Politics

Bush falters but who dare oppose him?

Here wobbles America, then, plutocracy rampant, 11 months into shadowy war, economically troubled, suspicious of allies, suspected by allies, hated – and American politics remains becalmed and unready. A lot of weak wills wait for events to take the initiative they’re not taking.

I’m reaching the limits of the comment system so I’m posting my response to swerdloff‘s comments on this here.

How can you say we have enough troups in Afghanistan? I’ll quote the Washington Post on April 17:

The Bush administration has concluded that Osama bin Laden was present during the battle for Tora Bora late last year and that failure to commit U.S. ground troops to hunt him was its gravest error in the war against al Qaeda, according to civilian and military officials with first-hand knowledge.

Intelligence officials have assembled what they believe to be decisive evidence, from contemporary and subsequent interrogations and intercepted communications, that bin Laden began the battle of Tora Bora inside the cave complex along Afghanistan’s mountainous eastern border. Though there remains a remote chance that he died there, the intelligence community is persuaded that bin Laden slipped away in the first 10 days of December.

Of course, this really begs the question of whether we’ve done anything about 9/11 at all. No one has ever presented evidence to the public that anyone involved in the plot is still alive — that we know who was involved other than the 19 hijackers. Even the “20th” hijacker prosecution lacks evidence that would stand up in a normal court of law. Merely telling us that there is evidence and even the courts can’t see it is not acceptable. How do we know the funders weren’t members of the Saudi royal family rather than Bin Laden and Al Quaeda?

It’s not surprising to read articles that ask whether this was as much about controlling Central Asian oil as it was about “revenge”. Who employed Karzai and many members of his government before 9/11? Unocal.

We also have not provided enought troops to actually regain civilian control of areas of Afghanistan outside of Kabul. They are once again controlled by the warlords of the pre-Taliban era. Remember Laura Bush, et al, talking about how this was a war about liberating women? When Karzai announced his cabinet 2 weeks ago, the minister for women’s affairs was not filled. It may not ever be, either because it’s too dangerous, or because of the opposition of religious conservatives. Remember a member of the government has already been assassinated.

Regarding Yugoslavia, I’ll quote the Tony Judt article I talked about in another post:

Earlier this year the US ambassador for human rights called for the early dismissal of the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and former Yugoslavia — even though these are integral to any serious war on international terror and the US itself spent millions of dollars to bribe Belgrade into handing Slobodan Milosevic over to the Hague tribunal.

Of 45,000 peace-keeping troops in the world, 700 are American, although we have troops stationed in approximately 150 countries. I refuse to count military advisers in places like Indonesia and the Philippines as peace-keepers. We have also announced that any country receiving aid from the U.S. will have to certify that it considers U.S. troops immune from prosecution of the International Criminal Court. It’s rather difficult to argue that we are a force for justice and peace in the world at this point. Why anyone should believe that our military might exist except to provide us with cheap oil and an inordinate proportion of the world’s resources is beyond me.

Regarding the NY Times: I read a lot of news sources, ranging from The Economist (not very liberal), to the Guardian, Ha’aretz, the BBC, etc. because I don’t trust one source for news. The Times is a pretty good paper, but it’s a centrist establishment paper, and I wouldn’t confuse it with a “liberal” news source any day.

In the end, I think the thing that frustrates me the most is that what we’re doing isn’t even particularly effective. Even if I were a Kissinger-style “realpolitik” thinker, I wouldn’t think the Bush Administration policies make sense. They really only make sense in the context of enriching defense companies and oil companies. We are spending a fortune, even before Iraq, and it’s not making it any safer for Americans overseas or in their own country. We are devoting more and more resources to military spending while the rest of the world is realizing that it’s not economically effective to do so. We are risking our own economic well-being, whether we care about anyone else in the world or not.

The always brilliant Tony Judt (don’t miss the Road to Nowhere links) uses a review of
The Paradox of American Power: Why The World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone to discuss how this country’s focus on unilaterism and military power over all other forms of persuasion are making us less able to influence world affairs.

I will summarize his points (all emphasis is mine, not his):

• The US is often a delinquent international citizen. It is reluctant to join international initiatives or agreements, whether on climate warming, biological warfare, criminal justice, or women’s rights; the US is one of only two states (the other being Somalia) that have failed to ratify the 1989 Convention on Children’s Rights. The present US administration has “unsigned” the Rome Treaty establishing an International Criminal Court and has declared itself no longer bound by the Vienna Convention on Law of Treaties, which sets out the obligations of states to abide by treaties they have yet to ratify.
• Focusing on the ICC treaty: There are only 700 Americans currently serving overseas in UN peacekeeping missions (out of a total of 45,000 personnel), and the ICC already contained clauses, inserted explicitly to mollify Washington, that virtually exempted UN missions from prosecution. Washington’s stance is particularly embarrassing because it makes a mockery of American insistence upon the international pursuit and prosecution of terrorists and other political criminals; and because it provides American cover for countries and politicians who have real cause to fear the new Court. All of our allies on the UN Security Council voted against the US on this matter; meanwhile Washington’s opposition to the International Criminal Court is shared by Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia, Israel, and Egypt.
• In Nye’s view, international relations today resemble a particularly intricate game of three-dimensional chess. On one level there is hard military power, a terrain where the US reigns uncontested. On the second level there is economic power and influence: in this field the European Union already challenges the US in trade, the regulation of monopolies, and the setting of industrial standards, and outdistances America in telecommunications, environmental policy, and much else. At the third level Nye places the multifarious and proliferating nongovernmental activities shaping our world: currency flows, migration, transnational corporations, NGOs, international agencies, cultural exchanges, the electronic media, the Internet, and terrorism. Non-state actors communicate and operate across this terrain virtually unconstrained by government interference; and the power of any one state, the US included, is readily frustrated and neutralized.

  The trouble with the people in charge of shaping and describing US policy today, according to Nye, is that they are only playing at the first level, their vision restricted to American military firepower. In his words, “Those who recommend a hegemonic American foreign policy based on such traditional descriptions of American power are relying on woefully inadequate analysis.”

• The European Union (including its candidate members) currently contributes ten times more peacekeeping troops worldwide than the US, and in Kosovo, Bosnia, Albania, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere the Europeans have taken more military casualties than the US. Fifty-five percent of the world’s development aid and two thirds of all grants-in-aid to the poor and vulnerable nations of the globe come from the European Union. As a share of GNP, US foreign aid is barely one third the European average. If you combine European spending on defense, foreign aid, intelligence gathering, and policing—all of them vital to any sustained war against international crime—it easily matches the current American defense budget. Notwithstanding the macho preening that sometimes passes for foreign policy analysis in contemporary Washington, the United States is utterly dependent on friends and allies in order to achieve its goals.

Oh my goodness, it’s too good to even quote. Just go and read it.

Can someone please explain to me how we can afford to have a larger defense budget than the next 25 countries combined, but we’re not going to make the deadline for screening all airline baggage for explosives?

Foreign Policy has a very interesting article whose thesis is that America is now in decline because of a number of factors, including:

• Public and private spending that is too heavily focused on military technology
• The damage to our economic interests from an attack on Iraq
• The likely failure of an attack on Iraq to “win” given the high risk of casualties and the lack of public support for combat leading to significant losses
• The collapse in our world stature and leadership when we, as the foremost military power in history, fail to create a sustainable regime to follow Saddam Hussein

Yay! A new episode.

I haven’t seen much coverage of this.

For 6 days, hundreds of oil workers have been trapped in a Nigerian oil terminal (owned by Chevron Texaco) by hundreds of women from surrounding villages, demanding jobs for their sons and electricity for their homes.

As many as 600 women from villages around the terminal took over the multinational Escravos plant on Monday, saying they want the company to hire their sons and use some of the region’s oil riches to develop their remote, rundown communities.

Nigeria is the world’s sixth-largest oil exporter — and the fifth-biggest supplier of U.S. oil imports — in major part because of the vast reserves of the Niger Delta here. Yet the people in the Niger Delta are among the country’s poorest.

Unarmed but unbudging, the women have blocked access to the helipad, airstrip and docks that provide the only exits for the facility, which is surrounded by rivers and swamps.

…

In the terminal airfield, two dozen women danced in the rain alongside four helicopters and a plane, chanting: “This is our land.”

So just go and read the latest Mark Morford column.

Of course we’re at war. Just look at all those flags stuck in all those manicured lawns, the ominous United We Stand billboards, the all-new 2003 Ford Excursion now with room for 13 and a full 10mpg Highway/7mpg City, all the cheap plastic stars-and-stripes kitsch at the Hallmark store, Made in Malaysia.

…

Of course we’re at war. Witness all the angry puffed-up deflections, every reproach of the president and every suspicious glance in the direction of his corporatized administration instantly retorted with a nice “how dare you don’t you know we’re at war” or maybe “the president has a great deal on his very compact little mind right now and he can’t be bothered with the details of, you know, rampant favoritism and hypocrisy.”

…

And it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find anyone but the truest I-believe-everything-Ari-Fleischer-says jingoists who actually believes this “war” has become anything but a grand excuse, a marvelously leveragable plaything which the Bush cadre can point to as their very own personal holy shroud, some sort of sacrosanct shield to protect them from criticism and claims of blatant impropriety and selling the nation’s soul for pennies on the barrel.