Barnett: Foreign policy: Distinguishing dedication from commitment
By THOMAS PM BARNETT, tom@thomaspmbarnett.com
March 25, 2007

I recently spent some time with an old friend who commands a big chunk of America's overseas military. This natural-born leader explains the difference between dedication and commitment as follows: the chicken is dedicated to your breakfast, but the pig is committed.
Think about the wide chasm, and you'll come to the same conclusion I have about where our nation's foreign policy has gone so incredibly wrong under President George W. Bush. We've committed ourselves to specific outcomes where we should remain dedicated to broader goals.

America should be dedicated to the goal of encouraging democracy around the world but committed to forcing its appearance nowhere. It was perfectly fine to topple the right dictator (Saddam Hussein) under the right circumstances (indicted by the U.N. Security Council more than a dozen times) but wrong to commit to Iraq's rapid transition to democracy (an unrealistic goal).

Our invasion of Iraq was an amazing success (fewer than 150 combat casualties across several weeks of combat), but our attempts to steer the resulting postwar situation toward a stable outcome have yielded a stunning disaster, so much so that Iraq has lapsed back into warfare across multiple dimensions (e.g., terrorism, insurgency, sectarian strife). The more we remain committed to Iraq's premature democracy, the longer this struggle remains - quite mistakenly in our minds - America's to prolong or end.

But Iraq's multiple conflicts are not ours to win or lose. We've run into levels of commitment on the other side (e.g., Kurds, Shiia, Sunnis, jihadists, criminals) that we're unwilling to match. We conflate the American public's dedication with the Bush administration's commitments - two very different things.

The way out seems clear enough: settle for what we can get now and remain dedicated to improving the situation over time.

What can we get?

First, we've launched a successful Kurdish nation, into which our remaining combat troops should largely retreat, in addition to being removed to sea. Second, we're stuck with a Sunni-Shiite civil war that either burns itself out because Iraq's neighbors commit themselves to squelching it or extends itself ad infinitum because Riyadh and Tehran are both committed to ruling the Gulf now that America is clearly over-extended and far too isolated.

The Bush administration's unwavering commitments elsewhere in the region complicate our seemingly intractable position in Iraq.

Bush and Cheney remain unblinking in their commitment to Israel but only marginally dedicated to a peaceful solution between Israel and Palestine. The world may end up recognizing Palestine's recently forged unity government, but Israel won't and therefore neither will America. As such, this conflict, like the war in Iraq, gets passed on to the next administration.

The Bush administration's commitment to Israel naturally translates into further commitment: stopping Tehran's reach for the bomb. America may be dedicated to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons, but we're committed to stopping only certain states from obtaining them.

Israel, the world's most powerful undeclared nuclear state, possesses roughly 200 warheads, in addition to a conventional military significantly superior to Iran's. Thanks to our enduring commitment, Israel could easily wipe Iran off the map - today. And yet there is serious talk throughout Washington about our inevitable war with Iran.

Ask yourself, whose interests are advanced by such commitment? American? Israeli? Saudi?

Remember this: When we go to war, our home front is dedicated, but our troops are committed.

America, we are told by this administration, is committed to stopping terrorism around the world. Thus, as Sunni-Shiite violence explodes in Iraq, our government takes the necessary step of arresting Iranian operatives caught funneling support to Shiite belligerents because, inevitably, some of that support will end up killing American troops.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, which has threatened all-out support for Iraqi Sunnis if the American-backed central government doesn't rein in Shiite fighters, quietly honors its commitments to its co-religionists. Such support will also - quite inevitably - end up killing American troops.

Expect any Saudi operatives to be arrested anytime soon?

Let's be clear: This administration - like so many before it - is dedicated to stopping international terrorism but is fully committed to the House of Saud.

I'm a grand strategist who's worked with the U.S. military his entire career, and here is what I've learned: Stay dedicated to your friends but remain committed to your core principles.

Oh, and trust both your allies and your enemies to be exactly who they are.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard Baker Center and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom@thomaspmbarnett.com

The USG hedge fund for emerging markets
POLITICS & ECONOMICS: “Bush’s Aid Policy Prods Countries: Yemen and Lesotho Embrace Overhauls; The Gambia Balks,” by Michael M. Phillips, Wall Street Journal, 14 March 2007, p. A6.
ARTICLE: “China Is Forming Agency To Invest Foreign Reserves: A $1 trillion hoard resulting from Beijing’s huge trade surpluses,” by Jim Yardley and David Barboza, New York Times, 10 March 2007, p. B3.

POLITICS & ECONOMICS: “Advocates of Borderless Money Temper Outlook for Benefits,” by David Wessel, Wall Street Journal, 15 March 2007, p. A4.

The Millennium Challenge Corp is probably the most innovative thing the Bush administration has done, because it’s all about making clear to developing economies what the standards are for emergence.
In 2005, on his first day as head of President Bush’s signature foreign-aid program, John Danilovich’s to-do list included the unpleasant task of telling Yemen’s president that his reform efforts had slipped so badly that the country was being cut off.
Last month, Mr. Danilovich phoned Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Saleh with better news: Yemen was back on the list of countries eligible for grants from the Millennium Challenge program.

What happened during those 15 months is evidence of the potential ripple effects of the high-profile aid program--and the power of the threat to publicly shame countries that veer off the path of economic and political overhaul.

In short, it’s all about being credentialed by the biggest aid donor (size, not per GDP) in the world.
My favorite example to date: Lesotho previously treated women the same as kids in terms of legal rights, unable to buy land or borrow money. We told them no good if you want MCC credentials:
With the Millennium Challenge Corp. pressing for changes, the Lesotho Parliament passed a law in November putting married women on equal legal footing with their husbands.
Only twice have countries been suspended: the nice Yemen story and the un-nice Ghana one (human rights abuses).
So America basically has a hedge fund of very small amounts (only $3b granted to date), but one that focuses on getting countries to acceptable thresholds.
Meanwhile, China puts together a fund that may command as much as half a trillion dollars and make financial investments (obviously different from grants, but in many instances not as much as you might assume) both at home and abroad. Naturally, China will be focused on making money as opposed to--as the leadership likes to put it--“interfering in the internal affairs” of other countries.
It’ll be interesting to watch the demonstration effects of each.
Why do I say this?
The last article (from the always great “Politics & Economics” column in the WSJ) notes some recent research that suggests that the freer flow of investments in and of itself isn’t the big change agent in terms of volume (as in, more money equals more change), but rather that the sheer connectivity of accepting money from the outside and sending it abroad forces a lot of positive rule-set changes.
In short, exposure to global capital markets ups a country’s game, forces financial markets and firms to be more efficient, offers businesses and consumers better terms for borrowing and lending, reduces opening for corruption and discourages short-sighted domestic economic policies. It isn't the money; it’s the collateral benefits.
In other words, there’s the policy connectivity of encouraging new rules explicitly, and there’s the financial connectivity of encouraging new rules implicitly.
Both can be very positive.

From Publishers Weekly
In this engaging if unbalanced survey, the author of the acclaimed Six Days of War finds continuity in U.S. relations with the Middle East from the early 19th-century war against the Barbary pirates to today's Iraq war. As America's power grew, he contends, strategic considerations became complicatedby the region's religious significance, especially to the Protestant missionaries whose interests drove U.S. policyin the 19th century and who championed a Jewish state in Palestine long before the Zionist movement took up that cause. Meanwhile, Oren notes, Americans' romantic fantasies about the Muslim world (as expressed in Mideast-themed movies) have repeatedly run aground on stubborn, squalid realities, most recently in the Iraq fiasco. Oren dwells on the pre-WWII era, when U.S.-Mideast relations were of little significance. The postwar period, when these relations were central to world affairs, gets shoehorned into 127 hasty pages, and the emphasis on continuity gives short shrift to the new and crucial role of oil in U.S. policy making. Oren's treatment views this history almost entirely through American eyes; the U.S. comes off as usually well intentioned and idealistic, if often confused and confounded by regional complexities. Oren's is a fluent, comprehensive narrative of two centuries of entanglement, but it's analytically disappointing. Photos. (Jan. 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
Reviewed by Robert Kagan
We often hear that Americans know little about other nations; a bigger problem is that we know too little about ourselves, our history and our national character. When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, in particular, we were all born yesterday, unaware of how present policies and attitudes fit into persistent historical patterns. So when a brilliant, lucid historian such as Michael B. Oren does bring the past back to life for us, revealing both what has changed and what has stayed the same, it is a shaft of light in a dark sky.

Today, the conventional view is that George W. Bush took the United States on a radical departure when he declared a policy to transform the Middle East and that, as soon as he leaves office, U.S. policy will return to an alleged tradition of realism, rooted in the hard-headed pursuit of tangible national interests. This is both bad history and bad prophecy, as Oren shows in Power, Faith, and Fantasy, a series of fascinating and beautifully written stories about individual Americans over the past four centuries and their contact with Middle Eastern cultures.

As a historian, Oren is more storyteller than grand theorist, so as a study of the complex and contradictory motives of American behavior, his book is a bit thin. Nevertheless, three powerful themes emerge from his tales: that from the Founders onward, Americans have repeatedly tried to transform Arab and Muslim peoples -- politically, spiritually and economically -- to conform to liberal and Christian principles; that since the days of the Puritans, many Americans have been obsessed with the idea of "restoring" Palestine to the Jews; and that from the colonial era to the present, many (and perhaps most) Americans have regarded Islam as a barbaric, violent and despotic religion. Whether these purposes and perceptions have been intelligent or misguided, based on reality or fantasy, Oren shows that they have been the dominant features of our foreign policy tradition in the Middle East.

Oren demonstrates that suspicion and hostility toward Islam are almost as old as the nation. John Quincy Adams called it a "fanatic and fraudulent" religion, founded on "the natural hatred of Mussulmen towards the infidel."

This was partly religious prejudice, of course, but that prejudice was reinforced by unfortunate experience. In the perilous early years of the republic, the Muslim Barbary powers preyed on American shipping and captured, tortured and enslaved hundreds of innocent men and women. When John Adams and Thomas Jefferson implored the pasha of Tripoli to stop, Oren recounts, the pasha's emissary insisted that the Koran made it the "right and duty" of Muslims "to make war upon" whichever infidels "they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners." George Washington raged, "Would to Heaven we had a navy to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush them into non-existence." And Congress did create a navy in the 1790s primarily to crush the Barbary powers and protect American traders and missionaries. President Jefferson -- so often mislabeled as an idealist, pacifist and isolationist -- eagerly launched the war and ordered the permanent stationing of U.S. nav!

al forces thousands of miles from the nation's shores.

As Oren relates, the modest number of 19th-century Americans who lived in the Middle East largely considered Islam -- in the words of a former Confederate officer hired to improve the Egyptian army -- a religion "born of the sword," one that was "opposed to enlightenment" and crushed "all independence of thought and action." They found the oppression of Muslim women appalling. Being Americans, they thought the best antidote was a thorough transformation of culture and society. Protestant missionaries utterly failed to convert Muslims to Christianity, but they did work to spread the "gospel of Americanism": liberalism, technology and democracy.

Over the next century, American politicians and policymakers repeatedly imagined they could liberalize a people who seemed to them bursting with "democratic aspirations," as one New Dealer put it in 1943. This may have been hubris, but if so, it was an enduring hubris. Oren quotes a mid-19th-century Arab guide warning a missionary: "You Americans think that you can do everything . . . that money can buy or that strength can accomplish. But you cannot conquer Almighty God." Yet a century later, Harry S. Truman insisted, "God has created us and brought us to our present position of power . . . for some great purpose. . . . It is given to us to defend the spiritual values . . . against the vast forces of evil that seek to destroy them."

No act of international social engineering was more audacious than American support for the establishment of a Jewish state in the middle of an implacably hostile Arab world. But this idea, too, had deep roots. The earliest members of the "Israel lobby" were the Puritan settlers, who even before they reached America had petitioned the Dutch government to "transport Izraell's sons and daughters . . . to the Land promised their forefathers . . . for an everlasting Inheritance." Their prominent heirs included John Adams, who imagined "a hundred thousand Israelites" conquering Palestine; Lincoln's secretary of state, William Henry Seward; and, a century later, Woodrow Wilson, who delighted in the thought that he might "be able to help restore the Holy Land to its people." Thus, President Truman felt a deep sense of historical and religious destiny when he recognized the newly created state of Israel in May 1948, comparing himself to the ancient Persian king who also had repatria!

ted the Jewish exiles and helped rebuild a Judean state. "I am Cyrus," Truman crowed. "I am Cyrus!"

Few acts in the history of U.S. foreign policy have been less in accord with "realist" principles. Oren, an Israeli historian whose previous book was the bestselling Six Days of War, shows that U.S. backing for the establishment of Israel was rooted in religious convictions going back more than four centuries. Americans' response to the enormity of the Holocaust helped transform old Puritan dreams into reality. But even so, the essential element here was the rise of the United States to global predominance; it is doubtful that any other country -- including Great Britain, which ruled Palestine after World War I -- would have placed religious conviction and moral sentiment above selfish and practical interests.

Critics from World War I onward warned that American support for a Jewish state would produce unending war, severely damage America's otherwise amicable relations with the Muslim world and, after the discovery of massive deposits of Middle Eastern oil in the 1930s, endanger access to this vital commodity. Saudi Arabia's pro-American first king, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, flatly warned Franklin D. Roosevelt that the "Jews have no right to Palestine" and that Arabs would die fighting to resist a Jewish state. When the typically American president spoke of the horrors of the Holocaust, the typically Arab king questioned the fairness of making "the innocent bystander," Palestine's Arabs, pay for the crimes of others. If 3 million Jews had been murdered in Poland, ibn Saud reasoned, then there was now room there for 3 million more. Many Muslims' sentiments have not changed over the past six decades.

And neither have those of many Americans. Despite all the crises of the past years, including the present war in Iraq, Oren predicts that the United States will continue "to pursue the traditional patterns of its Middle East involvement." Policymakers "will press on with their civic mission as mediators and liberators in the area and strive for a pax Americana." American "churches and evangelist groups will still seek to save the region spiritually." And Americans will regard the region as both "mysterious" and "menacing," as they have for centuries, and will seek to transform it in their own image. Many today may want to disagree, but they will have to wrestle first with the long history of American behavior that Oren has so luminously portrayed.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

EURASIA INSIGHT
PAKISTAN’S AFGHANISTAN DILEMMA
Abubakar Siddique 3/14/07
A EurasiaNet Book Review

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Many of Pakistan’s anomalies are evident in its sprawling capital, Islamabad – the name means an "abode of Islam." Since late January, a group of stick-wielding female students of the Jamia Hafsa Madrassa, or Islamic seminary, have occupied a state-owned children’s library.

Initially, this group of girls, covered completely with traditional black-colored hijabs, protested the demolition of seven mosques and madrassas in Islamabad that were allegedly constructed without government permission. This was supposed to be part of a government campaign to exert greater control over some of Pakistan’s 13,500 madrassas, a small portion of which are supposed to engage in militancy and sectarian warfare.

In the face of the protests, the government has already backtracked, indicating that it will rebuild the demolished places of worship. But another student demand, as yet unaddressed, concerns the implementation of Islamic Shariah law. "This is to ensure that the evil [of an un-Islamic political system] is eradicated from its roots," one protesting student told a local TV journalist.

Not far from the site of this ongoing confrontation, the city is undergoing a major facelift as highways are expanded and overpasses built to facilitate the ever-increasing vehicular traffic. One skyscraper offers quarter million dollar apartments across from the mud slums that dot the city’s Green Belts – groves of trees separating neighborhoods.

While such contradictions have always defined Pakistan, they have intensified since 9/11 when its military ruler, Gen. Pervez Musharraff, joined - or rather was forced to join – the Bush administration’s war on terror. The country’s geopolitical dilemma is highlighted in a well-timed and topical book, "Frontline Pakistan; the struggle with militant Islam," written by Zahid Hussain. The book is essentially a tale of the past five years, a period in which Pakistan became one of the international linchpins of global security. As the Pakistan correspondent for the Times of London, Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal, Hussain has had firsthand knowledge of all the important events in Pakistan during this crucial time, including: Musharraf’s U-turn against the Taliban after 9-11; Pakistan’s nuclear stand-off with arch-rival India in the summer of 2002; arrests of 9-11 masterminds Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and Ramzi bin al-Shibh; the December 2003 twin assassination attempts against Musharraf; the war in Pakistan’s western tribal borderlands; the nuclear proliferation scandal, and the ongoing saga of Islamabad’s love-hate relationship with Washington.

In a country where eight journalists have been killed and dozens more abducted, harassed or detained since 9/11, Hussain’s painstaking description of the rise of the Jihadis, and of the links between al-Qaida, the Taliban, Pakistani and Kashmiri Islamist militant groups along with sectarian terrorists, is extremely courageous. More significant is his detailed account of how the military viewed and used many of these groups as "strategic assets," and of the blowback it had to face when, under American pressure, the same people were declared "miscreants."

Such contradictions created dilemmas in Pakistan’s government policies and actions. "The politics of expediency cost Musharraf and the country dearly," Hussain rightly observes.

Hussain and his generation is witness to a major political soap opera spanning three decades. The 1979 Soviet invasion of neighboring Afghanistan provided the United States with an opportunity to settle scores for its Vietnam debacle. As Washington subcontracted its largest-ever covert Afghan operation to the Pakistani military, it fashioned the Afghan insurrection against Soviet occupation as an Islamic Holy War – Jihad.

After a decade of conflict, in which Afghans did most of the fighting and dying, the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and subsequently collapsed; America discovered new interests elsewhere, and Afghans were left with their predatory neighbors. The Pakistani military establishment declared itself the victor of Afghan Jihad and pursued more militant goals around the neighborhood. Thus the 1990s saw the rise of domestic sectarian terrorists in Pakistan and the Jihad in the disputed Himalayan state of Kashmir. The global Jihadi conglomerate found a secure base in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush with supply lines running through Pakistan.

September 11 brought home the blowback. Washington rediscovered Afghanistan, but the subcontracted project to rollback Jihad didn’t work as planned. The dismantling of the Jihadist infrastructure proved more challenging than anticipated, and neo-conservative blunders further compounded an already grim situation.

The misguided invasion of Iraq provided al-Qaeda with a golden opportunity to lend credence to all its theories about western imperialism. In Pakistan, the military and the militants were pitted against one another. Musharraf has undertaken a delicate balancing act, but, so far, most of his efforts have failed to please either Washington or the Jihadis.

Similar to any journalistic narrative, Frontline Pakistan could have been expanded and, instead of being a journalist’s reportage, might have been stretched to be more analytical and explanatory. One of the weaknesses of the book is the lack of a thorough and critical analysis of American policy, though most of Hussain assertions about it would appear to be self-evident truths.

"The war against militancy and Islamic extremism can be best fought – and won – in a liberal democracy," writes Hussain. "Musharraf’s authoritarian rule has blocked any hopes of democratic process taking root. It is very clear that the restoration of democracy in Pakistan is not a priority for Washington, because a leader in uniform can deliver far more than a democratically elected one. Any army general ruling Pakistan does not trouble the West, so long as he happens to be an effective ally in the war against terror."

Editor’s Note: Abubakar Siddique is a freelance reporter in Islamabad.

Report calls for unity on postwar rebuilding
The State and Defense departments should be forced to join forces in the future to avoid a repeat of Iraq, the study says.
By Julian E. Barnes, Times Staff Writer
March 22, 2007

Related
- Latest coverage of the Iraq war
WASHINGTON — Congress should force the State and Defense departments to cooperate in planning and overseeing any future wartime reconstruction to prevent the kind of problems that befouled rebuilding efforts in Iraq, according to an investigative report to be issued today.

The failure of a comprehensive, unified planning effort before the Iraq invasion — and shifting oversight of the reconstruction program afterward — hindered America's ability to effectively rebuild Iraq, says the report by the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

"Those planning programs shouldn't be balkanized; they should be unified," said Stuart W. Bowen Jr., the special inspector general. "There is fairly universal agreement that the United States government was not well poised to execute the kind of relief and reconstruction operation that was presented in Iraq."

The report outlines the continuing problems in planning and overseeing Iraq reconstruction. Bowen said reform should be modeled on the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act that forced the Air Force, Army and Navy to better coordinate how they fought wars.

Bowen said he was not advocating any specific changes or new positions. Instead, he said, he is recommending that Congress find a way to ensure that the State and Defense departments and the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, have "unity of command" when it comes to wartime rebuilding.

Though the inspector general has issued a series of audits of specific rebuilding projects outlining waste and failures, the report takes a broader look to suggest how the overall rebuilding efforts and oversight can be improved.

The special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction was created by Congress in 2004.

Bowen will release the report today at a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), the committee chairman, and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, the ranking Republican, voiced support Wednesday for the proposals, at least in theory.

"I agree … that the State and Defense departments and USAID must work together much more effectively on post-conflict reconstruction, and I will examine possible legislative fixes to achieve that goal," Lieberman said in a statement.

Collins, in a statement, said the special inspector general had uncovered "disturbing cases of egregious mismanagement, and in some cases, outright fraud" in Iraq reconstruction support. In addition to considering a Goldwater-Nichols style reform, Collins said she was pushing for broad legislation to revamp government procurement.

"These reforms would help ensure that the American taxpayers receive the best value and would curb many of the abuses" cited by the inspector general, Collins said.

The report said Iraq reconstruction was hampered by shifts in leadership and oversight when the State Department took over from the Pentagon-run Coalition Provisional Authority. Projects were complicated by several changes in spending priorities that "profoundly affected" the reconstruction.

"Managers found it difficult to implement projects in an atmosphere of continuously shifting priorities," the report said.

Bowen said the report was not meant to assign blame but to outline changes that could make future reconstruction efforts more effective.

"The story of Iraq reconstruction is a mixed story — there have been successes and there have been failures," Bowen said.

In addition to better coordination between the State and Defense departments, the report advocates other changes in nation-building endeavors. Possible reforms include better integrating the local population in reconstruction projects, providing more flexibility for rebuilding efforts to allow for unforeseen needs and creating a better mix of short-term and long-term projects.

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julian.barnes@latimes.com