The Blog

Daniel Altschuler: Stakes Rise for the United States in Honduras

2009-11-11T05:03:52Z

The stakes for the United States in the Honduran political crisis are higher than ever. At the end of October, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, celebrated the unprecedented overturning of a coup through dialogue. That assessment has now proved naïve, and the State Department finds itself in the awkward position of distancing itself from the rest of Latin America after saying it would recognize the Honduran elections whether or not Manuel Zelaya is restored to power. This crisis is an extremely important moment for Honduras, but it also now has the potential to undermine the Obama administration's efforts to mend the US's relationship with Latin America.

Since President Obama took office, his administration has worked hard to heal the wounds left by President George W. Bush in Latin America. Obama's most symbolic moves came with respect to Cuba, as he condoned the island nation's re-admission into the Organization of American States (OAS)--long a rallying cry of the OAS's other members--and eased the terms of the embargo. Obama has also toned down the rhetoric vis-à-vis Venezuela, cutting away at Hugo Chávez's platform for America-bashing. Whereas President Bush seemed to court confrontation in the region, the Obama administration has thus far sought compromise and consensus. These efforts have not radically altered US policy, but they have represented significant first steps towards repairing relations with Latin America.

Before last week, the United States had also marched in step with the rest of the Americas in its response to Honduras's June 28th coup. The United States supported the OAS's denunciation of the coup, suspended aid to Honduras and visas to leaders of the de facto regime, and continually demanded the restitution of President Manuel Zelaya. Until late October, the US assiduously avoided taking the lead on the Honduras issue, instead abiding by regional consensus and making sure not to stoke the flames with Hugo Chávez and the ALBA nations. State Department representative Thomas Shannon's deal-making visit to Honduras also built directly on the work of the OAS and Costa Rican president Oscar Arias, assuring that the fleeting victory was shared by all partners.

But then the deal broke down. Roberto Micheletti insisted that the agreement did not guarantee Zelaya's restitution--a strict reading of the text reveals that he is right--while Zelaya insisted it did. This would have been a moot point if international pressure had remained strong enough to convince the Honduran Congress that it needed to restore Zelaya to power. The agreement began to unravel, however, because it established a deadline for creating a unity government without imposing a deadline on the Honduran Congress's determination on Zelaya's restitution. Whether Shannon did not realize the importance of placing a deadline--which is hard to believe--or simply wanted to do anything necessary to quickly reach an agreement, this omission could now prove extremely costly for both Honduran democracy and the United States' position in Latin America.

Shannon compounded the error when he declared in a CNN interview that the signing of the agreement assured that the US would recognize the elections whether or not Zelaya was reinstated. This was the moment when the US first strayed from its Latin American neighbors in handling the crisis, and it took the pressure off of the Honduran Congress to reinstate Zelaya.

The State Department had an obvious reason for wanting to wash its hands of the Honduran crisis as quickly as possible. Certain conservative Republicans--most notably, Senator Jim DeMint--have been a constant headache for Obama since the coup, defending Micheletti's assumption of power as a "constitutional succession". DeMint has exercised leverage by holding up two of Obama's Latin America appointments--Arturo Valenzuela and Thomas Shannon himself--to prove his point, and the State Department used its promise of recognizing the election to get DeMint to relent.

But the State Department jumped the gun, and the Obama administration now finds itself having strayed from its Latin American neighbors. While Shannon declared the US' intention to recognize the elections, the countries of the Río Group demanded Zelaya's immediate restitution. Meanwhile, OAS secretary general, José Miguel Insulza, conditioned OAS support on full compliance with the agreement, and he has now rejected Micheletti's self-proclaimed "unity" government. This means that the OAS election observation team is now on hold, while the US position remains unclear.

The State Department has now placed itself in an unenviable position. If it sticks to the position laid out by Shannon, it will risk alienating the Latin American countries that have vociferously demanded Zelaya's restitution. And if it backtracks from Shannon's declaration, conservative Republicans will raise Cain in Washington. Simply put, if the Honduran crisis is not resolved before the November 29th elections, the Obama administration will not come out unscathed.

The State Department should be willing to risk Conservatives' ire, however, because the first scenario would create much bigger and long-term problem for President Obama. If the United States recognizes the elections without Zelaya's restitution, it could undermine much of the work President Obama has done--and the goodwill he has developed--in the region in his first nine months. It could also provide cover for other countries, such as Panama, to defect from the regional consensus. Such defections would provoke intra-regional discord and undermine what, until now, has been a strong defense of the Inter-American Democratic Charter in response to the Honduran coup. This would be deeply unfortunate for the region as a whole. It would also undermine the Obama administration's avowed support for multilateralism and mutual respect in Latin America and provide fodder for anti-American rhetoric in Caracas and Managua.

It remains unclear whether the State Department will see the light. Already, spokesman Ian Kelly has criticized both sides for the failure to form a unity government, but the State Department has not retracted the position laid out by Thomas Shannon. On Saturday, the New York Times called for Shannon's hasty return to Honduras, but at least as important will be pressure from the agreement's Verification Commission--which includes former Chilean President, Ricardo Lagos, and the US Labor Secretary Hilda Solis--on Micheletti and the Honduran Congress to reinstate Zelaya. If the Verification Commission adopts a strong stance, this could provide the State Department with the necessary cover to condition its support for the elections on good-faith compliance with the agreements.

Whatever happens, US intervention in Honduras backfired. In a rush to get a deal signed, the State Department prematurely took pressure off of the Micheletti regime and made Zelaya's restitution--never a certainty--less likely. The United States cannot afford to compound this error. The State Department must be willing, again, to take a strong stand against the Honduran coup, or it will jeopardize President Obama's policy goals in the region.

(Copied with permission from http://www.americasquarterly.org.)

Lloyd Greif: Israel Stands Alone

2009-11-11T03:10:40Z

Eight months into President Barack Obama's administration, his Middle East peace "road map" is crystal clear. First, he dialed down the pressure on Iran, whose nuclear weapons program presents an existential threat to Israel. Second, he shifted the blame for Islamic extremism to Israel and solely blamed it for the Palestinian's plight. Then he unilaterally ratcheted up the pressure on Israel to cease building settlements and to ease its self-defense blockade of Gaza. Now, Obama has upped the ante even further, framing lasting peace in the Middle East as requiring Israel to retreat to its 1967 borders. Although he blandly claims that there are "no preconditions" to relaunching negotiations, in truth he has doomed the peace talks before they even start. Obama has set up Israel as the fall guy for negotiations that will ultimately fail and is the architect of that failure.

When Obama was elected -- with 78 percent of the Jewish vote -- there was concern about what his administration would mean for the 60 years of unwavering support America had provided Israel. Unlike his Republican opponent, John McCain, or his predecessor, George W. Bush, both longstanding supporters of Israel, Obama had no such track record and was championing a different course, one of détente with such hard-line regimes as Iran and Syria. Jews took heart when then-President-elect Obama selected a Jew, Rahm Emanuel, as his chief of staff, and Hillary Clinton, previously a staunch supporter of Israel from her days as senator from New York, as his secretary of state.

An examination of the first 250 days of President Obama's administration convincingly demonstrates that the earlier concerns were well founded and the mitigating cabinet appointments mere window dressing. From his first telephone call as president to a head of state -- Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian National Authority -- and his first one-on-one television interview with any news organization -- Al Arabiya TV -- to his bowing to Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, then embracing the Muslim world at Cairo University and, most recently, rebuking Israel in an address to the United Nations General Assembly, Obama has shown far more concern for strengthening ties with authoritarian regimes on the Arabian Peninsula than to maintaining the historically close alliance with the region's only true democracy.

His Cairo speech scaled back his support of Israel in favor of establishing new diplomatic channels in the Arab world. He also equated the suffering of the Palestinians with the loss of 6 million Jewish lives in the Holocaust. Worse yet, Obama's affirmation of the Arab propagandist idea that Israel was created as a response to the Holocaust greatly undermined its legitimacy as a state and ignored Jews' forced diaspora and Judaism's historical ties to the Middle East that predate all other religions.

Instead of seeing Israel as the oasis and model for democracy that it is in the Middle East, Obama views the country and its conflict with its neighbors as "this constant wound ... this constant sore, [that] does infect all of our foreign policy." It is as if the president has blinders on: in effect repeating the red herring that blames the atrocities of 9/11 on America's support of Israel, in July 2008, Obama stated:

The lack of a resolution to this problem [the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] provides an excuse for anti-American militant jihadists to engage in inexcusable actions, so we have a national security interest in solving this.

Sound familiar? Former President Jimmy Carter, author of the canard, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," asserts, "lack of progress in the Middle East is one of the main causes for animosity, hatred and even violent acts against America." Both presidents conveniently neglect the fact that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, perpetrators of multiple attacks on America, never cared or linked any of their actions to the Palestinian cause until after 9/11. Islamic extremists are at war with the spread of Western culture, and the United States is the chief exporter of Western beliefs, so it is a pipe dream to assume that America can achieve détente with "anti-American militant jihadists" by, in effect, offering up Israel as a sacrificial lamb.

In his United Nations address, Obama called for Israel to establish "a viable, independent Palestinian state with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967." Like Bush before him, Obama referred to the territories Israel won in the Six-Day War -- a preemptive defensive strike against armies from nine Arab countries massing on its borders -- as "occupied territory" but, unlike Bush, Obama's proposal has Israel retreating from its own land, returning to indefensible 1967 borders and trusting in the peaceful intentions of its neighbors. Bush didn't go nearly that far, citing in his 2004 "road map" that "in light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949."

Obama went even further, linking America's continuing support for the Jewish state's very security with his demand that it surrender the territory, stating, "The United States does Israel no favors when we fail to couple an unwavering commitment to its security with an insistence that Israel respect the legitimate claims and rights of the Palestinians." Of all the countries in history that have won wars, only Israel is being denied the fruits of its victory in 1967.

Obama appears to have adopted as policy the controversial agreement Carter reached with Hamas last year to establish a Palestinian state in the territories won by Israel 42 years ago. Additionally, and again in sharp contrast to the Bush Administration, which opposed a Palestinian national unity government, Obama has communicated his support, through Special Envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell, for the formation of a Hamas-Fatah coalition government. Obama has even gone so far as to request Congress amend the Omnibus Appropriations Act of 2009 to enable the United States to continue to provide financial aid to any Palestinian government if the President determines that it is in the interests of national security.

As the United States, the European Union and other countries have classified Hamas as a terrorist organization, America under Obama would appear to have strange new bedfellows. Perhaps the president has forgotten that Hamas' charter (Article 7) advocates the killing of all Jews by Muslims, its leaders are Holocaust deniers, that his own FBI director, Robert Mueller, in testimony before the U.S. Senate, cited "the FBI's assessment that there is a ...threat of a coordinated terrorist attack in the U.S. from Palestinian terrorist organizations, such as Hamas," that Hamas has never accepted Israel's right to exist and is committed to "obliterating" it (preamble to Hamas charter), and that, according to Defense Secretary Robert Gates last January, Hamas and another terrorist organization, Hezbollah, have joined with Iran in fomenting "subversive activity" in Latin America. Or perhaps he believes America's stated policy of not negotiating with terrorists -- established by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and reaffirmed by Obama as a presidential candidate in April 2008 -- should be scrapped.

The United States is proving to be a fair-weather ally, abandoning Israel in the face of an impending existential threat from a nuclear Iran. Obama's self-declared "evenhanded" approach to solving the Middle East "problem" would appear to consist of continually pressuring Israel to give up its secure borders while simultaneously enabling grave threats to Israel's very existence, refusing to engage the United States in taking action to halt Iran's nuclear weapons program. Last May, the president connected the dots thusly:

To the extent that we can make peace... between the Palestinians and the Israelis, then I think it actually strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.

This idealistic view misses the point -- Iran isn't interested in a two-state solution. In the words of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "Israel must be wiped off the map," is a "stinking corpse," "is on its way to annihilation" and "has reached the end like a dead rat." Not a lot of room to negotiate there.

Nor is there room to negotiate Iran's nuclear weapons program. As Obama belatedly acknowledged on Sept. 26 regarding the country's newly disclosed nuclear power facility, "the size and configuration of this facility is inconsistent with a peaceful program." Iran desires global power and to spread the religious and political ideology of the Islamic Revolution, so what's left to negotiate? Access to nuclear energy for peaceful uses isn't on Iran's shopping list.

Iran and Syria rank as the leading state sponsors of terrorism, yet the president has removed a longstanding export ban on American technology to Syria, allowing the transfer of spare aircraft parts, information technology and telecommunications equipment, all material that could also benefit the air force of Syria's close ally, Iran. At the same time, Obama actually suspended the sale of military equipment to Israel -- holding up the shipment of Apache helicopters after Israel moved to defend its citizenry against daily Hamas-enabled rocket barrages earlier this year -- equipment necessary to safeguard Israel's security against overwhelming odds. Syria, an unrepentant state supporter of terrorism, was exempted by Obama from the longtime ban on the sale of sensitive, dual-use technologies. Yet, it is only Israel that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the United States as America's most important and dependable ally in combating terrorism. Can the president see the difference?

Obama spoke eloquently to the United Nations about having compassion for "the Palestinian boy in Gaza who has ... no country to call his own." Where's his concern for the 3,000-year-old Jewish communities in Arab lands that were ethnically cleansed between 1948 and the early 1970s? Commencing with Arab League retaliation for the declaration of the State of Israel, 1 million Jews were forcibly removed from their homes and personal property, forfeiting 62,000 square miles of land (nearly five times Israel's 12,600 square miles) and assets worth approximately $300 billion. What of their "right of return?"

By tying the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to improving Muslim-U.S. relations, Obama has forced Israel into the position of answering for U.S. failures in the Muslim world and making the sacrifices necessary to mend that relationship. Obama has placed immense pressure on Israel to halt settlement building. Where is the equal pressure on the Palestinian Authority to ensure Israel's security? Obama's far greater pressure on the Israelis has emboldened Arab intransigence and moved the Middle East farther away from the prospect of peace.

Case in point: Last weekend, Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian chairman of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency, asserted that Israel's nuclear weapons program, not Iran's, is "the number one threat" to Middle East peace. In the words of Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, "Israel seeks Iran's recognition; Iran seeks Israel's destruction. So of course it is Israel that poses a threat." Obama's strong-arm policies toward Israel have created the opening Arab countries have long sought to solve "the Jewish problem" once and for all.

President Obama's new, "evenhanded" policy in the Middle East is anything but fair and balanced. His policies increasingly endanger and isolate Israel. At the United Nations, Obama forcefully stated that "the United States of America will never waiver in our efforts to stand up for the right of people everywhere to determine their own destiny," that is, of course, unless the people are Israelis. Without the Jewish state of Israel as a standard bearer for Western ideals of democracy in the Middle East, the world will be a far more dangerous place. Then it will be America's turn to stand alone as "Public Enemy No. 1" for Islamic fundamentalists.

This article originally appeared in the Jewish Journal.

Chelsea-Lyn Rudder: Sexism Masquerades Behind a Mini Skirt

2009-11-11T00:23:43Z

On October 22nd Brazilian college student, Geisy Arruda, attracted more attention than she bargained for when she made a trip to the restroom, and a spontaneous student protest erupted. How did the 20-year-old, who studies tourism at Bandeirante University in Sao Bernardo do Campo, incite her fellow classmates into a vile demonstration? Arruda was escorted off campus by police and subsequently expelled from the university for wearing a mini skirt!

The offending attire is actually a short, hot pink dress, with long sleeves and a high neckline. I will leave the debate over the appropriateness of Miss Arruda's outfit to the moral and fashion police of Brazil. It is the discriminatory reaction of the university that is relevant to women throughout the world.

The horrific treatment that Arruda experienced at the hands of her classmates was shocking. Flanked by police, she was escorted out of the building as the visibly hostile crowd chanted "whore." Two weeks later the university responded to this act of aggression by notifying Miss Arruda of her expulsion by way of an advertisement, which appeared in several local papers on Sunday. The public outcry and government scrutiny in reaction to the university's decision to publicly rebuke and expel Arruda was so intense that the school decided to reverse its decision within twenty-four hours of publishing the offending ads.

So why did the school paint Miss Arruda as the aggressor in this case and not the victim? Instead of protecting Arruda from a senseless and demoralizing attack, the university subjected her to additional public humiliation. Bandeirante University concluded that despite what is apparent in video of the incident, which has been viewed thousands of times on YouTube, Arruda's conduct provoked the situation, "which resulted in a collective reaction in defense of the school environment." According to the university's attorney, "She always liked to provoke boys, the problem was not with her clothes, but the way she acts, talks, crosses her legs, and walks."

In other words, she asked for it. By expelling Miss Arruda from their private institution, the school deprived her of an opportunity for higher education. But it is the double dose of humiliation that the school achieved through its public notice of her expulsion that reeks of disrespect and discrimination. The school supposedly suspended other students for their role in the incident, but those names and punishments were kept confidential. Only Arruda was permanently dismissed from the school, only she was forced to bear the scarlet letter.

Who would have thought that a short dress would cause a young woman to be treated so disgustingly by her peers in a country where the bikinis are so tiny that they necessitated the invention of the "Brazilian" bikini wax? Before finding out that Arruda had been expelled because of the incident, I assumed that this was just another YouTube generation publicity stunt. It seemed obvious that this was a staged ploy for attention, an audition to become Brazil's next break out reality star. If the footage was legitimate it seemed symptomatic of the universal principles of jealousy and insecurity. Many of the taunts aimed at Arruda were launched by other women. According to reports,a group of female students accused Arruda of attracting "too much attention" and attempted to force her into a pair of pants. This type of petty behavior amongst women is not limited to college campuses. This "threatened," "kill or be killed" mentality is visible in a multitude of social and professional settings. Believe it or not, there is not a finite amount of attention in this world. There is more than enough to go around, even for those who choose not to wear short pink dresses.

To her detractors' disappointment, Arruda's expulsion and speedy reinstatement has only garnered more attention for the young woman. The Brazilian government asked Bandeirante University to provide an explanation of its actions. Citing intolerance and discrimination, Nilcea Freire, Brazil's Minister of Policies for Women announced an investigation into the circumstances of Arruda's expulsion.

The Education Ministry gave the university 10 days to clarify its reasons for expelling the coed. Government, and civil society organizations immediately took notice, and held the university's feet to the fire. Combined with the negative media attention that the institution received it did not take long for a mea culpa to be announced. This incident appears to have reached an appropriate resolution. Unfortunately, it is doubtful that this will be the last time that a woman will be verbally assaulted and humiliated as a result of personal choice that is of little consequence to those around her.

John Feffer: Obama and Immigration

2009-11-10T23:57:50Z

Russia is disappearing. So is Japan. Europe is next to go.

It's not the rising waters of global warning that threaten these parts of the world. The problem is more basic. The Russians and Japanese, as well as large numbers of Europeans, are not having enough children to replace themselves. The birth rates across a large swath of Eurasia are considerably below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies.

To prevent further shrinkage, many of these countries have instituted policies that encourage reproduction, such as more generous family leave and better child care.While such policies are essential regardless of a country's fertility rate, they are not going to solve the disappearing country problem. Birth rates continue to remain very low in Taiwan (1.14), South Korea (1.21), Japan (1.21), Ukraine (1.26), Poland (1.28), and Italy (1.31). In the 1970s, only 24 countries had birth rates of 2.1 or less. Today, over 70 countries fall into this category.

Pushing for another baby boom is also globally irresponsible. At a time of climate and energy crises, the earth simply can't take on too many more passengers. Women bearing children in the industrialized world, in particular, have an enormous impact on global warming: American women having babies generate seven times the carbon output of Chinese women having babies.

The solution lies not in the greater production of people but in their more equitable distribution. The answer to the disappearing country problem is immigration.Birth dearth countries already rely heavily on foreign workers to meet their labor shortage. Their remittances, although reduced by the current global economic crisis, have helped in a modest way to bridge the wealth gap between the developing and developed world.

But foreign workers only temporarily address a symptom of the deeper problem. Only by lowering the barriers to citizenship -- as Germany did in 2000 -- can shrinking countries revive their economies and become more dynamic international players.

It won't be easy to persuade Russians to welcome large numbers of Chinese into Siberia or Italy to embrace more Nigerians. The rancorous immigration debate in America demonstrates that fear and xenophobia can overwhelm practical considerations even in immigration nations.Demography, however, is destiny. The pull of economic need and the push of population pressures in the global south are already creating the next great migration.

Rather than watch these patterns unfold, world leaders should act preemptively. We've had global summits on population, racism, and the environment. We urgently need a migration summit to coordinate immigration policies, improve the integration of migrants, and address the inevitable xenophobic backlash.

President Obama, the son of an immigrant, should spearhead the initiative. By pushing for a migration summit, he can demonstrate that the United States is finally ready to play well with others. Such a Statue of Liberty play would be a fitting way for the president to spend the political capital of his Nobel Prize and secure his legacy as a global leader.

Cross-posted from Foreign Policy In Focus, where you can read the full post. To subscribe to FPIF's e-zine World Beat, click here.

Sharon Kelly: The Tide is Turning in the Fight to Close Guantanamo

2009-11-10T23:45:54Z

Yesterday, a heated debate took place on the Senate floor over an amendment proposed by Senator Lindsey Graham that would have prevented the 9/11 defendants from facing justice in U.S. federal courts. It did not pass. In a major victory for our campaign to close Guantanamo the Senate rejected this attempt to derail Guantanamo's closure and prevent the United States from rebuilding our reputation.

The voices of dozens of retired military leaders, experienced prosecutors, correctional officers, and committed activists who all want to see Guantanamo swiftly closed -- and understand that our institutions are up to the job of dealing with terrorist suspects -- is starting to break through and be heard by Congress. As we await the announcement of President Obama's plan to close Guantanamo, we can be hopeful that the tide of fear-mongering that has muddied this debate is being to ebb.

Victories like this take work. Last night on the Senate floor, Senator Patrick Leahy pointed to the bipartisan declaration signed by 120 prominent Americans including former Members of Congress, high-ranking military officials and judges, that Human Rights First partnered with the Constitution Project to organize. As today's Wall Street Journal noted, "Hours after the petition's release, the Senate rejected an amendment that would have barred prosecuting Guantanamo inmates in federal court."
Also yesterday, Human Rights First traveled to Michigan where a debate has been underway over whether Guantanamo detainees will be sent to the Standish prison facility. Two retired military leaders who traveled there with us had their message of support for closing Guantanamo appear in an op-ed published in the Detroit Free Press.

Most importantly, this victory took the help of people all across the country. Within hours of sounding the alarm, thousands took action, sending messages to their Senators letting them know that they opposed this destructive amendment.

Join us in this important effort to make sure Guantanamo is closed. You can sign up to help and stay informed on our website and on Facebook.

Bernard-Henri Lévy: The Fall of the Berlin Wall: Between Justice and the Cliché, We Must Choose Justice

2009-11-10T23:30:42Z

We are in the process of constructing a new myth: that of the "fall-of-the-wall-that-no one-predicted."

Because finally...

That no one knew the exact moment it would happen, yes, of course.

That the playing out of the episode itself, the chain of causes and circumstances that ultimately made it happen, remains enigmatic still today, sure.

That the form of this revolution followed the form of all revolutions, the true ones, those that rupture the rhythm of days in interrupting the regularities; that no historical explanation can render a perfect account of it because this revolution, like all revolutions, excludes and suspends, by nature, normal historical logic; that we were the witnesses, there, of a kind of miracle where we saw the people of the small nations of Central Europe reclaim the rudder of History from the great powers and reappropriate their own destiny, it is evident.

But to conclude, based on this evidence, that we witnessed this spectacle in a state of total stupor; to infer from the true fact that the event was incalculable the false idea that it was unimaginable; in short, to conclude from the extraordinary character of this upheaval the fact that the entire world would have swallowed whole the fable of an indestructible Sovietism; this is what is consistent neither with the truth of the matter, nor with the memory of those who had the chance to experience this unprecedented moment.

I remember the writers who, from Chalamov to Soljenitsyne, very clearly predicted that communism would collapse.

I remember the men and women that were called dissidents and who, like Andrei Amalrik, writing, already in 1970, a book with an unequivocal title, Will the USSR Survive until 1984?, had doubts only about the date.

I remember intellectuals who, in the West, relayed the words of these dissidents, and thus gave a second wind to an anti-totalitarianism whose message was that the demystification of the communist fraud was not only desirable, but probable, and, sooner or later, inevitable.

I remember an essayist, Cornelius Castoriadis, who in one of his last books Devant la Guerre [Facing War], saw in the hypertrophy of the Soviet military apparatus, in its exponential, insane metastatic growth, the sign of a cancer eating the system away from the inside, and ultimately condemning it.

I remember, to limit myself to the deceased, another essayist, my friend Jean-François Revel, who wouldn't have been so distressed about the "totalitarian temptation" in democracies, of the "grand parade" in which they engage to please the men of stone of a Sovietism that was itself petrified, of their incomprehensible, dizzying, suicidal "cowardice," if he hadn't known these regimes were at death's door.

I remember Michel Foucault saying and repeating that all discursive and political formation has a birth, and thus a death--and that this formation will indeed finish, one day, like the others, by dying.

I remember Pope John Paul II who, when he evoked the appearance of the Virgin Mary announcing, already in 1917, the death of Sovietism to the three shepherds of Fatima, told us unconditionally that the hour so anticipated wasn't, all of a sudden, very far away.

I remember the simple people that I came across in my travels in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany and the Soviet Union, before 1989, and who were increasingly less duped by the mystification that was holding on only by the fear it inspired or by the spinelessness of a "free world" betraying its own values.

We are in the process, in other words, of leisurely confusing two things.

Cowardice and blindness.

The fact that we didn't want to hear and the fact that nothing was said.

The attitude, on one hand, of the Kissingers, Brandts, or Giscard d'Estaings slamming the door on the condemned from the east; that of Thatcher or Mitterrand who, we know now, did everything, up until the last moment, to prevent the reunification of Germany and to save what could be saved from the former order; that, finally, of an intellectual clergy who, it cannot be disputed, found, in its immense majority in the United States as well as in France, nothing to find fault with in the scandal that was putting half of Europe in a space, a time, a civilization definitively different--we are in the process of confusing that with, on the other hand, the apparent silence, the long, silent, angry murmur of people who, on the ground, had understood for a long time and who were only waiting for the final spark to dare say that the king, or in other words the dictatorship, was naked.

This confusion is more than a mistake; it is a fault.

It is worse than a legend; it is disinformation.

And this disinformation, far from dissipating the lie, revives it in another way.

This is how we scratch out, in spirit, decades of the history of thought and of struggle.

And this is how we lay the foundation for tomorrows that will become disillusioned with a rewritten, distorted, revised History.

Sick of, yes, the banality, the clichés, rehashed ad nauseum; and honor to those who, with their minds or with their feet, saw the collapse approach and hastened it.

Translated from French by Sara Phenix.

Kevin Coval: The Wall: 20 Years After Berlin

2009-11-10T23:29:50Z

"The night of Nov. 9... was the fulfillment of a dream." German Chancellor Angela Merkel

today concrete stretches into sky,

twenty-six feet high. drab slabs

cut into four hundred and thirty-six

miles of country. dominos to block

the sun. an accordion of cement,

strung like a clothes line, wheezing

a deep, lone note.

today in al-Ma'sara children

grab barbwire with bare hands. march

toward a wall soldiers protect with guns.

soldiers push the children back,

bloody their hands on barbwire.

today armed men push children in the holy land.

today in Berlin, people celebrate.

politicians give speeches. the east and west

battle to tell the story in the light

that most suits them. regardless

how it is spun, people demanded

the wall fall.

twenty years later, more walls.

nations erect walls to keep people out.

walls are static, ugly and stupid.

people are resilient, fluid and numerous.

people break walls.

The Court in The Hague said the wall

is illegal. the wall is Israel's myopia.

america's revisionism. the wall bulldozes

hundreds of Palestinian homes

in a shrinking, stolen land.

today in Qalandiya, protestors

tore one slat of wall down,

twenty years to the day the wall

in Berlin fell.

today Palestinians wear neon yellow

shirts, black block letters across their chest

read, JERUSALEM, WE ARE COMING.

coming thru jidar al fasal al unsari!

coming thru the wall of apartheid!

coming to the city of peace!

as long as the wall exists

the city will have no name!

sons and daughters of the city

coming to reclaim the name!

walls fall like dominos.

the earth moves and people

demand the freedom to move

as the earth does; the freedom

to see cousins, to buy olives,

to visit hospitals. walls fall

or get ripped down or knocked

over. people walk thru walls

like superheroes.

today the state of Israel builds a wall.

today a piece of the wall was toppled down.

today the people of Palestine and today the people

everywhere dream of peace, dream no walls,

dream of the day the wall will

come down, piece by piece.

Johann Hari: Face the Facts -- and End the War on Drugs

2009-11-10T23:19:53Z

The proponents of the ‘war on drugs’ are well-intentioned people who believe they are saving people from the nightmare of drug addiction and making the world safer. But this self-image has turned into a faith – and like all faiths, it can only be maintained by cultivating a deliberate blindness to the evidence. The recent furor about the British government’s decision to fire its chief scientific advisor on drugs, Professor David Nutt, missed the point. Yes, it is shocking that he was ditched for pointing out the mathematical truth that taking ecstasy is less dangerous than horse-riding and smoking cannabis is less harmful than drinking alcohol. But this is how the war on drugs has to be fought. The unofficial slogan of the prohibitionists for decades has been: The facts will only undermine the war, so invent some that show how successful we are, fast.

Look at the United States, the country that pioneered the drug war, and still uses its military and diplomatic might to demand the rest of the world cracks down. In 1998, the Office of National Drug Policy (ONDP) was ordered by Congress to stop funding any scientific research that might give the impression that we should redirect funding from anti-trafficking busts into medical treatment of addicts, or that there is any argument to legalize, regulate or medicalize drug use. It’s Nutt cubed: only tell us what we want to hear. So, to give a small example, the ONDP spent $14 billion on anti-cannabis ads aimed at teenagers, and $43 million to find out if the ads worked. They discovered that kids who saw the ads were more likely afterwards to get stoned, so the evidence was suppressed, and the ad campaign marched on.

What would happen if we started to build our drugs policy around the facts, rather than our desire for a fuzzy feeling inside? Professor Nutt only took tiny baby steps in this direction before he was booted out. He argued that we should rank drugs by the harm they do, rather than by the size of the panicked headlines they trigger. Now the row is fading, it is possible to see how conservative he was. A must-read new report out this week – ‘After The War on Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation’ – follows the facts as far as they will take us. It shows that the rational solution is to take the drug market back from the unregulated anarchy of criminal gangs, and transfer it to pharmacists, off-licenses, and doctors who operate in the legal economy. To see why this is necessary, we have to look at some of the facts our politicians refuse to see.

Fact One: The drug war hands one of our biggest industries to armed criminal gangs, who unleash terrible violence across the country. When alcohol was prohibited in the US in the 1920s, it didn’t vanish. No: armed gangsters like Al Capone stepped in and sold it – and they shot anybody who got in their way. Yet today, Wine Rack does not shoot up Thresher’s. Oddbin’s does not threaten to kill anybody who sees its staff selling wine. Why? Because it wasn’t the booze that caused the violence; it was the prohibition. Once alcohol was reclaimed for legal businesses, the dealer-on-dealer violence swiftly stopped.

Where there is a huge profit to be made in a black market – it’s 3000 percent on drugs today – people will fight and kill to control it. Arrest a dealer, and you simply trigger a new war for his patch, with the rest of us caught in the crossfire. The Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman calculated that there are 10,000 murders in the US alone every year caused this way. Legalize, and you bankrupt most organized crime overnight. With their profits in free-fall, the gangsters don’t suddenly become cuddly – but the huge financial incentives to remain a gangster wither fast. It’s the drug war that keeps them in business, and legalization that shuts them down. As Friedman said, “Prohibition is the drug dealer’s best friend.”

Fact Two: Under prohibition, drug use becomes more hardcore. Before alcohol prohibition, most Americans drank beer and wine. After prohibition was introduced, super-strong moonshine became the most popular drink, as booze rapidly became 150 percent stronger. Why? The writer Richard Cowan called it “the iron law of prohibition”: whenever you criminalize a substance, it gets stronger. Because they are smuggling and stashing a substance, the dealers condense their product to give the biggest possible kick while taking up the smallest possible space. It’s at work today: it’s why dealers invented crack in the 1980s. The researchers Matthew Robinson and Renee Scherlen found: “The increased deadly nature of drugs under prohibition led to 15,000 more deaths in 2000 [in the US alone] than [if] prohibition had not made drugs more dangerous.”

Fact Three: The drug war doesn’t reduce drug use – but the alternatives can. Some people believe these two dark side-effects are a price worth paying if prohibition stops a significant number of people from picking up their first bong or needle. It was an understandable enough argument – until the evidence came in from countries that have experimented with ending the drug war. On July 1^st 2001, Portugal decriminalized the possession of all drugs, including heroin and cocaine. You can have and use as much as you like for your own needs, and if you are caught, the police might refer you to a rehab programme, but you will never get a criminal record. (Supplying and selling remains illegal.) The prohibitionists predicted a catastrophic rise in addiction, and even I – an instinctive legalizer – was nervous.

Now we know: overall drug use actually fell a little. As a major study by Glenn Greenwald for the Cato Institute found, among teenagers the fall was fastest: 13-year-olds are 4 percent less likely to use drugs, and 16-year-olds are 6 percent less likely. As the iron law of prohibition predicts, the use of hard drugs has fallen fastest: heroin use has crashed by nearly 50 percent among the young, who were not yet addicted. The Portuguese have switched the billions that used to be spent chasing and jailing addicts to providing them with prescriptions and rehab. The number of people in drug treatment is now up by 147 percent. Almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back. Indeed, many citizens want to take the next step: legalize supply too, and break the back of the gangs.

Portugal is no fluke. It turns out that wherever the drug laws are relaxed, drug use stays the same, or – where spending is switched to treatment – falls. Between 1972 and 1978, eleven US states decriminalized marijuana possession. The National Research Council found that the number of dope-smokers stayed the same. In Switzerland, a decade ago the government started providing legal centres where people could safely inject heroin – for free. Burglary rates fell by 60 percent, and street homelessness ended. A study by the Lancet – one of the most respected medical journals in the world – found that the rate of people becoming new heroin addicts fell by 82 percent. Why? Heroin addicts didn’t need to recruit new addicts to sell to in order to feed their habit. The pyramid scheme of heroin addiction was broken.

So the drug war doesn’t achieve its goal of reducing addiction. All it does achieve is horrific gang violence – and in some cases the cartels gut whole countries like Mexico and Afghanistan. It does unwittingly press people into using harder and more dangerous drugs. And it does waste tens of billions of dollars that could really reduce drug addiction, by spending it on treatment for addicts.

The prohibitionists are therefore left a contradiction between their message and the facts. They can either change their message, or try to suppress the facts. Last week, the British government made its choice. But how long will this be tenable for them or the wider world? The prohibitionists are – from the best intentions and the highest motives – unleashing a catastrophe. Human beings have been finding ways to get stoned or high since we lived in caves. In our attempt to end this natural impulse, we have created a problem worse than drug use itself.

There is another way. Imagine a country with no drug dealers killing to protect their patch or terrorizing whole estates. Imagine a country where burglary fell by 60 percent. Imagine an America where we spent all these billions treating addicts as ill people who need our help, not hunting them down as criminals who need punishment. We can be that country. We just have to come down from chasing the dragon of a drug-free world – and start looking soberly at the facts.

Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here. You can email him at johann -at- johannhari.com

To read an archive of his articles about drugs, click here.

Johann is also a contributing writer for Slate magazine. To read his latest article for them - about the loon Ayn Rand - click here.

You can follow Johann on Twitter at www.twitter.com/johannhari101

Noura Erakat: Delusional Self-Defense, Delusional Congressional Vote

2009-11-10T22:43:13Z

By Jimmy Leas and Noura Erakat

The 344-36 House vote last week condemning the Goldstone Report, which encourages Israel and Hamas to conduct "credible" independent investigations of war crimes committed in Gaza, may help Israeli leaders avoid prosecution in the short-term. However, the House vote and the negative US votes at the UN will have long-term detrimental effects both on Israel and on the U.S.'s moral authority.

Consider that within the General Assembly, 110 nations endorsed the Report, while the U.S. was among the minority of 18 nations that voted against the endorsement. The Congressional vote will increase the likelihood of a worldwide campaign to push the UN General Assembly, the International Criminal Court, or other countries, under universal jurisdiction, to hold Israel to account for war crimes committed in Gaza.

Self-defense is of utmost concern because self-defense was a central element of Israel's ongoing argument for the war and is the heart of the U.S.'s rejection of Goldstone. Israeli officials have featured that claim in every forum leading up to Operation Cast Lead's pummeling strikes. It was Israel's justification in its letter to the UN Secretary General when Israeli State officials announced the war on December 27, 2008. It was the main theme of Netanyahu's recent speeches to the General Assembly and to the Knesset. It was the main theme of the most recent House Resolution. It will be the U.S.'s main reason to veto the forthcoming Security Council vote. The self-defense claim is not just a matter of public relations; it is essential. Absent self-defense, political and military officials in Israel are subject to charges that go beyond those in the Goldstone Report, including, but not limited to, the crime of war of aggression.

However, the self-defense claim propagated by Israeli and U.S. politicians since the initiation of Operation Cast Lead is inconsistent with both the facts and the law. Within weeks of entering into the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement, Hamas rocket fire had come to a halt. According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the ceasefire was so successful that it brought "normal life and "calm" back to Israeli towns near Gaza. In an article posted on July 27, 2008, the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs even lauds Hamas, stating:

Publicly, Hamas leaders have stated time and again that the lull is a Palestinian national interest. On several occasions, Hamas members have arrested Fatah operatives who were involved in firing at Israel and confiscated their arms.

Calm prevailed for four months until Israeli forces broke the ceasefire agreement on November 4, 2008. While the world's gaze turned to one of the U.S.'s most historic elections that day, Israel launched an armed incursion into Gaza, accompanied by aerial bombing, killing six Hamas members and catapulting the region into a renewed wave of violent hostilities. Hamas rocket fire immediately followed the Israeli attack. Two weeks later Israel's largest circulation paper quoted Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak admitting that "the recent waves of rocket attacks are a result of our operations, which have resulted in the killing of twenty Hamas gunmen." Barak's admission, consistent with the fact that Israel broke the ceasefire, makes Israel's self-defense claim baseless.

Still, Hamas offered to reinstate and extend the ceasefire a month later on December 23, 2008. Israel refused, ducking the chance to reach a diplomatic agreement that would have again ended rocket fire and brought the security desired by Israel. Instead, Israel chose massive escalation and four days later launched a gruesome aerial offensive against Gaza.

On the Offensive's 17th day, Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni boasted that Israel was "going wild-and this is a good thing." The targeting of civilians described in the Goldstone Report seems to corroborate this Israeli attitude as Israeli forces attacked targets in Gaza that had nothing to do with Israel's stated military objective of stopping rocket fire. Israeli forces targeted schools, hospitals, factories, agricultural land, the only flour mill in Gaza, an egg farm, thousands of private homes, government buildings, and Palestinian civilians.

The Goldstone Report concluded:

While the Israeli Government has sought to portray its operations as essentially a response to rocket attacks in the exercise of its right to self-defence, the Mission considers the plan to have been directed, at least in part, at a different target: the people of Gaza as a whole.(Goldstone par. 1883)

A central element of the law of self-defense, as well as the laws regarding the conduct of war once started, is one unequivocal standard around which no controversy exists: the prohibition on targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. As demonstrated not only by the Goldstone Report, but also in reports by Israeli soldiers who participated in Operation Cast Lead and reports by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, and the National Lawyers Guild, Israeli forces directly targeted civilians and civilian infrastructure during its 22-day offensive. Even if Israel had not itself broken the ceasefire, its legal argument for self-defense would therefore be ineffective. Israel's only rebuttal to these charges was a military investigation conducted by the Israeli Army itself. But that self-serving investigation was nearly unanimously condemned as lacking independence and impartiality (see PDF).

Thus, neither the facts nor the law support an Israeli self-defense claim. Rather than condemn Israel's act of aggression and its ongoing occupation and blockade of the Gaza Strip, Congress added its name to a pungent piece of manipulative delusion: that Israel's onslaught of Gaza constituted an act of self-defense. The House is now on record disavowing international law and international accountability mechanisms. People around the world will be persuaded that protests, boycotts, and divestment campaigns are all the more necessary, and they will look to places outside the US political establishment for justice.

Noura Erakat is a Palestinian-American attorney and James Marc Leas is a Jewish-American attorney, and both participated in the National Lawyers Guild delegation to Gaza in February.

Saad Khan: Pakistan's Half-hearted Military Offensives Aren't Enough

2009-11-10T20:25:24Z

The Pakistani military has launched a major offensive against the Taliban in the South Waziristan region. The area is home of the Pakistani Taliban; a terrorist outfit that conducts sabotage activities in Pakistan but remains aloof from the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. North Waziristan, on the other hand, is the hub of the Afghan Taliban and they maintain cordial relations with Pakistani intelligence agencies and even get some tactile support. Although the Pakistani military is claiming victory and has faced minimal resistance but there are no independent resources to verify these reports. The area has been walled off for journalists and they have to rely on government handouts.

Additionally, there is a major crisis of people that have been displaced from the war-torn region. Secretary Clinton announced aid for the internally-displaced persons (IDP) and the Pakistani government has also announced a meager aid to these people. American military is also secretly complimenting the offensive by providing modern weapons and gadgetry to the Pakistani army. This is in addition to $7.5 billions given under the Kerry-Lugar-Berman legislation.

Despite an all-out effort by the US government, the Pakistani military is still reluctant on taking the Taliban challenge head-on. There have been reports in independent media -- Pakistani media face a lot of restrictions to reveal secrets and have just self-imposed a tougher censorship policy -- that the Pakistani military tipped off the Taliban before the offensive. According to a report in BBC Urdu, Pakistani intelligence agencies might have struck a deal with the Taliban in this regard.

It appears that the Pakistani military entered a deal with the Taliban where they agreed to avoid any "lose-lose" position. Pakistani military recaptured the territories while the Taliban retained their cadre, ammunition and organizational structure.

In any case, South Waziristan offensive was announced in May but it actually started after a delay of five months. It was enough time for the Taliban to finalize their combat strategies i.e. tacitcal retreat. The Pakistani military has benefited from this deal but not the common Pakistanis. Terrorist attacks have become a daily affair and hardly a day passes when dozens of people do not lose their lives.

North Waziristan Taliban, under the leadership of Haqqanis, are still strong in their bases and gathering support from some elements of the Pakistani military. As the Pakistani Taliban have also joined them in recent weeks, they might launch major attacks in Afghanistan. Although the real perpetrators of this carnage remain in the "open closet", the lack of a concerted effort would hamper any half-hearted attempts of the Pakistani military.

Alex Matthews: Zimbabwe Allowed to Mine "Blood Diamonds"

2009-11-10T19:42:05Z

Last week it was announced that Mugabe's Kimberley Process cronies have decided to give him until June to withdraw the soldiers in the Marange diamond fields. The army runs smuggling operations and use forced labour in mines whose profits benefit Zanu PF.

Human Rights Watch exposed the horrors of Marange in June. A task team from the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme followed soon after and confirmed HRW's findings. They recommended Zimbabwe be suspended from trading in diamonds.

But the horrors have continued. "As recently as late October 2009, [HRW] uncovered rampant abuses by the military in Marange including forced labor, child labor, killings, beatings, smuggling and corruption," says the rights body.

There is a clear case for Zimbabwe to be suspended. The gems from Marange are blood diamonds, extracted through the persecution and oppression of those living in the area. But Zimbabwe gets away with it. By letting them off the hook, "this diamond monitoring body has utterly lost credibility," says Georgette Gagnon, HRW's Africa director. She is absolutely right.

Having failed to do anything about the rights abuses and military occupation of Marange over the past few months since abuses have been exposed, it is highly unlikely that Mugabe will implement the Kimberley Process's recommendations by the agreed deadline. And with friends like South Africa, Namibia, Tanzania, DRC and Russia -- why should he? Doubtless they'll rush to his defence in June next year.

So the army will continue its plunder. The diamonds will continue to be smuggled. The people -- women, children included -- will continue to be oppressed and exploited. And the revenues will continue to fund senior Zanu PF apparatchiks' lavish lifestyles. All the while, the country continues its implosion: blackouts roll across the country; people starve; hospitals have no medicine; sewage trickles in the street.

Perhaps we should all boycott purchasing diamonds. Of course in these dark times it's not like there are vast hordes rushing to the jewelery shop anyway. But let's boycott nonetheless. If there was a significant drop in sales, perhaps the diamond producing countries that allowed Zimbabwe's shame to continue, will develop scruples. It's worth a try.

After all, there's very little one can do, it seems, except jump up and down, and weep and pray that sanity may prevail in Zimbabwe. MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai's re-engagement with Mugabe in the sham "unity" government is a great pity. It means his threats are empty. Mugabe can continue regardless. Do you really think Mugabe's going to fall in line within thirty days like Tsvagirai's demanded he do? And what then -- another deadline?

The unity government has failed to stop Zanu PF's reign of terror: human rights continue to be violated with brutal impunity. And the country continues to fall apart. Tsvangarai is an appeaser. His dalliance with Zanu PF makes me curious: Is he stupid, naïve, or has he been bought by Mugabe's machine? He reminds me of Neville Chamberlain, and the British prime minister's desperate attempts to secure "peace in our time" in the months before World War 2. Well, as that tragic history showed us, appeasement only led to immense suffering, cataclysmic violence and upheaval.

If Morgan Tsvangirai really cares about his country and the members of his party that continue being persecuted, he must act decisively and abandon the marriage he should never have agreed to. Mugabe needs his foe -- and bedfellow -- to maintain his legitimacy. If the latter walks away, the promise of aid, investment and all the other lifelines that would prop up the Zanu PF regime will be pulled away.

I admit, it's not easy for old Morgan. His job is difficult. And lonely. Shamefully, the SADC (which should stand for Southern African Dictators' Club thanks to its tireless support for Mugabe's tyranny) is not interested in true democracy taking root in Zimbabwe. Rather, the regional body craves a continuation of the post-colonial aristocracy in which despotic psychopaths can pillage and persecute freely because they are somehow entitled to. SADC's logic appears to be that such ghastly behaviour is reward for having liberated their countries from the Europeans.

But the threat of regional alienation is no excuse for Tsvangirai to be co-opted by the SADC. It is no excuse for him to become the useful idiot acting out SADC's willful contempt for the democratic will of the Zimbabwean people. Zimbabwe has suffered long enough. It is time Tsvangirai stops talking and starts acting.

Loretta Napoleoni: 20 Years After the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Will Another Superpower Meet Its End in Afghanistan?

2009-11-10T16:40:32Z

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US is losing the war in Afghanistan, a country that indirectly contributed to the break-up of the USSR. Where coalition forces today battle the Taliban and al Qaeda, in the 1980s, the Soviets fought the Mujahedeen -- a Muslim army of volunteers that Moscow called terrorists. Fighting the anti-Soviet Jihad, a brutal war funded by the CIA and the Saudis, became too costly for bankrupt Moscow. In a painful and humiliating withdrawal, the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan in February 1989, just a few months before the implosion of the Soviet System. Without that defeat we might not be celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the end of the Cold War or a unified Europe today. Remarkably, the central Asian country of Afghanistan seems once again to be shaping our future.
It is paradoxical that the graveyard of one superpower should become a battlefield for the other. It is even more ironic that the US, the very nation that used the Mujahedeen and this deeply hostile country to defeat the Soviet Union, should now have fallen victim to this current ordeal.

The similarities between the two Afghan wars are countless. The Soviet generals kept requesting more men in order to gain control of this vast land, because its high-tech war machinery did not work against such evasive enemies. The US and coalition armies face the same problem: mainstream war tactics do not deliver the expected results. All victories turn out to be illusions. As the Soviet generals found out, winning a village is pointless because, the day after, the terrorists are back in control of its streets. The Taliban are as intangible as the Mujahedeen; they vanish into the hills at night and are back fighting in the morning. Both groups littered the main roads with hidden explosives, the Mujahedeen used anti-tank mines while the Taliban employ improvised explosive devices (homemade bombs) to blow up soldiers on patrol as well as civilians.

Even the geography of the wars is remarkably similar, with much of the fighting during the anti-Soviet Jihad taking place in the south, near the Pakistani border. The Mujahedeen took refuge from the Soviet army in Waziristan, where today the Taliban and al Qaeda have their headquarters. Most Soviet soldiers lost their lives in Kandahar and Helmand province: the troubled areas of this new Afghan war.

Perhaps the most remarkable similarity between the two wars rests on their final objective: to transform Afghanistan into a friendly country by turning into a replica of the political status of the invading superpower. Twenty years ago Moscow wanted it to become a satellite state of the Soviet bloc; today the US wants to turn it into a Western-style democracy. This strategy is a dangerous exercise in nation building.

Until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US had been cautious in playing this game, which seemed to be more of a Moscow pastime. Two of Washington's prior attempts, turning defeated World War II enemies, Germany and Japan, into democratic countries, had been successful--even if it was only with the reunification of Germany 50 years later that the US finally completed its job. The fall of the Berlin Wall showed that democracy was transferable and that it was a remarkable force for bringing nations in line with the American vision of the world. Perhaps watching Europeans tear apart the Wall with their bare hands in order to reach friends and relatives across that Cold War divide had convinced the US that democracy was the most powerful weapon it possessed. That might explain why, after the end of the Cold War, nation-building became Washington's preferred pastime.

A 2003 Rand Corporation study shows that of the 55 peace operations mounted by the US since 1945, 41 came after 1989. Police intervention has always been followed by nation-building. And the record seems very poor. In 1993 Washington pulled out of Somalia at the first sign of resistance. In 1994 it opted to let an international force restore order in Rwanda. It hesitated before joining European troops in Bosnia and before committing itself to a military intervention in Kosovo. But each time it did go in, the "US-led intervention has been wider in scope and more ambitious than its predecessor," concludes the report.

George W. Bush criticized Clinton's attempts to spread Western democracy, but after 9/11 he ordered a massively ambitious nation building plan for Afghanistan and Iraq. None of the post-Cold War presidents, including Barak Obama today, has understood that nation-building is not primarily about economic reconstruction but rather about political transformation. Americans are making the same mistakes the Soviets did. The US has failed to install viable democracies in Somalia, Haiti, and Afghanistan because all three countries are divided ethnically, socio-economically or tribally. In Afghanistan, Western-style democracy may well be the wrong model to apply.

The Soviet Union crumbled when the economic and political model upon which it rested became obsolete; the Kremlin failed to modernize and the ill-fated war in Afghanistan exposed this failure. Moscow should never have gotten involved. Now Washington risks doing the same if it limits its modernization merely to the election of Barack Obama, the first black President, who campaigned on the promise of change. What is needed is a fresh, new approach to bringing peace and prosperity to countries fundamentally different from our own.

Lionel Beehner: Why A Maximalist Af-Pak Policy Will Not Work

2009-11-10T16:35:17Z

It's unbelievable, really. The US military is holding up Iraq as a model for Afghanistan. They'll tell you it took a few years to get right but by golly, Iraq is at peace with itself, with a large armed forces, a democratically elected government, and commerce flourishing. Let's replicate that "success" in Afghanistan.

Iraq is remarkably more peaceful than it was in 2006. Baghdad is safer than many U.S. cities (but, given the sad state of our inner cities, is that a good barometer?). And the government has reclaimed its monopoly on the use of force, important for any government trying to claim legitimacy.

So let's turn to Afghanistan. There is a weak and corrupt government, little to no standing armed forces, and parts of the country entirely controlled by the Taliban. Okay, so Obama is expected to move in an additional 30,000-plus troops (I'm told he will make his decision before heading to China but not publicize it until afterward and that he will give McChrystal nearly the numbers he asked for, probably in the 30,000-35,000 ballpark). Then what? We stabilize Afghanistan, weed out corrupt elements in the government, squeeze the Taliban, and "clear, hold and build" the provinces. What then? Are we buying ourselves time to stand up the army? Creating space for political reconciliation? These are all buzz phrases carried over from the Iraq experiment -- just change "Sunni Arab" to "Pashtun" and "Anbar" to "Helmund" and it's basically the same set of challenges, right?

Except for one thing. Those who attacked us in 9/11 are safely ensconced in a remote part of Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Oops. Seems no matter how swimmingly our nation-building experiment goes across the border, that simple fact does not change. Nor is the Pakistani army willing to really take the fight to the extremists (though their recent assaults near Swat Valley are a welcome sign). As long as standing up to India is more important than eradicating terrorists, Pakistan will never become a reliable partner worthy of billions of dollars of aid. To the Biden types out there who ask: Why are we spending only $1 on Pakistan for every $20 we spend on Afghanistan? The answer is not to spend more on Pakistan but to spend less on Afghanistan. As Boston University's Andrew Bacevich has eloquently put it: "A sense of realism and a sense of proportion should oblige us to take a minimalist approach. As with Uruguay or Fiji or Estonia or other countries where U.S. interests are limited, the United States should undertake to secure those interests at the lowest cost possible."

I just returned from Sri Lanka, where a maximalist approach worked to eradicate a nasty insurgency. It was a mop-up operation that squeezed the Tamil Tigers onto a tiny swath of territory the size of Central Park. The army mowed down the top few tiers of the leadership but killed thousands of civilians in the process. The government was successful at splitting the Tiger leadership (A former Tiger commando leader is now a minister on national integration), a lesson for us as we contemplate trying to pry away moderate Taliban or include them in a power-sharing arrangement in Afghanistan. But the bigger lesson from the Sri Lankan is this: Colombo was pilloried abroad for its human rights violations and alleged war crimes. It faces a potential humanitarian catastrophe in the north, where hundreds of thousands of Tamils remain corralled in overcrowded camps. And the EU, US, and UN have called for Gaza-style investigations into what happened. Sri Lanka is lumped into the camp of nasty regimes out there: the Sudans and Burmas of the world. It will take years before its good name is restored.

So what does this mean for our Af-Pak policies? If Sri Lanka, a tiny spit of land in South Asia, was so widely denounced for its use of overwhelming force, imagine the outcry if the US tried a similar tactic to pacify Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan or Pakistan. We could wipe out the Taliban leadership probably in one fell swoop but it would not wipe out Pashtun aspirations or the other root social or economic causes of anti-US resentment. In fact, a mop-up operation of this magnitude, which would kill untold numbers of civilians, would only create more resentment. For this reason, I believe that a maximalist approach cannot work. The costs are too high. And it's not in our security interest. Better to spend the money to secure the US against a future terrorist attack, which, let's face it, is more likely to come from some sleeper cell in London, not from some bearded guy in a cave in Waziristan.

What Obama will propose is a politically expedient yet worst-of-both-worlds solution: just enough force to piss off the locals and lose their "hearts and minds," but not enough force to eradicate the threat, resulting in a slow but "acceptable" trickle of violence, enough to put Afghanistan out of mind, out of sight, at least in the eyes of most Americans. Insurgencies take time, we keep being told. It took Sri Lanka 25 years to defeat the Tamil Tigers. We should hold up neither Iraq nor Sri Lanka as an example of effective counterinsurgency. Instead we should be leveling with the Afghan government and making preparations for our eventual drawdown, not surging blindly into a conflict where we have no real vested interest.

Malou Innocent: Obama's (In)Decision on Afghanistan

2009-11-10T16:16:28Z

According to CBS News, President Barack Obama will send most, if not all, of the 40,000 additional troops that General Stanley McChrystal requested and reportedly plans to keep those troops in Afghanistan for the long-term.

If the CBS report turns out to be true -- the White House has backed away, and other news outlets are leaving the story alone for the moment -- the president's decision is disappointing, but expected. Last month, the administration ruled out the notion of a near-term U.S. exit from Afghanistan, arguing that the Taliban and al Qaeda would perceive an early pullout as a victory over the United States. But if avoiding a perception of weakness is the rationale that the administration is operating under then we have already lost by allowing our enemies to dictate the terms of the war.

Gen. McChrystal's ambitious strategy hopes to integrate U.S. troops into the Afghan population. These additional troops might reduce violence in the short- to medium-term. But this strategy rests on the presumption that Afghans in heavily contested areas want the protection of foreign troops. The reality might be very different; western forces might instead be perceived as a magnet for violence.

McChrystal's strategy also presumes that an additional 40,000 troops will be enough. But proponents of an ambitious counterinsurgency strategy need to come clean on the total bill that would be required. For a country the size of Afghanistan, with roughly 31 million people, the Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency doctrine advises between 620,000 to 775,000 counterinsurgents -- whether native or foreign. Furthermore, typical counterinsurgency missions require such concentrations of forces for a decade or more. Given these realities, we could soon hear cries of "surge," "if only," and "not enough."

Even if the United States and its allies committed themselves to decades of armed nation building, success against al Qaeda would hardly be guaranteed. After all, in the unlikely event that we forged a stable Afghanistan, al Qaeda would simply reposition its presence into other regions of the world.

It is well past time for the United States to adapt means to ends. The choice for President Obama is not between counterterrorism or counterinsurgency; but between counterterrorism and counterterrorism combined with counterinsurgency. Protecting the United States from terrorism does not require U.S. troops to police Afghan villages. Where terrorists do appear, we hardly need to tinker with their communal identities. We can target our enemies with allies on the ground or, if that fails, by relying on timely intelligence for use in targeted airstrikes or small-unit raids.

President Obama's decision on Afghanistan could define his presidency. If an escalating military strategy leads only to thousands of more deaths, and at a cost of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, then that is a bitter legacy indeed.

This post originally appeared on Cato at Liberty on November 10, 2009.

Mike Papantonio: The Death Penalty Discussion (VIDEO)

2009-11-10T16:06:41Z

The anti-death penalty movement is resurrecting the worn out talking point that executing people who murder innocent men, women, and children is too expensive. They say new studies show that government is raising taxes in order to kill the people who murder America's children, wives, and fathers. We get it. We've heard this argument before. Organizations like the Death Penalty Information Center are retooling the same quotes we reread every time there is a movement to end the death penalty.

A prison warden, and a governor or two tell us that the cost benefit analysis is bad. Their position is that it is cheaper to allow ruthless murderers to die of old age in prison. But most Americans want them to die sooner.

When you drill down to the reason we want a cold-blooded murderer dead, it's simple to understand. We want justice. Death penalty reformers call it vengeance. They attack proponents of the death penalty as barbarians with a blood lust. But our desire to execute that person who has killed our friends, or our neighbors is something more elegant than barbaric. Intuitively, we understand that justice separates us from a society living in chaos. James Wilson wrote a book he titled, The Moral Sense, where he concludes that most of us are hardwired in a way that arms us with an innate sense of justice. We are sympathetic and even angered when our neighbor is mistreated. It is that moral sense that most of the time secures our position at the top of the food chain. Reformers sometimes attempt to shame the relatives of victims who have lost family to murders so brutal that we can't find equivalent conduct even in the most primitive parts of the animal kingdom. Arguments about the possibilities of rehabilitation, the ugliness of revenge, the waste of money, and the risk of mistake, sound hollow to a mother who has had her child murdered and decapitated by a repeat sex offender.

When that mother is asked whether she wants her child's killer executed in a system that clearly is imperfect, most all of us would agree that she has the unequivocal right to say, yes.

If Wilson is right, that directive for all of us to treat others as we want to be treated was written on our hearts long before the words were ever spoken at the Sermon on the Mount.

There are a couple of ways to analyze what is happening with a movie audience when a character like ... Charles Bronson, or Clint Eastwood interrupts the life of one of those barely human characters who's wiring has short circuited. When the audience applauds with approval, we might be fearful that our civilized world has become dysfunctional. But it is more likely that what we are hearing is an expression of that innate sense of justice that Wilson identifies.

Attempts by reformers to improve a flawed death penalty system by encouraging reflection and more safeguards is something we should appreciate. However, it sometimes shows a lack of understanding about our sense of justice when they argue that killing an incorrigible sociopath who has killed our friend or neighbor is "just too expensive."