The cure for what ails your Bush

[muckefuck]

Back some months ago (please don't make me dig up the entry), I said I would consider voting for Kerry if he (or his advisors) made more of the right noises on foreign policy. A debate elsewhere led me to this article from Sandy Berger on what a Democratic foreign policy would look like. Since he's Kerry's chief advisor on the subject, it's not unreasonable to view this as a blueprint for his administration. In that light, what do y'all think of it?

1. I don't really buy his contention that Democrats and Republicans agree on the ends and are only quibblling over the fine points of the means. "Most Democrats agree with President Bush that...Saddam Hussein's Iraq posed a threat that needed to be dealt with in one form or another." Sure, when you word it that vaguely, you can get consensus on anything. Shamans and surgeons both agree that apendicitis has to be dealth with "in one form or another". It's my recollection that most Democrats--along with no small number of Republicans--thought that a containment strategy enforced by sanctions and inspections was the best way to deal with Saddam; I beg to differ.
2. It gets increasingly wish-listy as one approaches the end. For instance, as y'all might expect, the proposal to push for a global reduction in farm subsidies caught my eye, but it prompted me to ask that, if this is one of the important things that "a Democratic administration should champion", why didn't I see this happen during the one where Berger was responsible for foreign policy? But perhaps that's an unfair question to ask of an article that's more abstract statement of intent than campaign platform.
3. "But the Israeli government's moves must be a way station, rather than an illusory end point, advancing changes in Palestinian leadership that could help foster a negotiated settlement." Am I reading this right? Does Berger share the belief of the Israeli administration that simply dumping Arafat will lead to the emergence of a moderate Palestinian leadership which will actually be willing to make sensible compromises in return for peace and independence?
4. In what way is negotiating an end to the world's longest-running civil war "treat[ing] Africa as...a backwater in the war on terrorism"? Or, to put this more positively, how would a Democratic African foreign policy look different? Would they be pushing for intervention in Darfur right now?
5. "Every postwar administration, Republican and Democratic, has believed that there are things in this world worth fighting: threatening regimes or individuals who deserve to be called evil and can be stopped only by force." Nice bit of revisionism there, Sandy. If I didn't have such strong memories of how thoroughly Democrats ridiculed Reagan for calling the Soviets "the Evil Empire", I might even take your word on that.
6. "After driving the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, the administration delegated the building of a nation to the same warlords who destroyed the Afghan nation in the early 1990s." Actually, if memory serves, it was the United Nations who did this. So what is he saying? That the US needs to build up a powerful nation-building team of its own and employ them aggressively? How does this jibe with his repeated demands that we seek legitimacy under international norms for our actions? (Note further that he points to Bosnia/Kosovo as a model of coalition-building, but completely leaves it out of any discussion of nation-building.)
7. He sets up a false dichotomy on North Korea--we must "put a serious proposition on the table" and, if they say no, then we collect our allies and apply coercive pressure. But what about the possibility that the DPRK says yes and then dicks us around for a decade more while they continue to pursue nuclear weapons? I only bring this up because it's exactly what they did do during the last decade. Berger doesn't seem closer than anyone else to lhn's requested "solution to the problem of North Korea that doesn't leave millions dead".

Comments

[gopower.livejournal.com]

One is tempted to say that Berger is talking through his shorts. But then, that's where he keeps most important documents.

Among other things, I was struck by his failure to see that his prescription for the Israeli-Palestinian problem is exactly what w the Clinton administration did and, by every standard not least the number of innocents murdered, made the problem much, much worse.

[bunj.livejournal.com]

I find it hard to draw any conclusions from Berger's article, it is so vaguely worded. It seems to boil down to "We'd be nicer." It's easy to complain about how no one likes us, but I don't see how that would change after five months of a Kerry presidency when he'd be forced to make unpopular decisions.

I would like some expansion his idea on consultation with our allies. I mean, the Bush administration did this, it just disagreed with many of its allies when it came to final decisions on subjects such as the Kyoto treaty and Iraq. What would a Kerry administration do in a similar difference of opinion? If push came to shove, would it give France an effective veto on US foreign policy? If not, how would its approach differ from Bush's? Or is Berger just saying that Kerry thinks more like our allies? Considering how ineffective much of the EU's (among others) foreign policy has been, is this a good thing?

Finally, I think his criticism of Bush's North Korea policy is pretty rich considering that Bush is reaping the seeds sown by the Clinton administration in 1994 (though, to be fair to Clinton, he didn't get support from our allies at the time. Berger isn't clear as to how a new Democrat administration would be more persuasive).

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

I still found it to be a worthwhile read. Of course, I'm an inveterate optimist, so the fact that it read a wishlist was kind of appealing, tho I realize that that's a bit naive.

I don't think that foreign policy presents and either/or scenario of giving France an effective veto vs. the US being all awwone in the world. Aren't international politics largely a matter of subtlety and compromise? It has seemed to me that subtlety in particular is not the forte of the present administration. Am I wrong in this? (admittedly VERY ignorant compared with you)

[lhn.livejournal.com]

I mean, the Bush administration did this, it just disagreed with many of its allies when it came to final decisions on subjects such as the Kyoto treaty and Iraq. What would a Kerry administration do in a similar difference of opinion? If push came to shove, would it give France an effective veto on US foreign policy?

And particularly in cases like Kyoto; unless he's going to amend the Constitution to change the treaty-making process, what's he going to offer them when the Senate votes 95-0 (the 95 including a certain Senator Kerry) against Kyoto or anything like it? Sure, the Bush administration could have continued to give lip service to treaties like Kyoto and the ABM treaty while ignoring the substance the way previous administrations (of both parties, in the case of ABM) did. But is the ability to lie with a straight face, and sign treaties that the President knows in advance won't ever be ratified really what the Democrats want to offer as sophisticated diplomacy?

[lhn.livejournal.com]

It has seemed to me that subtlety in particular is not the forte of the present administration. Am I wrong in this?

I wouldn't call subtlety the current administration's forte. On the other hand, subtle actions tend not to be as noticeable by their nature-- the administration's success in converting Pakistan from a semi-adversary under sanctions to a significant (if in need of watching) ally probably involved more negotiation than was publicly obvious, for example. And while Libya's turning state's evidence obviously involved the object lesson of the Big Stick, there was also a lot of negotiation going on under the radar first that only got heavily reported on afterwards. Its success in putting together a coalition of a couple of dozen countries (denigrated as "the bribed, the coerced, the bought and the extorted", but I'm not sure which of these is supposed to apply to the UK or Australia, for example) despite the lack of the magic UN mantle suggests that their diplomacy is not so ineffective as they're often portrayed.

Nor is subtlety always the best tack to take-- there was nothing particularly subtle about the Brits leaking the Zimmerman Telegram to us, but it served to bring us into WWI where three years of diplomacy had failed. I'm not sure what level of diplomacy it would have taken to cause Saddam Hussein to cease to be a problem for us, but neither the first Bush administration nor the Clinton administration ever seemed to find their way to clearing it off the board (either by convincing Saddam to abide by the obligations he'd undertaken at the end of the Gulf War, or by enacting the regime change the Clinton administration committed itself to in 1998 (with unanimous consent by the legislative body Senator Kerry belonged to at the time). Years of condemnation of the Taliban by the entire civilized world resulted in nothing but a steady stream of worsening horror stories-- if there had been a diplomatic solution available to hand, I'd have hoped someone would have happened upon it before 2001.

[nibadi.livejournal.com]

Ich kann einerseits deine Argumente verstehen. (ich bin nach wie vor der Ansicht, dass der Krieg gegen Afganistan legitimiert war, während der Krieg gegen den Irak unter der Prämisse einer Bedrohung durch Massenvernichtungswaffen falsch war). Dennoch; selbst wenn sich die Fortsetzung der einmal eingegangenen Politikrichtung zwischen beiden Parteien /Administrationen nicht mehr wesentlich unterscheiden sollte, wünsche ich mir einen Wechsel der amerikanischen Führung. Ich gebe vorab schon zu, dass ich mich stark von einem Gefühl dabei leiten lasse, will mich jedoch bemühen, dieses Gefühl durch ein paar - wenn auch vieleicht nicht ganz ausgewogenen - Argumente zu untermauern.

Vieleicht hälst du mich für kleinlich, aber ich wünsche mir einen Wechsel der Sprache in der amerikanischen Politik. Wobei ich denke, dasss die Sprache Ausdruck einer Haltung ist. Auch andere Präsidenten vor Bush äußerten sich patriotisch, aber sie waren Dank ihrer ausgewogeneren Sprache in der Lage, den Rest der Welt stärker zu integrieren. Bushs Lobeslied auf Amerika führt in der Außenwirkung zur Spaltung und beinhaltet für Menschen vieler Staaten immer den Aspekt der Demütigung. Die Sprache der Clintons war immer ausgewogen, wobei Clinton die Interessen der USA trotzdem sehr wohl im Auge behielt.

Ich wünschte mir vor allem einen amerikanischen Präsidenten, der die Trennung von Staat und Kirche ernst nimmt und nicht bemüht ist, die christlichen Fundamentalisten zu stärken, indem er sie für seine eigenen Zwecke mobilisiert und utilisiert. Ich wünsche mir eine Sprache, die von den Fundamentalisten der muslimischen Welt deutlicher zu unterscheiden ist, damit Äußerungen zur Freiheit und Demkratie auch wieder glaubwürdiger werden.

Ich wünsche mir einen amerikanischen Präsidenten, der der Freiheit und Demokratie im Inneren - also in den USA - wieder mehr Gewicht gibt.

Nun war ich auch eher global, aber es geht mir um eine Haltung. Die Haltung des jetzigen Präsidenten wirkt m.E. einerseits lächerlich und beängstigend zugleich (ähnlich wie Reagan seiner Zeit auf mich über lange Strecken seiner Amtsführung wirkte).

Aber ich gebe zu, Kerry ist sehr enttäuschend. Er ist vage, wird selten konkret und seine Haltung ist nicht erkennbar. Er macht den Eindruck, bemüht zu sein, so viel wie möglich von sich zu verbergen. So gewinnt man keinen Blumentopf (deutsche Redewendung) und vermutlich auch keinen Wahlkampf.

Ich würde ihn trotzdem wählen. Ich meine, es kann kaum schlimmer werden als unter Bush. Ich glaube, die Welt ist unter und durch Bush unsicherer geworden. Mit ihm werden die trennenden Gräben zum Rest der Welt nur noch tiefer.

Dem Problem des Terrorismus kann nicht nur durch Kriegsführung begegnet werden.

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

6. "After driving the Taliban from power in Afghanistan, the administration delegated the building of a nation to the same warlords who destroyed the Afghan nation in the early 1990s." Actually, if memory serves, it was the United Nations who did this.

He’s also not copping to the real source of that problem. It was the U.S. decision to rely on tribal leaders to prosecute the war in the first place that ultimately gave those leaders a place at the table. Yes, UN truckling gave them more power in the rebuilding phase than they would have had otherwise. But the fact of the matter is that they could not have been entirely ignored without replaying the Soviet experience in Afghanistan. The U.S. enlisted tribal leaders both to avoid this outcome and to minimize civilian casualties and avoid broadcast pictures of U.S. tanks rolling over Afghanis for very sound political reasons (not to mention moral ones). The alternative that would have given tribal leaders no place at the table would have been to have been at war with both the Taleban and all of their rivals for power at once. The U.S. may or may not have been able to bomb Afghanistan flat enough to achieve that sort of victory, but this obviously would have been an exceptionally bloody approach, with very high civilian casualties. It is a tad disingenuous, I think, to fail to explain exactly how you would have achieved a much better political outcome in Afghanistan while agonizing over "why they hate us." If we had prosecuted the war in a way that would have allowed Berger’s fantasy endgame to become a reality, we would no longer feel any need to wonder.

Which would at least have the virtue of (maybe) forcing Westerners to stop projecting their feelings about the UN onto Middle Easterners. It is simply bizarre to attribute Arab and Muslim hostility to the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to the absence of clear Security Council resolutions in favor of them. Would even the antiwar movement in the U.S. and Europe have suddenly decided that the invasion of Iraq was a good idea if France and Germany had signed off on it? Or is it more likely that they would have taken to belittling the UN Security Council in precisely the same fashion as they have those allies would did join the Coalition? The war was either good or bad in itself; a UN resolution cannot change that one way or another. So how would a formal resolution have blunted the perception (and not at all unrealistic fear) that the West was now committed to invading and occupying any Middle Eastern country at its own whim? I have never seen good polling data from the Middle East about popular feelings towards the UN, but my overall impression is that citizens of Middle Eastern states value it to the extent that it gives their own part of the world some voice in international affairs. But the Security Council contains no Arab or Muslim states. One of the most striking pieces of Islamist propaganda I’ve ever seen is a painting of a hook-nosed Uncle Sam cleaning his bloody knife on a UN flag while a dead and bloodied Arab woman lies at his feet. Citizens of Arab and Muslim states do not have some sort of innocent, childlike reverence for and faith in the UN; they applaud it when it does what they want it to, and despise it when it acts against their interests, just like we do.

#@$#@% Posting Limits

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

As an aside, I find the attribution of some Security Council’s members’ opposition to the Iraq war to Dubya’s bad manners rather trivializing as well. It seems to me that holdout states, particularly France and Russia, had very clear national interests at stake in avoiding the war. We won’t really know for sure until everyone’s written their memoirs, but it could well be that France, Russia, and Germany had no intention of ever publicly signing off on it under any possible diplomatic circumstances. If that was the case, then Dubya erred primarily in going to the UN at all. Instead, after quietly sounding these states about their likely commitments, he could have gone ahead with the war without ever forcing them to publicly oppose us in the UN arena. Without that embarrassing meltdown, opposing states may have been more inclined to have provided assistance in at least ameliorating the outcome of a war they had not supported, during the brief feel-good moment after Firdas Square. My own reading of the UN debacle was that Dubya went through the process as a method of providing political cover for Tony Blair, in the belief (correct in my opinion) that Britain was our most materially valuable potential ally. I agree that it would have been much better to have had more international support for the occupation phase of the war, but I have no idea how both goals could have been realized at once.

However, since that moment just after the capture of Baghdad, it has become quite clear that the cost of Coalition membership is rather high. France, Germany, and Russia can expect some percentage of any soldiers they send to die in Iraq, and some number of their own citizens to die at home in punitive Islamist terrorist strikes. I can’t think of a single reason why they should volunteer for these costs when they know that a much wealthier and militarily strong nation is already stuck with the bill. If either Berger or Kerry can think of one, apart from "we’re nicer," I’d love to hear it.

#@$#@% Posting Limits, pt.2

[mollpeartree.livejournal.com]

Berger’s discussion of Israel is just as disingenuous as his discussion of Afghanistan. What he proposes simply ignores the fact that Israelis and Palestinians are not the only actors here. Every despotic regime in the region benefits from keeping that wound open and bleeding, and in the last fifteen years Palestinian suffering has been drafted into the Islamist cause as well. We have repeatedly seen how foreign-funded terrorist groups routinely undermine asymptotic approaches to peace; it seems extraordinary to me that Berger fails to propose a solution to or even acknowledge this problem when the very extensive efforts of his own administration to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict broke upon that very same rock.

However, I think we can safely conclude that Berger’s essay does not really serve as a guide to Kerry’s likely foreign policy:

Iraq, too, will require a generational commitment by the international community. Regardless of whether the war was justified, everyone now has a profound stake in Iraq's success. The disintegration of that country along ethnic and religious fault lines would destabilize the Middle East and energize radical movements that threaten the world. A stable and democratic Iraq, on the other hand, would stimulate reform throughout the region. Attaining the latter outcome will require continuous involvement in Iraq's reconstruction and political development, as well as a proactive military posture that does not leave foreign troops hunkered down in bases and barracks, delegating security to an ill-prepared Iraqi security force. But that level of involvement will be unsustainable -- and will be considered illegitimate by ordinary Iraqis -- unless it is viewed as a truly international, rather than exclusively American, effort.

Whereas reportedly Kerry’s stump speech on Iraq has evolved on the campaign trail from "bring our troops home in my first term" to "bring our troops home in six months" to, simply "bring our troops home." I’ve never heard him articulate the establishment of a democratic form of government in Iraq as a necessary precondition of U.S. withdrawal; instead, I have only heard him mention "stability" when he mentions preconditions at all.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I've also heard him claim that his superior diplomacy will allow us to replace the majority of American soldiers in Iraq with foreign troops before the end of his first term--a claim which doesn't seem grounded in any diplomatic realities that I can recognise. The only concrete components of this plan that he's seen fit to reveal are (1) simply by virtue of being Not Bush, foreign powers will love him and jostle to do his bidding and (2) he's going to see to the appointment of a UN High Commissioner for Iraq, which will apparently function as the catalyst for a dedicated multilateral intervention. Now we have moved beyond the realm of wishful thinking to a land of outright fantasy.