For some time now, I've been a fan of the way the Washington Post's online presence has been evolving. Last September, when the New York Times introduced TimesSelect and moved various features, including its columnists, behind the paywall, it was clear that the two companies were pursuing very different business models. And I speculated that those divergent business models were likely to produce very different models of a "news organization."

The Washington Post Company and washingtonpost.com are continually engaged in product innovation -- using technology to redefine "news" as dynamic, conversational, contextual content which is networked with related content across the internet (especially the blogosphere, but also including their other properties, Slate and Newsweek), and linked with their other media properties -- now including their new radio station. By contrast, the NYTimes is focusing on production/distribution innovation of their existing product -- using technology to improve the timeliness, relevance to the customer, and revenues from their traditional product, tweaked for online capabilities such as video. As I explained in September:

The overall impression from [washingtonpost.com's] changes is that content is growing more dynamic -- no longer simply the electronic publication of a series of static stories, or photos or graphics. Each Post page becomes the center of, or portal to, a constantly changing network of relevant linky goodness.

The changes are also increasingly reflected in the approach reporters are taking to their respective "beats." Certainly, the "stories for publication" remain fixed by the size, form and flow that are dictated by the conventions of newsprint distribution. In that domain, the Post competes with other news outlets in its attempts to tell news stories better and, in its particular government-related specialties, with greater coverage. But the news stories are being enriched with complementary content by those same reporters, who are bringing more than simply extra information.
[...]
If the printed news story is history's first draft, a permanent record however partial of "what happened," the new types of complementary content implicitly acknowledge the limits of that permanent printed record. The stories are shown to have added layers. The complementary content also celebrates the fact that the stories are constantly evolving -- evolving not simply in the sense that tomorrow's events will overtake today's or that we will have more information about those events in the future, but that their context and meaning are always in the process of morphing as they become part of broader conversations.

Washingtonpost.com has now introduced another example of precisely the sort of product innovation I described, called PostGlobal. It's potentially very good news for those of us who focus on US foreign relations.

David Ignatius (WashPost) and Fareed Zakaria (Newsweek and his TV show, Foreign Exchange) will host roundtables on various timely issues. The responses will come from their stable of about thirty editors and journalists from around the world, their "PostGlobalBloggers." Readers have a thread for their own comments. And Ignatius and Zakaria will provide some sidebar notes and roundups in their "Editor's Inbox" blog. Here's how the site describes what they're trying to do:

PostGlobal is an experiment in global, collaborative journalism, a running discussion of important issues among dozens of the world's best-known editors and writers. It aims to create a truly global dialogue, drawing on independent journalists in the countries where news is happening -- from China to Iran, from South Africa to Saudi Arabia, from Mexico to India.

At least twice a week, we'll post a question then solicit responses from members of our diverse network of experts, whose combined views, we believe, will reflect what the world thinks about important issues more quickly and completely than would those of any single commentator. We will also post comments on the question from readers around the world, highlighting the most interesting.

As news breaks, PostGlobal will ask leading journalists to offer quick insights in our "Editor's Inbox" area. Look here for assessments of the latest stories and for links to useful resources for making sense of what's happening. We're also talking with potential partners about additional features that will allow PostGlobal to pull together and analyze information from around the world.

The first question, posted on Wednesday, was "If Iran becomes the dominant regional power in the Middle East, the region will be safer and more stable. True or false?" The True/False framing isn't all that interesting -- not surprisingly, it produced more "false" than "true" responses from the journalists. Far more interesting were the varied perspectives about the dynamics of the Middle East from journalists from around the world -- including Japan, India, Mexico. They had distinctive views on the prospects for Iran becoming "the dominant regional power," and just what that might mean. Good exercise in revisiting unstated assumptions that underpin a lot of what passes for debate in the US.

The readers' comments were also interesting and, as Ignatius noted in his roundup post today, "in many cases adding a dimension you would not find sitting around a discussion table in Washington." Readers who don't parrot the conventional wisdom of Washington foreign policy elites -- who woulda thunk?

As a further example of the potential for enriching content and conversation, Ignatius' first "editor's inbox" post broadened the discussion by asking "what would Kissinger do"? -- and linked to two documents detailing Henry Kissinger's secret diplomacy with China, which have just been released by The National Security Archive. A lovely reminder of just what a piece of work was Henry the K. And just how far the Bush Admin has moved away from anything resembling strategic thinking and effective diplomacy, even after its supposed return under Rice.

Today's question is: "Should the U.S. and other countries send representatives to the G-8 counter-summit?" (being held by some Russian "liberal dissidents" such as Gary Kasparov at the same time as the G-8 summit in St Petersburg in July). Wonder of wonders, Masha Lipman actually provides a thoughtful response with considerable context for understanding the issue. Wish she'd bring the same nuance to the stuff she produces for Fred Hiatt and the WashPost op-ed pages! That suggests that this more conversational format -- with Ignatius and Zakaria as sponsors -- may actually be as liberating for the opinion-peddlars as for readers and commenters.

One of the reasons why the Post's "global view" experiment may work is that, rare for American pundits, Ignatius and Zakaria both can put themselves in the shoes of non-Americans when looking at US policy and actions. Admittedly, neither has positioned himself as a contrarian, but rather as a mainstream observer whose insights don't fit neatly within the conventional wisdom. I fault both of them for timidity -- for sometimes not extending the logic of their observations to more forcefully challenge US policy. But it's refreshing that they aren't simply a part of the echo chamber on either side of the US political debates. And here's hoping that the voices they assemble  will expand the views available to those debates.

So back to the difference in business models between the WashPost and the NYTimes, and what that may mean for redefining the relation between traditional print and online media. Here's my speculation from nine months ago.

I expect the difference in the two approaches will in the long run have an impact on the content of the two newspapers and ultimately their philosophy of what it means to be a news organization. The NYT proposes to continue to "deliver" its "product." The Post, by contrast, is becoming a portal to a dynamic network of content, only a portion of which is home-grown. But by placing its own content at the heart of the portal and letting its home-grown content interact both with other Post-produced content and with content produced by others, the Post is pursuing a far different model than a classic portal, which aggregates content produced by others. In the process of distributing that home-grown content via the portal, the Post's own way of producing content, and the content itself, will continually be changed or enriched by the interaction with other content and content producers. Maybe, if Eric Nelson is right, the process may even produce added insight from Post reporters on their blogs, or from the commenters or trackbackers or Technorati-linkers, even if they're not named Friedman, Dowd, Brooks, Tierney, Kristoff or Krugman.

Very, very different bets. The NYT's business model is easier to discern than the Post Company's business model -- which clearly incorporates not just the Post but its other media properties. But then again, the NYT's model is easier to understand because it's basically defensive -- do better, whether in terms of quality vis a vis competitors, advertising revenues or satisfying their existing customer base, with their current newspaper business. The Post is, bit by bit, devising a new type of multi-media news business.

The new Ignatius/Zakaria joint venture appears to fit squarely within that prediction. I wish it great success!

P.S. -- While we're on the topic of media, the Huffington Post (NOT my favorite site) has a new section/portal that's devoted to the media, Eat the Press. It's an aggregator, blog and linkroll that's a bit of cross in style/content between Romenesko, Media Matters, CJR Daily, Jeff Jarvis and the Guardian's media section. If you like tracking the nexus of media as a business, politics, and tech, it looks promising.

[cross-posted at american footprints]

Introduction

On the surface, the US has been saying it wants Russia's cooperation on Iran's nuclear program in the Security Council this week. So praktike wonders what to make of the timing of Cheney's anti-Russia speech in Lithuania, in which he accused the Russia government of using oil and natural gas as "tools for intimidation and blackmail," "unfairly and improperly restrict[ing] the rights of her people," and taking "actions that undermine the territorial integrity of a neighbor, or interfere with democratic movements."

After that bit of raw chutzpah, Cheney proceeded, in the words of the NYT, to wade into the energy battles in Kazakhstan while embracing Nazerbayev with smiling praise for Kazakhstan's "political development." Cheney finished his tour in Dubrovnik with the endorsement of NATO membership for an unlikely trio of candidates, Croatia, Albania and Macedonia.

Altogether, the trip was a tour de force -- a nicely judged combination of high-minded Cold War-style ideological conflict with cynical Great Game competition, carefully tailored at each stop to play to the specific anti-Russian (and pro-US) interests of key local players.

Strategic linkages

I don't think there can be any question that the Bush Admin has been making a number of anti-Russian moves in recent weeks and that Cheney's trip was deliberately designed to be provocative. It appears to me that the Russophobe hardliners within the Bush Admin, led by Cheney, have won the internal debates about how to deal with Russia leading up to next month's G-8 summit in St Petersburg.

As important, I also think the provocations directed toward Russia are part of a parallel program to delegitimize the UN process for dealing with Iran, where the US is transparently engaged in faux diplomacy.

In my view, recent moves by the Bush Admin are comprehensible only when they are seen as linked -- part of a broader "forward-leaning" effort to aggressively reassert US hegemony. My fear is that the tactics the US is using in playing the "diplomatic route" re Iran may not only be extremely dangerous as a way of dealing with Iran itself. Those tactics are likely to have far broader and more profound long-term effects on the structure of the international system.

Where are US foreign policy elites?

Why so little reaction to the Bush Admin's tougher line on Russia by American foreign policy elites ("realists" and "liberal internationalists") who aren't the natural allies ("neocons" and "national greatness" conservatives) of the Bush Admin? Perhaps it's because most foreign policy elites tend to be experts in one area or another with limited overlap -- e.g. nuclear proliferation, Middle East, former Soviet Union, China, Latin America, defense, etc. Or perhaps it's because they've lost the old Cold War habits of seeing linkages across diplomatic and security issues and across regions.

I also think, in part, it's because almost all "schools" of American foreign policy share unquestioningly the assumption that being the sole superpower is in the natural order of things. American hegemony is, at least in principle, assumed to be necessary and/or benign, and its maintenance and assertion is a good thing. What the various schools quarrel about is how best to maintain and assert American power (soft and hard) and "leadership." When liberal internationalists like John Ikenberry and Anne Marie Slaughter question whether maintenance of a unipolar system is actually in American interests, note how gingerly they approach the issue in order to avoid being treated as anti-American heretics.

"Realists" and "liberal internationalists" may tut at Cheney's confrontational style, and some may question his blatant hypocrisy on the subject of democracy. But I'm rarely seeing any challenge to the basic narrative that Russia deserves a smack-down from the US. First, it's become conventional wisdom (albeit of the ahistorical variety) that Russia is rolling back democracy and increasingly flirting with dictatorship at home [ed. - without really explaining why, it seems to be assumed that Putin's "soft authoritarianism" at home should automatically have a negative impact on US-Russia relations on everything from terrorism to trade]. Second, there's a general feeling that Russia has been getting a bit uppity abroad [ed. - Russia is seen as somehow "meddling" where it doesn't belong, even where some American elites actually agree more with Russia's position than that of the Bush Admin -- e.g. issues such as Iran or the Palestinians]

So maybe it's not surprising that it takes a rabid anti-imperialist who doesn't belong to any of the mainstream foreign policy schools, Justin Raimondo, to produce the first article I've read that condemns Cheney's anti-Russia attacks as something more than just undiplomatic and hypocritical. Even Raimondo, however, doesn't fully link Cheney's moves with the diplomatic games vis a vis Iran.

A five-pronged strategic offensive?

To see how recent Bush Admin policy moves are part of a broader strategy of reasserting hegemony, I find especially helpful the following observation by DrLeoStrauss (Stop the Spirit of Zossen).

The U.S. is currently conducting five separate strategic grand offensives:

(a) the roll back of the old Soviet imperial periphery across Eastern Europe, down through the Russian 'Near Abroad' of Ukraine and Georgia and Central Asia;

(b) the on again off again stuttering efforts to isolate China as the new 'Peer Competitor' across both the Asian Pacific rim and also in Central Asia [ed. - and in recent months, competition in Africa has been added to the list];

(c) conduct an international war on 'terrorism' (such as it is);

(d) lead new international cooperation regarding nuclear and WMD proliferation [ed. - "lead" is a charitably neutral way of describing the Bush Admin goals of (i) leaving to the US the determination of which countries are worthy of obtaining nuclear technology and weapons and (ii) ensuring that no unfriendly state can achieve deterrence against the US use of force]; and

(e) bootstrap the Middle East into modernity through unilateral American force of arms.

(Sprinkle 'democracy' on all of the above).

What's remarkable is that Iran intersects with all five "grand strategic offensives" plus "democracy." That helps explain how and why the Bush Admin has turned the nuclear dispute with Iran into a "crisis" (with considerable help from the Iranians themselves, of course). The Iranian situation offers the Bush Admin an opportunity to make "progress" on a number of its strategic offensives simultaneously -- not just with Iran or with the nuclear proliferation regime but with China and Russia as well.

The UN process is set up for "failure" in the sense that the Bush Admin is not going to obtain the sort of robust steps against Iran that it has sought. Either the Security Council negotiations will produce some sort of deadlock over the statement or, as Bolton has suggested this weekend, the US intends to proceed without Chinese and Russian support. Either outcome would give the US the excuse to ignore the Security Council going forward -- Rice has already been claiming that the Security Council would suffer a fatal "loss of credibility" if it fails to take action on Iran. Next stop, as again Rice has already suggested, is "coalitions of the wiling."

The Bush Admin will likely pin the blame for failure on the "ineffectiveness" of the UN (and international institutions), in general, and on China and Russia, in particular. We should expect the bill of particulars against China and Russia to be three-fold:

• they are authoritarian regimes that cozy up to tyrants for their own narrow economic and geopolitical purposes
• they threaten global energy security (in their roles as major consumer and major producer, respectively), and
• they are potential threats to their neighbors.

Marketing the program

This three-pronged attack draws on several different policy rationales or motives, each with a different way of defining "threats" to American interests:

• Cold War-style: ideologically-defined enemies, based on the "nature of the regime";
• Great Game-style: challenges to US influence/control of global energy;
• US "global leadership"-style: threats to US predominance in any region.

As DrLeoStrauss suggests, even if the Bush Admin's strategic goals were commendable (which I dispute), the simultaneous pursuit of such an ambitious collection of strategic objectives is likely to produce considerable incoherence in execution. Furthermore, as Cheney's trip illustrated, that incoherence will be compounded by relying on such a mix of "styles." It's difficult to reconcile the Cold War-style (e.g. Cheney's ideological assault on Putin's supposed lack of democracy) with the Great Game-style (e.g. fishing for gas deals with Nazerbayev while praising his fifteen-year contribution to Kazakhstan's "political development").

The advantage of this mixed bag of rationales, however, is the same the Bush Admin enjoyed in assembling support for the Iraq war: a bit of something for everyone -- liberal hawks, ideological warriors, "national greatness" conservatives, and old-fashioned military hawks. The fact that no one can explain the "real reason" the US went to war in Iraq isn't a bug, it's a feature.

Of course, such an ambitious program can't be left entirely to the Bush Admin. They need help from pundits and politicians to frame, legitimize and sell the program. Not surprisingly, we've already begun to hear from the usual suspects. A mere four days before Cheney's appearance in Lithuania, Robert Kagan warned in the op-ed pages of the WashPost of a global threat to liberalism potentially greater than Al Qaeda: a "League of Dictators" (read China and Russia) that will use their positions at the UN to undermine the promise of a new international order. Although Kagan's essay is primarily an example of the Cold War-style, he deftly weaves in the "energy security" card by showing how China's ideological and strategic interests (i.e., access to energy) are likely to coincide in places like Africa or Venezuela.

Max Boot has similarly been busy on the op-ed pages. The day before Cheney began his trip in Vilnius, Boot was lamenting the "dictatorship dividend" -- the windfall from rising oil prices enjoyed by "noxious dictators" like Putin and Chavez. Boot hit the trifecta -- the challenge to global "energy security," an ideological conflict, and the threat of "regional contagion."

Vladimir Putin and Hugo Chavez can buy off their publics with generous subsidies and ignore Western pressure while sabotaging democratic developments from Central America to Central Asia.

Since in this article Boot is concerned with nefarious energy suppliers, his list of villains doesn't include China, with which he is willing for the US to make common cause, at least as fellow energy consumers. In a longer piece, I'm confident he'd be able to find a way to lodge China in the enemy camp a la Kagan. As Matt Yglesias notes, Francis Fukuyama reminds us that the PNAC folks always need an enemy, and China was their pre-9/11 favorite. So they may just be reverting to form.

If John McCain's speech at the Brussels Forum on transatlantic relations a week ago is any indication, the "national greatness" conservatives are on the same page as the neocons and, according to Dan Drezner, the "muscular liberals" in the person of Richard Holbrooke are in full agreement with McCain. And of course the human rights folks and democracy true believers have long had China in their sights and are delighted to hear Cheney take on the Russians.

Reporting on his attendance at the Brussels Forum, Drezner notes:

The general tenor of the conference so far has been to focus less on transatlantic frictions and more on the geopolitical and geoeconomic difficulties that Russia and China are posing to the West as a whole. More later, but a question to readers -- will the realpolitik of a rising China and a renegade Russia... be the ultimate driver for a closer transatlantic partnership? And should that be the main driver?

Snark aside, Kagan and Boot give us a taste of the sort of arguments, from the same unholy alliance that brought us Iraq, that I expect to hear against Russia and China as the Bush Admin seeks to reassert American hegemony.

This post certainly requires quite a bit more fleshing out, so let's call it an "Intro." As and if I develop some of these thoughts further, I'll update with links to future posts.

cross-posted at American Footprints

Between the continued tanking of President Bush in the polls and this week's White House shakeup-that-is-no-shakeup, the question is no longer whether Bush is the lamest of ducks. It's how Bush, the US and the rest of the world are going to navigate the next almost-three years of historic levels of lameness.

But Bush isn't alone -- he's one of a growing "paddling of ducks" (a la an exhaltation of larks) in Western-style democracies. Simon Serfaty of the CSIS observes that European elections are producing governing coalitions with little authority or lattitude to govern.

There could not have been any worse possible outcome to last week’s election in Italy than the political tie that leaves Romano Prodi with a plausible claim of victory, but a clear inability to govern. Such conditions had already been seen in Germany last September. They may well be seen next in France next spring — and in Spain the year after that. Everywhere, weak governments are getting weaker, making out their passivity to be a virtue and their flexibility to be a strength.

Serfaty sees this trend as troublesome for transatlantic relations, as America's approach to Europe has been shifting away from the first Bush Administration's prediliction for divide-and-conquer, with its ad hoc coalitions of the willing, and towards renewing partnerships with Euro-wide institutions.

[F]or the past 15 months, Bush has cultivated Europe not one state at a time, but all of them together in the context of the European Union to which the U.S. president has reasserted his country’s commitment. As a result, the central significance of bilateral relations — and, in this context, the personal dimensions of these relations — has been eroded. The issue is no longer what Italy — or Britain or Poland—can do for the U.S., but what the U.S. can do with Europe in the context of the two sets of organizations, N.A.T.O. and the E.U., that define the trans-Atlantic partnership.

There, in the E.U., the switch from one man, Berlusconi, to another, Prodi, might make a difference, not because Prodi proved to be an effective president for the European Commission, but because Berlusconi proved to be such a disliked head of government for Italy. In other words, Italy will regain an influence within the E.U. that had faded over the past few years. The problem, however, is that the more the E.U. becomes populated by weak members — not just à l’italienne but also à la française or German-like and more — the less likely it is to emerge out of the deep institutional crisis into which it has fallen of late.

I note Serfaty's comment not as further evidence for profound Europessimism, which I don't particularly embrace. Rather, it's a warning that we may be headed for a "crisis of governance" period -- akin to the moody decade of widely shared malaise, in the 1970s and early 80s, when politicians, pundits and political scientists fretted about the "ungovernability" of democracies and the collapse of the welfare state. The Thatcher/Reagan neo-liberal response seems to have run out of energy -- at least in its political incarnation in parties on the Right -- and the Clinton/Blair Third Way, though retaining some centrist abstract appeal, is certainly suffering from the disappearance or weakening of its prime proponents on the world stage. A growing sense of anxiety coupled with desire for change -- rather than the embrace of an alternative governing philosophy -- may be the common thread in election results across Europe (Eastern and Western) and even Latin America.

A compelling and coherent new vision from either Right or Left has yet to emerge. Instead, we have a hodge-podge of competing prescriptions for anxiety-reduction, which vary country-by-country according to which bundle of anxieties (economic, cultural, security) afflicts a given politician's electoral base. There's a growing sense that, whether in riot-riven France or in the US with its cratering approvals for Congress and the President, political elites are out of touch or, worse yet, irrelevant. If global macroeconomic trends lead to a new round of stagflation* -- especially if accompanied by the tensions produced by recycling petrodollars and a politically destabilizing slow-down of China's economic growth -- the recipe will be complete for another decade of gloomy pondering of the future for liberal democracy and the international system.

It is this prospect of a globally-shared sense of impotence in the face of a world seriously off-track that I find more worrisome than the oft-repeated warning that Americans will become "isolationists" in a fit of pique that the Iraq war is a disaster. Certainly, an America that withdraws from the world as it is consumed internally with bouts of xenophobia and culture wars would be a threat to both the US and the rest of the world. But like most analyses by Americans of the international system, it's too US-centric. It assumes that the rest of the world isn't susceptible to similar pressures and anxieties and that the management of the global system will be principally a matter of US choices.

We would be entering choppy waters if we were merely facing the prospect of a global hegemon having to come to terms with the limited utility of aggressively applying its power to pursue narrowly defined interests. Although "isolationism" might be one response, Jacksonian pugnaciousness might also produce a further outburst of "forward-leaning" aggressiveness. To navigate away from either extreme, it would be difficult but sufficient to execute the sort of unilateral shift in US grand strategy and national "personality" being advocated by John Ikenberry -- a rediscovery of the virtues of self-restraint and rule-set compliance and the importance of reassurance to other members of a unipolar international system.

My fear, however, is that the international system is going to present far more challenging conditions for the US and other Western-style democracies to navigate if they are also suffering from a "crisis of governance" period in domestic politics. As Serfaty concludes with regard to Western Europe:

Which gets us back to the disturbing tendency to go into democratic overtime as each election ends with an unwanted tie. That makes it difficult for each new or fading government to make the decisions needed to assuage its respective constituencies, for the E.U. to make the decisions needed to satisfy its members, and for the U.S. to be confident in its allies’ ability to not only be willing, but also capable and relevant.

The same can be said for European lack of confidence in the US -- certainly during Bush's forthcoming years of lameduckness -- but potentially longer if we're looking at a governance crisis that is not unique to this President and is shared among Western-style democracies.

------------
* Stagflation is one of several plausible scenarios for the long-predicted and oft-postponed but inevitable adjustment of global economic imbalances. The Cunning Realist has been warning of the risks of hyperinflation as we approach the day of reckoning for US fiscal and monetary policies. Though I view creeping stagflation, in the absence of a hard landing, as a more likely scenario if inflation rears its ugly head again, TCR's regular analyses of inflationary pressures and financial market dynamics are well worth a read. Certainly, the extreme narrowing of spreads and the ongoing search for yield regardless of risk are symptoms of a coming bout of creative destruction in the financial markets.

Just as the cover of Business Week has become a leading indicator of a company or sector about to reach its market highs, I expect that when we start hearing about the IMF no longer being needed to deal with the international exchange regime or global financial crises, we're about to painfully rediscover the relevance of the IMF as part of a reformed international financial architecture. The world will need a better response from the lameduck presidency than a cosmetic replacement for John Snow.

Cross-posted at American Footprints

I was flipping through the newest issue of Foreign Affairs and what should I see but an ad for the hot-off-the-presses book by Mark Lynch, aka Abu Aardvark, on Arab media: Voices of the New Arab Public: Iraq, al-Jazeera and Middle East politics today. Here's the catalog description:

Al-Jazeera and other satellite television stations have transformed Arab politics over the last decade. By shattering state control over information and giving a platform to long-stifled voices, these new Arab media have challenged the status quo by encouraging open debate about Iraq, Palestine, Islamism, Arab identity, and other vital political and social issues. These public arguments have redefined what it means to be Arab and reshaped the realm of political possibility. As Marc Lynch shows, the days of monolithic Arab opinion are over. How Arab governments and the United States engage this newly confident and influential public sphere will profoundly shape the future of the Arab world.

Marc Lynch draws on interviews conducted in the Middle East and analyses of Arab satellite television programs, op-ed pages, and public opinion polls to examine the nature, evolution, and influence of the new Arab public sphere. Lynch, who pays close attention to what is actually being said and talked about in the Arab world, takes the contentious issue of Iraq-which has divided Arabs like no other issue-to show how the media revolutionized the formation and expression of public opinion. He presents detailed discussions of Arab arguments about sanctions and the 2003 British and American invasion and occupation of Iraq. While Arabs strongly disagreed about Saddam's regime, they increasingly saw the effects of sanctions as a potent symbol of the suffering of all Arabs. Anger and despair over these sanctions shaped Arab views of America, their governments, and themselves.

Lynch also suggests how the United States can develop and improve its engagement with the Arab public sphere. He argues that the United States should move beyond treating the Arab public sphere as either an enemy to be defeated or an object to be manipulated via public relations. Instead of wasting vast sums of money on a satellite television station nobody watches, the United States should enter the public sphere as it really exists.

Amen, to that last point in particular. And just maybe the much-hyped and much-criticized new public-diplomat-in-chief, Karen Hughes, has figured that out? One indicator is the decision to pull the plug on the innocuous teen-oriented Arabic lifestyle magazine, Hi. Another potential indicator is the doubling of the number of the State Department's media interviews in Arabic this year, to about 100, as reported by Steve Weisman, in a profile of Hughes in the NYT. Weisman also reports that Arabic satellite television is definitely on Hughes' radar screen.

Ms. Hughes departs from one common policy among top American officials. She appears on Al Jazeera, the popular Arabic satellite television station accused by the Pentagon of cooperating with anti-American extremists. This past week, Ms. Hughes sparred with a Jazeera moderator over Iraq, Israel and democracy in the Middle East. "I came here because I respect Al Jazeera," she said. "You have a large audience, and I wanted to address that audience to communicate with the Arab world."

Afterward, Ms. Hughes said that she had been advised not to appear on the station but that she disagreed.

"We have to be out there," Ms. Hughes said. "We may not like everything they report. They may be putting out misinformation. They may incite violence. But we have to be out there."

Marc Lynch has set up a separate blog for discussions of the book, reviews, and his book-promotion schedule, and you can buy it there through his Amazon links. For a good intro to his views, see this recent article in the Wilson Quarterly, Watching al-Jazeera.

cross-posted at American Footprints

I couldn't help stealing that great post title from Patricia Kushlis (PHK) of Whirled View. Her starting point is Elisabeth Bumiller's recent White House Letter ($ req'd), which noted that the Bush Administration is now "on message" regarding the existential threat of an AlQaeda-sponsored caliphate.

Needless to say, both the history and geography contained in the warnings from Cheney et al are more than mildly suspect, as PHK illustrates. But the Caliphate is certainly a colorful way to package the President's claims that the West is engaged in another generational struggle of near-apocalyptic proportions akin to the Cold War. Norman Podhoretz and the World War IV advocates must be highly gratified.

"D" is for Dominoes?

Few would argue that the US is not facing a long-term threat of terrorist attacks on US interests at home and abroad. The debate is rather about the appropriate strategy for addressing that threat, which depends in part on how one views the nature and sources of the enemy's strengths and weaknesses, and the best means to reduce its strength and counter its ability to cause lasting damage. And one of the central points of contention in that debate is the place, within the "global struggle against violent extremism" (yes, GSAVE is actually a useful concept despite its origins) of the current fighting with the AlQaeda-linked insurgents in Iraq.

By introducing the caliphate argument, the Administration seems to be shifting away from crude "flypaper" logic, although certainly not abandoning the rhetoric entirely, based on the President's Sunday speech from the Oval Office. The handy feature of the caliphate argument is that it doesn't simply equate Iraq as the "central front in the GWOT" because that's where the terrorists are fighting. Rather, Iraq is proclaimed to be the main line of defense against the encroachment of a geopolitical enemy. We can't leave Iraq because it could be taken over by AlQaeda -- step one in the march to the caliphate. Echoes of dominoes anyone?

Big Media Justin and his Cato colleague, Christopher Preble, have addressed the Administration's fear of an AlQaeda victory in Iraq in The Daily Star. After examining Iraqi and Arab public opinion, as well as the hostility against AlQaeda of other well-armed Iraqi insurgent groups and sectarian militias, they conclude that if America leaves, AlQaeda will not inherit Iraq.

As Logan and Preble parse recent speeches by Administration figures, what emerges is not only the argument that AlQaeda's defeat in Iraq (by the US or by Iraqi forces?) will be critical to preventing AlQaeda from achieving its goal of a caliphate. That argument is supplemented by the assertion that a withdrawal by the US would be greeted by AlQaeda as a moral victory, which would in turn attract legions of bandwagonning Muslim supporters across the arc of instability.

And "P" is for Peace with Honor?

Shades of Nixon and Kissinger's "peace with honor," the President's Sunday speech expanded on the theoretical costs of America's losing credibility by prematurely withdrawing from Iraq, providing a laundry list of international audiences:

We would abandon our Iraqi friends and signal to the world that America cannot be trusted to keep its word. We would undermine the morale of our troops by betraying the cause for which they have sacrificed. We would cause the tyrants in the Middle East to laugh at our failed resolve, and tighten their repressive grip. We would hand Iraq over to enemies who have pledged to attack us and the global terrorist movement would be emboldened and more dangerous than ever before. To retreat before victory would be an act of recklessness and dishonor, and I will not allow it.

Logan and Preble respond to the President's final warning:

The jihadis will certainly claim that the American withdrawal represents a victory for their side, but they will do so whenever U.S. forces leave - be that next year, or 10 years from now. In his Johns Hopkins speech, Rumsfeld declared that a "retreat in Iraq" would tell our enemies "that if America will not defend itself against terrorists in Iraq, it will not defend itself against terrorists anywhere."

That is absurd. An American military withdrawal from Iraq would not signal that the U.S. has chosen to ignore events there; it expects all countries around the world to cooperate with it in the fight against terrorism. The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq must be coupled with a clear and unequivocal message to the people of Iraq, and to the world: Do not threaten us; do not support anti-American terrorists. Meanwhile, the U.S. must continue to pursue Zarqawi and his network, just as it pursues bin Laden and his network. The world can be assured: the U.S. will take all necessary measures to carry the fight the enemy, wherever he might reside, be that in Germany, Afghanistan or Iraq.

An American military withdrawal from Iraq will hardly be a stepping stone for Al-Qaeda's grandiose plan to establish an Islamic super-state from Morocco to Indonesia. The Bush administration ought to stop inflating the costs of leaving Iraq, and take a more serious look at the benefits.

That's not to suggest that the Iraqis, the US and Iraq's neighbors shouldn't be concerned about AlQaeda taking advantage of chaos and low-grade civil war in western Iraq to maintain fluid bases of operations from which attacks outside Iraq could be carried out. The recent bombings in Amman underscore that threat. But that argues more in favor of working on the political dimensions of the non-AlQaeda insurgencies. (More on that later.) Not on casting the conflict in Iraq with Zarqawi's supporters as the battlefield on which the future of a caliphate is to be determined.

As I've argued for a long time, the US needs a "peace with honor" exit for its own political equilibrium, not for its international standing, which will be helped, not hurt, by significantly scaling back its involvement in Iraq. And I'm willing to engage in a few harmless fictions from the Administration if it's helpful to that process. But ginning up new existential battles is a pernicious distortion of the threat from terrorism America is facing as well as of the nature of the conflicts in Iraq and the Middle East. As we should already have learned from the Iraq/WMD fiasco, fashioning and executing sensible strategy is considerably more difficult when the Administration engages in fanciful threat inflation.

cross-posted at American Footprints

Steve Clemons has an extensive sneak peak of an article by Mark Leon Goldberg that will appear today in The American Prospect. Clemons adds his own intel to Goldberg's case that Bolton's back to his old tricks, undermining the Secretary of State as he pursues his own agenda. And that even though there's a new Secretary, State is once again forced to deploy the "put Bolton in the box" strategy.

As I wrote last summer, I was far less outraged than many who had opposed Bolton's appointment by his handling of the vast UN summit agenda when he arrived in New York in August. Quite simply, the draft he was presented was inconsistent with stated Bush Administration policy on a number of fronts. Only last weekend in Montreal, we saw a replay of a similar collision between a broad consensus among most developed countries over global warming and the Bush Administration's long-standing rejection of the Kyoto process. It wasn't a pretty sight, and the head of the US delegation in Montreal was none other than Paula Dobriansky, one of Steve Clemons' favorites to replace Bolton as the nominee for the UN position. So on some matters, it's clearly not the personality, it's the US policy that's the problem.

But Goldberg has lots more episodes of more recent vintage where Bolton is described as going against, or actively undermining, Rice's diplomatic efforts. Most notably re Syria. And there's lots of goodies about how Rice and Foggy Bottom are end-running the UN ambassador in order to strike deals with allies and friends. On the matter of the UN budget, which could really provoke a crisis if the US insists on not approving it by December 31, the scuttlebutt is that Bolton managed to get support from the Oval Office to overrule Rice. (See Suzanne Nossel and Morton Halperin at Democracy Arsenal.) It will be interesting to see how much intel Goldberg's managed to collect on that particular conflict.

As they say, stay tuned.

UPDATE: Mark Leon Goldberg's The Arsonist is now online. As usual, you can follow all the action along with Stygius.

To be fair, we should note that quarrels over the US paying its way in the UN, and the potential adverse impact on international peacekeeping efforts, is not purely a Bolton-manufactured problem. Lee Feinstein has just posted a report at America Abroad on several problems rearing their ugly heads in Congress, where the funding of international programs is low on the list of priorities in budget debates. The African Union's inadequate but essential force in Darfur would be one of the casualties. As for UN peacekeeping dues, Biden is trying to make sure that a gap of $25 million gets paid. But as Feinstein points out, it's not entirely a Congressional matter.

[I]f Congress gives the administration all the money for UN peacekeeping it has requested ($1.03 billion), there will still be a $500 million gap between what Congress has funded, and the UN bills coming due. The main reason: the administration in March pushed for authorization of the critical UN mission in Sudan (to enforce the north-south agreement), but hasn't yet figured out how the US will foot its share of the bill.

This sort of foot-dragging by the US on its commitments, which is not unusual behavior for either Republican or Democratic administrations, makes Bolton's grandstanding on the UN budget all that more difficult for our friends to swallow. But according to Goldberg, that may be one of Bolton's objectives.

“The UN is simply one of many competitors in the global marketplace for problem solutions and problem solvers,” he told reporter Mark Turner [from the FT]. “If it is not good at solving problems, Americans will look to some other institution; some other organization; some other framework.”

As if in a nod toward diplomacy, he added that he hoped that those who want a stronger UN would “see the logic of our argument.” But his remarks to another British reporter just one week prior were probably more to the point. After listening to a tirade from Bolton against inefficiency, corruption, and supposed anti-Americanism at the UN during a private dinner, a Sunday Telegraph reporter in the audience asked him what he enjoyed most about the UN, to which Bolton replied, “It’s a target-rich environment.”

Campaign for the FY07 International Affairs Budget - Act NOW

So now you're all steamed up again and revisiting the Bolton battles of last summer, don't just sit there fuming. Yes, there's not much to be done about Ambassador Bolton, at least for the next twelve months until his recess appointment expires. But there is an important step coming up to help address some of the funding problems. That's the Administration's FY07 International Affairs budget request.

Right now -- until this Friday -- "sign-on" letters are being circulated in the House and Senate to register Congressional support for an increased budget. The sponsors are Senators DeWine, Feinstein, Smith and Durbin and Representatives Leach and Berman. To date, they have 103 signatures, the majority Democrats.

A bipartisan organization of foreign policy heavyweights and American businesses and NGOs, US Global Leadership Campaign, is sponsoring a campaign for people to contact their legislators to encourage them to sign on.

Here's their "tool-kit" page with links to information about the International Affairs Budget, the Congressional "sign-on" letters, the "write your legislators" campaign, how to contact legislators on a "priority" list, and even a telephone "script" if you prefer voice over written contact. Just two more days for this round. And then the campaign will gear up again when it's time to debate and pass the budget for FY07. We'll keep you posted.

[cross-posted at American Footprints]

Dave Schuler (The Glittering Eye) and I have been exchanging some lengthy comments on his blog about the domestic politics of the war in Iraq. Dave and I have similar perspectives on the war -- not only why it was a bad idea strategically in the first place but how, once the US went into Iraq, the US has had both a responsibility and a strategic national interest that compel it to try to make the best of its intervention. We also share similar views of the dynamics of the on-the-ground situation and the limited options remaining now to the US. And we both get extremely cranky when public debate disintegrates into the false dichotomy of "withdrawal" versus "stay the course." At least rhetorically, Dave's a bit more optimistic than I am. He still talks in terms of possible "victory" in the long-term, whereas I've been in "damage control" mode for some time. Still, I'd say that compared to the wide range of opinions about Iraq that you find in the blogosphere, Dave and I are more often than not on the same page (or at least in the same section of the hymnal).

Which is why I find it interesting that Dave and I have such markedly different opinions about the play of domestic politics re Iraq. At the end of an excellent discussion of assumptions underlying the "National Victory Strategy" presented by the President on Wednesday, Dave "couldn't resist" the following remark about "a good part of the Democratic Party" including at least one of what we might call war-Dems, Senator Clinton:

C’mon, folks. Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.

In response, I too "couldn't resist" -- commenting in part:

Sorry Dave, you should have resisted. The critiques by the “war-Dems” have been the same as the Republican Senators like McCain, Hagel, Lugar (and even increasingly Warner!) — and they’ve been on the money for the last several years in terms of where the big weaknesses have been in the Admin’s abysmal planning and execution. The changes in policy we’ve seen over the past 4-6 months under the Casey/Khalizad team are the sorts of things that “war-Dems” and the more serious of the Republican Senators have been calling for since 2003. Note Lugar-Biden attempts to deal with these issues in hearings that the media have generally ignored.

I don’t see what the war-Dems have been doing as anything other than responsible. They’re not in a position to “lead”, they surely shouldn’t be expected to have “followed” the criminally incompetent Admin without insisting on changing course, nor do I see them as “in the way.”

Dave clarified what he had meant by his off-the-cuff slap, I responded with a monstrously long essay in the comment thread, and Dave has now penned a further post that goes to what I believe is the heart of the matter. Rather than continue to bury this discussion in comment threads, and eat up vast quantities of his bandwidth, I figured I'd post my response here.

Dave's new post is appropriately titled “The President proposes, Congress disposes” -- "a play on a much older apothegm: 'Man proposes but God disposes'."

When you realize that in the Washingtonism “Man” has been replaced by “The President” and “God” by “Congress”, the meaning becomes quite clear: the President is the handmaiden of Congress and subject to its will, not the other way around.

Under our system the president has primary responsibility for the military, the conduct of foreign policy, and the administration of the departments of government:

The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.

and enforcing the law. The Congress has primary responsibility for the creation, passage, and promulgation of laws (and, of course, raising and apportioning revenue).

Here’s what the Constitution says about the president’s responsibilities in formulating domestic policy:

He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States.

It should be clear that ours is a system in which the bulk of the responsibility particularly in the area of domestic policy devolves upon the Congress; we expect leadership and courage from our Congress; when you have cowardice and venality and a willingness to wait for the President to act and then snipe you get, well, what we have now. But that’s not our system it’s a perversion of our system.
[...]
Like it or not Senators are leaders. The slim Republican majority in the Senate doesn’t absolve the Democrats in the Senate from the responsibility to lead.

Let me be very clear: I’m not just critical of Senate Democrats. I think the Senators of both political parties did not fulfill their responsibilities when they authorized the president to go to war with insufficient debate. But I further think that those Senators who voted “Nay” had a responsibility to hold their peace once our soldiers had gone into harm’s way and those who voted “Aye” had an affirmative responsibility to defend their vote and advocate the position to the American people. This is manifestly not what happened and that’s why I’m convinced that many Senators, particularly Senate Democrats, did not vote their consciences but voted with one eye (as Nadezhda pointed out) on the midterm elections and the other on the upcoming presidential primaries. Of course there will be political calculation from Senators. But there should be more than political calculation. Where is the statesmanship? We aren’t just warring factions; we’re all Americans.

I also freely acknowledge that the greatest incompetency of the Bush Administration has been in communicating with the American people, with the Iraqi people, and with the world. But the Administration doesn’t have sole responsibility for communicating with the American people. Congress has substantial responsibilities in that area, too.

I share Dave's visceral commitment to what at times seems like an old-fashioned notion of separation of powers, with each branch responsible for playing its part and protecting its prerogatives in order for the system's checks and balances to work. Since I began blogging, one of my recurrent themes has been that our checks and balances haven't been working properly in recent years.

Dave and I are also certainly on the same page in believing that Congress has not been living up to its responsibilities. In my view, only the courts have provided an occasional check on executive power. I am personally hopeful, with the first small indications of a reassertion by the Senate of its institutional prerogatives, that a rebalancing is starting to emerge.

I don't, however, put Congress' failure down to sheer cravenness on the part of either individuals or their respective parties. Instead, I see several (hopefully transient) structural factors that have recently inhibited the sort of Democratic leadership Dave calls for -- or encouraged the media to ingnore attempts at constructive leadership by either Democrats or Republicans on the Hill -- while producing a quasi-parliamentary arrangement that fits poorly with the US system.

As Jack Balkan points out in a very nice short essay on the subject of checks and balances, James Madison's assumptions didn't include political parties. When US parties start acting as cohesive blocks, the system's potential weaknesses become glaring. Even before 9/11, some political trends had converged to produce a far more disciplined party-based organization (running the House, extending into the Senate once the party took over the White House, and maintaining its power base through especially effective political-financial connections) than has traditionally been the case in our national politics.

When one party hits the rare "constitutional trifecta" as Balkin calls it -- when all three branches of government "are working more or less together to achieve the party's goals" -- a parliamentary-style system is likely to emerge. And today, the power base that supports the GOP's trifecta is unusually insulated from voter sentiments by the current arithmetic of geographic representation. (See e.g. Hacker & Pierson's The Center No Longer Holds in the NYT Mag from a couple of weeks back.) The cohesion of this party-based organization has been more financial and electoral than ideological. It remains to be seen whether it can renew its cohesiveness now that its primary strengths -- electoral (Bush's popularity) and financial (DeLay-KStreet connection) -- are eroding and ideological fissures are widening.

It is my strong hope that we've not been going through a permanent change in America's political system. Rather, I prefer to believe that we've encountered a sort of perfect storm that has produced an excess of executive power which will be soon begin to be corrected. The combination of 9/11's trauma and the peculiar (to the US) polarizing style of this White House and GOP congressional leadership, when combined with the related growth of executive-branch patronage, has overridden the inherently conservative brakes of our system, not only in the legislative branch but within the executive branch itself. It's not simply the problem of the so-called "Mayberry Machievellis" who ignore substantive policy issues in favor of a purely political calculus. We have seen a widespread pattern of the Bush Administration trying to run a government via little groups of ideologically-committed but inexperienced appointees who bypass the bureaucracy (whether civil service, foreign service, military or intelligence). These practices have served neither the Bush Administration nor the country well.

Post-invasion Iraq and Katrina are two sides of the same coin. Organization Theory 101 teaches us that when you don't involve the folks with experience who are going to have to execute policy in your policymaking or planning, then when it comes time for action and you put your foot on the accelerator, you won't get to where you want to go. The engine may reve, but the connections to the gears and steering are missing or broken. This has not been a problem for the Bush Administration exclusively in the realms of military action or homeland security. The Administration has also been hollowing out the most professional and effective, and least partisan, parts of the bureaucracy, such as Justice and Treasury, and seeding the second tier of departments and agencies with political hacks and ideological naifs. The costs to the government and the nation are increasingly visible, and Congress is finally starting to push back on the appointment process.

In recent months, as more buried problems from Bush's first term start rearing their ugly heads in the press and Senators of both parties increase their pointed critiques of Administration policy, we're starting to hear indirectly from government, military and intel professionals who have been bypassed by the White House (or the Vice President's office) and its political apparatus in the departments and agencies. The whole "torture" and "detainees" issue is a perfect example -- the WH, OSD and DoJ ignored the accumulated wisdom of both the government departments and the military. The bipartisan opposition in the Senate, being led as much by Republicans as Democrats, is starting to give voice to those views. The same has been happening with a number of aspects of the Administration's military, political and diplomatic efforts in Iraq and the Middle East more boradly. Jack Murtha, John Warner, Chuck Hagel, John McCain and Joe Biden each have a different approach for the future course the US should take. But though their conclusions differ, they are all reflecting the facts and opinions they are regularly receiving from officials and officers who have been unable to be heard within the Administration's own decision-making processes.

I think Dave and I agree that a more robust system of Congressional (and especially Senatorial) oversight would and should have brought those voices and views to the fore years ago. As I see it, however, better late than never. I think we are starting to see a natural and healthy process of rebalancing, although it will be a noisy and acrimonious process. But then, it takes a good deal of noise and acrimony to effect a rebalancing when the system has gotten so far out of whack.

My principal disagreement with Dave is that I do not see the noise as the actions of a minority political party adopting the role of "parliamentary opposition" or failing to embrace the fact that "we're all Americans" when it comes to issues of war and peace. We should not be surprised by an occasional "parliamentary opposition" stance taken by the Democrats, primarily in the House given the way it's run. And perhaps on the Alito nomination in the Senate, especially if his files keep producing a stream of worrisome evidence of his opinions and habit of thought on some key issues.

But on the Iraq war, I don't see a "parliamentary opposition" emerging or likely to emerge. The Democrats have agreed to disagree among themselves for the past three years. As the debates heat up, they are already reverting to form (and to the incentives of the US system of constituency representation), with a considerable variety of individually-defined and rather nuanced positions. I assume that Reid and Pelosi won't even try for a unified party position on the war, since they know better than anyone it's like trying to herd cats. As the President's power has started to erode, the same phenomenon, by the way, has been emerging on the Republican side in the Senate, though the critiques of the President's performance by Republican Senators are more implicit than explicit.

Instead, we're likely to see more and more highly charged debates over policy positions that are, on close examination, difficult to distinguish. Battles to the death over distinctions without significant differences may simply be the way the American political system deals with disagreements over war, as Ed Kilgore has recently reminded us.

I had one of those old-guy moments today when I suddenly remembered a moment in the debate on Vietnam which reminds me of the odd disjunction between the relatively small policy differences dividing most Democrats and many Republicans on Iraq, and the big tonal and intepretative differences they sometimes convey.

In the famously fractious 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the big platform debate over Vietnam (note to young people: this was back when big platform debates were still possible) involved a majority plank which endorsed free elections in South Vietnam to create a coalition government including the National Liberation Front (the political arm of the Viet Cong), and a minority plank endorsing a coalition government including the NLF that would be required to sponsor free elections. The policy distinctions between these two planks were about as meaningful as today's difference between supporters of a benchmarked withdrawal from Iraq based on estimated dates, and a timetable withdrawal contingent on benchmarks.

Yet at the time, these two proposals were almost universally described by the news media as "pro-war" and "anti-war" platform planks.

The lesson is this: So much as many of us might wish to focus on the policy details of proposals about what to do now in Iraq, you can't take the politics out of politics, and the "tonal" or "contextual" implications of various proposals, despite their substantive similarity, matter a great deal.

The challenge of reconciling policy with political imperatives isn't unique to Democrats. Praktike and I have written repeatedly on the huge gap between the President's political rhetoric on Iraq and the evolving (and improving) policies being adopted by both the military and the State Department in his second term. The primary virtue of what the President accomplished in his speech this week was to narrow the rhetoric/reality gap, as did his spokesman in somewhat disingenously claiming that Senator Biden's proposals represented Biden's embrace of the President's own strategy, as described by Eric Martin.

These sorts of "failures to communicate" that Dave bemoans are, in part, driven by political considerations of the White House and politicians of both parties positioning themselves with the electorate. Let's hope for all our sakes that the politics this time serves a broader purpose than acting as a circular firing squad of Democrats. At the close of Jack Balkin's admittedly partisan essay on the structural reasons for recent failures of Congressional oversight, he asks:

If Congress won't perform its assigned function of oversight, the only recourse is the American people. Will they become sufficiently engaged to put our constitutional system back in order, and once again let ambition counter ambition?

Many media commentators, especially the purveyors of "moderation" and the "pox on both your houses" punditocracy, argue that the Democrats shouldn't run so heavily against the performance of the Bush Administration since Bush won't be on the ballot in 2008. But that misses the point that one of the major political themes running across both domestic and foreign policy is a rebalancing of the system of powers. It's in the interest of the health of the body politic that we "once again let ambition counter ambition."

[cross-posted at American Footprints aka Liberals against Terrorism]

When the Graham/Kyl/Levin amendment stripping habeas corpus rights from Gitmo detainees was passed, I wrote a post on the longer-term strategic costs to the US of adopting such a policy. I focused on why access to courts is a hot-button issue across much of the developing world, where the phenomenon of the "disappeared" -- prisoners or people inconvenient to a regime who vanish off the face of the earth -- is all too common. The fate of the "disappeared" is often one of the biggest stumbling blocks when countries try to democratize after the overthrow of a repressive regime. Stories of innocent detainees caught up in the US system with no recourse, their families having no notion of what's become of them, are likely to resonate painfully around the globe. And in the process, undermine US interests, including promotion of democracy.

I presented the case in the abstract. Now hilzoy, in her final post in the habeas series at Obsidian Wings, puts names and faces to the story.

As JC noted in earlier comments here, "that's going to make a good movie one day, although a deeply depressing movie."

My response: "Yes, and it will be a movie that millions upon millions of people in other parts of the world will go to see. And that will be part of how they think about America and Americans. A hundred Karen Hugheses can't compete with that message."

Hilzoy has written the first part of the screenplay for a movie that will be coming to a theater near you. Let's hope that the yet-to-be-written ending is a little more uplifting than what's come before.

[cross-posted at American Footprints (aka Liberals Against Terrorism)]

The Senate has apparently adopted the so-called Graham/Levin compromise on the habeus corpus issue discussed in Eric Martin's recent post. As Eric notes, Katherine and hilzoy at Obsidian Wings have been doing a remarkable public service providing detailed analysis of the issue and the various legislative proposals. I am not going to go over the ground they have so ably laid. Rather, I want to return to one of Eric's themes -- the strategic costs to the US from the ongoing erosion of American "soft power."

In some ways I find the manner in which our legislators are dealing with the habeus corpus matter even more troubling than the highly emotional issue of torture. When considering the rights of a prisoner to challenge indefinite detention without charges, we're not talking about the hard task of drawing lines between acceptable and unacceptable behavior based on modern standards of morality. No, we're talking about something far more fundamental -- a core principle defining the limits on executive power in any liberal political system, regardless of form -- democracy, constitutional monarchy, etc. You know, Magna Carta and all that. Ironically (or should I say tragically), the people who are pushing for a derogation of this core principle are the same conservatives who are on the great global crusade to bring freedom to the oppressed. Heaven knows how they define "freedom" (or for that matter, how they can call themselves "conservatives," given their cavalier approach to ancient legal and constitutional tradition).

I agree with Eric that all of this represents a terrible failure to live up to the standards America preaches to others, a failure which undermines US foreign policy. There is, of course, the erosion of "moral authority" in a broad sense that Eric points to. But the hypocrisy of "do as I say, not as I do" also produces concrete damages to US interests. Take for example the plethora of "democracy promotion" programs being pushed by the BushAdmin and supported enthusiastically by Congress. Most such programs contain, as core elements, projects on "rule of law," "judicial reform" and "sound governance." Although one should never attempt to transfer US legal and administrative practices whole-cloth into other systems, there are a number of basic principles that can and should be transferred and adapted to local circumstances. Among these, some of the most important deal with the need for an effective judiciary to limit arbitrary exercise of executive power against individuals, including prisoners. It's a bit of a challenge for American advisers, helping others to reform their own systems, to justify why other countries shouldn't follow America's own example and start carving out convenient exceptions to principles that are at the heart of liberal democracy.

The damage to the US is not limited, however, to being seen as hypocrites. The Senate's habeus corpus political stunt will be viewed by much of the world as simply part of a cynical pattern, which includes the failure by Congress to tackle the practices of "black sites," "ghost detainees" and "extraordinary renditions." Much of the world is concluding, reluctantly or not, that Americans have abandoned their basic principles and now tacitly endorse the "disappearing" of people by the US government.

Perhaps Americans don't understand that "the disappeared" is the most powerful symbol of political oppression across much of the developing world -- the very regions where the BushAdmin is conducting its freedom crusade against tyrants and extremists, not only in the Middle East but also in regions like Latin America. Perhaps Americans are simply too insulated from what goes on beyond their borders.

In order to understand how profoundly "the disappeared" resonates as an idea, perhaps one has to have lived or worked in the developing world, watched closely the politics of countries after authoritarian or totalitarian regimes have been overthrown, or followed carefully the various "reconciliation commissions" that often accompany attempts to democratize. Although abusive treatment and torture of political prisoners is usually an issue in these countries, their biggest hurdle is often the trauma associated with massacres of civilians (usually by paramilitaries) and the thousands of people who simply have disappeared into an opaque system run or sanctioned by the authorities. Some of the "disappeared" are found when their jailers are overthrown, but others are never to be heard from again. The families and friends of the "disappeared" know full well that a key factor in the "successful" operation of these systems of political oppression is the unenforceability of detainee rights such as habeus corpus.

America is connecting itself with practices that are associated, in the minds of hundreds of millions of people, with the most odious of tyrants and the worst of authoritarian regimes. No matter how skillful US public diplomacy may be in the future, it's going to take an enormous amount of effort and considerable time to overcome this self-inflicted damage.

The Senate should be ashamed. And that includes Democrats, although they do get marks for crafting a compromise that removes the worst of Graham's original proposal. Logrolling over pork is one thing, but there's no excuse to treat matters with important constitutional and foreign policy ramifications as an exercise in sausage-making. It is the height of irresponsibility to legislate this way -- tossing together a half-assed provision as somehow a sop to the Admin and its supporters on the torture debate, and tweaking the language in backrooms and hallways over the course of a couple of days, with no hearings and no real debate, on such a fundamental issue.

Marty Lederman at Balkinization offers one of the few attempts I've found so far in the blogosphere to look at some of the possible implications of the Graham/Levin deal. The dearth of analysis isn't surprising, of course, given how quickly the issue sprang into the public domain and how rapidly it's being disposed of. Lederman jots down a long list of questions that sprang to his mind on a first reading of the compromise. After reading the list, it's hard to fault Lederman's conclusion:

My initial, seat-of-the-pants impression is that this is a blunderbuss solution that cries out for careful and deliberate consideration and debate by congressional committees, where experts can weigh in and various questions can be examined and answered. Alas, that doesn't appear to be a realistic option any longer.

And then Lederman asks the same question I asked myself:

Is it nevertheless worth enacting this "compromise" now if that's the cost of enacting the McCain Amendment prohibiting cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment? I'm not sure.

I'm not sure either, but I'm strongly tempted to say, "no, that's a trade with the devil." We already have 90 senators on the record against torture with no exceptions, the military has made its anti-torture policy official, and John McCain is on the cover of Newsweek. It's time to draw a line on the issues of detainee status and treatment that have been overshadowed by the "torture debates."

Perhaps the strongest argument for opposing the Graham/Levin compromise is that habeus corpus for detainees shouldn't be addressed in isolation from the host of other legal and practical issues that have arisen from the BushAdmin's handling of terrorist suspects, both within and outside the US, both citizens and non-citizens. It is long past time the US had a coherent, consistent and transparent program that addresses the difficult problems presented by detainees, including how to deal with the dilemma of an open-ended GWOT. Until that happens, however, the courts have been the only force imposing a few limits on this President. And now the Senate proposes to take away much of the courts' already limited authority over these matters. {It's unclear to me whether Hamdan and Rasul will be affected by Graham/Levin. The military trials have just been suspended until after Hamdan is decided, after a district court ruling on Monday suspended the Hicks trial.}

As one of the commenters at Balkinization noted:

After 9/11 Congress authorized "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001." Then they went back to passing Highway bills and giving out farm subsidies. If we are left with a bad law, it will be because appropriations is the only thing Congressmen want to do any more. The history books may call this the War on Terror, or they may call it the "War on somebody Congress was too lazy to name carried out by means that Congress was too lazy to define."

Craven idiots!@#@! Indeed, the history books are not going to be kind to them. Andrew Sullivan quotes Churchill:

In a telegram on November 21, 1943, Winston Churchill defined a fundamental difference between the Anglo-American way of war and that of our enemies. Churchill wrote: "The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgement of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."

nadezhda quotes the Medium Lobster:

Guilty until proven dead. After eight centuries of ossified due process and doddering dedication to the rule of law, it's refreshing to see Western democracy make the bold leap forward to locking people up forever without charges or legal representation.

UPDATE:Katherine at Obsidian Wings has a recap of the various votes in the Senate as well as some thoughts about the unseemly CYA by the GOP that the political bargain between torture and habeus amendments seems to represent. One bright spot, there were 14 Senators who couldn't bring themselves to vote on any version of a bill to strip habeus: Baucus, Biden, Bingaman, Byrd, Dayton, Durbin, Feingold, Harkin, Kennedy, Lautenberg, Leahy, Rockefeller, Sarbanes, and the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter.

[ cross-posted at American Footprints aka Liberals Against Terrorism]

Praktike points to the hot new trend in US diplomacy, pragmatism! He attributes this outbreak of reality-based policymaking to a confluence of good and bad factors -- the good news, the departure of the "crazies" from key positions in the second BushAdmin; the not-so-good news, the constraints on US options produced by Iraq and other mistakes of the first BushAdmin.

This new found pragmatism seems to be producing some progress in isolating both Syria and Iran. The formula in both cases combines a multilateral approach with a focus on issues around which a consensus can be built rather than insisting on maximalist positions.

I'd add to that list another area where there has been a shift in approach -- bilateral relations with major countries. In the cases of China, India and Russia, the BushAdmin2 seems to be repositioning the US agenda away from a bunch of disconnected (and sometimes inconsistent) issues toward more multi-dimensional relationships.

• The central theme of Singh's visit to the US was the broadening and deepening of inter-connected economic and security aspects of the US-India relationship.
  
• There have been a flurry of notable China initiatives in preparation for the (Katrina postponed) Hu trip -- Zoellick going to Beijing in August explicitly to launch a multi-dimensional relationship-building exercise; Rumsfeld's recent trip focusing on increasing the range of military contacts and improving communications on a number of levels; and Snow's attempt to expand the agenda beyond exchange rate regimes to the financial sector more broadly.
  
• Russia has received less attention, but one could argue a similar shift is underway toward relationship-building and a greater focus on economic and political integration of Russia in Western structures. There is certainly a greater emphasis on finding ways to collaborate, or at least not create competitive frictions, in post-Soviet space where Russia will continue to be a major presence. (See the interesting remarks (pdf) on enriching the US-Russia relationship by Thomas Graham, the NSC's Senior Director for Russian Affairs, at an AEI forum on Russia in October. Without giving Putin a "free ride," Graham displayed considerable appreciation of the political and economic challenges the Russians face. The Russophobes and democromanes in the audience must have been disappointed.)

One of the most frequent critiques of the BushAdmin1's approach to diplomacy has been its embrace of "unilateralism." And certainly prak's examples of the more pragmatic diplomacy of the BushAdmin2 include a new acceptance of the potential usefulness of multilateralism. But it seems to me, if we also look at the adjustments being made by the BushAdmin2 in bilateral relations, we are seeing something beyond pragmatism or multilateralism. There seems to be at least a hint of a structural shift in the way the US is defining the sources of its political power and how it is deploying that power in the diplomatic arena. Some of this shift may be simply tactical -- forced on the BushAdmin2 by circumstance. But hopefully some of the shift also reflects a greater appreciation by Bush himself of the merits of a less polarizing approach to the politics of diplomacy.

In The Politics of Diplomacy, James Baker's memoirs as Secretary of State, Baker tells the story of how he was able to translate the rather formidable skills he had developed in the domestic arena to the international stage. For Baker, and for his close partners Scowcroft and Bush41, diplomacy was anything but a zero-sum game.

By contrast, the approach to the politics of diplomacy adopted by the hardliners in the BushAdmin1 was a Rove/DeLay winner-take-all style, based on assumptions about how a polarized structure can be used to augment power. What are some of the factors I'd point to as polarization politics?

• They regularly turned differences of opinion about means into irreconcilable disputes by choosing to emphasize maximalist positions and preferring no solution to compromise -- with John Bolton starring as Dr No, the poster boy of polarization. They converted disagreements into ideological battles ("we don't do business with evil dictators," environment), and they turned differences of degree into stark opposition ("you're either with us or against us.")
  
• They used campaign-style techniques to personalize and demonize foreign public figures, both political leaders and international civil servants, who dared to raise questions.
  
• They preferred constructing smaller coalitions over building broader consensus. And then they publicly displayed carrots and sticks -- bilateral deals to gleefully reward supporters and openly punish those countries who failed to support them.
  
• The issues they focused on were a set of pet peeves or hot-button issues for various parts of their domestic political constituencies that didn't add up to a coherent agenda -- anything-but-Clinton dissatisfactions, long-standing grievances, hostility to Lilliputians and munchkins, moral/religious battles, debates over the use of "scientific" evidence in policymaking.
  
• They ignored the stuff that Baker was so adept at managing -- cross-issue linkages that contribute to the general political atmosphere in the society of nations, both within multilateral institutions and in bilateral relations.
  
• They sacrificed long-term credibility for short-term tactical gains.
  
• And they seem to have relied on the Rove theory of bandwagonning -- look like you're unstoppable, and those vacillating on the sidelines will jump on board.

These patterns are reminiscent of the BushAdmin behavior especially in the House of Reps, where the GOP has become infamous for gratuitously sticking nonessential bits into legislation that reduce the size of the majority voting for a bill. They focus on red-meat issues to keep the base mobilized. They don't go looking for accommodations that could pull Democrats into supporting an initiative. Those who are on their team get well rewarded through assignments, pork, campaign funding and the support of the RNC machinery. Those who cross them are punished -- and sufficiently openly as an example for others who might be tempted to act independently. At the presidential level, who needs wide but shallow public support when narrow but deep support produces 51% and the power to dictate the agenda. And their agenda is incoherent -- a wishlist of pet peeves and rewards for various parts of their base. And as for demonizing those who challenge the Administration and sacrificing credibility for short-term gain...

I certainly don't see the moderation of approach in BushAdmin2 as evidence of repentant hardliners, although one could argue that grappling with the complexities of the future structure of the US military has forced Rumsfeld to adopt a more pragmatic set of priorities. Certainly, Iraq has left them little leverage to continue with a polarization approach. Bandwagonning has also demonstrably ceased to be a plausible theory. They can no longer credibly threaten a small-coalition approach to issues like Iran and NKorea -- the "coalition of the willing" would be the US and who else? And the US by itself is now tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan. The management of key relationships rather than red-meat issues is coming back into vogue, whether China, India, Russia or France. Making nice to international leaders who don't agree 100% with White House talking points is coming into fashion. And "spin" is no longer much of an option because they've repeatedly shredded their credibility.

All told, it looks like the Baker-type approach to diplomatic politics has finally managed to win some breathing space. If the Latin America trip is any indication, however, this isn't a diplomatic style that comes naturally to Bush. The limited game plan the US displayed for the Latin America Summit suggests that in areas where Condi or Zoellick aren't personally heavily involved, the WH/NSC/State apparatus isn't yet geared to play the Baker political-style game.

[cross-posted at Liberals Against Terrorism]