Category: International

Accidental Guerrilla, a book by Australian counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen, contains at least one reference that won’t be appreciated by keepers of the George W. Bush legacy.

 

The bedrock of that legacy is that the Bush Administration protected America, say what you will about methodology, after the 9/11 attacks. There were no more attacks on the American homeland.  How’s that for a bottom line?

 

According to Kilcullen, Osama bin Laden has given, not surprisingly, a contrarian rationale for backing away from future assaults on American soil. Kilcullen quotes this (2004) statement by bin Laden: “All we have to do is send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make the (U.S.) generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses…so we are continuing this policy of bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.”

 

Kilcullen, ironically, was so well regarded by the Bush Administration that he was asked to give a briefing on Afghanistan to aides of both Barack Obama and John McCain.

 

What Kilcullen didn’t say: The Bush Administration’s legacy is already seen by many as this: After 9/11 the U.S. owned the moral high ground. With the poorly rationalized, ineptly planned invasion (not liberation) and subsequent occupation of Iraq, that moral high ground turned into a geopolitical sinkhole.

Last weekend’s Summit of the Americas underscored the reality — historic enmity yet rife with 21^st century potential – that is the United States relationship with the rest of the Western Hemisphere, especially Latin America. Cuba, of course, was an issue, even if it wasn’t on the agenda. And the Obama-Chavez exchanges made headlines and wire photos.

Both Cuba and Chavez also provided more ammo for the usual suspects making the usual Sunday talk-show rounds, who don’t see merit in the American president taking something other than an arrogant, unilateralist approach to certain sovereign countries.

Almost lost amid the bombastic, partisan sniping (such as Sen. Lindsey Graham’s “Put up or shut up” decree to Cuba) are two developments well worth watching. Cuban President Raul Castro has indicated that “all issues” (including political prisoners) would be on whatever table he might share with the American president. He also conceded that, indeed, Cuba might been “wrong” in the past on some things. This doesn’t, of course, mean a market economy, free press and Jeffersonian democracy are imminent, but it’s a positive sign.

As for Venezuelan President Chavez, he has indicated plans to appoint an ambassador to Washington. Last year both the U.S. and Venezuela expelled each other’s ambassadors. But, no, he didn’t request an autographed copy of “The Audacity of Hope.”

President Richard Nixon, the consummate anti-Communist, talked with Chairman Mao, and history has affirmed it as an appropriately pragmatic move. But Obama shouldn’t deign to shake hands, act cordial or even sit down with adversaries who aren’t even mass murderers?

Vice President Joe’s Biden’s recent comment on the Cuban embargo was disappointing. His answer to a media question about whether the U.S. had plans to abrogate the 47-year-old, Cold War relic was: “No.” 

The venue was significant. Biden was in Vina Del Mar, Chile. He was attending the ironically dubbed Progressive Governance Summit and meeting with leaders from Latin America and Europe.

His beguiling rhetoric came right out of the playbook of the George W. Bush Administration – and its eight predecessors. Biden said that he and President Obama “think that Cuban people should determine their own fate, and they should be able to live in freedom.” As if that laudable goal were somehow incompatible with lifting the counterproductive embargo.

But let’s accord Biden the political benefit of the doubt.

President Obama has enough spoilers in the GOP over his administration’s stimulus plans, toxic-asset strategy and education-energy-health care hat trick. He doesn’t need to hand Rush Limbaugh and the “party of no” more ammo right now about “caving in to a dictatorship.”

It makes pragmatic, political sense.

But it’s not “change” we can believe in yet on Cuba. 

            It’s not yet a drumbeat issue, but the subject of the Cuban embargo is increasingly in the geopolitical conversation these days. The Obama administration is obviously making changes — as in pushing to undo travel and remittance restrictions imposed under President George W. Bush. Beyond that, the administration’s strategy still looks incremental – especially when it comes to the 47-year-old trade embargo.

            At a recent seminar organized by the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, retired diplomat Vicki Huddleston underscored some of the embargo’s finer points and their pertinence to a new administration. Some of you may recall that Huddleston is a former chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana (1999-02) and achieved a measure of fame — or notoriety — for handing out those shortwave radios to average Cubans. She is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.  

Huddleston said Obama has numerous options for improving bilateral U.S.-Cuba ties – notwithstanding the 1996 Helms-Burton Act that codified the embargo.

            “President Obama has the authority, whether you like it or not, to do just about anything he wants on Cuba,” she stated. “He could negotiate and even give back Guantanamo. He could change the ‘wet foot-dry foot’ policy or negotiate expropriated property claims, but we don’t expect him to do that.”

            And while Huddleston underscored that President Obama would need Congressional approval to end the embargo altogether, he could still move to dismantle it in piecemeal fashion.

            “What Helms-Burton did in 1996 was codify the regulations of the embargo as they stood then,” she explained. “But it also gave executive authority for the president to modify or change the embargo. So the power to change the embargo was codified along with the regulations.”

             For the record, President Obama still says he’s in favor of maintaining the embargo for its value as “leverage” – to encourage democratic reform in Cuba.

            They’ve done this before. The vehicles vary, the subject doesn’t.

Jack Ross and Ahmed Bedier — each speaking truth and reality as they know it. About Jews and Muslims. About Israelis and Palestinians. About blame.

In the end, they don’t agree on enough, but they do personify hope. That’s because Ross, a member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and Bedier, the Muslim president of the Tampa/Hillsborough County Human Rights Council and radio talk-show co-host, are as collegial as they are articulate.

They both agree that the violence and resultant human suffering – in both Gaza and southern Israel – are deplorable. They both agree that peace is a goal.

End of agreement.

But this, of course, wasn’t the frustrating, tragic crucible that is Gaza. This was the eminently civil political forum that is the Tiger Bay Club of Tampa luncheon at Maestro’s, comfortably ensconced within the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.

Bedier went first and decried the “collective punishment” meted out by Israel over the actions of a few “criminals” and “terrorists” in Gaza. He labeled such disproportionate response as “Nazi-like tactics.”

Israel, underscored Bedier, has “habitually and consistently used violence to get its way….They’re the most powerful nation in the Middle East…The actions of its military and hardliners have furthered the radicalization of the Palestinians.”

What they’ve done in Gaza, stressed Bedier, “doesn’t send a message of peace. When you treat Palestinians like animals, you’re going to get animal behavior. Palestinians don’t hate Jews. They hate the treatment. They hate what they see. ‘Never again’ should apply to all people all the time.”

And while he found “condemnable” the acts of civilian-targeting “terrorists” and “un-Islamic” suicide bombers, Bedier found more moral culpability on the Israeli side. “Yes, these (Gaza residents) are terrorists, and I personally condemn what they do,” he insisted. “But that’s (Israelis) a government. We expect more.”

What the Palestinians have done, countered Ross, is to continually miss  opportunities – going back to the Oslo Accords of 1992 and through the Camp David compromise that Yasser Arafat walked away from in 2000 – for a realistic, two-state solution. They instead, said Ross, chose an Intifada strategy and elected Hamas, which sponsors terror and has refused to recognize Israel. The predictable result: A deal-breaking “land for insecurity” reality that Israel cannot countenance and has been forced to combat with its land-air-sea barrage.

Ross cited “truce violations by Hamas” and the “10,000 missiles fired from Gaza to southern Israel over the last three years.

“There’s a pattern,” emphasized Ross. “They re-arm during cease fires. They provoke a military response. Until they take responsibility, this won’t end.”

And, yes, the amorphous subject of a “solution” inevitably came up.

According to Bedier, any meaningful sense of a solution would have two prerequisites. First, a halt in “killing Palestinians and treating them like animals.” Second, a “return to pre-1967 borders.”

Ross: “But who do you talk to who can deliver?”

                                                       

                                                   Bedier Outtakes

Afterward, Bedier elaborated on a couple of points.

*He had indicated earlier that a Muslim version of a “Reformation” – along the lines of those experienced by Judaism and Christianity – could, indeed, occur. But if so, he averred, it would likely be propelled by Muslims living in Western democracies.

“The Muslims there (West) are a bit more detached from the ongoing political situation,” explained Bedier. “They enjoy the freedoms of democracy. They can express themselves more effectively. Remember that Muslims in America responded to the Danish cartoons differently than in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Here, there were no protests. They wrote letters to the editor.

            “The people in the Middle East are too close to the action,” added Bedier, a native of Cairo, Egypt. “Politics is closely mixed with religion.”

            *Bedier then addressed the issue of outrage. The word is all too applicable when referencing the Middle East. He has been consistently outspoken in his condemnation of terrorist tactics.

            But where was the global Muslim outrage – as expressed by massive crowds, burning effigies, government-controlled newspaper editorials and key, influential leaders – over the INTENTIONAL targeting of innocents from 9/11 to Mumbai to southern Israel? Where was the in-the-streets outrage over sadistic beheadings and the cherry picking of the Koran to justify the world’s division into believers and “infidels?” Why, candidly, did Dutch cartoons elicit more of a response in Muslim countries than mass murders?

            “The area is evolving,” said Bedier. “Absent any Gandhi-like leaders in that part of the world, there are still signs that people are speaking out. Especially in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Egypt. There have been protests against suicide bombers in the West Bank. There have been peace demonstrations. Especially in Iraq.”

            The problem, maintained Bedier, is context. Israel and the U.S. are seen as occupiers who have ceded the moral high ground.

“It’s hard for peace demonstrators to be empowered when, for example, Israel has a policy of political assassination, and they will bomb a whole block to get one terrorist,” noted Bedier. “This is what undermines moderates.”

But where there is dialogue, there is hope.

And where the word “martyr” doesn’t get sacrilegiously invoked, there is hope.

And wherever George Mitchell takes his “special envoy” portfolio, there is hope.

That will have to do for now.

            It’s bad enough that there still exist Holocaust deniers, let alone within the Catholic Church. Would that this inexplicably repulsive revisionism were limited to the Mahmoud Amadinejads of the world.

            But what was with that “apology” to Pope Benedict XVI by the offending cleric, the renegade Bishop Richard Williamson? He expressed regret to the pontiff for the “distress and problems” he had created. He called his Holocaust-denying remarks “imprudent.”

            How about obscenely incorrect?

            And how about not accepting such a sham “apology?” Especially if you’re the first German pope in 500 years.

            But then, in the aftermath of an ecumenical firestorm, the pope got public relations religion.

            Considerable impetus came from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who rebuked him for giving the impression that holocaust-denying was tolerable “imprudence.” Germany has this history. In fact, it’s an actual crime in Germany to deny the existence of the Holocaust. And the furor kept growing – one not limited to Germans and Jews.

            So, Williamson has now been dismissed from his position as head of an Argentine seminary, and the pope has finally demanded that he recant his Holocaust denials. And what’s the cover story? The pope didn’t know about the British bishop’s controversial Holocaust views when he lifted his excommunication a fortnight ago. The pontiff apparently had been ill served by his briefers.

            Oh.

            But the pope’s spin meisters are not yet through. Benedict has one more sectarian hurdle.

            The Ninth Commandment.                

            The Israeli-Hamas conflict is, alas, a zero-sum game at its core. It will not end with a treaty. Israel is adamant in wanting to continue to exist. Hamas won’t settle for that. Ultimately, only one can survive – but the innocent will die.

          Among those making recent pitches to the new Obama Administration is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber – plus a dozen other prominent business groups – wants the president to kick start a process that would eliminate Washington’s trade embargo with Cuba. Among the other groups: the American Farm Bureau Federation, the Business Roundtable and the National Retail Federation.

            The U.S. Chamber’s proposal letter to Obama cited a 2001 government report that estimated the Cuban embargo was costing U.S. exporters up to $1.2 billion annually in lost sales. The letter, penned by Jake Colvin, vice president of the National Foreign Trade Council, also noted that the U.S. Treasury Department devotes more resources to enforcing the embargo than to tracking the finances of al-Qaeda.

Last week’s New York Times Magazine cover story detailed the grim reality that is contemporary Cuban life and chronicled the near half century of the Cold War atavism that is the United States-Cuba relationship.

            One comment seemed particularly cogent – and ironic.

Among those in officialdom that writer Roger Cohen interviewed was Elena Alvarez, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Economics. She was asked if it were still worth persevering with a two-generation revolution that has left Cuba with “dilapidated buildings, deserted highways and a need to import sugar?”

“The revolution has been a success,” responded Alvarez. “It overthrew a tyrannical regime. We got our national sovereignty. We got our pride. We survived aggression by the most powerful country in the world for 50 years. We preserved the essence of what Fidel fought for.”

Yeah, but about that crumbling infrastructure, subsistence lives and an economic model only North Korea could admire?

 Upon further reflection, her spin-doctoring seemed the perfect — and ironic — complement to the perverse rationalization we hear from the usual suspects about the “success” of the Cuban embargo.

           The United States has understandably absorbed plenty of international opprobrium for its treatment of terrorism-related prisoners. Abu Ghraib became the face of American occupation for much of the Middle East. Guantanamo became the symbol of judicial overkill. And “water boarding” became a 2008 presidential campaign issue.

            No one, of course, looks good defending torture – even of a legitimate suspect with likely knowledge of an imminent, and possibly catastrophic, threat. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Gitmo-incarcerated 9/11 mastermind, notwithstanding.

             So how is India eliciting valuable information from Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving gunman from the deadly Mumbai attacks? Keep in mind, this was a suicide mission. All of the mass-murderers, including Kasab, expected to die.

            And yet India, through repeated interrogations, has learned that Kasab was trained by Lashar-e-Taiba, the banned, Pakistan-based militant group. Kasab also revealed details of the maritime infiltration and supplied the names of fellow plotters and locations of training camps.

            So how did the Indians do it?

What do you use for leverage with one so soulless that he would massacre innocents and so inured of death that he would “martyr” himself? Ravi Shankar played at the decibel level of a jet engine? 73 virgins?

Or does water boarding really work?