The Palestinians at the UN ... Does It Matter

The Palestinian Authority has applied to the UN Security Council for admission to the United Nations as a full member.   The application will be sent to a committee of the Council and if it is supported at that level and brought up for a vote, the United States will veto.  Action will shift to the General Assembly and the Palestinians will most likely seek upgraded observer status, perhaps as a “non-member state.” 

This is the culmination of a process that began shortly after the latest attempt by the United States to broker peace talks blew up last winter in a dispute over a freeze on settlements in the West Bank.  It is not a seismic shift in the landscape of Middle East conflict nor is it “... a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing ...”  It is a significant moment with consequences.

There are so many dimensions to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians and the issues cut so deeply into people’s sense of themselves and their existence, that it is impossible to discuss it without implicitly taking stands and introducing bias.  There is no clinically detached language, no omniscient observer prospect.  All I can claim is a serious attempt to avoid unreflective partisanship.

[If only it were that simple ... I once read an article analyzing the conflict over “Jerusalem” which argued that you could remove that intensely emotional issue from the equation by renaming the city.  The author did not offer any suggestions.]

The United Nations arena.

Since the application for recognition is being considered right now, let’s start with trying to disentangle several ideas.

1) What does it mean to be a “sovereign, independent, equal nation-state”

Maybe the noted international legal scholar Frank Zappa said it best, “You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons but at the very least you need a beer.”  Professor Zappa’s more formal colleagues would cite three conditions: defined territory, population, and a functioning government.  Ultimately each of those is a political criterion, decided upon by other nation-states.  The real criterion is: you’re a nation-state if enough other nation-states say you are.  And in the 21st century the members of the United Nations are the ones who decide who’s in and who’s not.

All states are equal at the UN but some are more equal than others.  It’s one state, one vote in the General Assembly (yup, the 1.3 billion citizens of China have the same formal status as the approximately 10,000 citizens of Tuvalu.)  But when one of the five permanent members of the Security Council votes “no,” that’s the end of that.

Regardless of the quality of your beer, you cannot be a full member of the UN until the Security Council says so.  But the General Assembly grants several different levels of observer status with different rights of participation in conferences and debates.  Right now the Palestine Liberation Organization is an official observer at the General Assembly and can participate in debates and discussions but not vote.  The Assembly, unencumbered by the veto and with an overwhelming majority of members sympathetic to the Palestinians, could easily decide to grant the Palestinian  Authority upgraded status as a non-member state.  This would matter for two primary reasons.  First of all, it is the Palestine Liberation Organization that has been recognized since the 1970s as the entity that is the observer.  The PLO is the umbrella organization formed to represent all the groups involved in the Palestinian resistance.  The largest group in the PLO has always been al Fatah, which was created and led by Yassir Arafat.  Changing the identity of the observer to the Palestinian Authority means it is a governing body not just a political party that is represented at the UN.  And that leads to the second crucial dimension -- “governing body” implies there is something to be governed, meaning a nation-state.  For everyone in Palestine, Israel, and the rest of the world who believes that a two state solution is the only viable option, this is a progressive step.  It will make it more difficult to maintain that the status quo is tenable.

The months of maneuvering leading up to the Security Council and General Assembly votes and the increased status and legitimacy for the Palestinian Authority will have consequences for all the major players in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

All politics is local

The major immediate impacts of this week’s activity will play out in the internal politics of the Palestinians, Israelis, and the United States.  The most important longer term international impacts will be on the United States.

The Palestinians.

The territory of  Palestine is physically divided into two geographic and political regions: the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.  The West Bank (of the Jordan River) has some relatively fertile farmland and grazing areas and some relatively developed urban areas.  The Gaza Strip contains one very large, poor city and desert.  It is one of the poorest areas in the world.  Since the end of the Six Day War in 1967 the two areas have been physically separated by Israeli controlled territory.  But until 2007 there was a set of functioning government institutions (The Palestinian Authority) that united both sections. Since Hamas took control of Gaza and expelled both military and civilian representatives of the Palestinian Authority in 2007 the political divide has been as sharp as the physical separation.  The Palestinian Authority (PA), headquartered in Ramallah, shares effective control of the West Bank with the Israel Defense Forces.  One major difference between Hamas and the PA is public position on Israel.  The PA has been willing, even eager, to negotiate; Hamas has disavowed any contact with what they scornfully refer to as “The Zionist Entity.”  The failure of the U.S. sponsored talks, plus growing tensions between Palestinian villagers and Israeli settlers in the Jordan Valley, have weakened the authority and credibility of the PA and allowed Hamas to build political support outside its base in the Gaza Strip.  If Hamas became the major force in both the West Bank and Gaza, it would end any hope of negotiations or other strategies for a Palestinian state and would pit the religiously conservative leadership of Hamas against the far more secular and modern majority of West Bank citizens.

The PA government in Ramallah has portrayed the entire UN saga as a triumph.  The official line is that for the first time Palestinians are controlling the initiative and forging a bold new path to the future.  The PA is organizing laudatory demonstrations (which both Israel and the PA fear will get out of hand and turn into real mass protests) to underscore the message that it can deliver the goods.  The great hope is that this diplomatic success, coupled with the real improvements in governance and delivery of services that have taken place in the past two years, will cut deeply into support for Hamas and forestall the kind of mass based expressions of discontent that have been the hallmark of the “Arab Spring” in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria and elsewhere.

Israel

Public opinion surveys in Israel have been very consistent for a long time.  The hypothetical “average Israeli” believes 1) some kind of negotiated settlement that gives the Palestinians their own entity is a good thing; and 2) there is no one with whom Israel can negotiate right now because the Palestinian Authority does not control the Gaza Strip and Hamas as seen as a terrorist group dedicated to the destruction of Israel.  The show at the UN will reinforce that perception, especially because the official line from the government of Israel that this “unilateral action” is contrary to the need for direct negotiations. 

In the short run a General Assembly vote to upgrade the Palestinian’s status will probably increase approval of the Netanyahu government’s hard line.  The UN is seen by many Israelis as hopelessly biased against Israel.  Many Israelis, inside and outside the government, are deeply ambivalent about the popular movements that have toppled Arab regimes, especially Egypt.  Mubarak may have been a dictator and oppressor, but he was a reliable Israeli ally, helping the effort to tame and control Hamas and stifling any public opposition to Israel.  The current interim regime is far less cooperative in the blockade of Gaza and the recent assault on the Israeli embassy in Cairo is taken as a frightening example of the wide spread animosity that could be expressed by a democratically elected regime. 

The Netanyahu government is actually quite weak and not wildly popular in Israel.  In the last elections for the Knesset, no party got a majority of the seats so there had to be a coalition government.  Netanyahu’s Likud (the major conservative party) got fewer seats than Kadima (a centrist party.)  But Netanyahu put together a coalition of small parties that included a very hard line nationalist party largely representing immigrants from Russia and two extremely conservative religious parties to get a very slender majority. 

A telling example of both how hard line some parties are and how weak Netanyahu is came a year ago.  On the very day that Prime Minister Netanyahu met with President Obama to promote the new round of peace talks, the Foreign Minister gave a speech in which he said the talks were useless and bound to fail.  Not only does this reflect his and his party’s distaste for negotiations, but it also shows that Netanyahu cannot insist that members of his own cabinet support an official government position.

There were public demonstrations against the government’s economic policies this summer.  The tremendous influence of the 300,000 or so settlers living in the West Bank and the conservative religious establishment on policy are resented by many Israelis.  But the “rally ‘round the flag” effect of increased support for the government in the face of negative events abroad is likely to kick in.  There is a great fear in Israel of being isolated and friendless in the world.  The inability of the U.S. to control the outcome in the UN plus the growing role of Europe (which is seen as pro-Palestinian) will reinforce that fear.  Even those in Israel who have been sharply critical of Netanyahu for picking a fight with President Obama and blame Netanyahu for the deterioration of the US-Israeli relationship are likely to show more support.

The United States

Support for Israel is coming to play an unprecedented role in American partisan politics.  American Jews have long been concerned about Israel for obvious reasons.  But this has never translated into a monolithic, unthinking, automatic approval of whatever the current government does.  Increasingly conservative, evangelical Christians have become strong partisans of Israel.  Readers of the Book of Revelations know that restoration of Israel is a precursor to Armageddon and the end times and Second Coming.  And that has translated into a knee-jerk, uncritical support for Israel.  The position of some evangelicals that Islam is evil and satanic reinforces the bias.

Prime Minister Netanyahu was warmly applauded when he addressed a joint session of Congress, even when he directly repudiated the positions of the United States government. Seemingly obscure and quite conventional statements of U.S. policy, such as the status of the 1967 borders as a starting point for negotiations, have been met with sharp criticism and damned as “selling out” Israel. 

The idea that “politics’ stops at the water’s edge” and foreign policy is the particular domain of bipartisan warmth and fuzziness has always been more fantasy than fact.  But it is very rare for a hot button foreign policy issue to become so embedded in rigidly partisan politics.

Many observers think Republican strategists see portraying anything less than complete agreement with the Netanyahu government as the same thing as being anti-Israel as the wedge issue that will split a significant portion of the Jewish vote away from its customary home in the Democratic party. The conventional wisdom is that the Republican candidate won the recent special election in New York city because he appealed directly to conservative older Jewish voters by blaming Obama for all the difficulties with the Netanyahu government and for not backing Israel completely.   Conservative Republicans have already begun to try to use the issue, sometimes in bizarre ways.  For example, over 40 Republican members of the House of Representatives issued a call for Israel to annex the West Bank and make it part of Israel.  (Why do I think that is bizarre?  It would essentially make Jews a minority in the expanded Israel.)

The White House is going to try to spin the UN actions as anything other than a major defeat for the United States.  That will be a major challenge because the U.S. has worked very hard for months to avoid a Palestinian application for full membership that we would have to veto. 

I think this week has very significant international implications.   The Palestinian application for full membership will be interpreted as sign that the Palestinians no longer regard the U.S. as an honest (albeit strongly biased) broker in potential peace talks.  The U.S. is widely perceived to have failed to exert any influence over Israel when it could not get even a very temporary freeze on settlement activity.  The assumption the U.S. is the indispensable player in peace talks because of its influence on Israel has been shattered.  And now the U.S. seems unable to influence either the Palestinians or the overwhelming majority of UN members.

While I think this is significant as another symptom of the evolution of an international system in which the United States is not as dominant as we have been (a topic for another entry), I do not think it affects the prospects for an enduring agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians, which look as distant today as they did twenty years ago. 

The Troubled Euro Zone

For most of us, Europe is a nice place to visit but we wouldn’t want to live there.  And we pay little attention to European politics and even less, except when we’re trying to exchange dollars into euros, to European economics.   We may be aware that something has been going on this summer -- rowdy demonstrations in Athens and Madrid, riots in London, gyrations in stock markets that mirror the turmoil on Wall Street -- but it’s all been pretty peripheral. 

As I write this, there are pervasive worries that Greece will default on its debt, that other European economies will tank, that the euro is destined for the scrap heap and the grand scheme for European integration represented by the European Union will falter.

There are three big points that I think are worth commenting on.

1) The problems that have prompted austerity programs in Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Italy and the UK are to some extent very much like the problems afflicting the U.S. economy, since they revolve around short term deficits and long term debt.  And to a significant extent they are quite different because of the size and nature of the U.S. economy.  You can understand some of the underlying dynamics of the problems in Europe by thinking about the U.S. economy.  But you need to avoid the facile comparisons that equate our short and long term issues with the smaller and weaker European economies.

2) The fact that these countries are members of the European Union and the euro zone adds a dramatically different dimension to national economic issues.

3) The so called “Neo-liberal Washington Consensus” continues to dominate international economics.

1)  The roots of the European Crisis 

The collapse of the financial system that began with the bursting of the housing bubble in the United States in 2008 spread rapidly to the rest of the advanced capitalist economies in Western Europe.  The same lousy mortgages that were bundled, “securitized” and sold to U.S. investment banks and insured by folks like AIG were sold to European banks as well, with drastic effects on the ability of businesses and governments to borrow money when those mortgages turned out to be worthless.

Many governments run deficits – spend more money than they raise in taxes in a given year.  Mainstream economists generally agree that some deficit spending is actually a good idea if 1) it is being used for long term investments, like infrastructure, that increase economic growth (which increase tax revenues over time and – at least in theory – pays for itself); 2) it is being used “counter cyclically” – to stimulate demand during a recession or depression (and the other side of the coin is that governments cut spending and/or raise taxes when times are good to prevent inflation.) But if the deficit is for current consumption, that is to pay benefits or wages or for other programs, then it is generally regarded as a bad thing.    

Governments borrow money 1) directly from international banks and 2) on a larger scale by selling bonds that pay interest over a number of years.  The “collateral” for government loans is future tax revenues.  In the imaginary perfect world, a government would use the borrowed money to expand economic activity and its taxes and end up with enough extra money in the long run to pay back the loan or pay off the bonds.  In the short run, the borrowed money would improve the economy enough to let the government pay the annual interest on the loan or bonds, what economists call debt service.  Things go rapidly downhill when the economy does not grow fast enough and the government has to make debt service payments by borrowing more money.  At some point banks and investors stop making loans or buying bonds (or they start charging such high interest that the government can’t afford it.) 

This is very over simplified but, I hope, not such a cartoonish sketch that it is misleading.  Any discussion of deficits and debt is complicated by the recent brouhaha in Congress over the debt ceiling that obliterated the difference between short term and long term effects of spending and borrowing.  In Europe, as in the United States, annual budget deficits and the national debt are are different phenomena.

Greece (along with Portugal, Spain and Ireland) is in deep trouble right now because the government has consistently run deficits to pay for current programs and benefits and the underlying economy is weak.  Greece is a small country with – by European standards – a relatively low standard of living.  That means there is not a huge domestic market and exports become far more important than they are in the U.S.  But Greece does not have a large export market ... it is not a major agricultural producer, it is not a hot bed of high tech industry, it is not a manufacturer of machinery, etc.  Thus the long term prospects for sustained economic growth in Greece at rates that will let the government pay the current bills and keep long term debt at manageable levels are bleak when the global economy itself is faltering.

The Greek situation is quite different from the stronger European economies like Germany and France.  The United Kingdom is different from both the weaker economies like Greece or Portugal and the situation in France and Germany.  The UK does have a pretty strong economy that has been battered by the global financial crisis.  The austerity budget the government adopted last spring that slashed a lot of spending aimed at the poor and working class had, I think, as much to do with the Tory’s ideology as it did with presumptively dispassionate economic analysis.

The United States is distinctly different from both the weaker and the healthier Western European economies.  The U.S. differs from the smaller and weaker economies because our deficit issues are not driven by a fundamentally weak economy but by decisions on financing the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, tax policy, and the impact of the 2008 financial meltdown.  Our big problems are short term, not long term.  And the U.S. differs from Germany and France both  because of the sheer size and diversity of our economy and because of the role of the dollar as the world’s premier reserve currency. 

 But, as the cliche goes, I digress.

2) The Euro zone

From its formal inception in the Treaty of Rome in 1956, the European Union has reflected two very different visions.  One the one hand, the goal has been to create a political, social and economic unit that would transcend and render irrelevant the component nation-states.  The nationalism blamed for the bloodshed of the 19th and 20th centuries would be replaced by a pan-European identity.  On the other hand, the vision has been a much narrower focus on economic cooperation between nations and the goal the elimination of barriers to trade, not some larger transcendent “New Europe.” 

One vision leads to an emphasis on creating new institutions and fostering a common identity ... hence the European Parliament, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the European Council, the European Commission and the European Central Bank.  The other vision leads to an emphasis on the rights of nation-states and the limitations of “European” decisions compared to national decisions. 

Every major development on the path from the common market of 1956 to the Europe of today has generated skepticism from those who see traditional nation-states as the reality of politics.  The vision of a new Europe has been pronounced as dead or near dead time and time again.  So called Euro skepticism is especially pronounced in the United Kingdom.   The acronym PIGS, for Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, complete with the negative connotations, works only in English. 

An important feature of European development, supported by both those who seek a new Europe and those who seek to improve cooperation among existing states, is the common currency, the euro.  The initial major impact of the new money was to make business in Europe far more efficient.  Heineken no longer had to translate its costs and profit margin from Dutch guilders to German marks to French francs to Italian lira, Portugese escudos, etc.  Heineken buys its raw materials in euros, pays its workers in euros and sells the beer in euros. 

The euro zone has not abolished national economies and differences in productivity and costs of doing business, including taxes and some government policies.  The only way a huge economic unit like the euro zone, composed of a number of somewhat distinctive smaller units, can survive is if there is relative uniformity in wages, hours, working conditions and other costs of doing business, including taxes and inflation.  The European Central Bank was created to encourage states to coordinate their economic policies.  When the global financial crisis hit and some vulnerable states were in bad shape, the ECB expanded its responsibilities and launched a series of plans to stabilize government finances and international bond markets.

In effect, the strong European economies tried to share some of their strength with the weaker links.  That exposed Germany and France in particular to pressures on their own economies and what is seen by critics as spending their taxpayers’ money on bailing out other governments. Good old timey nationalism has resurfaced, too, with critics wondering why hardworking, thrifty northern Europeans have to come to the aid of feckless Mediterranean types. 

Decision making in Europe is complicated and even experts in European politics have a hard time explaining exactly how the Commission and the Parliament and the Council interact.  The European Central Bank Board of Governor is composed of members from the central banks of member states and they reflect different perspectives on risk and inflation.  The result, in the eyes of many critics, is that the steps the ECB and the political leadership of the European Union have taken to deal with the problems of the past year and half, have been too little and too late and too confused. 

If Greece is unable to make the interest payments on its outstanding debt, then the bondholders will have to change their balance sheets.  And if international banks suddenly have less capital than they thought (because the Greek bonds are now worth less) then they will have to cut back on loans to businesses and to other governments.  This will further retard already sluggish recoveries.  If a default in Greece or elsewhere results in the collapse of the euro and a return to national currencies, that will not only make the short and long term economic problems in Europe worse, but it will disrupt the global economic system. This will have real, tangible effects on Americans.  For better or for worse, our well being is tied to people and events far beyond our borders.

3) The Neo-Liberal Consensus

The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the U.S. Treasury are located within walking distance of each other in Washington, D.C. The number of economists working in those institutions or researching developmental economics in major research universities is quite small and many of them move back and forth between academic life and policy making at the IMF, World Bank or Treasury.    By the mid-1980s the professional economists had come to share a conventional wisdom about what Third World countries should do to spur economic development and came to apply that prescription to more developed countries as well.  The details and specific policy applications of this “Washington Consensus” differ to some extent, but all three global institutions accept the principles that governments in economic trouble should 1) open up their national economies to the globalized capitalist market system; 2) reduce the government’s role in the economy by privatizing the widest possible range of government activities; 3) slash government spending, especially on non-productive immediate consumption including the “safety net” programs.  The fact that the consensus is based on an updated version of the market capitalism first described by Adam Smith makes it “Neo-Liberal.” “Neo” because it is updated and revised, “liberal” in the 19th Century use of the term which is about 180 degrees from 21st Century progressive (since we don’t say “liberal” anymore) thought.

Like all prescriptions, this package is based on both empirical analysis and political values.  I think it is fair to say this approach is skewed in favor of the values and interests of the well off.  If governments have to sell bonds to investors, it is no surprise that the interests and preferences of those investors, be they rich individuals or managers of huge investment portfolios, cast long shadows over policy making.   It is no surprise that the prescriptions for Thailand, Kenya, Greece and the United States all involve immediate hardship for the poor and working class. 

I don’t mean to end this with a sneaky manipulation where you are supposed to think “Oh how fair, to punish the poor for the sins of the rich!”  The conventional wisdom argues that some short term distress may be the only guarantee of long term good times.  The political (moral) question is how much distress is justified.

A hundred years ago this all seemed simpler.  Nicaragua defaulted on its debt and the U.S. Marines went in and collected the taxes for several years until the debt was paid off.   The events of the past three years, initiated by the collapse of the housing market in the United States, have underscored the growing importance of a global economy.  The short term question is whether Greece and the rest of Europe can survive the current crisis.  The long term question is whether countries can act together to increase the benefits of the new economy and shield everyday people from the potential harms.








   

Libya Is Not Deja Vu All Over Again

The story of regime change Libya provides an interesting contrast with Iraq.  At the risk of pushing the comparison too far, it seems as if the U.S. and NATO consciously set out to do the opposite of what had been done in Iraq.

Specifically:

The war in Iraq was an American war.  The “coalition of the willing” really wasn’t.  The British did send some soldiers and a few other American allies sent token forces, but almost all the roughly 600,000 soldiers and contractors were American.  The fact that this was a unilateral American an adventure cost us a great deal in terms of international influence and leadership, not to mention the impact on the budget.  (This was also a stark contrast to the first Gulf War that expelled Saddam’s army from Kuwait. The first President Bush did put together an international coalition.)

In contrast, the faces of the fighters on the ground are Libyan. Contrast the pictures from Tripoli of Libyans celebrating with the iconic shot of the American tank toppling the statue of Saddam in Baghdad.   The NATO air strikes in Libya over the past five months have mattered but they are not the central story.  The handful of western operatives on the ground have been nearly invisible. We have to assume that the intelligence services of several NATO countries were involved in getting arms into the rebels’ hands but that rates no more than a footnote in the drama.   The NATO intervention itself was clearly collective operation, with France and Britain leading the way.  Ironically that has led to criticism in the United States that Obama did too much by committing any U.S. forces without Congressional approval and that he did too little, by “leading from behind” and not using all the available aircraft.  (That unfortunate phrase may be a symptom of how rapidly events moved and the U.S. policy evolved -- no one had second or third thoughts about how badly it would play.)

Operation Iraqi Freedom relied on American military might.  It started with the “shock and awe” of the air assault and ended with almost 250,000 American troops on the ground.  More importantly, the overall strategy in Iraq was conceived of in military terms.  Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were the chief architects, not Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice.  The State Department and CIA were relegated to the sidelines as the central decisions were being made.   Little attention was given to post conflict issues.

In contrast, the Libyan operation seems to have been strongly focused on what happens after Gadhafi fell.  For example, the military authorities running the occupation of Iraq almost immediately disbanded the army and police forces.  And shortly after that, as part of the “de-Baathification” effort, essentially gutted all institutions.  But even as Tripoli was under siege, the U.S. government and others were urging the Libyan rebels to maintain the few governing institutors Gadhafi had allowed to exist. 

Side note: an interesting similarity between the two cases is the fact that the professional military was not very enthusiastic about either one.  The objections were operational and in the Iraq case revolved around fears that we were not committing a large enough force.  In the Libyan case, the concerns were not using adequate force and the inherent ambiguity in the mission.  (Senator John McCain does not make things up, he frequently gives speaks for the military professionals who are constrained from speaking out.)

The U.S. was deeply involved in the organization of a new government for Iraq.  The Vice President’s office, the Department of Defense, the CIA and the State Department all had their favorites among the exile community and did what they could to give them prominent roles.  The interim constitution created by the Coalition Provisional Authority (i.e. the U.S. occupation) designed a political system based explicitly on ethnic and religious distinctions.  That is hardly the sole cause of Iraq’s current problems but it made it nearly impossible for those politicians who sought to bridge the Shi’a-Sunni divide and the Arab-Kurd differences. 

NATO and the U.S. have been scrupulous about keeping their distance from the internal workings of the National Transition Council in Libya, even though everyone has their friends among the Libyan expatriate community.  The leadership has evolved largely as the result of internal Libyan politics, not the maneuvering of outside patrons. That means we know less about the key players than we did in Iraq in 2005 and that outside actors have less control over the decisions the NTC will take.  But it also means the NTC does not have the albatross of foreign intervention around its neck.

A final contrast has hurt the Obama administration.  The invasion of Iraq came after a prolonged campaign to justify it to the public.  It was a war of choice. A variety of rationales was advanced: Weapons of Mass Destruction, complicity in 9/11, Saddam as uniquely evil, democratizing the Middle East, protecting Israel, enforcing UN Security Council resolutions.  At times it almost seemed like a political campaign with a message of the week and something for everybody.   

The Libyan intervention was unexpected and unplanned. The Obama administration was treating the Libyan uprising as it had treated other moments in the Arab Spring, making sympathetic noises but keeping its distance.   (This, like all policies, was supported by different people for quite different reasons: avoiding the risk of having the protestors tarnished as American agents, preserving relationships and ties with incumbent regime elements, a preference for stability and the devil you know.)  In general the administration was all for regime change but not via direct U.S. intervention.

I think the fears of a massacre of civilians in Benghazi created a sense of crisis and a rather hurried decision to cooperate with the French and British who were strong advocates of intervention.  There was no time to lay the domestic political groundwork, no time to float various rationales to see which ones worked, no time to develop public opinion. Gadhafi the wacky goofball dictator made a far less scary villain than Saddam Hussein.  The long term regime change strategy was swamped by the short term humanitarian intervention.  The careful distinction between use of force to protect people and reliance on political means to support regime change is too fine a point to maintain when cruise missiles are streaking overhead and fighter planes are bombing tank columns. 

The invasion of Iraq was followed by an insurgency, a near civil war, de facto separation of the Kurdish region, a large number of refugees, and an inability to resolve the most basic issues facing the country. Certainly U.S. policy was not the sole cause of all that, but it was an important contributor. 

Libya faces greater challenges now than Iraq did in 2003 after the invasion.  Clearly the United States, NATO and/or any other international actor are not going to step in to try to guide (or manipulate) Libya’s development.  The Obama administration is hoping that a combination of humanitarian and technical aid plus coaxing and encouragement from the sidelines will be enough to help Libya avoid the doom and gloom outcomes that some analysts fear. 

The long term implications for American politics are not clear.  The Obama people will certainly claim this as vindication for their strategy.  Rightly or wrongly, the administration will be blamed by its critics if things in Libya go badly ... with widespread bloodshed and retaliation, for example, or the emergence of a nationalist, anti-Western regime.   But I am not sure this episode will make some great new departure in U.S. foreign policy, as some people have suggested. It is more likely to recede quickly into the background, much as the Clinton administration’s air war in Kosovo has been largely forgotten.  Hmm ... there may be some deja vu here after all.

Comments on Syria

I’ve run across a couple of pieces that do an excellent job explaining Syria. 

http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/middle-east-north-africa/iraq-syria-lebanon/syria/109-popular-protest-in-north-africa-and-the-middle-east-vii-the-syrian-regimes-slow-motion-suicide.aspx

The International Crisis Group has become a major source for understanding current conflicts around the world, combining good analysis with policy proposals.  They have enough street cred that their reports are read in policy making circles. 
http://www.merip.org/mero/mero081011

Middle East Research and Information Project is a little edgier than the ICG.  Their stuff typically begins with good analysis but does not always make a clear separation between understanding why things are the way they are and prescribing how things ought to be.  Their work topically has a “progressive”  bias that is a refreshing balance to the usual conventional wisdom. 

.... to the shores of Tripoli

    Among the many important issues and events that have been shoved into the background in the past six weeks have been the messy stalemates in the Middle East.  Libya and Syria have gotten some minimal attention; Yemen and Bahrain have gotten less.
    Many people find Libya puzzling and somewhat disturbing.  It is hard to understand what is going on and equally hard to understand what the U.S. is doing there.  Let me try to clarify the major dimensions.

 Libya’s Revolution

    Like many countries in the Global South, “Libya” was constructed out of three distinct regions of North Africa by European colonialism.  Opposition to the Italian occupation provided the primary basis for a Libyan identity.  The externally imposed definition of Libya was continued during and after World War II, with British and French occupation leading to independence in 1951. 
    In 1969 a 27 year old colonel, Moammar Gadhafi, led a military coup against the traditional monarchy that emerged with independence.   There were several sources of discontent, an important one was the feeling that Libya was locked in backwardness.  Gadhafi had the personal and situational skills and resources to build a coalition of discontented fellow officers; he also saw himself as a visionary and transformative leader.  Four years after taking power, he announced a total revolution, in which old political elements would be purged, formal institutions would be abolished, and the masses would rule directly through local consultative assemblies.  The rationale and ideology for this attempt to create a new Libyan person in a new Libyan society was spelled out 1975 in the Green Book that proclaimed a third way, neither Communist nor capitalist. 
   
Libya in the Gadhafi Era

    Setting out to change everything, from institutions to people’s beliefs in the name of the Truth, led to the creation of a highly repressive, highly intrusive police system.  Politics became top down dictation (if I’ve got the Truth, you either see it and agree fully with me or you are mired in lies and evil and need to be dealt with.)  In addition to its domestic enemies, “the Third Way” was threatened by traditional Middle Eastern regimes, global Imperialism, and global Communism.  The unholy alliance of traditional monarchies and U.S.-led Imperialism was the major external enemy.  This led to direct action such as the Lockerbie bombing, assassination attempts on Mubarak and others, and intervention in Chad.  It led to indirect actions such as supporting the Irish Republican Army, the Bader-Menihoff Gang,  the North Korean regime, among a host of other presumptive revolutionary anti-Imperialists. 
    The Green Book is quite short and provides little detail on how to run a country.  Gadhafi’s regime did not ever generate a coherent strategy for economic development.  While oil revenues have been constrained by an international embargo and lack of maintenance for facilities, sizable amounts of money have been poured into the economy with precious little to show for it.

We’re Mad as Hell and We’re Not Going To Take It Any More

    The failure of the economy to generate enough jobs for the youth who entered it each year, plus the repressive state apparatus, plus regionalism led to the 2011 rebellion.  It is not accidental that it is centered in Benghazi, capital of the easternmost region.   Gadhafi’s greatest support is in the westernmost section of the country.  The fact that, despite rhetoric about the rule of the masses, Libyan politics is centered on Gadhafi and his personal allies and is almost exclusively top down, has meant that Libyans have had no opportunity to develop organizations or alliances or experiment with the various institutions we usually lump under the head of “civil society.”  The lack of organized opposition has meant that the rebellion has suffered from lack of leadership and unity.  In March almost everyone outside as well as inside Libya could echo Butch Cassidy, “Who are those guys?” 
    The rebels’ initial successes came in areas where traditional ties to the capital were weak and there were few personal or tribal links to the regime or to the tribes that most closely identified with the regime.  But when the rebellion moved closer to Tripoli and Gadhafi deployed his elite troops, the untrained, undisciplined rebel soldiers were repeatedly routed.  As rebel forces retreated to the East, Gadhafi threatened massive and bloody retaliation against “disloyal” elements.  This was widely understood inside and outside Libya to portend indiscriminate violence against the citizens of Benghazi and surrounding towns.

NATO gets involved

    The decisions to get involved were complex and differed somewhat from country to country.  For the United States, I think a very important factor is the personal and professional backgrounds of many of the key policy makers.  The Rwandan genocide happened back in 1994 and the Srebenica massacre in 1995, thousands of miles from Libya.  But these atrocities, especially Rwanda, are widely regarded as a shameful failure on the part of the international community.  They are particularly painful for former members of the Clinton administration (many of whom are part of Obama’s foreign policy team.)  The conventional wisdom in the foreign policy establishment is that the United States could and should have exerted leadership to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths.  When it appeared that Gadhafi’s elite army units were on the verge of unleashing mass killings in Benghazi, the choice seemed to be between a potentially messy intervention and the specter of a preventable massacre.
    There were, of course, other motives and rationales.  Everyone involved in policy making brings their own personal and professional interests and judgements to the table; no foreign policy action is ever taken for a single reason. [Quick, stifle the “It’s all about oil!” chants ... if it were all about oil, we’d have been rooting for Gadhafi to win.] For a variety of reasons, from short term questions of available resources to longer term questions of the future of NATO, the U.S. worked actively to make the intervention an international action.  Hence NATO states were encouraged to take the lead and the UN Security Council was used to confer international legitimacy.  Skillful diplomacy got approval from the Arab League and tacit support from the African Union and token participation from Turkey and Qatar.

A Fine Distinction

    From the beginning of talk about intervention in Libya there were two issues, conceptually distinct but damnably hard to separate in practice.  One issue was humanitarian intervention: the use of force by outside actors to prevent heinous actions by a government.  The other issue was regime change: aiding and abetting an internal political process that would oust Gadhafi and his cronies. 
    This is not the time or place to discuss in detail the emerging norm in international relations of a “Responsibility to Protect.”  The traditional view in international law and politics has been that sovereignty, flowing from the fact that the state is the highest moral authority, means that states must recognize the right of each government to rule its country and treat its people any way it sees fit.  A growing body of scholarly analysis and political rhetoric has argued that like all rights, sovereignty comes with a corresponding responsibility.  If the state has a right to run its internal affairs any way it sees fit, it has a correspponding duty to protect the well being of its people.  This is seen as providing a moral and legal basis for violating the right of sovereignty in egregious cases.
    So the U.S. and NATO and a few other states launched a military operation to enforce a no-fly zone over rebel held territory.  That quickly morphed into a mission to destroy the ability of the Libyan armed forces to undertake offensive actions on the ground as well.  And lots of stuff happened and didn’t happen ... I think it is probably fair to say that the original rosy scenario: some well placed cruise missiles and a moderate number of air strikes against military formations would erase the threat of massive casualties inflicted on civilians, was grossly over optimistic.  (So what else is new?  SNAFU and FUBAR are far more common than “Golly, that was easier than we thought.”)
    At the same time, the U.S., NATO and other states undertook an active campaign to get Gadhafi out of power.  This campaign was meant to be political not military and to involve the usual combination of sanctions, overt and covert support for opponents, and widespread condemnation.  The aim was to topple Gadhafi from within by encouraging the regime to crumble and collapse.  It was expected this would take time, although perhaps not as long as it has.
    When tomahawk cruise missiles are exploding in Tripoli and French and British jets are dropping bombs or launching air to ground missiles, it can be darn hard to remember that nice distinction between humanitarian intervention and regime change.  What began as a rebellion has grown into a civil war, with two distinct territories, two militaries, and two bodies claiming to be the government of Libya. 
    There is a military stalemate on the ground (although the rebels are claiming significant progress in the past few days) and slowly increasing support for the rebel government in the international community (most importantly those parts of the community, like the U.S. and UK who have possession of money belonging to Libya.)  There is also widespread confusion, ranging from popular opinion in the countries involved to uncertainty about the eventful winners in a factional struggle within the Transitional Government, to when and how this might all end.

The Two Most Critical Issues

    The Libyan episode raises a number of questions.  The most important issues are: when and where to intervene and the War Powers Resolution.
    Virtually no one consistently argues that sovereignty is the only value and any outside intervention in the internal affairs of another state is always wrong.  For a considerable period of time the Chinese foreign ministry and its UN delegation actively promoted the widest possible definition of sovereign rights.  But China, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council has declined to veto a number of actions, both military and civilian, that appear to violate an absolutist view of sovereignty.  Leaving aside the normative arguments, states act as if sovereignty were contingent and other values can sometimes trump it.  You don’t have to accept all the arguments advanced by proponents of the strong version of a Right to Protect to arrive at the conclusion that sometimes intervention is OK.  Clearly, I think, not every injustice or violation of human rights justifies, let alone demands,  an external intervention.  But I do not think a contemporary American can argue that the U.S. should never intervene in the affairs of other countries.  A moral argument, based on a common humanity and America’s founding values, may or may not be persuasive.  There is a hard nosed, eminently practical reason as well.  We are the single largest economic unit in a global economy.  We are at the center of the global political system.  We should understand that the quality of our future depends on the state of the rest of the world.  We are a status quo power.  We do not want massive change in the distribution of wealth and influence in the world.  Injustice breeds instability.  A government that harshly abuses many of its own citizens is ultimately a threat to its neighbors and the system as a whole. 
    The question, then, is not should we or should we not ever intervene.  The question is prudence.  Given the scope of the evil in another country, given our coercive resources and the resources of the other state, given our ability to bring other countries along (both for leveraging their coercive resources and the legitimacy an international consensus supplies), given the probability that an intervention can be designed and executed that will not cause more harm than it was meant to stop, is this particular intervention a good idea?  This means it may be prudence, not hypocrisy, that expalins why we send missiles and planes into Libya but not Syria.
    Saying “it depends” is not the easy way out.  It is a recipe for soul searching, deep analysis, and spirited debate for each potential situation. 
    A uniquely American aspect to the Libyan situation is the War Powers Resolution of 1973. [The most relevant provisions allow the President to deploy U.S. armed forces for up to 60 dayus with prior Congressional authorization.  The President must inform Congress of the action within 48 hours  and seek specific authorization if the use of force lasts longer than 60 days.]  It began as a joint resolution of the House and Senate, was vetoed by Richard Nixon.  Congress overrode the veto and enacted the Resolution. [Thus it is sometimes referred to as the “War Powerd Resolution” and sometimes “War Powers Act.”]  Every Administration since then has sooner or later argued that this is an unconstitutional infringement on Executive Power and every Congress has rejected that argument.  Several Presidents have sent formal notifications to Congress after initiating the use of military force, always insisting that they are “consistent” with the legislation , not “pursuant” to it.
    President Obama has argued that the initial use of U.S. forces in Libya was terminated before the 60 day notification deadline and U.S. direct involvement in the NATO operation is minimal.  The House of Representatives has “rebuked” the President. 
    It seems to me that one could argue for or against the War Powers Act on legal and Constitutional grounds (it has never been tested in court.)  One can also argue both the principle and the application in a specific case on prudential grounds. Declared wars between states are increasingly rare in international politics.  The majority of conflicts in the world today are civil wars or insurgencies within a state, often with a lot of involvement by outsiders.  If nothing else, I that guarantees that the debate over War Powers and humanitarian intervention will not die down.

International Implications of the Debt "Crisis"

Since everyone else is talking ... or talking about how they’re not talking ... or not talking about how they’re talking ... figure I might as well talk about the debt ceiling kerfuffle.  Since I can’t claim any real expertise in American politics or economics, not sure I can say much about the domestic ramifications that hasn’t been said better several other places.
    But I think there are some things to be said about the international implications of the spectacle.  If there is a failure to raise the debt ceiling, the implications for America’s position in the international system and ability to exert positive leadership will be serious and dramatic.  Even if the worst outcome is avoided, this sorry episode will still mark another increment in the changing relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.
    There are, I think, three distinct dimensions to this summer’s spectacle, each of which is having a negative affect on the United States in the world: the long term implications of rising deficits, the immediate impact of the dangerous flirtation with default, and the consequences of failed governance.
   
Funding the National Debt: a problem, not a flaming crisis

    The long term implications of budget deficits are not a new issue nor a “crisis” that demands immediate resolution.  Lots of folks have pointed out for the much of the past decade (since the twin impacts of the Bush tax cuts and blank check financing for war in Iraq began to be felt) that at some point the deficit would be a problem because of the cost of borrowing on global markets to cover it.  The U.S. treasury sells bonds to generate the revenue needed to make up the difference between spending in a given year and revenue (the deficit).  The total of all those outstanding bonds is the National Debt.  The bonds get sold to investors, including rich folks, money managers, international banks, and foreign governments.  It costs you and me as tax payers a little something to meet the interest on those bonds. 
    [side note -- or rant -- the beguilingly simple comparison to the family budget that some folks love to make, as they piously intone “live within your means” is pretty lame.  For starters, there aren’t too many Americans who do not borrow money to buy things they could not otherwise afford, like houses and cars.  Secondly, governments are NOT like mom and pop sitting around the kitchen table ...  Some pretty powerful economic analysis suggests that effective governments should generally NOT balance their budgets, but should spend more to stimulate the economy when times are bad and build up a surplus to cool off inflation when times are good.]
    When it comes time to borrow, the United States has been in a uniquely enviable position since the end of the World War II  when the dollar became the international reserve currency.  Almost every country wants to have some dollars in its treasury so it and its citizens can do business with the rest of the world.  This means the U.S. can sell Treasury bonds with dollar amounts with lower interest than, say, Poland whose bonds come in zlotys.  (Zlotys aren’t very useful outside Poland except at selected arcades with old school zlot car tracks.)   The second major advantage to the U.S. of the fact that foreigners buy so much of our debt is that they are motivated to avoid screwing up the U.S. economy.  Yes, China already owns a large chunk of the U.S. debt and yes, China could really mess us up by refusing to buy any more.  But if the dollar collapses then China loses a great deal of money. 
    There is some point, and no one knows where it is, where U.S. debt gets so large that foreigners start to worry that we won’t pay off our bonds and begin to drive up interest rates on bonds.  That makes the debt bigger, of course, and worries foreigners even more, and raises interest rates and that hurts the U.S. economy and slows growth, etc. 
    The size of the debt needs to be addressed, but not in a fevered panic in the next two weeks. 

The “crisis” of 2011 could become real

    The current hassle over raising the debt ceiling is a manufactured “crisis,” driven by domestic political calculations.  But it is pushing the U.S. and the world much closer to a genuine crisis of confidence. 
    And that could be a major negative consequence of the debt ceiling brouhaha on America’s international position.  One of the things that has made U.S. bonds attractive is the belief that they are as good as gold.  Actually, they’re better than gold because bonds pay interest.  But if the U.S. cannot pay interest when it is due, even if it is only temporary, then the value of bonds themselves (some part of which rests on the fact that they always pay interest) drops.  So all of a sudden folks who hold a lot of Treasury bonds, like big global banks and major countries, realize they had less money than they thought and that affects lending and spending around the world. 
    What could and should have been a small, short term event threatens to mutate into a much larger, far more serious problem if it raises any doubt about the value of U.S. bonds.   

America as a circular firing squad

    The second major negative consequence of the current debacle for our position in the world is the perception that the U.S. has a dysfunctional political system.  The spectacle of a paralyzed United States government, the concern that even the most routine issues may threaten Armageddon, and the inability of presumptive leaders to lead hurts America’s image and interests. 
    The damage comes in two ways, I think.  At the elite level in foreign countries, it undermines leaders’ confidence in the U.S. as a consistent actor, a country that says what it means and means what it says.  At the level of everyday people, it gives “democracy” a bad name.  The argument people in the Third World (aka Global South) hear most often from authoritarian leaders is that “democracy” means chaos.  Everyday people in the Global South are no more, nor less, sophisticated than everyday people in the United States.  They are not deeply immersed in the ins and outs of issues and institutions, they’d rather watch CSI: Las Vegas, Desperate Housewives, or the Bold and Beautiful [the drama, comedy and telenovelas/soap opera series with the largest global audiences in 2010] than CSPAN or a lecture on the difference between a presidential and a parliamentary system.  But they do have images of other countries, they do think they know something about the world.  And many of them are aware of some kind of political imbroglio in the U.S.  This episode by itself is not going to change anyone’s mind, but it is going to have an erosive effect on perceptions of the U.S. as a beacon and model for how to organize a society.
      

More On Political Islam

As a way of following up and extending the discussion of political Islam let me respond to some questions Cathy raised in an email:

What I think would be helpful as a follow-up would be some explanation of: since these groups and countries are incredibly diverse, how does an outside observer know when “political Islam” IS potentially dangerous to Western democracies? Are there buzzwords to worry about, or others that should be reassuring?

    I don’t think it is political Islam that is a threat to the West, but individuals and groups who advocate violence against either us or democratic movements in Muslim countries.  The causal dynamics of political violence are complex (hey, they’d try to take back my Political Science degree if I didn’t say that), like all human behavior.  And there are major differences between leaders who advocate and organize political violence and followers who carry it out.  But neither fits the one dimensional caricature of a simple and simple minded) direct link from a religious commitment to terrorist attacks. Religion, ideology, nationalism, a code of personal honor, among many other value systems, can provide a rationalization for behavior.  I don’t mean “rationalization” in the everyday language pejorative sense of a bogus veil of platitudes hiding one’s “true” motives.  We have multiple motives, at varying levels of awareness, behind any behavior and underlying every emotion.  We use the various ways we think about the world to explain our actions and feelings to ourselves and to others.     The buzzwords to watch out for are the exhortations to violence.  And you don’t have to be carefully attuned to the nuances of Arabic to pick those up.

Is “jihad” always to be interpreted as calling for physical violence against non-Islamic societies (my guess is not, but I don’t know!).

    “Jihad” is typically taken to mean “struggle”.  The pious person wages jihad against her or his vices and imperfections.  The community is called to jihad against injustice.  “Jihad” can also be used in the same ways we use “war” ... as in war on drugs or poverty, as well as war as military conflict.  Lots of good Christians still sing “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before” without thinking they are advocating invasion and conquest.

Do Americans just need to educate themselves better about strains of Islam and the cultural background of individual societies? I don’t see THAT happening, unfortunately.

No, I do not think it is necessary for people to become conversant with Islam, let alone hundreds of more or less distinctive cultures.  I’m not real fond of the much abused notion of “common sense” but it may be applicable here.  Simplistic, sweeping generalizations about other people ought to be always suspect.  If you assume that at some deep level all people are alike, that there is only one standard model of “human being,” then you will less likely to buy a superficial account or accept an alien devil image of others.

 And what are the alternatives to the “war” paradigm and how can they be couched in a way that people with very little knowledge about Islam or the Middle East can grasp them and be comfortable with them? And if not “war,” how should we respond to groups like Al Quaeda?

    If it isn’t “war”, what is it?  Crime.  Terrorist attacks and threats in Europe are treated as police problems.  The attacks on the Madrid and London subways were horrible crimes, not acts of war.  And it was the police, not the army, who found the perpetrators.  There was no question of making up some special tribunals for trying the accused.  (And no hysteria that if we bring a terrorist to the U.S. to try them in court all their friends will come and wreak unspeakable revenge on us!!) The regular courts worked quite well.  It’s not that the English and Spanish are more tolerant or more knowledgeable or less frightened by potential terrorism.  But it is that their politicians have defined and framed the situation as dealing with crime, not fighting a war.

I don’t mean to gloss over real differences in world views and values.  Many people outside North America and Western Europe have profound disagreements with our values and are determined to resist becoming just like us.  It is important to know that the aspects of the West that non-Westerners most often reject: materialism, hyper-individualism, moral laxity, hypocritical foreign policies, are the same aspects we ourselves criticize.