Rootless Cosmopolitan – By Tony Karon | Analysis and commentary by Tony Karon

Getting Sarkozy Wrong

Posted on May 17, 2007 by Tony

Bonhomie does not a policy make:
Sarkozy’s agenda is “to the left of Kucinich”

One of the reasons I know I’m doing something right on this web site is the fact that I’m lucky enough to have Bernard Chazelle as a frequent reader of and commentator on my postings, be they on matters Middle Eastern or the state of European football. A Princeton computer science professor, Bernard is an unfailingly erudite commentator with spectacularly diverse interests and fascinating insights — check out his personal page — and when I recently waded, rather ignorantly, into the minefield of French politics, he set me straight on a few questions. Now that Nicolas Sarkozy is the new president — and is being claimed in the U.S. media as being as pro-American as Chirac was ostensibly anti- — I invited Bernard to offer us some insights on what we should really expect to change in France as a result of a Sarko presidency. Bernard elegantly shreds the mainstream media picture of “France in decline,” but at the same time skewers the received notion of Sarkozy as an anti-immigrant vigilante or a Gallic Tony Blair.

I’m delighted to welcome Bernard in what I hope will be the first of many guest appearances on Rootless Cosmopolitan

Why Sarkozy Will Disappoint the White House

by Bernard Chazelle

The story has been all over the media: Nicolas Sarkozy might not be an easy man to like but France is the “sick man of Europe” and tough love is what it needs. If its new president’s odes to the liberating power of work
and paeons to “the France that gets up early” grate on the ears of his 35-hour-work-week nation, so be it.
Yeah, yeah, Sarko made few friends in the riot-prone banlieues when he called the locals “scum” and threatened to clean up the projects with a Kärcher power hose (a German brand, no less). But at least he promised them jobs and not more empty socialist rhetoric. Having missed the train of globalization, the French economy is collapsing under the strain of a creaky welfare system and a chronic incapacity to create jobs.
By rejecting the neoliberal creed, France has turned its back on modernity. Aware of its decline, the nation pines for its lost grandeur, a risible notion so quintessentially Gallic English doesn’t even have a word for it. The pro-US, pro-Israel, tax-cutting, union-busting Sarko is France’s best hope for breaking with the gloomy years of the past.

Nice story. Too bad it bears so little connection to reality. France faces serious problems but they are none of the above. Oddly, to get the country all wrong seems a bit of an art form in the U.S. media. On any given day, Tom Friedman can be found berating the French for “trying to preserve a 35-hour work week in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day.” Friedman’s genius is to suppress in the reader the commonsense reaction—Indian engineers have no life—and improbably redirect the pity toward the French. That takes some skill.

‘French decline’ by the numbers

With the highest birth rate in Europe after Ireland, France contributes 70% of Europe’s natural population growth. GDP per head in France, Germany, Japan, and the UK are nearly identical. Growth over the last 10 years has averaged 2% in france, 2.1% in the U.S., and 2.3% in the UK. In the last quarter, France actually raced ahead of Britain and the U.S. Productivity is higher in France than in both countries (and 50% more so than in Japan). But pity the French: with their 35-hour work week, 5-week paid vacations, and 16-week paid maternity leaves, they work 30% fewer hours than Americans. Maybe that’s why they live longer (81 years vs 78) and infant mortality is lower (4.3 vs 7 per 1000). Unless the reason is France’s health care system: the best in the world, according to the World Health Organization. Or perhaps it’s the narrower inequality gap: child poverty in France is half the British rate and one third the American.

“French decline” experts like to contrast France’s catastrophic unemployment rate of 8.3% (lower than the U.S. rate during the Reagan years) with Britain’s marvellous 5.5%. In the process they miss two points: First,
France created more jobs than the UK in the last 10 years. (The discrepancy comes from the fact that France is younger and has experienced higher labor force growth). Second, virtually all of the job growth in the UK since 2000 has been the result of public spending. The neoliberals who so admire Britain’s recent growth
conveniently forget that it was built on a Keynesian binge through tax increases and a huge public sector expansion: from 37% to 46% of GDP in a mere 6 years. Gordon Brown at the Exchequer has, indeed, looked much the part of a French finance minister with a London office.

José Bové, the Astérix of French politics, has burnished France’s antiglobalisation
image by ransacking McDonald’s outlets wherever he can find enough TV cameras to capture his exploits.
But while France has been noisily scoffing at globalization for decades, it has quietly become one of the most globalized nations on earth. (Reform by stealth is a French disease.)
Some of the evidence:

France has more companies listed in the Fortune Global 500 than
Britain and Germany;

for the last 10 years, France’s net foreign investments (FDI) have ranked in the top 5,
and its net FDI outflows have been the world’s largest;

foreign investors own 45% of all French stocks. The comparable
figure is 33% for Britain’s and only 10% for the US.

What, then, is wrong with France?

Simply put, the French system serves the interests of two-thirds of the population (the insiders). The outsiders (the young and the old) have been knocking at the door for 40 years. The sons and daughters of North-African immigrants have paid the highest price. While a few might be seeking a new Muslim identity, which their parents shunned, the overwhelming majority of them have no greater desire than to integrate into secular French society. Savor the irony: the only practicing Muslim on the French national soccer team, Franck Ribéry, is a white Christian who converted to Islam. Integration has failed but the battle is not lost.
Half of all immigrant couples are racially mixed and a quarter of all French women of Algerian descent marry non-Muslims. (By comparison, only 2 to 4 percent of African-American women marry outside their race
and 5 percent of Britain’s South-Asian women do so.) The crisis of the projects is France’s biggest challenge in the years ahead. The problem is rooted in the twin evil of racism and the insiders’ fierce defense of the status quo. Sarkozy’s presidency will succeed or fail on his ability to break the door open to let the outsiders in,
and create jobs for the unemployed youths.

Sarkozy is blessed with all the attributes of a successful politician, including a unique gift for being a jerk.
In the back alleys of the banlieues, France’s former top cop comes off as just another white racist thug.
Soccer star Lilian Thuram might well be right that “Sarkozy stirs up people’s latent racism,” but as to being a racist himself the evidence is thin. Sarko actually never used the word “scum.” An exasperated resident of the projects asked him when he would rid them of the racaille (wrongly translated as scum; it means
rabble) and he repeated her plea in the affirmative. Likewise, “I’ll clean up the place with a power hose” were the angry words Sarkozy spoke to the parents of an 11-year old boy who had just been killed in a gang shootout—hardly Hitler addressing the 1927 Nuremberg rally. However, Sarko’s open admiration for the rancid views of my former Ecole Polytechnique colleague, Alain Finkielkraut, makes one wonder. One of the “new philosophers,” he is the French Niall Ferguson, who goes whining to Haaretz that “In France… we no longer teach that the colonial project sought… to bring civilization to the savages.”

On a personal note, I can never forgive Mitterrand for intentionally boosting Le Pen’s fortunes at the ballot box
in a Machiavellian divide-and-rule strategy. On the other hand, as someone who did not vote for Sarko,
I am still grateful to him for dealing Le Pen his biggest electoral blow. I also note that while other politicians regurgitate the same tired “solutions” to the crisis of the banlieues—namely, building more community centers named after great poets—Sarko has suggested somewhat more adventurous ideas,
such as a restructuring of labor relations, a more flexible labor market, hiring incentives, and even that big French bugaboo, affirmative action, all the while reaffirming France’s traditional rejection of communautarisme. But he is a figure of hate among minorities and, unless he can repair his image and build bridges, he will not accomplish much. The issue of ethnic integration towers above all others. The future of France hangs in the balance. Jacques Chirac, the friendliest and most ineffective French president in memory,
spoke endlessly about solidarity but never did a thing about it. Sarkozy has a mandate: 32% of France voted for him; by comparison, only 15% of the U.S. voted for Clinton in ’92. His ideas might well fail but he’s earned the right to try them out. His success on integration will be the ultimate test.

Who is Nicolas Sarkozy?

Unlike Chirac, Sarko is a true man of the right. Being France, of course, that still puts his agenda, though not necessarily his character, to the left of Kucinich. But he faces a French left that, unlike its American version,
lost the battles but won the war. France typically elects rightwing presidents to implement leftwing policies.
The consummate pragmatist, Sarko will not fight his battles on ideological grounds. In anticipation of the social unrest that is sure to greet his reform of labor laws, he intends to use his (likely) new majority in parliament
to pass a minimum service public transportation law to dull the effect of transit strikes. Sarko is the shrewdest French politician of his generation: a coopting master.

Commentators who wrongly see significance in his mixed Hungarian/Greek/Jewish background seem unaware that France is the most ethnically mixed country in Europe: 20% of the population has a foreign parent or grandparent; and the density of foreign-born, the highest in Europe, is similar to that of the United States.
In that regard, Sarko is the textbook French success story. What is highly significant, however, is that
he did not graduate from ENA, the breeding ground of French politicians. This gives him the independent streak to, say, staff half of his cabinet with women, as is his stated intention, without thinking twice about it.

What foreign policy?

His likely selection of Bernard Kouchner as foreign minister is a master stroke. The highly popular founder of the Nobel-prize winning Doctors Without Borders is a former Communist who worked for Mitterrand, campaigned for Ségolène Royal, and, as the chief advocate of the wooly concept of “droit d’ingérence” (right of humanitarian intervention), played Bush’s useful idiot in the run-up to the Iraq war. His selection is a canny way to please, annoy, and confuse everyone all at once.

French foreign policy is framed within a “Gaullist consensus” that has been remarkably consistent over the years. On the European front, Germany will remain France’s only indispensable partner. Merkel’s first foreign trip was to the Elysée Palace. Sarkozy returned the favor on Inauguration Day. London’s hopes for a weakening of the Paris-Berlin axis will once again be frustrated. The axis will put the final nail in the coffin of Turkey’s EU admission, to the chagrin of Britain and the U.S. This will be made all the easier by troublesome new members like Poland, who offer daily reminders to the growing legions of Eurosceptics that the EU is already too big and the last thing it needs is the addition of an impoverished Muslim nation that would soon be its largest member. Sarko and Brown will lower Merkel’s ambition for a new European constitution and they’ll all agree on a referendum-free slimline treaty. True to his faith in industrial policy (which seems to have escaped the eagle eyes of his neoliberal admirers stateside), Sarko will strong-arm the European Central Bank into putting downward pressure on the Euro. He will fail.

Sarkozy’s pious words about changing France’s (shameful) neocolonial position in sub-Saharan Africa will come to naught. France’s chasse guardée will remain well guarded. His proposed Mediterranean union is a different story. France is the strongest power in the Mediterranean rim and it’s a mystery why no Gaullist leader had yet thought of making a move in that direction. Actually, Chirac did: he signed on to the 1995 EU Barcelona Initiative, but the EU’s focus on eastward expansion and the NAFTA-esque imbalances of the project led it to its current vegetative state. Except for Turkey, which will regard Sarko’s Mediterranean initiative as yet another “nail in the coffin” (see above), the reaction in the region will be globally positive. Even Israel might take a shine to it. The U.S. would be wise to support it, but it’s unclear it will.
Regarding Russia, Sarko will follow Merkel’s lead in being firm with Moscow but opposed to an aggressive stand by the U.S. The neocons’ push for a new cold war meant to reverse America’s declining superpower status, which is what the missile shields in Central Europe are all about, will be strongly resisted.

France’s interests in the Levant coincide with America’s. Methods have differed in the past but, after the fiascos of the Iraq and Lebanon wars, they will increasingly converge. Sarko’s take on Syria won’t be as personal as Chirac’s (who never forgave Bashar’s goons for killing his buddy Hariri) but he will work to contain Syrian and Iranian influences. Paris will see eye-to-eye with Washington about Hezbollah and will bark alongside against Iran’s nuclear intentions while opposing military action. The French policy in Iraq? There is none. France has no policy about Dante’s lower rings of hell.

Sarko will initiate a rapprochement with Israel. Given the dysfunctional state of Israeli politics and the 40 years of bad blood between the two countries, he won’t get far. (Hard to believe that France was once Israel’s closest ally.) The contour of French support for a two-state solution around the 1967 lines will not change. Is Sarko pro-Israel? Yes. Does it matter? No. France has the largest Jewish population in Europe and the world’s third biggest (as well as Europe’s largest Muslim population) but there is no “Jewish vote” and no French AIPAC.
Sarko is likely to have done well with Jewish voters (he got an astounding 90% of he absentee ballots in Israel).
But one should not read too much into it. France’s Arab policy might tilt toward Israel ever so slightly but Sarko will quickly discover that his room for manoeuvre is very limited.

Sarko’s Jewish roots are irrelevant. His strong support among Sephardic Jews reflect his tough stance against the antisemitic violence that flared up during the second Intifada. Many Sephardim live near or in the “hottest” banlieues and suffered the brunt of Muslim anti-Jewish hostility. Although this new form of European antisemitism has since declined, it would be tragic to dismiss it. To his credit, Sarkozy did not. Some perspective might be useful, however. Sharon’s attempts to portray France as an antisemitic country
was silly pandering. The 2006 Pew Global Attitudes Survey asked the question: “Do you have a very or somewhat favorable opinion of Jews?” The answer was “yes” for 86% in France, 77% in the US, and 74% in Britain (the figure for that staunch Israeli ally, Turkey, was 15%). More interesting, among Muslim respondents, the answer was “yes” for 71% in France but only 32% in Britain (even though the UK has far fewer Arab Muslims). It would appear, therefore, that the antisemitic violence is hardly representative of French Muslim society as a whole. It must also be pointed out, if there were any need for it, that the most prevalent form of racism in France is not against Jews but Muslims.

Sarko the American?

Washington will have a hard time getting its head around it, but trans-Atlantic relations have ceased to be Europe’s main focus (except in Britain). U.S.-EU relations will improve but the era of a grand common planned destiny is over. Europe will let America’s dreams of liberal hegemony vanish, the idea having outlived its usefulness. The EU has a bigger economy and a larger population than the U.S. With the end of the Cold War and the Iraq war debacle, America’s military umbrella has lost credibility (at least in Western Europe). NATO got its second wind in Kosovo but is now dying a painful death in Afghanistan. (Sarko wants out.)

France’s priorities outside the EU will be on the global South, while it channels its Asian policy through the EU.
On a personal level, Sarko loves America. But so did Chirac; and, to measure the full irrelevance of personal leanings in this matter, consider that the closest Franco-American relations in the last 50 years took place under the most ideologically anti-American president, François Mitterrand. A President Sarkozy in 2003 would have never joined America’s war in Iraq (pace Kouchner). Sarko will be friendly to the White House and kind to Brown and Merkel’s Atlanticist sensitivities. But smiles don’t make policy.

Good luck, Mr President!

Nicolas Sarkozy once confided to a journalist: “I don’t want to be president. I must be president.” Ruling France might prove a good therapy for Sarko. Let’s hope it is good for the French, too—especially
those of a darker skin tone who’ve been left behind. I am full of doubts about Sarko. But I’ll root for his success
and hope he proves me wrong.

Posted in Annals of Globalization, Featured Analysis, Guest Columns, Situation Report | 99 Comments

Palestinian Pinochet Making His Move?

Posted on May 15, 2007 by Tony

There’s something a little misleading in the media reports that routinely describe the fighting in Gaza as pitting Hamas against Fatah forces or security personnel “loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas.” That characterization suggests somehow that this catastrophic civil war that has killed more than 25 Palestinians since Sunday is a showdown between Abbas and the Hamas leadership — which simply isn’t true, although such a showdown would certainly conform to the desires of those running the White House Middle East policy.

The Fatah gunmen who are reported to have initiated the breakdown of the Palestinian unity government and provoked the latest fighting may profess fealty to President Abbas, but it’s not from him that they get their orders. The leader to whom they answer is Mohammed Dahlan, the Gaza warlord who has long been Washington’s anointed favorite to play the role of a Palestinian Pinochet. And while Dahlan is formally subordinate to Abbas, whom he supposedly serves as National Security Adviser, nobody believes that Dahlan answers to Abbas — in fact, it was suggested at the time that Abbas appointed Dahlan only under pressure from Washington, which was irked by the Palestinian Authority president’s decision to join a unity government with Hamas.

If Dahlan takes orders from anyone at all, it’s certainly not from Abbas. Abbas has long recognized the democratic legitimacy and popularity of Hamas, and embraced the reality that no peace process is possible unless the Islamists are given the place in the Palestinian power structure that their popular support necessitates. He has always favored negotiation and cooperation with Hamas — much to the exasperation of the Bush Administration, and also of the Fatah warlords whose power of patronage was threatened by the Hamas election victory — and could see the logic of the unity government proposed by the Saudis even when Washington couldn’t. Indeed, as the indispensable Robert Malley and Hussein Agha note, nothing has hurt Abbas’s political standing as much as the misguided efforts of Washington to boost his standing in the hope of undermining the elected Hamas government.

Needless to say, only an Administration as deluded about its ability to reorder Arab political realities in line with its own fantasies — and also, frankly, as utterly contemptuous of Arab life and of Arab democracy, empty sloganizing notwithstanding — as the current one has proved to be could imagine that
the Palestinians could be starved, battered and manipulated into choosing a Washington-approved political leadership. Yet, that’s exactly what the U.S. has attempted to do ever since Hamas won the last Palestinian election, imposing a financial and economic chokehold on an already distressed population, pouring money and arms into the forces under Dahlan’s control, and eventually adapting itself to funnel monies only through Abbas, as if casting in him in the role of a kind of Quisling-provider would somehow burnish his appeal among Palestinian voters. (As I said, their contempt for Arab intelligence knows no bounds. )

But while the hapless Abbas is little more than a reluctant passenger in Washington’s strategy — and will, I still believe, repair to his former exile lodgings in Qatar in the not too distant future — Mohammed Dahlan is its point man, the warlord who commands the troops and who has been spoiling for a fight with Hamas since they had the temerity to trounce his organization at the polls on home turf.

Dahlan’s ambitions clearly coincided with plans drawn up by White House Middle East policy chief, Elliot Abrams — a veteran of the Reagan Administration’s Central American dirty wars — to arm and train Fatah loyalists to prepare them to topple the Hamas government. If Mahmoud Abbas has been reluctant to embrace the confrontational policy promoted by the White House, Dahlan has no such qualms. And given that Abbas has no political base of his own, he is dependent entirely on Washington and Dahlan.

Seeing the disastrous implications of the U.S. policy, the Saudis appeared to have put the kibosh on Abrams’ coup plan by drawing Abbas into a unity government with Hamas. And as Mark Perry at Conflict Forum detailed in an excellent analysis Dahlan was just about the only thing that the U.S. had going for it in terms of resisting the move towards a unity government. Although his fretting and sulking in Mecca couldn’t prevent the deal, the U.S. appears to have helped him fight back afterwards by ensuring that he was appointed national security adviser, a move calculated to provoke Hamas, whose leaders tend to view Dahlan as little more than a torturer and a de facto enforcer for Israel.

But Dahlan appears to have made his move when it came to integrating the Palestinian Authority security forces (currently dominated by Fatah) by drawing in Hamas fighters and subjecting the forces to the control of a politically neutral interior minister. Dahlan simply refused, and set off the current confrontations by ordering his men out onto the street last weekend without any authorization from the government of which he is supposedly a part.

The new provocation appears consistent with a revised U.S. plan, reported on by Mark Perry and Paul Woodward, that emphasized the urgency of toppling the unity government. They suggest the plan emanates from Abrams, who they say is operating at cross purposes with Condi Rice’s efforts to appease the Arab moderate regimes by reviving some form of peace process. They note, for example, that Jewish American sources have told the Forward and Haaretz that Abrams recently briefed Jewish Republicans and made clear to them that Rice’s efforts were merely a symbolic exercise aimed at showing Arab allies that the U.S. was “doing something,” but that President Bush would ensure that nothing would come of them, in the sense that Israel would not be required to make any concessions.

Whatever the precise breakdown within the Bush Administration, it’s plain that Dahlan, like Pinochet a quarter century, would not move onto a path of confrontation with an elected government unless he believed he had the sanction of powerful forces abroad to do so. If does move to turn the current street battle into a frontal assault on the unity government, chances are it will be because he got a green light from somewhere — and certainly not from Mahmoud Abbas.

But the confrontation under way has assumed a momentum of its own, and it may now be beyond the capability of the Palestinian leadership as a whole to contain it. If that proves true, the petulance that has substituted for policy in the Bush Administration’s response to the 2006 Palestinian election will have succeeded in turning Gaza into Mogadishu. But it may be too much to expect the Administration capable of anything different — after all, they’re still busy turning Mogadishu into Mogadishu all over again.

Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report | 50 Comments

Gavin Evans: Why Blair Embraced Bush

Posted on May 11, 2007 by Tony

In all the political obits this week to Tony Blair, the one theme that nobody seems to have touched is what, in his personal makeup, allowed him to move from a paid up member of the Chile Solidarity Campaign in the 1970s to an eloquent pitch-man and apologist for the imperial misadventures of the Bush Administration. To answer that question, I had to turn to my old friend Gavin Evans, in London. Gavin arrived in London in 1993, and immediately got behind Tony Blair as the man to lead the left into the new millennium. Needless to say, the honeymoon didn’t last long. As Blair bows out, Gavin looks back with schadenfreude and a teeny-weeny bit of grudging admiration, but concludes – via an interesting mea culpa from his own political career — that Blair’s disgraceful legacy is a result of deep-seated character flaws. It’s always a pleasure to welcome Gavin back onto Rootless Cosmopolitan, but you should check out more of his work on his own web site, www.gavinevans.net

When Tony Blair stood for the leadership of the Labour Party 13 years ago, I backed him in a spirit of enthusiastic delight. Having joined the party on arriving from South Africa 18 months earlier, I was relieved to see it led by a sunny optimist with the vision to keep Britain in tune with a changing world – characterised by a free-flowing, outsourced capitalism of the post-industrial information age. Not that I relished the prospect of private greed encroaching on the public space – far from it – but having witnessed the early signs of retreat from socialism during my ‘struggle’ years in South Africa, I doubted the feasibility of resistance to capitalism’s global march, and Blair seemed to grasp the implications more than anyone else on the left.

So my support wasn’t glazed by illusions of turning the corner on Thatcherism – sadly, that option seemed closed (although now, as a result of the implications of global warming, it has re-opened) – and I appreciated the compromises essential for staying in power. New Labour needed to neutralise opposition from the alliance that had kept it out for 18 years: the City, big business, middle England, Rupert Murdoch. I liked Blair’s stand on law and order (‘tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime); I liked the way he picked a tactical fight with the antediluvians of his party (by scrapping the anti-democratic Clause Four in the party’s constitution); I even liked his personal style: more steely than his slightly effeminate exterior suggested. So I was delighted be among drunken English and Irish friends in 1997, cheering along. This Cool Britannia thing suggested if not quite a new era then certainly a fresh ethos.

Blair’s early policy probes- not least in raising spending on health and education (initially cautious, but increasingly bold) – were consistent with these imperatives, and it was a bonus to have a leader prepared to use his limited global power in a way no Tory would contemplate: his interest in debt relief, his commitment to peace in the north of Ireland, the interventionism seen in his strong stand against Serb ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, and his commendable decision to tackle barbarism in Sierra Leone (incidentally, in both of those cases there would have been no concerted international action without Blair).

One of his major domestic thrusts was crime, and here his record was more ambiguous. Crime figures eventually declined, yet violent crime continued to increase, as did fear of youth lawlessness. The reasons surely relate, in part, to the neglect of the Thatcher years – the children of those left behind then are today’s delinquents – but there is also a sense that despite huge increases in social spending, a steady reduction in unemployment and higher growth rates than the rest of Europe, Blair’s government was not tough enough on the causes of crime (the gap between rich and poor continued to grow, with the bottom 15 percent beginning to resemble the American underclass); nor were they tough enough on crime itself. Blair admired the ‘zero-tolerance’ approach taken in American cities but was reluctant about the follow: more prisons, more prisoners; longer sentences, less remission, more police on the beat; more armed officers.

Some more marginal domestic policy initiatives, like the ban on fox hunting and the halting reform of the Lords, were Labour projects that happened despite rather than because of Blair. Others clearly had his stamp, and were unambiguous successes, ranging from civil unions for gay people to the introduction of the minimum wage to the Scottish parliament, Welsh Assembly and London Mayor’s office. And yet, like so many other early New Labour enthusiasts, I soon became so profoundly disgusted by the man that I not only allowed my Labour membership to lapse but could not bring myself to vote for the party until he bowed out (which will finally happen on June 27). I don’t expect substantial policy changes from Gordon Brown but it will be a relief to see the back of a man who, despite his ‘hand on heart, I did what I thought was right’ plea, consistently misled his people on issues of life and death.

It is hard to escape the suspicion that Blair’s character defects played their part in dragging his country into the myopic mess of its current foreign policy. These emerged in three areas: First, an attitude to power and money that is, frankly, craven; Second, a profound cynicism about those who had made him their leader; Third, an inability to reflect on his own motives. Early hints came in the tone of his dealings with the moneymen, extending way beyond cautious admiration, and ending in his government’s determination to make the entire public sector a giant feeding trough for its benefactors, prompting the current cash for peerages scandal. That he needed to get along with men of money and power was obvious; problem was, he seemed desperate to prove he was one of them. Just one example: a suck-up remark to the British venture capital conference in 1999. “I bear the scars on my back after two years in government,” he gushed, in reference to their shared antipathy to the public sector.

One quid pro quo should have been an unbending fervour about the keeping the dinosaurs of Old Labour at boot tip length, but instead, when it came to getting his way with the party he despised, he was only too happy to use these beasts from the past to keep order – like when he turned to the union bosses to secure the ascendancy of his hopelessly irascible lapdog, Alun Michael, for the Labour leadership in Wales in preference to the slightly less compliant Rhodri Morgan. When that cynical scheme collapsed I assumed it was a lesson learnt, but not a bit of it. London’s Labour members overwhelmingly backed Ken Livingston for mayor but Blair and Brown dug in, fearing the immensely popular ‘Red Ken’ was too much the maverick. Their insistence on reviving the Old Labour voting formula and of allowing union bosses to bypass their own members, ended in the public disembowelling of their sad candidate, Frank Dobson. On a matter of principle I campaigned for Livingston, and never regretted it, but I still lived in hope that Blair would learn from his mistakes.

Worse was to come, however. When it came to his dealings with Europe, Blair always dressed right (Aznar in Spain, Merkel in Germany, Sarkozy in France, and, most disreputably, Berlusconi in Italy). But the implications were far more serious in the United States. Ever since the Suez Crisis, conventional wisdom in British foreign policy was to stay close to America, but there was still room to manoeuvre. Harold Wilson avoided sending troops to Vietnam; Margaret Thatcher went against Washington’s will on the invasion of Granada or the 1980 Moscow Olympic boycott. Blair had no alternative but to get on with the new American president, but this need was taken to extremes never seen before. The craven attitude shown to the moneymen at home – to the kinds of men his wealthy Tory dad would have admired – was magnified in his approach to the ‘Special Relationship’.

Blair seemed driven by an overwhelming urge to be respected by the big beasts of the American right; a craving seen in all its pathetic servitude in the transcript of the open-mic “Bush-Blair recording on the Middle East last year (which saw Tony sucking up to W, and getting brushed off with something approaching contempt). Blair had been comfortable with Clinton’s like-minded charm but with Bush, and the hard men around the president, he had to try harder to please. There have been many fictional attempts to capture the tone of this relationship but for me one of Alison Jackson’s lookey-likey television sketches came closest. It showed a tennis game between Tony and W, where Bush’s ball is clearly out, but the fawning Blair insists it’s in. Watch them together and the body language is unmistakable – the no-doubt unconscious attempt to mimic Bush’s casual machismo coming across stiff and slightly awkward.

A note of mea culpa here: In the mid-to-late 1980s the ANC in South Africa was engaged in an attempt to prize loose powerful elements within the white community, including business leaders, opposition politicians and Afrikaner notables. I became deeply engaged in it at every level, while remaining an active member of the underground. I thought I understood the fears, concerns and motivations of the business leaders, and became embarrassed by those within my tribe who didn’t fully appreciate the implications of our strategy (who still talked of insurrection and nationalisation) and I developed a measure of disdain for some of them, while along the way I became over-eager to please those I had been sent to woo – hinting that we weren’t all that-way inclined, letting them appreciate that there were realists among us. It was almost as if I was trying to say: trust me, I’m one of you. In retrospect, I cringe.

I think Blair was doing the same thing, on a far grander scale – sucking up without realising it (because, like most top politicians, sportsmen and business leaders I’ve met, he’s devoid of a capacity for introspection) while at the same time feeling brave and original about putting down his own tribe. The most tragic result of this misguided sycophancy was Iraq.

I’m not inherently opposed to using troops abroad. It was certainly the best option in Sierra Leone, the Balkans and, initially, in Afghanistan (at least before the bulk of the troops and money were withdrawn to concentrate on the Iraqi misadventure), so the idea of removing a torture regime like Saddam’s might have seemed worthy enough if taken in isolation. But aside from the fraught question of whether the invasion would make the world a better place (and, sadly, the verdict is now in on that one), there was a pressing, home-based reason for caution. The one absolute principle every national leader should respect if sending troops to possible death, is to tell them the truth why they are going. Instead, Blair lied.

I have no doubt that after 9/11 Blair thought ‘regime change’ was a fine idea – it was certainly consistent with the tenor of his internationalist streak. I believe him when he insists, ‘hand-on-heart’ that he felt he was doing the right thing and I can’t even say he consciously fibbed when getting it wrong on weapons of mass destruction (although he and his bully of a press officer, Alastair Campbell, had no qualms about misleading the public on the evidence). But all this is irrelevant because his initial decision to support the invasion had nothing to do with WMDs or regime change. We now know he made a promise to Bush that he’d back him four-square in Iraq – a promise that long preceded the UN process and WMD inspections. Had he told this truth – rising to the despatch box and pleading, ‘Hey, look, I gave my word to George and I like to be thought of as a man of my word and I believe this is vital to the Special Relationship and I think I can influence the way the war is conducted and what happens next and that’s why I want you to vote for war’ – parliament would have laughed him out of office, America would have entered Iraq alone, and, quite possibly, John Kerry would be president today. But, instead, Blair pretended his real motivation was the WMD thing, misled parliament about the nature of the intelligence, and got his way.

This man wants his legacy to rest on other factors. He hopes to finish with a flourish, with the reasons for his decision on Iraq forgotten. But this will never happen. Like Lyndon B Johnson with Vietnam, like Anthony Eden with the Suez, he will forever be associated with a catastrophic military adventure. His thirst for the approval from rich men and men of the right, his hubristic disdain for those who chose him, and his lack of capacity for self-reflection, all came to together and he sent (so far) 150 British men and women to their deaths while at home 55 were killed and hundreds injured in bombings prompted, in part, by his policy. The blood of these men and women – and of many more Iraqis – is on his hands.

Blair should be torn apart by guilt, but I can’t quite see it. I suspect that like most of his calling he’s a man incapable of serious regret, let alone remorse. He will leave office wounded and, increasingly despised at home, and head off across the Atlantic to wallow in the warm glow of approval on the US lecture circuit. And when that finally happens, I will give Labour another try.

Posted in Guest Columns, Situation Report | 17 Comments

What Belfast Teaches the Middle East

Posted on May 11, 2007 by Tony

Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness: hard men make a deal

Yes, yes, I know, Northern Ireland and the Middle East are entirely different situation, and things that worked in one place are not going to necessarily work in the other. Nonethless, in this week’s historic Northern Ireland unity agreement, there are certain universal principles from which anyone looking to broker a peace deal anywhere ought to learn.

The original Good Friday agreement ten years ago was brokered by very different parties to the ones who have now joined a unity government. On the Catholic side, it was the SDLP of John Hume who was the dominant voice at the table, while the Ulster Unionists of David Trimble represented Protestant loyalists. But the electorate eventually rejected those parties, and each community chose more uncompromising parties — the Sinn Fein on the nationalist side and the Democratic Unionists on the loyalist side — to represent them at the table.

The government of Tony Blair did not flinch or give up hope, it pressed on, pushing the chosen representatives of both communities into a process that led to agreement. And the agreement may be far stronger than its predecessor, in that it was brokered by hard men on both sides and that has left no significant rejectionist constituency on either side.

The implications for the Middle East should be obvious: Palestinian voters have chosen Hamas to represent them; imagining that Hamas could be excluded from any peace process is not only absurd, it is self-defeating and dangerous.

The grownups of Europe and the Arab world understand that; that’s why they’ve backed the unity government that has drawn Hamas and Fatah together in a single administration. But the hard-line Likudniks who still write the Bush Administration’s policy are still hard at work on schemes designed to split the Palestinians in the naive hope that Hamas can be sidelined.

Conflict Forum reports that there are detailed plans in place to marshal new economic, political and security efforts aimed at smashing Hamas and boosting President Abbas. The very scary clowns who churn out these plans in Washington labor under the illusion that they can manipulate the process through the selective application of sanctions and resources in a way that will prompt the Palestinian electorate to reject Hamas and restore Fatah. Yeah, right, just like all those sweets and flowers the Iraqis have thrown at U.S. forces over the past four years.

If the berserkers like Elliott Abrams in the Administration are not curbed, they will succeed only in destroying the Palestinian Authority and bringing anarchy to its domain, ending all prospects of peace for Israel, and — in that phrase that has become popular on the Republican primary speech circuit — almost certainly “following America home.”

Posted in Situation Report, Unholy War | 52 Comments

Worse Awaits Olmert, More So Israel

Posted on May 10, 2007 by Tony

If you think it strange that Ehud Olmert is still prime minister of Israel even after it’s official inquiry into the war found him to be an incompetent shlemiel, that may simply be a sign of the leadership crisis in Israel. That Olmert is a moral and political midget is plainly accepted by an Israeli public that had given him approval ratings smaller than the margin of error even before the Winograd report was published. The fact that he’s still in office after having been found to have recklessly plunged his country into a disastrous strategic defeat in Lebanon is a sure sign that Israel’s political leadership is riddled with moral and political midgets. Olmert may still be there because, to borrow a phrase from Hunter S. Thompson, in a generation of swine, the one-eyed pig is king.

Look at the alternatives on offer: Tzipi Livni, so beloved by the purveyors of political kitsch that love a good yarn, moved in for the kill, urging Olmert to resign so that she could take power while avoiding an election, but wouldn’t go as far as to resign her own post to force a choice — moral courage, eh? And then there’s the Labor Party’s presumptive next leader, Ehud Barak. Yes, that’s right, Mr. Zig-Zag, whose own skittish style helped torpedo the Oslo peace process, and who then spent years dissembling about how he was only trying to “expose” Arafat’s duplicity. Barak who withdrew from Lebanon but forgot to cut a deal with Hizballah or anyone else about what would happen there afterwards. Barak failed last time around, the very idea that he’s having another go reveals a measure of chutzpah. And then there’s Bibi Netanyahu, veritably the Newt Gingrich of Israeli politics — a self-impotant, self-serving right-wing crank with Senator Joe McCarthy’s knack for grabbing the headlines with alarmist demagoguery — and make no mistake, if there was an election now, Bibi would be the frontrunner.

It may be with that in mind — or simply the fact that most of the political class is so comfortable with its current share of power and patronage — that Olmert is surviving, so far. None of the politicians wants to face the electorate, except Netanyahu and the parties of the left.

But the stasis may be finite. That’s because the preliminary report of the Winograd Commission, issued almost two weeks ago now, covered only the first five days of the Lebanon war. It publishes its full report in July. As I wrote at the end of the Lebanon war last August, it was on the last weekend of the war that Olmert issued orders that make him morally culpable for the utterly pointless deaths of more than 40 Israeli soldiers by ordering a ground invasion with no clear strategic purpose having already decided that he would declare a cease-fire within 48 hours. If Winograd was harsh on him over the first five days, it’s only going to get a lot worse when the final report comes out.

(Hopefully that one will ask the question of the extent to which Olmert was following the Bush Administration in extended and escalating the war — even if he waded on his own, it’s clear that Washington was goading him to escalate rather than restraining him, in the hope that he could wipe out Hizballah.)

The idea that from this morbid cast of characters we are suddenly going to a bold push for peace is worse than wishful thinking. Sure, Olmert will make gestures in the months ahead, aimed at distracting the public from his failures, but in truth he is utterly paralyzed, even if he were ever serious about a credible peace process.

The parlous condition of Israel’s leadership, which shows no sign of being transformed for the foreseeable future is one half of the reason why Robert Malley and Hassan Agha argue persuasively that “the idea that negotiations conducted bilaterally between Israelis and Palestinians somehow can produce a final agreement is dead.”

They note in the opening of what is a very important piece, “Its fate was sealed in part because neither side has the ability, on its own, to close the gaps between the positions they have taken. The two parties also lack any sense of trust, but that, too, is not an overriding explanation. If bilateral negotiations have become a fast track to a dead end it is because today neither the Palestinian nor the Israeli political system possesses the requisite degree of coherence and cohesion.”

Neither the Israeli leadership nor the current Palestinian political structure is capable of achieving the internal consensus necessary to revive a bilateral peace process. The only prospect for a two-state solution, then, is if it is imposed by the international community, along the lines of what the UN is currently moving to do in respect of independence for Kosovo. While that remains the only credible path to such a solution, I frankly doubt that domestic politics in the U.S. will tolerate going there for the foreseeable future.

Posted in Situation Report, Unholy War | 17 Comments

Gunboat Diplomacy? Not This Time

Posted on May 7, 2007 by Tony

The U.S.S. Nimitz is in the Persian Gulf

So, Condi Rice failed to “bump into” her Iranian counterpart, Manouchehr Mottaki, in Egypt last week, meaning that despite the junior-high flirtation tactics employed by the Administration, there were no direct talks between the U.S. and Iran.

Tom Engelhardt and Michael Klare have reminded us that despite the artless diplomacy, the reality remains that the USS Nimitz is fast approaching the Persian Gulf, suggesting that diplomacy may not really be what the Administration has in mind anyway, when it has enough airborne firepower assembled just off Iran’s coast to pulverize a lot of Iranian concrete — and vaporize a lot of Iranian flesh.

And it’s certainly hard to take seriously the “diplomatic” language. Tom reminds us that when Bush was asked whether Rice would meet Mottaki, he answered: “Should the Foreign Minister of Iran bump into Condi Rice, Condi won’t be rude. She’s not a rude person. I’m sure she’ll be polite. But she’ll also be firm in reminding this representative of the Iranian government that there’s a better way forward for the Iranian people than isolation… [I]f, in fact, there is a conversation, it will be one that says if the Iranian government wants to have a serious conversation with the United States and others, they ought to give up their enrichment program in a verifiable fashion. And we will sit down at the table with them, along with our European partners, and Russia, as well. That’s what she’ll tell them.”

In other words, if Rice ran into Mottaki, she’d lower herself to scold him over Iran’s nuclear program and its alleged support for Shiite insurgents in Iraq. Needless to say, the Iranians were never going to take seriously such silliness. As Mottaki told my friend and colleague Scott MacLeod in an exclusive interview at the Sharm el-Sheik meeting, it was frankly childish. “There was no advance planning for a meeting — that’s why it didn’t take place,” Mottaki said. “Ministers of foreign affairs don’t just meet accidentally. You need to have certain preparations in advance. First of all, there should be a political will for the meeting. They should have an agenda of what they are going to talk about. We don’t want to have this conversation for the sake of a conversation. We are not looking for a theatrical show.” Indeed, he said, Iran was very keen to hold substantive talks with the U.S. adding that such talks with the EU over a nuclear compromise were going well.

For Klare, the Bush “diplomacy” is simply a ruse. He writes:

President Bush keeps insisting that he would like to see these “diplomatic” endeavors — as he describes them — succeed, but he has yet to bring up a single proposal or incentive that might offer any realistic prospect of eliciting a positive Iranian response.

And so, knowing that his “diplomatic” efforts are almost certain to fail, Bush may simply be waiting for the day when he can announce to the American people that he has “tried everything”; that “his patience has run out”; and that he can “no longer risk the security of the American people” by “indulging in further fruitless negotiations,” thereby allowing the Iranians “to proceed farther down the path of nuclear bomb-making,” and so has taken the perilous but necessary step of ordering American forces to conduct air and missile strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. At that point, the 80 planes aboard the Nimitz — and those on the Eisenhower and the Stennis as well — will be on their way to targets in Iran, along with hundreds of TLAMs and a host of other weapons now being assembled in the Gulf.

While the importance of his warning that the amassing of this armada is not going unnoticed by the Iranians even if the U.S. media is largely ignoring it, I don’t share his sense that the diplomacy is simply a charade. Bush may be unable or even unwilling at this point to acknowledge the reality of his situation — and by extension, of what a conversation with Iran will entail — and he and his handlers are certainly not likely to admit to the U.S. public that they will, in fact, have to approach Iran in the supplicant position. Yes, even with those carrier battlegroups deployed off its coastline, the Iranians remain confident. Mottaki certainly didn’t seek out Rice, after all. He actually avoided her. The reason for Iran’s relative confidence is not only that they’re moving along nicely in progress towards a deal with the Europeans to take the sting out of the nuclear issue; it’s that the U.S. is mired ever deeper in the bloody quagmire of Iraq.

No matter how hard Washington has pushed, the Iraqi leadership has shown no inclination to implement the U.S. script in respect of political moves deemed necessary to resolve the conflict there — and no amount of threats and benchmarks from the Democrats is likely to make the Iraqis do U.S. bidding. The U.S. is truly stuck, because it can’t afford the geopolitical consequences of a precipitous withdrawal, yet it can’t control the Iraqi political space — Maliki has no intention of acting out the U.S. script, and yet Maliki can’t be replaced because to impose a more malleable government, the U.S. would face the wrath of the Shiite street and find its position there quickly untenable.

So, not that they’re ready to admit it, but the U.S. is more dependent than ever on Iranian cooperation in Iraq as the only basis for a credible retreat. Iran has considerably greater leverage over the Iraqi Shiites, in terms of persuading them to make accommodations for the Sunnis, than the U.S. does. In fact, it may be precisely the realization that Iranian cooperation is essential to restoring stability in Iraq that explains the mounting frustration among U.S.-allied Arab regimes over Washington’s refusal to engage with Tehran.

If the U.S. did strike at Iran, its ability to pull its hand out of the Iraq meat grinder would go up in smoke. Not that this would necessarily restrain Bush and Cheney whispering in his ear out of the side of his mouth, but it’s a safe bet that the likes of Defense Secretary Gates (and probably even Rice) would make sure that this didn’t happen — because they know it would create a situation nothing short of calamitous for the U.S. situation in Iraq, and throughout the Middle East.

So, despite the firepower being in position, my bet is still that the U.S. refrains from attacking Iran. Indeed, already now, the hawkish position on Iran is has been substantially weakened in Washington, and is almost entirely isolated abroad.

Posted in Situation Report, Unholy War | 11 Comments

Iraq: The Trouble With ‘Benchmarks’

Posted on May 4, 2007 by Tony

Or else what, George?

From my new piece at TIME.com:

Now that they each have registered their respective positions about tying Iraq war funding to a withdrawal timetable, congressional Democrats and President Bush are seeking a workable compromise. The most likely deal appears to be to make continued U.S. commitment in Iraq conditional on the Iraqi government meeting certain political “benchmarks.” But there’s no reason to believe Iraqi leaders will take a new set of benchmarks any more seriously than they have taken Washington’s political exhortations until now.

The benchmarks, in fact, are already well known to the Iraqi leadership, because the U.S. has spent the past year cajoling the Iraqis over them — reaching out to the Sunnis by reopening talks on the constitution, passing a new oil law guaranteeing an equitable sharing of revenues across the regions, reversing most of the purge of former Baathists from political life and government employment, and dismantling sectarian Shi’ite militias. The response of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been to verbally reassure U.S. envoys all the way up to President Bush, but then to, if not quite ignore U.S. demands, either interpret them so broadly as to make them meaningless, or else simply stall. Al-Maliki is plainly hedging his bets, acceding to U.S. demands but at the same time cushioning Shi’ite militias from Coalition attack; he has even reportedly gone so far as to purge Iraqi military officers for being too aggressive in pursuing the Mahdi Army of his key ally, Moqtada al-Sadr.

Like most Iraqi leaders, Maliki is unlikely to believe that what his government does or does not do will prompt the U.S. to simply pack up and go home. The Iraqi leadership knows that the U.S. didn’t invade their country out of concern for their well-being. It went to war in order to secure its own objectives — and that’s exactly what the main Iraqi political factions are doing, too. (Indeed, it’s hardly surprising that both the Shi’ite and Kurdish parties that dominate the current government are more inclined to pursue their own objectives than follow Washington’s script, since each has bitter memories of being abandoned by the U.S. during their abortive uprisings against Saddam in 1991.) A U.S. withdrawal, after all, would mean abandoning many of its own objectives, fatally weakening the moderate Arab regimes it has vowed to protect, abandoning some of the world’s largest oil reserves to be fought over by jihadists, Baathists and proxies of Iran, while Turkey and the Iraqi Kurds slug it out on the under-card of what could quickly become a regional war. Right now, the U.S. presence may be all that is holding Iraq together, but letting it fall apart would deeply damage a far wider range of Washington’s interests.

The Iraqi leaders appear to recognize the limits on U.S. leverage in Baghdad a lot more clearly than Democrats in Congress.

To read the whole thing, click here.

Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report, The 51st State | 10 Comments

The Blind Spot in Israel’s War Probe

Posted on May 2, 2007 by Tony

It is tempting to congratulate Israel, as my friend and colleague Scott MacLeod has done, for holding its own leadership to account for its blunders at war. The Winograd Commission, created by the Israeli government to assess the reasons for its debacle in Lebanon last summer, has certainly offered a withering assessment of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s failings. And if you take its summary of failures outlined below and transpose them to the Bush Administration’s decision making on Iraq, well, you get the point that Scott was making:

The decision to respond [to the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hizballah – TK] with an immediate, intensive military strike was not based on a detailed, comprehensive and authorized military plan, based on careful study of the complex characteristics of the Lebanon arena. A meticulous examination of these characteristics would have revealed the following: the ability to achieve military gains having significant political-international weight was limited; an Israeli military strike would inevitably lead to missiles fired at the Israeli civilian north; there was not another effective military response to such missile attacks than an extensive and prolonged ground operation to capture the areas from which the missiles were fired – which would have a high “cost” and which did not enjoy broad support. These difficulties were not explicitly raised with the political leaders before the decision to strike was taken.

b. Consequently, in making the decision to go to war, the government did not consider the whole range of options, including that of continuing the policy of ‘containment’, or combining political and diplomatic moves with military strikes below the ‘escalation level’, or military preparations without immediate military action – so as to maintain for Israel the full range of responses to the abduction. This failure reflects weakness in strategic thinking, which derives the response to the event from a more comprehensive and encompassing picture.

c. The support in the cabinet for this move was gained in part through ambiguity in the presentation of goals and modes of operation, so that ministers with different or even contradictory attitudes could support it. The ministers voted for a vague decision, without understanding and knowing its nature and implications. They authorized the commencement of a military campaign without considering how to exit it.

d. Some of the declared goals of the war were not clear and could not be achieved, and in part were not achievable by the authorized modes of military action.

e. The IDF did not exhibit creativity in proposing alternative action possibilities, did not alert the political decision-makers to the discrepancy between its own scenarios and the authorized modes of action, and did not demand – as was necessary under its own plans – early mobilization of the reserves so they could be equipped and trained in case a ground operation would be required.

f. Even after these facts became known to the political leaders, they failed to adapt the military way of operation and its goals to the reality on the ground. On the contrary, declared goals were too ambitious, and it was publicly stated that fighting would continue until they were achieved. But the authorized military operations did not enable their achievement.

Reading that summary, President Bush would be forgiven for thinking it was all about him. Perhaps, though, Winograd ought to have had more about Bush than it actually did (perhaps, criticizing the U.S. is a kind of third-rail of Israeli politics!): It struck me that the most glaring omission in the all the summaries I saw of the Winograd findings, was any mention at all of the U.S. role in shaping Israel’s decision to go to war, and its approach to the conflict. (Granted, Winograd’s findings released thus far concern only the first five days of the war, but there’s scarcely a mention of any coordination with Washington, whereas the Israeli media at the time made clear that Olmert was in constant contact with the White House.)

I wrote at length at the time about how Israeli and U.S. actions strongly suggested that this was, in part, a proxy war by Israel on behalf of the U.S. against an ally of Iran, and Seymour Hersh reported at great length on the U.S. involvement in planning and strategizing this war.

Given Olmert’s panicky neophyte behavior when faced with a crisis of this magnitude — and given that it is rather obvious that as a grand strategist, he makes a pretty good mayor — Winograd’s findings on the limit of his consultations within Israel’s security and political establishment in his decision making over the war suggest, to my jaundiced eye, at least, that Olmert was talking to someone else. He certainly needed his hand held. And the reports of in the Israeli press at the time of him running out of his own cabinet meetings to discuss the war on the phone with Condi Rice deepens my suspicion that Olmert did not make these blunders entirely alone (and I’m not talking about the rest of the Israeli leadership echelon that is now racing to distance itself from the decision).

This was a blunder that was, well, shall we say, Bush-esque. I’m looking forward to someone reporting this out a little more.

Posted in Situation Report | 21 Comments

Six ‘Rabbis’ for May Day

Posted on April 30, 2007 by Tony

On we go with our list of “rabbis” for the secular and progressive-minded. May 1 being international labor day, it’s time to roll out some of my favorite Jewish lefties:

3. Joe Slovo
When Joe Slovo died, the Central Committee of the South African Communist Party, of which he was the Secretary General, wanted to put a single word epitaph on his headstone: “Mensch.” The only problem was that it would not be understood by the Party’s African working class rank and file. But it was absolutely true. A nice Jewish boy from Joburg who became the best-loved white person in South Africa because of his unfailing commitment to the liberation struggle, Joe personified for me the idea that the calling of a good Jew in South Africa was to fight for justice for all — the mainstream Jewish organizations in South Africa missed the point, choosing quiet quiescence and occasional quiet pleading in response to some especially noxious instance of anti-Semitism. Joe knew that anti-Semitism in South Africa was part and parcel of the racist colonial order, and the best place to fight it was out in the forward trenches of the national liberation movement. He may have been the movement’s most senior ideologue and one of its top strategists, but when I had the pleasure of meeting him in the late 1980s, we ended up playing Jewish geography.

12. Studs Terkel
Studs Terkel, the great chronicler of America’s story spent his life collecting and amplifying the voices of ordinary Americans on the issues that defined their life and times; it was as if he lived the Brecht poem “Questions from a Worker Who Reads” (Who built the seven towers of Thebes? / The books are filled with names of kings. / Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone? / In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished / Where did the masons go? … Caesar beat the Gauls / Was there not even a cook in his army? Philip of Spain wept as his fleet was sunk and destroyed. Were there no other tears? etc.) Studs Terkel’s life was spent chronicling the history of our times through the lives of the ordinary people who made it. And that for me captures the very essence of a tradition that gave ordinary people the potential, by teaching them to read and write (albeit for purposes of studying the Torah), to understand and make their own history.

13. Ray Alexander
As a young activist in the liberation movement, I’d come to know of Ray Alexander as a living legend who, as a young immigrant from Latvia had set about organizing women workers in the food canning industry in Cape Town, and had dedicated her life to their struggle. A lifelong communist, she was now living in exile in far-away Lusaka, but maintaing a central role in the leadership of the liberation movement as an active member of the ANC’s Revolutionary Council. When I finally met her, in 1989, I couldn’t believe how this icon of the struggle sounded exactly like my bubba, speaking English with a thick, thick Yiddish accent. She, too, started out in the Zionist movement, and recounts her political evolution in this extensive historians’ interview. I love this tale from her days as a teenager in Latvia in the 1920s: “Earlier, at school, I had been a Zionist with my older sister Getty and brother Isher. I often helped the Zionist organisation with office work. When the Jerusalem University was opened — it was in 1926 — the Zionist organisation made a big celebration of it. They invited our school to send a speaker. I was chosen. I prepared my talk on higher education. I made an observation that we are celebrating the opening of the university in Jerusalem, but if there would be a university opened in Timbuktu we should celebrate it as much. Because wherever a university is opened, it is a big candle to lead to a better understanding between human beings. My teacher in algebra was a very strong Zionist, she did not approve. She came over to me after I finished speaking and she said: ‘How dare you compare Timbuktu to Jerusalem. Do you know where Timbuktu is?’ I said: ‘Yes, it’s in Africa, central Africa.’ I said to her: ‘What’s your objection to Timbuktu ? People are living there too.’ ”

22. Isaac Deutscher
Isaac Deutscher, one-time Polish Yeshiva student, was best known as a Marxist historian and biographer of Leon Trotsky. But what I got from him, in a remarkable essay “The Non-Jewish Jew,” is the notion that the Jewish heretic, the Jew who leaves the reservation (shtetl) curious to make his connection with a wider world, even the Jewish atheist, are in fact an integral part of Jewish history and tradition. He sought the roots of Jewish contributions to wider society’s cultural achievement precisely in the fact that Jews lived on the margins and interstices of nations. Talking of the likes of Spinoza, Heine, Freud and Marx, he wrote “You may, if you wish to, place them in a Jewish tradition. They all went beyond the boundaries of Jewry. They all found Jewry too narrow, too archaic, too constricting…. Yet, I think in some ways, they were very Jewish indeed. They had in themselves something of the quintessence of Jewish life and the Jewish intellect… as Jews, they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions and national cultures. They were born and brought up on the borderlines of various epochs. Their minds matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other…. Each of them was in society and yet not in it; of society and yet not of it.” It was this condition, he said, that enabled their transcendent thought. But he makes clear that European Jewish communities always produced restless thinkers, like Spinoza, who wandered beyond the closed community, their minds fertilizing and fertilized by a wider world of ideas. That, he says, is in some ways an expression of the universal essence of Judaism’s message — that it applies equally to all of humanity — and its contradiction with the notion of a “chosen” people favored over others by their god.

39. Marek Edelman
There are times, as Nelson Mandela said at his trial, when a people is faced with the simple choice of submit or fight. Marek Edelman recognized that choice, as a young activist of the Jewish Socialist Bund in Warsaw in 1942, and together with others of the left and Zionist organizations, he helped form the Jewish Fighting Organization that organized the heroic (and the word is not used lightly here) uprising of the Warsaw Ghetto against the liquidationist plans of the Nazis. His account, The Ghetto Fights, makes gripping and moving reading, and negates the myth that Europe’s Jews went meekly to the slaughter. He survived the uprising and the ghetto’s liquidation, escaping with assistants from the leftist partisans of Poland’s People’s Army to become a leader of the underground, and eventually participate in a second heroic rising, the 1944 general Warsaw uprising. In the ultimate triumph over Nazi designs, he remained in Poland after the war, and kept fighting the good fight — from 1976 onwards, he became a labor activist, and eventually in 1980 a leader of the Solidarity movement that helped end authoritarian rule in Poland. As he noted of his early affiliations, “The Bundists did not wait for the Messiah, nor did they plan to leave for Palestine. They believed that Poland was their country and they fought for a just, socialist Poland, in which each nationality would have its own cultural autonomy, and in which minorities’ rights would be guaranteed.” And he remained true to that vision.

46. Janet Jagan
For reminding us that you can’t very well be a light unto the nations unless you actually live among the nations — although she’d never put it that way — and also that a Jew’s homeland is wherever he or she chooses to make it. Born Janet Rosenberg in Chicago, she met and married the young Guyanan independence campaigner Dr. Chedi Jagan in her days as a young communist student. The couple moved to Guyana, where they played a leading role in the movement for independence from Britain, spending plenty of time in jail for their politics. And the Caribbean nation repaid her in 1992 by electing her president.

Posted in A Wondering Jew, Situation Report | 12 Comments

Why the U.S. Can’t Leave Iraq

Posted on April 26, 2007 by Tony

The debate in Washington over troop withdrawals from Iraq is largely a pantomime for domestic political consumption — the Democrats are maneuvering to disassociate themselves from an unpopular war that a majority of their senators originally backed, and that they know can’t be ended any time soon but for which they don’t want to share the blame come election year 2008. The reality is that the U.S. can’t leave Iraq for the foreseeable future without fundamentally altering the basic goals of its Middle East policy over the past half century, and the Democrats talk of “benchmarks” and “deadlines” is unlikely to be taken seriously by the Iraqi players — except to the extent that they need to humor the Americans. The failure of the Iraqi government to make significant “progress” towards achieving the Bush Administration’s benchmarks may be routinely reported here has a sign of infighting among them or their political weakness, but the reality may be that they have no intention of acting out Washington’s script.

The Iraqis are unlikely to believe the threats that if they don’t do as they’re told, the U.S. will go home — Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki may have reason to fear that the U.S. will try and engineer his ouster in a coup (although it has no alternative leader capable of gaining any traction), but not that the U.S. will simply walk away from Iraq. That’s because Maliki, like all the other players in Iraq, knows that the Americans didn’t invade their country out of some magnanimous concern for Iraqi wellbeing; the invasion was motivated by U.S. concerns and interests. And so the threat to take their troops and go home unless the Iraqi politicians agree to adopt the Americans’ idea of good governance rings pretty hollow in light of the matrix of interests that drive U.S. foreign policy in the region.

It’s not that they doubt that the U.S. will eventually be forced out of Iraq by domestic pressure driven by the cost in U.S. blood and treasure of maintaining the expedition — they’re not “shocked and awed” by U.S. power, remember, and recognize it as finite and fallible. Each of the players in Iraq has a Plan B for that eventuality, but they’re in no hurry to hasten the moment. (Even Moqtada Sadr plays to popular sentiment by demanding withdrawal, but he’s demanding a timetable rather than immediate withdrawal.) They’re actually assuming that the U.S. will eventually go. Until then, however, they’ll continue using the U.S. presence to pursue their own political interests and agendas — even as many of them publicly demand U.S. withdrawal — and position themselves to gain maximum advantage when it actually does go (as opposed to acting in ways that advance U.S. interests in order to allow Washington to substantially draw down). And, of course, Washington’s own position reflects a similar gulf between the actual policy and the public statements — Bush, for example, has always dodged the question, whenever asked (even by John Kerry in the presidential debates) about why the U.S. is building 14 permanent bases in Iraq

“While the U.S. can no longer successfully manipulate regional actors to carry out its plans, regional actors have learned to use the U.S. presence to promote their own objectives. Quietly and against the deeply held wishes of their populations, they have managed to keep the Americans engaged with the hope of some elusive victory.

That’s an observation by Dr. Hussein Agha, in one of the best pieces I’ve read in ages on Iraq, arguing why none of the region’s political players, from Israel to al-Qaeda, wants the U.S. to withdraw right now. (Agha’s piece is an absolute must-read; as are his ongoing contributions along with Robert Malley to the New York Review of Books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — most recently this one.) There’s no comfort in this for the Bush Administration, because it’s not as if anyone in the region (indeed, anyone from Israel to al-Qaeda, regardless of their rhetoric) who believes the U.S. can win in Iraq; the reason all of them need it to remain there is in pursuit of their own interests.

Even while King Abdullah denounces the U.S. occupation as illegal, Saudi Arabia and its fellow pro-Western Arab regimes can’t afford to see the U.S. leave, because such a departure would bring great peril to their own prospects of survival. The U.S. for better or worse long ago signed on as the guarantor of their security, and the spectacle of a stunning defeat for their key backer is intolerable to these regimes — and would force them, at minimum, to fundamentally alter their relationship with the U.S. to Washington’s detriment, in order to ensure their own survival. They’re already suspicious of the Shiite dominated regime in Baghdad, and without the U.S. there to restrain its excesses against the Sunnis, these regimes would be even more hostile, forcing Maliki even closer to Iran and simply deepening the cycle of suspicion and hostility. Also, Agha notes, “As some Arabs see it, the occupation is what holds the country together. So long as coalition forces are deployed, a full-blown breakup can be avoided.”

The interests of these regimes, as well as Israel whose own sense of its military deterrent power has been badly shaken by the U.S. failure in Iraq, need the U.S. to remain. So does Turkey, which sees the U.S. presence as the best guarantor against the Iraqi Kurds seceding and forcing Turkey into a political-military quagmire of its own in northern Iraq. (The flip side, of course, is that the Kurds have used the U.S. presence as a buffer against their Arab and Turkish foes, behind which they have maximized their autonomy.) Al-Qaeda’s interest in having the U.S. in Iraq is so obvious there’s no need to dwell on it here.

Having created a vacuum, Washington simply has no alternative but to fill it — or, as Colin Powell might have it, “you broke it; you own it.” And I have no doubt that if the Democrats were in the White House now, and given responsibility for managing the realm (not just Iraq, but the entire connected matrix of U.S. interests in the region), that they’d reach the same conclusion. That’s why Iraq is seen as such a catastrophe by the U.S. strategic establishment: The U.S. cannot win, but nor can it accept the consequences of retreat.

Agha notes, though, that it may be equally important for the likes of Syria and Iran to keep the Americans engaged in Iraq, because as long they’re bogged down there, they’re unable to contemplate other adventures — and if they should do so, the massive U.S. troop presence in Iraq gives those countries an accessible target for retaliation.

Among the Iraqi political factions, none is yet ready for the U.S. to withdraw, according to Agha:

Inside Iraq, this is a period of consolidation for most political groups. They are building up their political and military capabilities, cultivating and forging alliances, clarifying political objectives and preparing for impending challenges. It is not the moment for all-out confrontation. No group has the confidence or capacity decisively to confront rivals within its own community or across communal lines. Equally, no party is genuinely interested in a serious process of national reconciliation when they feel they can improve their position later on. A continued American presence is consistent with both concerns – it can keep clashes manageable and be used to postpone the need for serious political engagement.

Shias in government would like the US to stay long enough for them to tighten their grip on the levers of state power and build a loyal military. Those Shias who are not in power would like them to stay long enough to avoid a premature showdown with their rivals. Militant Shia groups can simultaneously blame the occupation forces for their community’s plight and attack them to mobilise further support.

The maneuverings of Moqtada Sadr perfectly illustrate the point: He is at once in the government — even since he withdrew his cabinet ministers, he has continued to have his bloc vote with Maliki, and has even been said to be helping Maliki accomodate U.S. concerns by making himself scarce — and out in the street, riding the wave of popular anger against the occupation. He’s not hedging his bets as much as playing out the clock to preserve his political advantage.

In short, the Iraqi political class is unlikely ever to give the U.S. what it wants — a client regime that will secure the interests that drove the U.S. to invade in the first place. It’s not that they don’t understand the demands that Washington has deemed to be in their best interests; it’s that they have something else in mind. Their patience is a lot greater than that of the U.S. public, which is why the U.S. occupation, for them, is a phase that will eventually end, but which they’ll use to position themselves to best take advantage of the moment in which the U.S. is forced to withdraw — or more likely to radically reorder things in Iraq, perhaps by backing some form of coup. That’ll be the moment for Sadr to bring his forces onto the streets, for the Kurds to consider their options, for the Arab regimes to once again back an Iraqi dictatorship, and so on. Until then, however, the U.S. occupation represents less of a crisis than an opportunity.

Last word to Agha:

In this grim picture, the Americans appear the least sure and most confused. With unattainable objectives, wobbly plans, changing tactics, shifting alliances and ever-increasing casualties, it is not clear any longer what they want or how they are going to achieve it. By setting themselves up to be manipulated, they give credence to an old Arab saying: the magic has taken over the magician.

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Rootless Cosmopolitan – By Tony Karon