Tag: us

State of the (dis)Union

I watched President Bush’s State of the Union address last night. After calling for a balanced budget (I’m not sure if it was such a priority for the Republican Congress to balance the budget, but anyway..), health care tax credits, and immigration reform, he got to the main thrust of his speech: a defense of the war in Iraq and a request for support for “the surge.” I have to admit that most of it was so familiar that it barely registered
The president reiterated US commitment to Middle East democracy, although as has been noted on this blog, Rice’s recent tour of Arab autocrats is just one sign of our complete abandonment of any pressure for serious democratic reform in the region.

Free people are not drawn to violent and malignant ideologies — and most will choose a better way when they’re given a chance. So we advance our own security interests by helping moderates and reformers and brave voices for democracy. The great question of our day is whether America will help men and women in the Middle East to build free societies and share in the rights of all humanity. And I say, for the sake of our own security, we must.

About Iraq, he had this to say:

If American forces step back before Baghdad is secure, the Iraqi government would be overrun by extremists on all sides. We could expect an epic battle between Shia extremists backed by Iran, and Sunni extremists aided by al Qaeda and supporters of the old regime.    A contagion of violence could spill out across the country — and in time, the entire region could be drawn into the conflict.

For America, this is a nightmare scenario. For the enemy, this is the objective. Chaos is the greatest ally — their greatest ally in this struggle. And out of chaos in Iraq would emerge an emboldened enemy with new safe havens, new recruits, new resources, and an even greater determination to harm America.To allow this to happen would be to ignore the lessons of September the 11th and invite tragedy. Ladies and gentlemen, nothing is more important at this moment in our history than for America to succeed in the Middle East, to succeed in Iraq and to spare the American people from this danger.[…]

Our country is pursuing a new strategy in Iraq, and I ask you to give it a chance to work.

The response to this speech has been underwhelming. I saw headlines this morning saying the president “pleads” and “begs” for support, and that his policy faces “challenges.”
You can read the whole State of the Union here. You can read the Democratic response (it’s much shorter and more interesting)–given by newly-elected Senator Webb, who’s son is serving in Iraq–here.

On Hillary

Imagine if Hillary Clinton wins the 2008 US presidential elections. Statistically speaking, she is likely to be re-elected in 2012 (most presidents have been) and therefore remain president until 2016. This will mean that between 1988 and 2016 two families will have shared the presidency — 28 years of Bushes and Clintons. You could even add another eight years if you consider that George H. W. Bush was a relatively powerful VP under Reagan because of his intelligence and foreign policy background and was even acting president for eight hours on 13 July 1985 when Reagan underwent surgery.

If this happens, a generation — my generation — will have spent the time between its teenage years and its middle age ruled by two feuding families. That will be oddly familiar for those of us with Arab origins, a situation reminiscent of Kuwait’s succession system or the much-gossiped rivalries of Saudi princes. So it seems that Arabs don’t only have political lessons to learn from America, but that they can export some of their cherished political values too. But for some reason, I don’t take much comfort in that.

Chinese lessons

From a WaPo piece on Rice’s recent Middle East tour:

At one point, Rice said that the difficult circumstances in the Middle East could represent opportunity. “I don’t read Chinese but I am told that the Chinese character for crisis is wei-ji, which means both danger and opportunity,” she said in Riyadh. “And I think that states it very well. We’ll try to maximize the opportunity.”

But Victor H. Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, has written on the Web site http://pinyin.info, a guide to the Chinese language, that “a whole industry of pundits and therapists has grown up around this one grossly inaccurate formulation.” He said the character “ji” actually means “incipient moment” or a “crucial point.” Thus, he said, a wei-ji “is indeed a genuine crisis, a dangerous moment, a time when things start to go awry.”

It would be comforting to know that top policy-makers do not get their strategic thinking from pop psychology books. But then again we are dealing with a president that got excited about democratization because he read Nathan Sharansky’s book and a few years later apparently got bored with the whole idea.

Update: I forgot to include these choice quotes from Neil King’s article in the WSJ:

While traveling this week through the Middle East and Europe, Ms. Rice engaged in several long historical tutorials with reporters in tow. Her point in referring back to the Cold War, she said, isn’t to argue that history repeats itself or that the analogy is exact.

“The reason that I cite some of these other times, like Europe, is that it is so clear in everybody’s mind that the United States and its allies came out victorious at the end of the Cold War,” she said in Kuwait. “But if you…look at the events that ultimately lead to that, you would have thought that this was failing every single day between 1945-1946 and probably 1987 or 1988.”

Her contention is while things may look bad now in Iraq and elsewhere in the region, history is on the administration’s side. She pushed a similar argument to reporters last month. The Middle East is “moving toward something that I am quite certain will not have a full resolution and that you will not be able to fully judge for decades,” she said.

Critics dismiss Ms. Rice’s references to the Cold War as both convenient and a sign of her limited frame of reference. The challenges facing Europe in 1946, they say, bear little similarity to those of the Middle East in the 21st century.

“The administration’s reservoir of historical analogies seems limited to the 1914-1991 period. And it’s all about Europe,” said Adam Garfinkle, a former Rice speechwriter who edits the foreign-policy journal The American Interest. “No one in a senior position in this administration seems to have even the vaguest notion of modern Middle Eastern history.”

When asked this week about what moments in Arab history inform her thinking, Ms. Rice said she had read about “the British experience” in Mesopotamia in the 1920s, which led to the founding of modern Iraq and the withdrawal of British forces. “I know a number of things that went right, and I know the things that went wrong,” she said.

What also comes out in the article is the idea that Rice’s main strategic objective is securing a new regional arrangement that favors Israel:

On this trip, which wrapped up in London, Ms. Rice has portrayed her main mission as firming up what she calls “a new alignment” of moderate states allied with the U.S. to push back against Iran. Ms. Rice also has shown a new interest in trying to promote an Arab peace deal with Israel after years of inactivity.

Four years ago, the administration theorized that the U.S. invasion would spawn a democratic Iraq, on good terms with Israel, that would break the regional mold and compel erstwhile enemies to end hostility toward the Israelis. Now, Ms. Rice says it is the Iranian ascent wrought by the war that makes Arab states more open to negotiations.

Yet, the leading initiative for Arab-Israeli peace is an Arab one and was announced in March 2002 in Beirut — and been ignored by successive Israeli administrations, as well as the Bush administration. So it’s not so much peace that they are interested in, but have their cake and eating to. Understandable from an Israeli right-wing perspective, but should American politicians be towing the same line?

[Thanks, X]

WaPo: “Lost in the Middle East”

The Washington Post takes the time to point the obvious and gets in some good old fashioned Hozz-bashing:

The new strategy explains a series of reversals of U.S. policy that otherwise would be baffling. In addition to embracing the Middle East peacemaker role that it has shunned for six years, the administration has decided to seek $98 million in funding for Palestinian security forces — the same forces it rightly condemned in the past as hopelessly corrupt and compromised by involvement in terrorism. Those forces haven’t changed, but since they are nominally loyal to “mainstream” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and serve as a check on the power of the “extremist” Hamas, they are on the right side of Ms. Rice’s new divide.

So is Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, a thuggish autocrat who was on the wrong side of Ms. Rice’s previous Mideast divide between pro-democracy forces and defenders of the illiberal status quo. In past visits to Cairo, Ms. Rice sparred with Mr. Mubarak’s foreign minister over the imprisonment of democratic opposition leaders such as Ayman Nour and the failure to fulfill promises of political reform. On Monday, she opened her Cairo news conference by declaring that “the relationship with Egypt is an important strategic relationship, one that we value greatly.” There was no mention of Mr. Nour or democracy.

They should also mention that this US egging on of a Sunni-Shia conflict is the most irresponsible thing since… well, since the invasion of Iraq. My feeling is that while some Arab governments are at least partly encouraging this worldview to justify their backing of US policy — see Sandmonkey’s reflections on anti-Shia diatribes in the Egyptian press lately — the main force behind this is the Bush administration, which against all common sense seems bent on escalating tensions with Iran. If some kind of regional conflict pitting Shia against Sunnis emerges, than the US will bear a great deal of the responsibility for having started it, and this will not be forgotten by the region’s inhabitants.

Over the last five years, major Arab states like Saudi Arabia and Egypt had made some overtures to Iran and both sides were keen to improve relations. Trade with Iran has also increased over the last few years. Now talks of reopening embassies are over.

This is not dismiss the problem posed by Iran’s nuclear program, but between Iran having nuclear weapons and a region-wide second fitna, I know what I’d choose.

natural bedfellows

It’ll be interesting to see whether the IHT hits Cairo newstands (has hit the newsstands? when does the print edition come out?) with a Michael Slackman piece intact. The article is more than a little critical of the Egyptian regime and of Condi’s support for it, and, while it is posted on the IHT and NYT websites, it will give the boys down at the Ministry of Info no great pleasure if they are told they have to let it through here.

Cairo: In the days before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with officials in Egypt, the news media here were filled with stories detailing charges of corruption, cronyism, torture and political repression.

And Slackman then fills out his lead: police torture on video, contaminated blood being distributed, journalists getting arrested. He gives Ibrahim Eissa space for a quote on regime duplicity and political tensions, lets Hafez Abou Saada say the usual, and runs through a short list of the kind of reforms instituted since 2005 (back when Condi was making those huffy puffy noises that sounded to some like criticism of beating protestors and fixing elections):

Since then, Egypt’s government has piled up a long list of repressive actions, including ordering the police to block people from voting in parliamentary elections; delaying local elections by two years; imprisoning an opposition leader, Ayman Nour, on charges widely seen as politically motivated; battling with judges who have demanded oversight of elections; and imprisoning Talaat el-Sadat, a member of Parliament and the nephew of President Anwar el-Sadat, for a year in a military jail after he criticized the armed forces on television.

And he twists it closed nicely at the end, juxtaposing the experience of some Wafd members who tried to do something about sewage in their village (you guessed it, friendly visits from security) and Condi’s latest public message to Egyptians:

“I especially want to thank President Mubarak for receiving me and for spending so much time with me to talk about the issues of common interest here in the Middle East,” Ms. Rice said. “Obviously the relationship with Egypt is an important strategic relationship — one that we value greatly.”

Thanks for clearing that up Condi.

The depressing part, however, is the point that Slackman raises in the middle of his article. Shalit’s still walled up in little cell under Gaza somewhere and Fatah and Hamas are going at it like a bunch of well-armed soccer hooligans. So what does Washington have to gain these days in exchange for its complicity in the very public human rights violations of the Mubarak regime? Are they anticipating an imminent need to outsource the questioning of Gitmo releasees to the Lazoughly Interrogation Company?

Ultimately, Condi’s stance looks at best like knee-jerk retrenchment in the face of the utter failure, and at worst like somebody taking comfort in the arms of like-minded friends.

Politics doesn’t always make strange bedfellows, it seems.

Zbig vs. Shrub

Zbigniew Brzezinski angriest column yet? Looks like the realists might take their gloves off now that W. has made a fool out of their don, James Baker III.

“Its language was less Islamophobic than has been customary with President Bush’s rhetoric since Sept. 11”
“the president still could not resist the temptation to engage in a demagogic oversimplification”
“The commitment of 21,500 more troops is a political gimmick of limited tactical significance and of no strategic benefit.”
“The speech did not explore even the possibility of developing a framework for an eventual political solution.”
“the administration’s diplomatic style of relying on sloganeering as a substitute for strategizing.”
“America is acting like a colonial power in Iraq.”

The patricians strike back…

Update: While on the subject of patricians who suddenly become anti-imperialists, here’s what Edward Luttwak has to say:

It was the hugely ambitious project of the Bush administration to transform the entire Middle East by remaking Iraq into an irresistible model of prosperous democracy. Having failed in that worthy purpose, another, more prosaic result has inadvertently been achieved: divide and rule, the classic formula for imperial power on the cheap.

The rest after the jump.

Continue reading Zbig vs. Shrub

CIA, Saudis covertly plot support of Siniora

Rather obvious, of course:

The Central Intelligence Agency has been authorised to take covert action against Hizbollah as part of a secret plan by President George W. Bush to help the Lebanese government prevent the spread of Iranian influence. Senators and congressmen have been briefed on the classified “non-lethal presidential finding” that allows the CIA to provide financial and logistical support to the prime minister, Fouad Siniora.

The finding was signed by Mr Bush before Christmas after discussions between his aides and Saudi Arabian officials. Details of its existence, known only to a small circle of White House officials, intelligence officials and members of Congress, have been passed to The Daily Telegraph.

. . .

A former US government official said: “Siniora’s under siege there and we are always looking for ways to help allies. As Richard Armitage [a former deputy US secretary of state] said, Hizbollah is the A-team of terrorism and certainly Iran and Syria have not let up in their support of the group.”

Prince Bandar bin-Sultan, the former Saudi Arabian ambassador to Washington, is understood to have been closely involved in the decision to prop up Mr Siniora’s administration and the Israeli government, which views Iran as its chief enemy, has also been supportive.

“There’s a feeling both in Jerusalem and in Riyadh that the anti-Sunni tilt in the region has gone too far,” said an intelligence source. “By removing Saddam, we’ve shifted things in favour of the Shia and this is a counter-balancing exercise.

Why don’t they just redraw the maps while they’re at it?

New Carnegie report on Egypt and US policy

This new Carnegie Endowment report on Egypt by Michele Dunne (editor of the Arab Reform Bulletin and former State Dept. diplomat in Egypt, among other things) has gotten quite a lot of attention in the Egyptian press because it focuses on the succession issue in Egypt, its link to the ongoing (flawed) political reform initiatives and the apparent grooming of Gamal Mubarak to succeed his father:

The Constitutional amendments proposed by the NDP are intimately linked to the positioning of Mubarak’s son Gamal, who has risen gradually over the past decade to become Deputy Secretary General of the NDP and the party’s likely candidate in the next presidential election. Over the past several years Gamal Mubarak has made economic and political reform his signature issues, and in fact he previewed most of the new initiatives announced recently by the president at the annual party conference in September. He also made news by advocating a nuclear energy program and a more assertive Egyptian regional role in order to counter U.S. influence. These attention-getting statements—along with a notably humbler, more populist tone in his rhetoric about the need to translate economic reform into real benefits for poor Egyptians—appeared to be an effort to show Gamal’s responsiveness to the concerns of Egyptian citizens and to demonstrate his growing mastery of national security issues. Domestic political and economic reform took center stage, however, in NDP proposals for legislation in the parliament.


The report actually does not offer any decisive take on Gamal, which is wise (I personally believe in a Gamal scenario less and less.)

Dunne’s report offers an overview of the major amendments proposed by the NDP and the demands made by the opposition, including the Muslim Brotherhood. In its recommendations on US policy on Egypt, it urges Washington to support widespread opposition demand for term limits and the amendment of Article 77. Funnily enough — and probably no coincidence — today’s state newspaper headlines are all about Mubarak categorically refusing to amend Article 77 on the grounds that “the people decide to choose their president” and that other “big countries” also have no term limits.

I have only had time to skim the report, but I find the section on recommendations to US foreign policymakers the most interesting because Dunne is a former policy insider (she advised Rice and Bush on Egypt in 2000-2002, I believe) and an established “Egypt hand” who has been working on the problems of the US-Egypt relationship for a long time. Here are a few:

Freedom for parties: The United States should support the demand of parties for a more open and straightforward licensing system—one in which the NDP cannot strangle nascent rivals in the cradle—and should protest regime interference in party affairs. Only with such changes would the NDP initiative to shift to a proportional representation system give parties with a small base of support (which means all parties except the NDP and the illegal Brotherhood) a real chance at parliamentary representation. Regarding the Brotherhood, there is as yet no clear consensus on how it can be fully enfranchised without threatening stability, and it is not up to the United States to resolve this conundrum. Washington should, however, encourage Egypt to continue opening the political system so that a solution can emerge over time.

Electoral supervision: It is extremely important that the gains made in 2005 be built upon and not reversed. Although the creation of a truly independent and capable electoral commission is desirable, it probably is not feasible at present, and so the United States should support the calls of Egyptian judges for continued extensive involvement in electoral supervision for the time being.

And perhaps most interesting:

the single most important thing the United States can do to promote political reform in Egypt is to pay consistent attention to the subject. Direct engagement should primarily take place through private dialogue with the Egyptian government and continued assistance to governmental and nongovernmental entities. The United States can have a significant effect on opposition and civil society activists in Egypt despite widespread anger at many aspects of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

It seems to me that is a polite of way of saying that US policy towards Egypt has been, in recent years, hesitant and incoherent, if not outright contradictory. The difference between 2002-2004 and post-2004 is particularly striking, and it’s not only the changing of ambassadors.

Egyptian satellite broadcasting Iraq insurgents

Lawrence Pintak has a very interesting story about a dispute between the US and Egypt over a Iraqi jihadi channel airing on NileSat, the Egyptian government-owned satellite system:

Al Zawraa, a television version of the now-infamous jihadi websites, is being broadcast across the Arab world by Nilesat, a satellite provider answerable to the Egyptian government.

The Iraqi station features non-stop scenes of US troops being picked off by snipers, blown up by roadside bombs and targeted by missiles.

“We find the channel utterly offensive,” said one US diplomat. Getting the Egyptians to pull the plug is “at the top of our agenda.”

But the Egyptian government insists it’s all just business.

“For us, it means nothing,” Egyptian Information Minister Anas Al Fiqi told me. “It is a channel that reserved an allocation on Nilesat. They had a contract, paid the fees. There is nothing political for Nilesat. It’s pure business. We have no concern what the channel is doing.”

Hey, I have an idea. Can I buy a channel on NileSat for Kifaya and the Muslim Brotherhood? I want to air a soap opera about life inside the Mubarak household. An Everybody Loves Hosni kind of thing.

Anyway, read on for the interesting details on how Egypt has resisted pressure to drop the channel — including threats against the Egyptian embassy in Baghdad — despite having quite a hands-on role in the affair, since it is not just relaying the channel but actually broadcasting taped footage on repeat from Cairo since last December. Arguments about freedom of speech seem moot: NileSat is not a platform for freedom of speech anyway, and if the channel is as nasty as reported, it should drop it.

Taibbi on the Friedman syndrome, again

No one rips into Thomas L. (don’t forget the ‘L’!) Friedman than Matt Taibbi:

Tom Friedman is the oracle of this crowd, the tormented fat kid with a wedgie who got smart in his high school years and figured out that all he had to do to be successful was shamelessly and relentlessly flatter his Greatest-Generation parents, stroke their outdated prejudices, sell them on the idea that the entire aim of the modernization process is the spreading of their amazing legacy through the use of space-age technology.

So he goes into America’s sleepy suburbs with his Seventies porn-star mustache and he titillates the book clubs full of bored fifty- and sixtysomething housewives with tales of how the Internet is going to turn Afghanistan into Iowa. The suburban guys he ropes in with a half-baked international policy analysis — what’s “going on” on “the Street,” as Friedman usually puts it — that he cleverly makes sound like the world’s sexiest collection of stock tips: “So I was playing golf with the Saudi energy minister last week, and he told me…”

This is just a modern take on the same old bullshit rap that traveling salesmen all over America have been laying on wide-eyed yokels at 99 Steak Houses and Howard Johnsons hotel bars for decades: So I was having lunch with Jack Welch at the Four Seasons last week when I heard about this amazing opportunity…. And these middle-manager types who live in Midwestern cubicles or in the bowels of some federal bureaucracy in Maryland eat it up: They buy every one of Friedman’s books, treat his every word like gospel and before you know it they’re all talking about Israeli politics and “the situation” in Yemen or Turkey or wherever like they’re experts.

And so this is how we got where we are. You get a whole nation full of people who spend 99 percent of their free time worrying about their lawns or their short iron game, you convince them that they know something about something they actually know nothing about, and next thing you know, they’re blundering into a 1,000-year blood feud between rival Islamic groups, shooting things left and right in a panic, and thinking that they can make it all right and correct each successive fuckup by “keeping our noses to the grindstone” and “making lemons out of lemonade.”

The article is actually about Saddam Hussein’s execution, described as a “fuckup” because of its PR effect on Iraq and the region. I think all these “oh-no-they-killed-Saddam-during-Eid” whines aren’t terribly important to most people in the region (although they may become important to some Iraqi Sunnis), but perhaps I’m wrong. A very funny article nonetheless.

(And don’t forget his great first column on Friedman.)