Category: International

Some things I’ll never accept, even if it puts me at visceral, rhetorical odds with most others. We should never target civilian populations in the context of war. And, yes, that goes for Hiroshima and Nagasaki too.

And, yes, I’m aware, am I ever, of the existential arguments to the contrary. My father would likely have been part of VJ Plan B: the invasion of the Japanese home islands.

I was moved in seeing that the grandson of former President Harry S. Truman recently attended the annual service for the atomic bomb victims at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. The visit by Clifton Truman Daniel was the first by a Truman-family member.  He was accompanied by American Ambassador John Roos. I was also saddened to learn that America didn’t start sending a government representative to the annual commemoration until two years ago.

Mitt Romney’s sortie to England, Israel and Poland was supposed to be his version of Candidate Barack Obama’s Berlin visit in 2008. A foreign-policy bona fides booster. But Romney’s trip turned into an awkward, counterproductive gaffe-a-thon.

Now think back to the Republican primaries. After Jon Huntsman, Mitt Romney was the most presidential–in executive experience, stage appearance and statesman demeanor–of all the candidates. But suppose Romney hadn’t captured the nomination. Can you imagine Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Michelle Bachman or Rick Santorum on the stump overseas? That’s scary.

Not to sound incurably naive, but is nothing truly sacred anymore?

The religion I grew up in, Roman Catholicism, continues to experience the crucible from hell. Clergy abuse, coverups and now the-butler-did-it, aggravated-theft, Vatican leaks. What’s a Church to do?

Well, apparently what any other embarrassed, seemingly blind-sided contemporary organization–sectarian or not–would do. Go on a media offensive.

First, change the subject: Thank you, Obamacare. Position health-insurance-that-covers-birth-control mandates for Catholic-affiliated hospitals, charities, universities and social-service agencies as a mortal sin. And in an effort to mitigate female outrage, characterize it as an attack on religious freedom.

Then upgrade public relations wherewithal. For further verification of such a need, note the clergy-abuse-scandal message that Pope Benedict XVI sent to Irish Catholics via a sports stadium video earlier this month. “How are we to explain the fact that people who regularly received the Lord’s body and confessed their sins in the sacrament of Penance have offended in this way?” rhetorically asked the Pontiff. “It remains a mystery.”

A “mystery”? Anyone think that recruitment, an increasing challenge and limited to the celibate-male demographic, might be problematic?

So who does the Vatican hire to improve its PR approach? Turns out it’s a guy named Greg Burke, a member of the uber conservative Opus Dei movement, who will help to shape the Vatican’s message. He’ll be a senior communications adviser. What are his media credentials? He had been the Rome-based, Fox News correspondent. Honest.

This sounds more like a sin for the confessional than a good-faith strategy for the media.

I’ve been reading with considerable interest the revelations and insights of Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, as he has been journeying around Iran. His theme: If we can avoid an Iran-West war, there’s a good chance Iranians will be surprisingly accommodating. From his perspective, Iran and the non-hardliner majority can be dealt with. For all of its axis of evilness and uranium-enrichment fixation, Iran is not some consummate infidel-hating, dysfunctional “stan” country, let alone a total rogue misfit like North Korea.

It caused me to reflect back a dozen years and my own experience in Iran, and I absolutely get what Kristof is saying. To know a nation and a people only through the filtered lens of the American media and international geopolitics is to court collective ignorance. I traveled there with a contingent of the Friendship Force, a non-political organization that fosters friendship among private citizens worldwide. It was founded more than 30 years ago by former President Jimmy Carter.

Except for a few dyspeptic mullahs in Qom, the center of religious instruction, we were met with uniform curiosity, friendliness and even graciousness. Lots of salaam exchanges. Many Iranians seemed flattered that some Americans cared enough to see their country first hand.

What’s important to remember about Iranians, and more than half of them are under age 25, is that they are proudly Persian with an appreciation for literacy and higher education. Its university enrollment is more than half female. Iran, which was officially called Persia until 1935, is the only country invaded by Arabs that retained its language–Farsi–and culture.

Two incidents in particular are still with me because it underscored a sense of identification that transcended decidedly different cultural norms. A wink-and-nod acknowledgement that all is not necessarily as it seems.

At the Tehran Airport we were given a briefing by a government official. Here’s how he put it: “You must remember that there is no alcohol available here. It is forbidden. Not in the hotel. Not in restaurants…But if you can find it somewhere…What you do in your room is your business.”

And it had other applications. We would later learn that the high-rent district of North Tehran still existed–and the worst-kept secret was that you would likely find foreign videos, stylish ensembles, chic coiffures and open bars very much the cloistered rage behind closed doors–where the West was more venerated than vilified.

A well-worn Iranian joke is illustrative. An archetypal, fundamentalist, vigilante sort is asked how the Islamic Revolution has impacted his life. He answers: “Very little,” and explains: “Before the Revolution I got drunk in public and prayed in private. Now I pray in public and get drunk at home.”

The other example is the commentary of a well-traveled businessman, Akbar Heshani, from Isfahan. “First of all, I think America is a great country, and I love Americans,” he said. “I think a lot of Iranians would say the same thing. But I don’t think a lot of Americans handle their freedoms with responsibility.

“I know this seems repressive to Americans, but we don’t want your excesses,” he added. “But as for our young people, who weren’t around for the Revolution, I think they would like some excess. I guess all young people do.”

Indeed.

It is supremely ironic.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta flew half way around the globe to visit Vietnam last Sunday. THAT Vietnam, the one where more than 50,000 American G.I.’s died during the heat of the Cold War. The one where thousands more, including the physically wounded and the psychologically impaired, came home to a groundswell of indifference and dishonor. The one that fomented anti-war riots, undermined American foreign policy credibility and alienated a generation. THAT Vietnam.

Now Secretary Panetta is underscoring the real-world, contemporary U.S.-Vietnam relationship. Yesteryear’s Cold War policies remain interred with that regrettable era. Let geopolitical bygones be bygones. Our relations have been normalized for nearly two decades. Common sense and enlightened self interest have prevailed.

We trade and invest with Vietnam. We even see them as a partner of sorts in countering the ever-increasing influence and military assertiveness of China. THAT China. The one previously known as Red. The one that was up to no good in befriending Ho Chi Minh.

But that was then–and this is not even close. “We’ve come a long way, particularly with regards to our defense relationship,” understated Panetta after being saluted by his Vietnamese counterpart at Cam Ranh Bay International Airport. “A great deal of blood was spilled in this war on all sides–by Americans and by Vietnamese.” Indeed.

And yet.

It is obscenely ironic.

How preposterous is it that America, after understandably moving on from a country that claimed so many American casualties, is still maintaining its Cold War status with Caribbean neighbor Cuba? A half century after the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis, we are still geopolitically freeze framed in time as if John Kennedy were still learning the presidency and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara still yielding to the Joint Chiefs, the CIA and Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge.

Any wonder no one but Israel stands with the U.S. at the United Nations when voting on the resolution to condemn the “economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba”? Last fall the vote was 186-2. When the U.N. is right, it is overwhelmingly so.

Imagine, in a world of proven, blood-on-their-hands, we-hate-infidels villains, we are still treating Cuba as an enemy. The state-sponsor-of-terrorism type. Hell, Mexico, for all of its democratic trappings and capitalist ways, is our biggest hemispheric threat.

Cuba is one of myriad authoritarian states worldwide with human-rights issues. A lot of them are U.S. allies. But all the wrong parties have been hurt by Cuba’s schizoid ideology, a half-baked economy and America’s intransigence.

No need to revisit the machinations of the vendetta-agenda, exile crowd and the cowed politicians they continue to control. This is still personal, the way Vietnam could never be. And this is still–a half century and counting–counterproductive to America’s best interests. And it’s still an embargo on common sense and enlightened self interest.

Meanwhile, Panetta is hoping to further broaden the ratcheting cooperation with Vietnam, which is now allowing U.S. Navy supply ships to dock for repairs and maintenance.

Unfortunately, it was only a four-day trip. That’s how long Gov. Rick Scott was out of state–and in Spain touting (“HO-lah, boo-noze die-ez”) Florida as a great place to do business if you don’t much care about mass transit, higher-ed priorities, concealed-weapons carriers or right-wing politicians that Generalísimo Franco would have admired.

Interesting timing for Gov. Gringo.

Spain, which doesn’t make Florida’s top 30 trading partners, is experiencing the Continent’s most depressing recession.

Spanish consortiums were on the short list of those very much wanting to bid on the Orlando-to-Tampa high-speed rail line. The one that would have been a marketing bonanza for the winner and an economic catalyst for Tampa. The one that was short-circuited by Scott before bids could even be proffered. Would have been ironic–and made for great photo-ops–had the Florida trade delegation sampled one of those numerous high-speed rail routes connecting Madrid to Seville, Toledo, Barcelona, Valencia and other cities. Spain’s well-regarded HSR network is the second largest (after China) in the world.

And presumably Scott & Co. were able to seamlessly cherry pick prospects to avoid any Spanish entities doing business in Cuba. Recall that Spain has spearheaded the European Union’s drive to improve diplomatic and commercial relations with Latin America and Cuba. In fact, Spain is the leading EU investor–from tourism to telecoms to energy–in Cuba.

*Much has been made over the geopolitical challenge presented by China’s legal activist Chen Guangcheng. Already, relations between the U.S. and China are frayed over trade, North Korea, Iran and Syria. Nobody needed this–but apparently Washington and Beijing have been able to save face.

It looks like Chen will get a visa to come to the U.S. to study, one that will also accommodate his family. Thus, the U.S. extracts a dissident from his personal hell and China is rid of a high-profile, increasingly embarrassing internal irritant. Both the U.S. and China dodged a foreign policy bullet with diplomatic cover.

That pretty much leaves only one awkward, really embarrassing issue unresolved. How the hell did the Chinese let a blind guy escape in the first place?

* Now we hear that weapons analysts suspect that those brand-new North Korean missiles recently displayed at a high-profile military parade might be fakes. Call it the Potemkin approach to military prowess. You never know with the Hermit Kingdom. Perhaps its leader really isn’t a 20-something fat kid with a bad haircut.

*Less-than-Secret Service. The still burgeoning scandal involving Secret Service and military personnel and prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia underscores the ultimate security breach shy of assassination: access. That’s why the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair was so dangerous. That’s why what JFK’s procurer, David Powers, did was so risky. Who knows what agendas come with paramour play?

In the Colombian case, who knows what a passed-out, compromised Secret Service agent might lead to? Frankly, would someone who takes chances with hookers and vodka be trusted to take a bullet for the president?

And anyone believe that this gaggle of frat-boy agents–including Dania Londono Suarez’s one-night, soused suitor–were caught and fired the first time they strayed from their presidential-advance assignment? Ted Nugent would have done a better job.

I’d like to know what President Obama, for whom access is personal, really said when apprised of agents’ appalling lack of judgment in preparing for his arrival.

*For President Barack Obama, the recent Summit of the Americas–the first one in three years–was a mixed bag for the United States.

Simply seated among leaders of more than 30 hemispheric countries, Obama reinforced the message that this country, albeit the world’s pre-eminent super power, not only identifies with its neighbors but finds serious common cause–ranging from trade positions and energy policies to drug-trafficking concerns. No matter that there were non-agenda subplots–from liberal, union and GOP spin back home on the trade pact with Colombia to the rapidly-increasing economic influence of China in Brazil, Chile, Peru and the Caribbean to apparently appalling behavior by an advance team of Secret Service agents asking who they can do for their country while in Cartagena, Colombia.

But there was one constant. The one that keeps that hemispheric bag mixed. The one that reminds all of Latin America that this country, for all of its inclusive rhetoric and good will, for all of its regional outreach, cooperative efforts and economic heft, is still out of sync with its neighbors–and the rest of the world–when it comes to Cuba. And has been for the better part of a half century.

Not only is the Cuban trade embargo still in effect, unfettered travel still disallowed and diplomatic relations still not normalized, but the U.S. once again has refused to budge on even allowing Cuba to attend the Summit of the Americas. Only Canada, seemingly content to act the geopolitical lapdog, went along with the U.S. position to veto Cuban participation in future summits.

Ironically, Obama dismissed some of the inevitable tensions in the region as unfortunate artifacts from the past. He likened the context to an unhelpful “time warp,” one that harkened back to the bad old days of “gunboat diplomacy and yanquis and the Cold War. … This is not the world we live in today,” the president underscored.

Except for that glaring anachronism that tells the rest of the Americas that vendetta politics out of South Florida counts so much more than what every sovereign not named Canada or America thinks is the right thing to do. It makes Obama sound disingenuous in reminding attendees that we’re not the high-handed yanquis of yesteryear. And it reminds everyone still listening that we still reserve the right to cherry pick the world for those so resistant to democracy they don’t warrant official acknowledgement, much less regional summit invitations.

“There is no justification for that path that has us anchored in a Cold War overcome now for several decades,” stated Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, the summit host. It’s one thing when leftist governments in Bolivia and Venezuela push for Cuba’s inclusion, an entirely different dynamic when the Colombian president calls for it.

* America’s Cuban policy is, of course, largely an extension of previous administrations’ policies. The most significant difference: a sense that Obama really knows better. But once he had passed on the low-hanging geopolitical Cuban fruit after his inauguration, he signaled that pragmatic politics under his presidency would preclude major change in policy.

* Much was made of President Obama’s quasi-campaigning/export-touting Port of Tampa stop on his way to Cartagena. Among other comments in his brief presentation last Friday, the president noted Tampa’s historic ties to Latin America and stressed that “a lot of the business being done here (at the port) has to do with trade between us and Latin America. So the fact that it (exports) has gone up 46 percent since 2009 is a big deal for Tampa. In Florida, exports to this region are up nearly30 percent.”

Ironically,  two of the prime beneficiaries of normalized trade relations with Cuba would be the state of Florida and the Port of Tampa. While the Cartagena Summit would highlight the geopolitical cost of America’s arrogant, Cold War Cuban policy, the Port of Tampa still symbolizes its counterproductive economic impact. Talk about a “time warp.”

* You know things aren’t going well for Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez when he opts to skip the summit, send his foreign minister in his place and return to Cuba for cancer treatment. This would have been his kind of forum–and his kind of confrontation with Obama.

Americans–and others–have continued to die in the aftermath of those Koran burnings in Afghanistan. The outrageously sobering bottom line:

Awful, nightmarish stuff inevitably happens during an occupation, de facto or not. Miscommunications resulting in tragic friendly fire, check. Clueless cultural missteps and insults, check.  Rogue elements out of control, check.

It’s how liberators and stabilizers and nation-builders become occupiers.

Most countries, including the United States, have laws proscribing outsiders from directly financing political parties and campaigns. Interference is a touchy, sovereignty matter the world over. And an insult.

And yet the U.S., which has national interests around the globe, wants to stay influential. But without, of course, interfering. So, cue a number of non- and -quasi-governmental organizations with names such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI). Their charge is to have some influence in countries with strategic value to the U.S. They do it in the obeisant name of “promoting democracy” and “supporting dialogue.”

I saw it a few years back when I was in Caracas. American interest in how things play out in Venezuela is a given. One manifestation was the aid provided by NED to Primero Justicia (PJ), a key opposition party to President Hugo Chavez.

Such assistance, to be sure, could look a lot like, well, interference, depending on perspective.  But not to the PJ spokeswoman I met with. PJ, she insisted, did not receive money from the U.S. Government. What it did receive is NED help in the form of “support for training, scholarships and workshops.” Oh.

You obviously have to know your semantics. There’s traditionally a lot of winking and nodding when it comes to such non-profit organizations, especially with key countries in transition.

Which brings us to Egypt, a country on the cusp–and on the receiving end of $1.5 billion in annual American aid. This week it begins criminal proceedings against at least 16 Americans, among others, charged with belonging to illegally funded, pro-democracy groups with an agenda anathema to Cairo’s transitional government. Egyptian officials consider foreign funding of the nongovernmental groups, including the IRI, to be meddling in their fluid and highly flammable political system. The groups, however, insist their goal is to teach Egyptians technical assistance in helping them take part in the democratic process.

This is either thinly veiled interference in the internal affairs of a geopolitically critical country or the exercise of democratic ideals in action. Sucker or succor.

One thing is certain: $1.5 billion doesn’t buy what it used to.