Category: International

Last Sunday was the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. We’ve be seeing the moving images and network footage.

It also transports me back in time–to the Cold War winter of 1972. Eleven years after this monument to man’s inhumanity was built and 15 years before Ronald Reagan implored Mikhail Gorbachev to tear it down. I remember  interviewing U.S. soldiers at Checkpoint Charlie, which bisected East and West Berlin.

The four G.I.s were squeezed into a grim little guard house–think back-yard tool shed–in the middle of Friedrichstrasse. It was surrounded by drab storefronts, abandoned apartments, empty lots and a modest museum dedicated to those who had died fleeing from the East. They would continuously peer through binoculars at the East German guard tower on the other side of the wall–and typically see East German counterparts peering back at them through their binoculars, their breathing more than discernible in the frosty, night air.

The Americans seemed glad to have some stateside company, however unexpected and maybe inexplicable, to talk about home as well as the world’s most notorious, Cold War trip wire.

I still vividly recall one G.I. saying: “How ’bout that Super Bowl? Were you surprised to see Miami beat Dallas?”

“Actually, I’m surprised you said that,” I replied. “Dallas won.”

“I know,” responded the soldier through a nominal smile. “Just checkin’.”

Checkpoint Charlie checkin.’ Dallas won, 24-3. I’ve not forgotten–or its Berlin Wall context.

* Saudi Arabia has announced that a well-known Shiite cleric has been sentenced to death for, among other crimes, disobeying the ruler, sowing discord and undermining national unity. In Saudi Arabia, most such sentences are carried out by beheading.

It’s their country.

Saudi Arabia has also indicated that prosecutors are asking for the execution to be FOLLOWED by crucifixion.

It’s their country.

Saudi Arabia has precedent for such cases. Crucifixion in this context means the body and head would then be put on public display.

It’s our ally.

* Venezuela has been voted in as one of the United Nations’ five new temporary (two-year terms) members of the Security Council. The others: Malaysia, Angola, New Zealand and Spain.

So much for that recent report by the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions, which condemned Venezuela for taking political prisoners during a crackdown on anti-government street protests this spring. Nobody’s perfect.

* Cold War Update:

Last week Secretary of State John Kerry welcomed his counterpart, Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh for a working lunch before announcing that the U.S. was easing up on the arms-sales embargo to Vietnam. It will help boost Hanoi’s maritime security against you know who.

It was a reminder that the U.S. has had normalized relations with the Communist country with human-rights challenges since the Clinton Administration. And that it will go to embargo-breaking lengths if it involves national security. And the only reason we had an (arms) embargo to begin with is because we lost about 60,000 American G.I.s in the ill-fated Vietnam War.

It was also an inevitable, ironic reminder that we still have our Cold War embargo with Cuba, a neighboring country with human-rights challenges that we’ve never been to hot war with.

* The other day the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman was commenting on how much “if-only-Obama-could-lead-like-Reagan” talk there was. He then pointed out that during the Cold War President Ronald Reagan had the benefit of working with Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who won the Nobel Peace Prize. Moreover, the one time Reagan did face a “miniversion” of President Barack Obama’s Middle East challenge in Lebanon, it didn’t end well.

I’ll add this. What we now see with the barbaric ISIS, the internecine mess that is historic religious and tribal enmity and the proven impossibility of nation-building in the Middle East practically prompts nostalgia for the Cold War.

There was a time–the existential missile crisis of 1962–when mankind stood at a nuclear precipice. What saved us all was this: Nobody wanted to die. Not for an ideology, not for geopolitical leverage, not for proxies. If one side said, “We’ll have to kill you,” it mattered. No one answered: “Thank you. The afterlife can’t come soon enough.” How’s that for leverage?

No, dealing with Gorbachev–or even Leonid Brezhnev–is not to be compared with confronting Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self appointed Caliph of the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

* Talk about juxtaposition.

Last Friday’s Tampa Bay Times chronicled the latest on airstrikes against ISIS. The page-6, AP story at the top, left corner said: “ISIS Tortures, Executes Female Rights Lawyer.” The New York Times story in the top, right corner said: “Emirates’ First Female Fighter Pilot Led Mission.”

Talk about irony. Talk about fitting response.

* Eau de capitalism.

For the discerning traveler to Cuba who wants souvenirs more evocative than the hackneyed “Che” T-shirt, there’s now something more, well, revolutionary: iconic colognes.

Formulated by a French company and produced in Cuba, tourists and savoring socialists can now choose between two unique blends, the snuff of legends. There’s “Ernesto,” a woodsy and citric scent that’s somehow redolent of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and “Hugo,” a combination with hints of mango and papaya that plays to the Hugo Chavez market.

* Looks like Edward Snowden, America’s most notorious former National Security Agency contractor, will have some help paying for whatever he incurs in asylum expenses in Russia. Snowden was among four winners of the Right Livelihood Award, the Swedish human rights award sometimes referred to as the “alternative Nobel.” The $210,000 award was shared with three other winners.

Reportedly, the Swedish Foreign Ministry was not pleased.

* For once, seeing headlines referencing U.S. troops and a foreign assignment didn’t yield a sense of foreboding and geopolitical hand-wringing. Knowing that President Barack Obama will be sending the military and medical supplies to Ebola-ravaged West Africa is a reminder that America’s capacity to help and do good is alive and, well, necessary.

* Remember, probably back in a sociology or anthropology course in college, being introduced to “ethnocentrism“? As in a sense of superiority over other ethnic, racial, religious or cultural groups. Who would ever defend that?

Then you read about those young Iranian men and women sentenced to lashings and (suspended) jail terms for participating in a video deemed indecent by government hard-liners. The video, we learned via YouTube postings, shows them dancing together to the music of Pharrell Williams’ “Happy” in sunglasses and goofy clothes on Tehran rooftops and alley ways.

But, no, the silly duds didn’t include headscarves. Major Islamic Republic oops. And that–plus dancing–is a LASH-able offense.

So much for the norms of relativism and tolerance. Some things are relative, some things are absolutes. Some things are just culturally and religiously different–always have been. And some things are just, well, stupid and cruel.

That’s as elevated an approach as this matter deserves–and we haven’t even touched upon blasphemy crimes and punishments. Somebody has to say it besides Bill Maher.

* ISIS is verifiably demonic and barbaric. But they are also unnervingly conniving–and the release of those 49 Turkishhostages has unsettling subplots written all over it. Officially, Turkey is saying no military actions were taken and no ransoms were paid. That pretty much leaves only a Faustian deal with the ISIS devil to explain how the Turks achieved their release.

That could mean a less-than-significant role for Turkey, a major Middle East player, in the international coalition that the U.S. is trying to build against ISIS. It could also mean frustrations for NATO in what it would ask of its most important, militarily-potent, non-American and non-Western European member.

Back in 2003, President George W. Bush and his neocon puppet masters made that ill-advised, WMD-rationalized invasion of Iraq that continues to cost us lives, treasure and reputation. Recall the Bush Administration’s real agenda: a pro-West buffer state to complement Israel and lots of guaranteed oil. WMD scares and erroneous 9/11 associations were the perfect cover.

Fast forward to now: We’d settle for tyrants, dictators and thugs in a nanosecond. Concluding a war seems endless. This assuredly isn’t what President Barack Obama and all non-neocons wanted. But it’s what we have: an existential threat to virtually everybody–whatever the homeland.

“The worst people on the planet” is how dyspeptic, conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer, whom I rarely agree with on anything, accurately defines the marauding, beheading Islamist State. It’s also well-financed, equipped with captured, American-made weaponry, including M1 tanks and howitzers, and privy to Sunni generals who commanded Baathist troops under Saddam Hussein. It also has serious land, a stash of uranium, Western ex-pat jihadists with American and European passports and a safe haven in Syria. And it doesn’t get much more personal than a video decapitation of one of your own.

Recall that the missile crisis of 1962 was averted, in large part, because neither side wanted an apocalyptic endgame. That dynamic no longer applies. This is a zero-sum game with evil–not a forum for a treaty or an armistice. You don’t negotiate with iniquity. You erase it.

Call it a Rubicon that needs crossing.

Sooner, rather than later, the president will have to expand aerial attacks carried out by our F-16 and F-18 jets. Sooner, rather than later, the president will have to acknowledge that military advisers–and this isn’t the Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay crowd that John Kennedy had to rein in–are right in their consensus that a sworn enemy can’t have unfettered access to a Syrian safe haven to regroup, re-plan and resume.

What helps is that we increasingly have European support for such an offensive as well as a lot of anti-Islamic State sentiment among Muslims. In fact, the aerial strikes are done in coordination with ground assaults by Iraqi special forces, Shiite militias and Kurdish peshmerga fighters. Ironically, the Iranian and Syrian governments, regardless of cautious, parsed rhetoric and convoluted history with the U.S., want to see the Islamic State razed. “Convert or die” understandably appalls the neighborhood.

Moreover, we have an indigenous, trustworthy ally in the Kurds. Ever since President George H.W. Bush ordered the no-fly zone over Northern Iraq after the first Gulf War, the Kurds have been grateful–a rare sentiment in the Muddled East–to the U.S. They also have normalized relations with Israel.

The demise of the Islamic State and statehood for Kurdistan: This would be the way to end a war.

The photo in the Sunday paper caught my eye. It was of Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He was reviewing a military honor guard. In Ho Chi Minh City.

It was a reminder that we do, indeed, have normalized relations with Vietnam, a country we’ve been to war with. A war that cost us nearly 60,000 American lives and generationally divided a nation.

Gen. Dempsey was there to grease the skids for the ending of the lethal weapons embargo that is still on the books. Seems that Vietnam might be able to help us out in offsetting the power of China. Besides, those could be weapons they would no longer need to buy from the Russians.

Meanwhile, there’s that other embargo that periodically makes the news involving a near-by country we’ve only been to Cold War with–and counterproductively hurts us economically and geopolitically.

The irony still abounds.

* According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the most recent homicide rate (2012) in the United States is 4.7 per 100,000 people. The rate in Honduras: 90.4. It’s that horrific.

* Some anniversaries are cringe-inducing. Hiroshima is one. Japan just marked the 69th anniversary of that city’s atomic bombing. U.S. Ambassador Caroline Kennedy represented the U.S. at the somber, never-again ceremony.

We know the context, including the lives of American G.I.s that would have been lost in an all-out invasion of the Japanese homeland. But targeting areas that are sure to incinerate thousands of civilians–140,000 at Hiroshima and 70,000 three days later at Nagasaki–will never feel right. It just won’t.

* While the Middle East and Russia have lent themselves to much Obama Administration  speculation, second guessing and outright criticism, some developments in our own hemisphere have hardly qualified as foreign-policy bragging points. And this is in addition to easedropping on Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.

For example, the Obama Administration has been playing the incrementalist card on Cuba from the get-go. That’s hardly the sort of “change” a lot of us wanted to believe in. No executive order to open up travel, no White House lobbying for Helms-Burton changes. And now, as we well know, the political climate won’t allow for sensible, humane immigration or gun-control legislation, let alone a historic turn on Cuba.

But now we find out that in the fall of 2009, this country–via the U.S. Agency for International Development–began overseeing a project that sent Venezuelan, Costa Rican and Peruvian youths undercover to Cuba in hopes of stirring up rebellion. And that same autumn saw the beginning of the once-secret “Cuban Twitter” project that was exposed in April of this year.

Is this a Cold War time warp? Was Allen Dulles reincarnated as Leon Panetta? Are there more Amateur Hour undertakings to be unearthed?

* This just in: The U.S. has now officially spent ($104 billion) more in fighting and reconstructing in Afghanistan than it did on the Marshall Plan ($103.4 billion current-dollar value) after World War II.

The Afghanistan return: 2,200 U.S. deaths, 20,000 Americans wounded. Every expectation that endemic corruption will continue and the Taliban picks up where it left off 12 years ago.

The Marshall Plan return: European nations helped in their rebuilding efforts. Viable democracies and trade partners resulted.

* Let’s not make too much out of that Uganda court that recently struck down an unconscionably punitive anti-gay law that can punish some homosexual behavior with life in prison. The rationale is nothing to celebrate. A five-judge panel in Kampala said the Anti-Homosexuality Act was invalid because it had been passed by Parliament without a proper quorum–not because it was, well, barbarically wrong.

* As leader of the country that will host the 2018 World Cup, Russian President Vladimir Putin was in Rio de Janeiro last Sunday for the official hand-off from Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. And while in the hemispheric neighborhood, Putin tended to some other business.

He signed deals with Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner on nuclear energy and engaged in talks on possible construction of hydroelectric plants and bases for Russia’s satellite system. He also inked a nuclear agreement with Brazil and had dinner with Fernandez as well as the presidents of Venezuela, Bolivia and Uruguay.

Hardly coincidental: the countries on Putin’s itinerary have been uncritical or downright sympathetic of Russia’s position on Ukraine. Fernandez, for example, was able to analogize Ukraine with the Falkland Islands that are still claimed by Buenos Aires.

And one other Putin stop: Cuba.

Officially, it was about economic and commercial links as well as investment in projects ranging from transportation and civil aviation to energy. Russia has cooperated with Cuba in recent years on offshore oil exploration. And, oh yeah, Putin formally waived 90 percent of Cuba’s Soviet-era debt–or money that Russia was never going to see anyhow.

But amid the bilateral agreements with countries in the Americas, you just knew there was another agenda item at play for Putin, who at his core remains a KGB punk. Such as underscoring how much he despises Western, let alone North American, involvement in matters along Russian borders. In other words, “Call it what you will–including Cold War flashbacks–but now you know what it feels like to have outsiders poking around your geographical periphery and sphere of influence. Deal with it.”

* An ongoing irony of America’s Cold War relationship with Cuba is our normalized relations with Vietnam, a country we actually went to hot war with during that period. A war that cost us nearly 60,000 dead, drove a president out of office and divisively traumatized the country. We currently trade and invest with Hanoi, while still maintaining a trade embargo and travel restrictions with Havana.

Now a last vestige of the Vietnam era may finally fall into the dustbin of history: the prohibition of the sale of American weapons. The Obama Administration has been indicating it wants to lift the ban. One sign: the newly nominated U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, Ted Osius, spoke positively about such a change in recent Senate testimony–and giving Vietnam weapons options beyond Russia, Israel and India.

* Humor is where you find it, including the unlikely venue of certain Arab countries. One regional definition of “Sushi”: Sunnis and Shiites who intermarry.