, who wrote at the height of the conflict:

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is the figure leading the strategy of changing the situation in Lebanon, not Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or Defense Minister Amir Peretz. She has so far managed to withstand international pressure in favor of a cease-fire, even though this will allow Hezbollah to retain its status as a militia armed by Iran and Syria.

As such, she needs military cards, and unfortunately Israel has not succeeded to date in providing her with any. Besides bringing Hezbollah and Lebanon under fire, all of Israel’s military cards at this stage are in the form of two Lebanese villages near the border that have been captured by the IDF.

If the military cards Israel is holding do not improve with the continuation of the fighting, it will result in a diplomatic solution that will leave the Hezbollah rocket arsenal in southern Lebanon in its place. The diplomatic solution will necessarily be a reflection of the military realities on the ground.

The rhetoric of the Bush Administration about this war being the dawning of a “new Middle East” confirmed a sense that it had been appropriated for the deranged purposes of Rice and Bush’s giddy fantasies about transforming the region through “shock and awe.” The extent of U.S. influence was also made clear by Israeli media reports at the time of Olmert rushing out of critical security cabinet meetings to coordinate his strategy on the phone with Rice — hard to picture Ariel Sharon doing that, actually. But Schiff also makes clear that, plainly, the Israelis had no idea what they’d signed up for, which is why, as Winograd concluded, they waded into battle without a plan. (But Winograd doesn’t appear to want to ask why — presumably U.S.-Israeli relationship is a third-rail of Israeli politics that dare not be touched…) They had assumed they were launching retaliatory strikes to punish Hizballah for seizing two of its soldiers; then, suddenly, they were exected — by Washington — to militarily eliminate Hizballah.

And the neocons in and around the Administration spelled this out during the conflict, with some of Israel’s most aggressive supporters in Washington making clear what was expected of it in service to the American grand design. John Bolton’s comments, recently, about the pointlessness of Israel’s final ground offensive underscore this sense.

My friend Daniel Levy wrote a thoughtful analysis of Rice’s role in that conflict last month:

“Senior Israeli ministers are on record testifying to an investigating committee that when they voted in the cabinet to authorize the initial military strike they did not consider this to be the start of a prolonged war. Their working assumption was that diplomatic pressure would end the military conflict after 48 to 96 hours.

That did not happen – America prevented it, thereby making Israel a prisoner to accomplishing a mission that was never realistic. The delay in diplomacy did not change the substance of the deal eventually reached, it did, however, cause more death, destruction and loss of American prestige.”

A year ago, I wrote an op ed in Haaretz questioning whether it was in Israel’s best interests to hitch it’s wagon to a dangerously misguided Bush Administration’s wild and obviously doomed revolutionary schemes, because “it’s a safe bet that Assad, Nasrallah, Ali Khamenei and Hamas will be there long after Bush, Rice and their fantasy are wheeled off the stage.” In the piece, I wrote this of the Lebanon war:

When Olmert stumbled into Lebanon last summer, he may have been expecting Washington to play the role of the big brother who would drag him, still swinging, off Hassan Nasrallah, having demonstrated his “deterrent” power without getting himself into too much trouble. Instead, he found Washington impatiently egging him on, demanding that he destroy Nasrallah to prove a point to the Shiite leader’s own big brother, and holding back anyone else who tried to break up the fight. As neocon cheerleaders like Charles Krauthammer made plain, the administration was disappointed at Olmert’s wimpish performance.

The Winograd report, as far as I can tell from the reporting I’ve seen, has avoided asking these questions. And that’s unfortunate, not only because it fails to establish a complete picture of what shaped Olmert’s decision making — was he just a shlemiel, or was he Bush’s Shlemiel? — but because it avoids forcing Israelis to confront the consequences of the disastrous policies the Bush Administration has purused, often on its behalf, over the past eight years.

Posted in Situation Report | 31 Comments

The Incredible Shrinking Davos Man

Posted on January 26, 2008 by Tony


Last week’s annual Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum was conspicuous by how little it seemed to matter to anyone — the event passed with hardly a nod from the mainstream media, which had more important things to worry about. But as I wrote on TIME.com, it wasn’t simply that Davos was eclipsed in the news cycle by global stock market wobbles and by Hamas in Gaza wiping the floor with its dunderheaded adversaries (dutifully gathered at Davos, in the persons of Condi Rice, Tony Blair, the Israeli government and the leaders of Fatah). On fronts as different as financial markets and the geopolitics of the Middle East, it has become plain that the political and economic elites of the West have seen a sharp decline in their ability to dictate events.

The decline of Davos Man is not simply related to a credit crunch or a U.S. election year. Even if America elects a new Administration dedicated to reversing the mistakes of the Bush team, it is unlikely to restore U.S. and Western primacy such as it existed in the golden years of Davos. The policy failures of the Bush years may have accelerated the decline of U.S. influence, but they are not its sole cause. In the years during which the U.S. became distracted by the “global war on terror,” China’s economy has grown to twice the size it was when President Bush first took office. It is to China — guarantor, by virtue of the trillion dollars and growing line of credit it makes available to the American consumer, of the American way of life — that U.S. investment banks turn for help when confronted by their losses in the subprime loan crisis. The very success of capitalism in developing and former socialist countries has inevitably weakened the grip of the West on the global political economy.

Today, market analysts contemplate whether the best hope for the global economy avoiding being dragged into the vortex of recession by the U.S . slowdown may be the “decoupling” from the U.S. economy that some believe could allow economies such as China and India to continue growing by virtue of momentum in their own economies. It’s a theory, untested in crisis — and clearly the wobbles hitting India’s stock market this week suggest its own investors are not convinced. Still, China has already become the key trading and investment partner in both Africa and in some key Latin American countries, offering a model of development quite different from the “Washington consensus” on issues of governance and economic management that might, as easily, have been dubbed the “Davos consensus.” China is certainly not going to take direction from its debtors, and global energy prices have transformed Russia from obedient supplicant to swaggering challenger to the West.

The U.S. and its allies remain immensely powerful, but the limits of their ability to influence events have been laid bare in Iraq. Today, long-term traditional U.S. allies in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Europe can no longer be counted on to follow Washington’s lead. At the same time, the Davos crowd has lost its near-monopoly on global political and economic power, which is increasingly being diffused across a variety of different power centers with shifting alliances. French foreign policy intellectuals of the 1990s, fearful of what they called the American “hyperpower,” fantasized about a “multipolar world” where power was balanced across a variety of different power centers and interests. While economic “decoupling” remains an untested hypothesis, geopolitical “multipolarity” is today increasingly plain to see.

But a far more extensive and interesting development of this argument can be found in Parag Khanna‘s must-read New York Times magazine piece, Waving Goodbye to Hegemony. Khanna begins with the present distribution of power, noting that the presidential candidate in the U.S. sound almost quaint as they discuss their plans for managing the world. “At best, America’s unipolar moment lasted through the 1990s, but that was also a decade adrift,” he writes. “The post-cold-war ‘peace dividend’ was never converted into a global liberal order under American leadership. So now, rather than bestriding the globe, we are competing — and losing — in a geopolitical marketplace alongside the world’s other superpowers: the European Union and China. This is geopolitics in the 21st century: the new Big Three. Not Russia, an increasingly depopulated expanse run by Gazprom.gov; not an incoherent Islam embroiled in internal wars; and not India, lagging decades behind China in both development and strategic appetite. The Big Three make the rules — their own rules — without any one of them dominating. And the others are left to choose their suitors in this post-American world.”

He has interesting thoughts on why Russia won’t make it as a major power in its own right, and will be forced to align either with Europe or with China. (It’s population continues to rapidly diminish.) He makes the case that the geopolitics of the next century will be contested by three main hemispheric power blocs led by the U.S., Europe and China, and that the outcome of their battles will be determined largely by the choices of what he calls “second world swing states” — countries with substantial economic or political weight, such as Turkey, Iran and Brazil, with no fixed allegiance to any of the Big Three.

The key second-world countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia are more than just “emerging markets.” If you include China, they hold a majority of the world’s foreign-exchange reserves and savings, and their spending power is making them the global economy’s most important new consumer markets and thus engines of global growth — not replacing the United States but not dependent on it either. I.P.O.’s from the so-called BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) alone accounted for 39 percent of the volume raised globally in 2007, just one indicator of second-world countries’ rising importance in corporate finance — even after you subtract China. When Tata of India is vying to buy Jaguar, you know the landscape of power has changed. Second-world countries are also fast becoming hubs for oil and timber, manufacturing and services, airlines and infrastructure — all this in a geopolitical marketplace that puts their loyalty up for grabs to any of the Big Three, and increasingly to all of them at the same time. Second-world states won’t be subdued: in the age of network power, they won’t settle for being mere export markets. Rather, they are the places where the Big Three must invest heavily and to which they must relocate productive assets to maintain influence….

Second-world countries are distinguished from the third world by their potential: the likelihood that they will capitalize on a valuable commodity, a charismatic leader or a generous patron. Each and every second-world country matters in its own right, for its economic, strategic or diplomatic weight, and its decision to tilt toward the United States, the E.U. or China has a strong influence on what others in its region decide to do. Will an American nuclear deal with India push Pakistan even deeper into military dependence on China? Will the next set of Arab monarchs lean East or West? The second world will shape the world’s balance of power as much as the superpowers themselves will.

The starting point of a new American leadership looking to remain competitive in the new geopolitics (the idea of restoring American primacy is already an anachronism, he argues), will be to pursue what President Bush promised during his first presidential campaign — a humble foreign policy. One based on a consultative and cooperative relationship with new and emerging power centers of a sort quite unimaginable to those currently in charge. It may be a sign of Davos’s own decline as a showcase of global influence that the conference was opened by Condi Rice and chaired in many key sessions by Tony Blair. Why would you want to listen to the unrepentant cranks who screwed things up over the past decade when trying to figure out how to manage the next one?

Posted in Situation Report | 22 Comments

Buy This Book!

Posted on January 24, 2008 by Tony

Former New York Times staffer Sarah Boxer has done a wonderful service in her new book Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web, showcasing some truly fine writing from the much-hyped blogosphere. And the fact that there are a couple of pieces from this site in there has nothing, nothing to do with why I’m promoting it, I swear…

Posted in Shameless Cronyism | Comments Off on Buy This Book!

Hamas Blows a Hole in Bush’s Plans

Posted on January 23, 2008 by Tony

The hole blown by Hamas in the Gaza-Egypt border fence has finally punctured the bubble of delusion surrounding the U.S.-Israeli Middle East policy. In a moment reminiscent of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, through the breach surged some 350,000 Palestinians — fully one fifth of Gaza’s total population, as my friend and colleague Tim McGirk observed at the scene. And what did they do on the other side? They went shopping for the essentials of daily life, denied them by an Israeli siege imposed with the Wehrmacht logic of collective punishment. And the Egyptian security forces didn’t stop them, despite Washington and Israel urging them to, because U.S.-backed strongman Hosni Mubarak would provoke a mutiny among his citizenry and even his own security forces if they were to be ordered to stop hungry Palestinians from eating because Israel has decided that they should starve until they change their attitude.

With some carefully placed semtex (or whatever the Palestinian sappers use), Hamas managed to take advantage of the impossible situation the U.S.-Israeli policy had created for Mubarak and for President Mahmoud Abbas, to once again emerge on top. Then again, it ought to be noted that Hamas is blessed by the brutal ineptitude of its enemies.

Rob Malley and Hussein Agha, in a characteristically sharp analysis last week noted that Israel, Abbas and Hamas were confronting one another in a three-way standoff in which each was obsessed with preventing any rapprochement between the other two. But Hamas has now forced the issue. The Israelis have no choice but to recognize that the group’s control of Gaza is an intractable reality, that will force the Arab world and Abbas himself to accelerate efforts to restore Palestinian unity. And Israel will have no choice but to pursue the cease-fire option offered by Hamas as the most effective means for ending rocket fire out of Gaza.

In that sense, of course, Hamas has done Israel a favor, presenting it with a fait accompli that can allow it to stand down from an unworkable and morally untenable position evolved by the dunder-headed combination of the Bush Administration and the two Ehuds, Olmert and Barak (whose return to the center stage of Israeli politics is a sure sign that Israel has run out of ideas… Next up, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu — take that one to the bank.)

By breaking the siege, Hamas has opened the way for a range of new possibilities, including movement toward restoration of a single Palestinian government (by inviting Abbas to once again send PA units to guard the border with Egypt), cooperation with Egypt over managing Gaza’s affairs, and even movement towards a cease-fire with the Israelis.

It remains to be seen whether Israel has the imagination to seize the opportunity — to the extent that Olmert is still taking directions from Washington, I wouldn’t bet on it. Then again, as Malley points out in another of his must-read pieces, the alternative is war.

The whole Annapolis strategy is based on the false premise that Arab leaders could be rallied to the purpose of isolating Hamas (and also Iran) through blockades and even military action in furtherance of U.S. and Israeli objectives. The hole in the wall in Gaza is an eloquent tombstone to President Bush’s Middle East policy. The post-Bush era has begun, a moment of great promise for all in the region who hope to live in peace and security.

Posted in Situation Report | 65 Comments