Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

U.S. Foreign Policy

Spanking Jumbo*

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There is little to add to the words from all quarters about the election.  But a few random thoughts;

Much of the press’s analysts (sic) began almost immediately asking what the new Democrat-controlled party will do about Iraq. Their thinking (sic again) seems to be that since they don’t like what Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld have done it is time to put up or shut up.  The problem with this approach is that the war is the President’s – he bought it and owns it. Journalists should not have to be reminded that in the United States form of government the President manages foreign policy and serves as Commander-in-Chief.  This is simple high school government class stuff and the likes of Chris Matthews et alia need to get out their old textbooks.

My Kiwi friend reminds me that the Congress can have an enormously positive impact in two important domestic policy areas: stem cell research and cost of drugs.  I would add health care costs in general and tax reform for the middle class, and environmental issues.  One problem will be that the GOP Congress created so many messes that just managing the agenda will be a challenge.

Some journalists have referred to the possibility of the new Congress holding hearings on issues related to the war, energy policy, and environmental issues as “vengeance”.  The checks and balances that have served the interests of the American people for over two hundred years require such hearings. For example, shortly before the election the administration eliminated the office of the inspector general for the Iraq War.  This must not stand and the Congress is where it can be revived in spirit if not in fact.

The long overdue firing of Rumsfeld will mean little as long as the president continues to live in his fantasy world. Gates is, by most accounts, a smart guy who will work with James Baker and Lee Hamilton to extricate us from this Dubya disaster but the president really needs to face the reality he created and to work with the new Congress to find an honorable way out of his dishonorable war. At his press conference yesterday the president continued to operate in his state of denial although he talks less and less of “victory” and more and more of the need for the Iraqis to take over. We shall see.

Finally, this political upheaval presents opportunities to rebuild relationships between the U.S. and its long-suffering allies.  There is no need to pile on here – only to recognize that the U.S. has lost prestige, honor and friends during the Bush years and we can hope that this election is the first step on the long road back

* With apologies to Matt Taibbi, author of “Spanking the Donkey” the best book on the press and the politics of the 2004 presidential campaign.

The Irony of Arab Public Diplomacy

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The United States has reduced its public diplomacy effort to a shadow of its former self – major reductions in surrogate radio broadcasting into Iran, Iraq and Russia matched with increased broadcasts of Western pop music and a tilt towards programs that trumpet the glories of U.S foreign policy.

While this has been going on the Arab TV network Al Jazeera has been preparing to initiate an English language TV network that would present the news of the Arab world with an Arab point of view. This should not be confused with a blind propaganda effort – given the quality of some of its Western hires it would appear to be designed to be less so than the Fox network which presents the news through the prism of personalities like Bill O’Reilly. What we have then is Arab public diplomacy directed to the West, particularly the United States, at a time when the U.S. continues to reduce its public diplomacy efforts to a defense of policies which are not even an easy sell to its own citizens let alone the rest of the world.

the decline of the wild west

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How the mighty have fallen – and how fast. Not long aqo a visit by the US Secretary of State would have been a reason for any Asian country to pull out all the stops and to listen carefully. Now Ms Rice makes a quick tour of Asian capitals to rally support for some sort of initiative against loose cannon North Korea and finds only polite indifference. The fact is that the US has given away its poistion of power in Asia with hopelessly (un)planned attack on Iraq, its failure (with some allies who would not have dreamed of getting invoved in Iraq) to solve the endless problem of Afghanistan, where no invading power has ever come out looking well, and its hopelessly one-sided support of Israel. Every Asian diplomat listened politely and played the protocol game, but no one really cared a great deal what she said. Japanese diplomats immediately thereafter suggested it was time to discuss nucear weapons for Japan, China presses on with its own (somewhat confusing) policy on North Korea, Russia clearly acts in its own interests, and, worst of all North Korea makes it perfectly clear that even a dwarf can ignore the demands of the blustering former superpower. Can this be changed? Hard to say but whoever takes over from the present amateurs will have plenty of recuperative work to do in Asia.

Kaplan: Genocide in Iraq?

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Robert Kaplan describes his worries about the consequences of withdrawing from Iraq in the current Atlantic Monthly Unbound. Kaplan supported the invasion of Iraq but now realizes that it was “a bet not a policy” and that we have for all intents and purposes lost that bet. His concern now is that the U.S.  withdrawal could also be a bet rather than a policy and that it needs to be managed a whole lot better than the post-war period was “managed” (sic).

While President Bush claims to never have been a “stay the course”  kinda guy, Kaplan worries that politics will demand a precipitous withdrawal that will put Iraqi Sunnis at risk of a genocide that will create enormous problems for the U.S. in the region. Kaplan writes: “We simply cannot contemplate withdrawal under these conditions without putting Iraq’s neighbors on the spot, forcing them to share public responsibility for the outcome, that is if they choose to stand aside and not help us.”

Hmmm. So, we ignore all advice that told us not to invade, lie about intelligence information to justify the invasion, totally screw it up leading to a Civil War and a possible genocide and need those people who told us not to do it to bail us out.  How hopeful should we be?

The British Press, Darfur and the Bush Prism

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Much of the British press gave up on the United States when the Bush administration invaded Iraq, with Tony Blair’s support and blessing. Given the deception used to justify the invasion and the incomprehensible incompetence of the Iraq adventure this made some certain sense. The problem for journalism is that when reporters see everything through the prism of Bush’s obvious inadequacies, they can become blinded to other realities.

A case in point is Peter Beaumont, Foreign Affairs Editor of the Guardian who actually wrote in the fall of 2004 a piece claiming that problems in Darfur were being hyped by the Bush administration and that there was no real evidence of a coming genocide.

Beaumont used the classic journalistic ploy of assigning what was surely his own opinion to unnamed “international aid workers”. Bush, USAID head Andrew Natsios, and Secretary of State Powell were all blamed in Beaumont’s article for exaggerating the seriousness of the situation to suit their political agenda for Sudan.

Journalists make mistakes and of course it is not possible to always see into the future – but in the fall of 2004 there was ample evidence of the coming catastrophe and Beaumont was guilty of ignoring those realities and hyping his own theory that Darfur was a product of George Bush’s imagination.

Last month, the Guardian reported the estimated death toll in Darfur – some two years later – to be between 200 and 300 thousand. When does a “hype” become genocide?

Genocide for Oil

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A serious diplomat, Jan Pronk, seeing the genocide around him— and knowing history will rightly convict him of facilitating genocide—has done the minimum and spoken out about the Sudanese government’s disintegration, and the desperation that will lead to a renewed wave of janjaweed “cleansing attacks” on the minority populace.

The UN, and most particularly Kofi Annan knows this is genocide because we have experienced an earlier one nearby.

But the UN cannot even give the pogrom its proper name–genocide–because of Chinese support for their Sudanese oil suppliers. The Sudanese are now trying to distract the world community with assertions that the UN is being misled by a Jewish conspiracy.

Claims against Jews and their “American toadies” are now the cover for this new genocide. (See this Sudan Tribune piece)

The UN is failing to stop the second African genocide in a generation and now the perpetrators and their enablers are blaming those who would stop them as puppets of a Zionist plot. Americans might dismiss such an outrageous claim, but it is one that is allowed to take root in much of the rest of the world.

We can lament that American credibility is so diminished and its moral authority so wasted that this is allowed to happen. But that does not exempt Americans from doing at least as much as Jan Pronk has done to bring pressure on the world to intervene. This is an issue on which President Bush has spoken forthrightly. See his statement on the White House website.

No Pain, No gain

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Our Kiwi correspondent has sent a link to a piece from the Weekly Standard’s website that presents serious criticism of the Bush administration – but from a conservative writer in a flagship magazine of conservative thought. Irwin Seltzer’s piece, “Guns and Butter: How the Bush administration’s fiscal policy has narrowed its options in the realm of foreign policy” is worth a read, but raises some questions. These led to an email to Kiwi that is in the Comments below….

The Coming Vote To Impeach

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All votes are important. All elections are important. But in the general election fast approaching this November we have a chance to dump enough Republicans from Congress and elect enough [angry] Democrats to produce an impeachment team in the House and a majority vote to convict in the Senate. The target of course is George W. Bush. This man will go down in history as one of our worst Presidents – he is guilty of deception and incompetence on a grand scale. Those two qualities are a tough combination, almost an oxymoron, but Bush has managed both. It is a combination that equates to “high crimes and misdemeanors,” the Constitutional requirement for impeachment. We can use other terms, such as abuse of power and gross misconduct, to justify Bush’s impeachment, but deception and incompetence seem to capture the man. His grand deception is Iraq, which is also his greatest failure. But that is not to say that there are no contenders. The failure to deal with Katrina would stand out in any other presidency and forever brand such a president for that failure alone. But Bush has so much more. His domestic spying. His “off-site” prisons. His abandonment of Afghanistan. His ignorance of all things environmental. His perverted tax policies. But it is his deception, which he used to convince too many Americans and far too many Congressman, that we must invade Iraq and his incompetence in dealing with Iraq post-invasion that are the foundation of his impeachment. He followed the neo-cons’ grand strategy of empire. Publicly, he argued the need to separate Hussein from non-existent WMD. He represented to Congress only those facts that supported the invasion. His administration ignored, and even attacked, those who presented contrary facts. This rush to war, this deception has resulted in, according to one very recent estimate, over 600,000 Iraqi dead. Bush’s startling incompetence in the aftermath of the invasion has torn that country apart – the infrastructure is gone, the rule of law [such as it was] is gone, civil and social life is gone. The Iraqi people are dying. US and British soldiers are dying. The world is tired of it all. We, the people are tired of Bush and his deception, his incompetence. We need a new Congress – a Congress that will act to rid us and the world of this man. Vote this November and let the games begin.

Former State Department official leaves Bush Ranch

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Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations previews in the Financial Times an essay on the troubled future of the Middle East, which will be published in the November-December issue of Foreign Affairs. The Op Ed in the Financial Times indicates a switch for Haass who was something of an administration cheerleader for the effort to bring democracy in Iraq. (see W. Post editorial, Dec. 29, 2002) who left the State Department in mid -2003.

Haass’s movement away from the Bush Administration on its Middle East policies seems to be peaking as he writes in the FT: “It is just more than two centuries since Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt heralded the advent of a modern Middle East; but now – some 80 years after the demise of the Ottoman Empire, 50 years after the end of colonialism and less than 20 years after the end of the cold war – the American era in the region has ended. Visions of a new Europe-like Middle East that is peaceful, prosperous and democratic will not be realised….No one should count on the emergence of democracy to pacify the region….”

When North Korea Falls

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Thanks to our Kiwi correspondent for alerting us to the above titled article in the October Atlantic Monthly by Robert Kaplan.

Kaplan is always interesting writing about soldiers and soldiering and his insights into the military provide a particular prism through which to view the situation in North Korea. Note that it is titled “When” North Korea Falls, not “If” North Korea Falls. He is persuasive in concluding that the winner when N. Korea falls will likely be China and that the U.S.’s influence in the region will be diminished. The article provides some fresh insight into a situation which seems burdened in the press with relatively unsophisticated – even jingoistic – perspectives. Read it at the Atlantic Monthly’s website.