Archive for July, 2006
Future Atlas noted in March that “a democratic or at least popularly supported Iraqi government could emerge as a harsh and more effective critic of Israel,” making prospects poor for an Israel-friendly Iraq that some invasion advocates imagined before the war.
That was illustrated this week when Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki strongly condemned Israel’s actions in Lebanon, and called them “aggression.”
The NYT noted that:
The resentment of the Iraqi government toward Israel calls into question one of the rationales among some conservatives for the American invasion of Iraq — that an American-backed democratic state here would inevitably become an ally of Israel and, by doing so, catalyze a change of attitude across the rest of the Arab world.
Israel’s advocates seem to attribute Arab and Muslim views of Israel to propaganda and misinformation; though both influence these views, at the heart of enmity for the Jewish state is how it actually treats the Arabs under its rule and beyond.
Views of Israel could also undo another American goal for the invasion: faced with Israeli military dominance, future Iraqi leaders — even democratically elected ones — may renew their interest in nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.
A WP article reveals some of the thinking behind American policy toward the outbreak of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah:
- “‘The president believes that unless you address the root causes of the violence that has afflicted the Middle East, you cannot forge a lasting peace,’ said White House counselor Dan Bartlett.”
- “In the administration’s view, the new conflict is not just a crisis to be managed. It is also an opportunity to seriously degrade a big threat in the region, just as Bush believes he is doing in Iraq. Israel’s crippling of Hezbollah, officials also hope, would complete the work of building a functioning democracy in Lebanon and send a strong message to the Syrian and Iranian backers of Hezbollah.”
- “The U.S. position also reflects Bush’s deepening belief that Israel is central to the broader campaign against terrorists and represents a shift away from a more traditional view that the United States plays an ‘honest broker’s’ role in the Middle East.”
- “‘He thinks he is playing in a longer-term game than the tacticians,’” according to a “former senior administration official.”
Outcome analysis
- Root causes — Central root causes of Middle Eastern instability are support for Islamic extremists and Arab-Israeli enmity. Both are reinforced by Israel’s current course of action.
- Degrading Hezbollah — A military campaign is likely to have a marginal and temporary effect, while bolstering the organization’s prestige in the larger Middle East. This may start with Lebanon: Mideast experts “warned that the military campaign is turning mainstream Lebanese public opinion against Israel rather than against Hezbollah.”
- Building Lebanese democracy — This campaign is more likely to strain or collapse Lebanese democracy.
- Syria and Iran — They are not harmed by this campaign, and Israel is giving them the opportunity to burnish their images in the eyes of the Mideast public: when other Arab governments sit passively, they are at least indirectly supporting resistance to Israeli actions.
- Fighting terrorism — Making Israel more central to the US campaign only undermines that effort (and some want to blend Israeli and US policy thoroughly, as explained here). Apparent unconcern for innocents on one side of the conflict undercuts the central moral narrative of US opposition to terrorism; the next time the US decries the dealth of civilians in a terrorist act, millions of people will recall the hundreds of civilians who died in Lebanon while the US sped up shipments of bombs for use there.
- Longer-term strategy — The Bush administration appears to be attempting longer-term strategy based on gut feel, without an awareness of the actors, the stakes involved, or how the situation is perceived.
Moises Naim suggests two ways to redirect US policy in Latin America and reengage with the region:
- end the trade embargo with Cuba
- engage with Brazil, beginning with a trade agreement
Of Cuba, Naim writes:
The first step toward draining the appeal of Chávezism and restoring the U.S.’s image in Latin America would be to unilaterally lift the embargo on Cuba. The U.S. embargo has never worked as a tool to weaken Castro. Instead it has provided him with a wonderful excuse to hide his failures and justify the island’s dire poverty and harsh political repression. The embargo is even less effective now that Cuba is so deeply intertwined economically and politically with Venezuela and other countries in the region. …. The U.S. embargo on Cuba has enormous political costs for the U.S. and no benefit other than pleasing a portion, but not all, of Cuban-American voters.
Engaging with Brazil would mean paying attention to the single most important country in the region. Engagement
would involve offering an attractive trade agreement that would grant freer access to the U.S. market for Brazilian steel, shoes, orange juice, ethanol and other products that currently face import barriers. The costs for the U.S. economy would be relatively minimal. For Brazil, such a deal would stimulate exports, drive investment and lift the economy. Even more important, such an approach would reward and support a country (and a government) that is providing a powerful counterexample to the populist policies that are gaining favor in the region.
Writing in The Telegraph, historian Niall Ferguson attempts to make the case for immediate military action against Iran via a future scenario perspective.
His scenario includes these ideas:
- It would not be difficult to stop Iran’s nuclear program with preventive airstrikes.
- This is a repeat of the history of the 1930s, with a dictator arming for war.
- Iran will have nuclear-armed missiles by 2007.
- China will threaten to intervene on the side of Iran in the resulting 2007-2011 war.
Analysis
Ferguson’s assumptions are weak:
- It appears doubtful that bombing will easily arrest Iran’s nuclear program. According to Seymour Hersh, definitive targets have not even been identified.
- Ferguson strains to invoke the Hitler analogy, but Hitler was absolute dictator of one of the most powerful, technologically advanced nations on Earth. Ahmadinejad is the bureaucratically constrained head of a weak nation highly vulnerable to disruption.
- Ferguson explicitly criticizes as delusion the idea that “the West” is still in a position to dominate the Middle East, but a ready resort to force depends on that very idea.
Ferguson exaggerates the pace of change:
- No credible sources foresee a nuclear arsenal in Iranian hands by 2007. A decade after that appears more likely.
- China will have neither the capability nor the inclination to intervene in the Middle East in the next few years.
He may be accelerating the plausible timetables of his scenario in order to heighten the apparent urgency.
Given that he is a historian, Ferguson’s strangest omission is that he fails to address the possible medium- and long-term consequences of the course he advocates. These include:
John Robb at Global Guerrillas argues that a US attack on Iran could have far-reaching consequences, in three waves:
- Instability intensifies in Iraq and the Persian Gulf, and oil prices spike.
- American targets are hit by terrorist attacks around the world. US forces in Iraq are forced to withdraw. The US falls into political crisis. “Radical reductions” in global economic activity occur.
- “A gulf monarchy falls. Successful terrorist attacks on oil production systems have deepened the global energy crisis …. The global economy goes into a severe and prolonged contraction. The worst finally happens: China’s export oriented economy collapses,” and the country fragments.
Analysis
- This is virtually certain as an outcome of US attack
- The scope and effect of terrorist attacks are uncertain. Withdrawal from Iraq would probably be accelerated, with negative consequences, including a strengthening of Iranian influence in Iraq (at least temporarily). The effects on oil supplies could be severe, as Iran has at least the power to disrupt the Persian Gulf. On the other hand, both the US and Iran would face mounting pressure to get the oil flowing again, and might work out a modus vivendi that enabled this. However, if the conflict escalates and the US appears bent on destroying the Iranian regime, Iran would have no reason for restraint.
- Severe economic consequences depend on the scope and duration of the disruption. The causal ties to the fall of a Gulf monarchy and the fragmentation of China are not at all certain.
Examining a map of the regional split in the Mexican election results, Investor’s Business Daily applies American political analogies: the “red,” sunbelt north of Mexico voting for the conservative PAN party, and the “blue” south going for the leftist PRD.
The analogy is flimsy, however, due to “dyschronicity”: Mexico and the US live in wholly different eras, and no elements of their politics line up neatly beside each other.
The PAN may be conservative, but in the Mexican context that means that they are modernizing, outward-looking, and one sense progressive: they are trying to achieve a functioning modern state in which capitalism can operate. Success would mean making Mexico more like the early 20th century United States: Mexican conservatives can only dream of their country being as capitalist, individualist, and libertarian as “blue America.”
The Mexican south is much farther removed from any American experience, resembling blue America not at all, and red America only by loose analogy, in that both are the traditional, religious, and inward-looking parts of their countries. The dyschronicity with the US is acute: the peasant and indigenous culture that dominate the Mexican south has never existed in the United States, and most Americans’ ancestors have not lived in similar circumstances for 300-500 years. Chiapas resembles Bolivia more than it does Massachusetts.
In short, the Rio Grande is too broad for some analogies to make it across.
[via Social Technologies]
A new poll shows that Russians are not particularly enthusiastic about democracy.
Only 15% strongly agree that democracy is the best form of government, with another 37% agreeing somewhat. The comparative numbers in the US are 57% and 34%.
That only half of Russians believe much in democracy helps explain Russia’s current trajectory toward soft authoritarianism. The likelihood of an Asian political model — perhaps like Singapore or Malaysia — is rising.
The Washington Post reports on the spread of mobile telephony in Africa, taking Congo as its example.
That mobile phones are spreading even in the disaster area that is Congo is telling; if they can be deployed there, they will go everywhere, given that Congo has “almost no roads, mail or telephone system” and is in the midst of a chaotic war.
Mobile phones achieve several immediate goals:
- They allow rapid communication, sometimes replacing extreme difficulty. The article cites a man who previously had to journey eight days by riverboat to see his mother, and now talks to her on the phone every day.
- They enable e-commerce, or more technically m-commerce. African phones are increasingly equippped with the ability to transfer money and pay merchants.
- Mobiles bring efficiencies to commerce, potentially boosting economic activity.
Mobiles also have several larger effects:
- Information speed — They vastly speed up information flows. In a place like Congo, they supplement sparse broadcast media with millions of person-to-person information nodes.
- Information decentralization — As information accelerates, it also decentralizes, with a variety of social and political effects. The classic Third World coup-starter, seizing the radio and TV stations, will have less and less meaning.
- Leapfrogging — Mobiles enable leapfrogging over other technologies, from broadcast TV to fixed-line phones and even the Internet. The Post notes that Congo now has 3.2 million mobile customers, compared to only 20,000 land lines. Mobiles can help begin to close the information devide that grew steadily wider between developed and developing world over the last century.
Mobiles will be particularly transformative in Africa, the least-wired of all regions. They are actually growing fastest here now, and have 152 million users on the continent, the Post says. (This probably includes North Africa, but growth seems to be faster in sub-Saharan.)
The WP reports that fundamentalists are edging out the moderates for control of the Islamic militias.
The first hints of change came when militia members forced the closure, in some neighborhoods, of cinemas showing the World Cup and films they deemed too sexually explicit. Some young women opted for more conservative head coverings, some young men for shorter hair.
Restraining mechanisms might come into play:
Some Somalis hold out hope that the same loose coalition of businessmen, activists and clan elders that helped drive out the warlords will soon turn against the militias as power breeds brashness. Ali Iman Sharmarke, a businessman and radio journalist in Mogadishu, said he believed the Islamic militias would lose power if they grew too strict in their interpretation of religious law. “People will hate them as they hated the warlords,” Sharmarke said from Nairobi. “The moderates will not fly with bin Laden.”
Overall, the likelihood of the “Taliban on the Horn” scenario prevailing has risen, and this also ups the probability of future war between Somalia and Ethiopia.
Cuban dissident Oswaldo Jose Paya Sardinas offers a “program for change” whose elements outline a scenario for a moderate transition to a democratic Cuba:
We want to preserve the right to free health care and education, and to expand our rights to include freedom of religious education and freedom of expression. We do not want change if it comes at the cost of paying a ransom to those in power, allowing them to take control of the country’s resources, to define its values, to become millionaires and to leave the people of the country in distress. In Cuba, there will be no lynchings, no revenge, no exclusions. Those now in power will have the same rights as all citizens. There will be no uncontrolled privatizations, but there will be a guarantee for the right of all Cubans to a free economy, the right to have private enterprise and to trade freely. No one will be forced out of his home; the law will prohibit evictions. All Cubans in exile will regain their rights as Cuban citizens.
The plan is clearly an effort to preserve aspects of Cuban society that many Cubans value, and avoid the jarring transitions that many post-communist countries have gone through. It attempts to defy the reality that those in power in any society will attempt to continue in power, even if in a new guise, and also seeks to forestall a vindictive backlash, which may make such a plan unpopular with Cuban-Americans, whose leadership is still prone to extremism.