December 27, 2007
BORDER CROSSINGS
A Global Trek to Poor Nations, From Poorer Ones

By JASON DePARLE
JUAN GÓMEZ, Dominican Republic — The scrap-wood shanties on a muddy hillside are a poor man’s promised land.

They have leaky roofs and dirt floors, with no lights or running water. But hundreds of Haitian migrants have risked their lives to come here and work the surrounding fields, and they are part of a global trend: migrants who move to poor countries from even poorer ones.

Among them is Anes Moises, 45, a dark-skinned man with flecks of gray hair, who has worked the Dominican banana fields for more than a decade, always illegally. Farm bosses pay him $5 a day and tell him that Haitians stink. Soldiers have called him a dark-skinned “devil” and deported him four times.

Still, with the average income in the Dominican Republic six times as much as in Haiti, Mr. Moises has answered each expulsion by hiring a smuggler to bribe the border guards and guide him back in.

“We are forced to come back here — not because we like it, but because we are poor,” he said. “When we cross the border, we are a little better off. We are able to buy shoes and maybe a chicken.”

Across the developing world, migrants move to other poor countries nearly as often as they move to rich ones. Yet their numbers and hardships are often overlooked.

They typically start poorer than migrants to rich countries, earn less money and are more likely to travel illegally, which raises the odds of abuse. They usually move to countries that offer migrants less legal protection and fewer services than wealthy nations do. Yet their earnings help sustain some of the poorest people on the globe.

There are 74 million “south to south” migrants, according to the World Bank, which uses the term to describe anyone moving from one developing country to another, regardless of geography. The bank estimates that they send home $18 billion to $55 billion a year. (The bank also estimates that 82 million migrants have moved “south to north,” or from poor countries to rich ones.)

Nicaraguans build Costa Rican buildings. Paraguayans pick Argentine crops. Nepalis dig Indian mines. Indonesians clean Malaysian homes. Farm hands from Burkina Faso tend the fields in Ivory Coast. Some save for more expensive journeys north, while others find the move from one poor land to another all they will ever afford. With rich countries tightening their borders, migration within the developing world is likely to grow.

“South to south migration is not only huge, it reaches a different class of people,” said Patricia Weiss Fagen, a researcher at Georgetown University. “These are very, very poor people sending money to even poorer people and they often reach very rural areas where most remittances don’t go.”

The Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic, its neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, has been large, longstanding and filled with strife. The Spanish-speaking Dominicans still refer angrily to a Haitian occupation that ended in 1844. The Creole-speaking Haitians point to 1937, when a Dominican massacre along the border is estimated to have taken the lives of tens of thousands of Haitians.

Haitian workers started coming in large numbers nearly a century ago, as seasonal help in sugar cane fields. But many now work year-round on farms or urban construction sites, which raises their visibility and the chance for conflict. Estimates vary greatly, but Dominican officials put Haitian migrants at one million, or 11 percent of the population.

As Haitians see it, the problems go beyond hard work and low pay to the systemic violation of their rights. Dominicans profit from their labor, they say, but deny them work papers, deport them at will and discriminate on the belief that Haitians have darker skin.

“There is no justice here,” Mr. Moises said.

Dominicans often present themselves as generous neighbors of limited means, forced to bear the burden of Haiti’s failed state, indigence and epidemic disease. They say they offer Haitians jobs and health care — 30 percent of the public health budget is spent on Haitians, government officials say — while enduring lectures about human rights from countries far from the fray.

“Ay-yai-yai-yai,” said Gen. Adriano Silverio Rodríguez, the commander of a new border force, when describing how Americans would respond if they shared a border with a country as troubled as Haiti. “That wall they’re building — it would be longer and taller.”

Per capita income in the Dominican Republic is $2,850; in Haiti it is $480.

The clash of civilizations can be seen along the Massacre River, a muddy, waist-deep waterway that divides them. On the Dominican side, Dajabón is a market town of 10,000 people, with paved streets, public utilities and a new Internet cafe. Its Haitian counterpart, Ouanaminthe, is seven or eight times as big, with no municipal lights or running water. The dirt roads are filled with trash and pigs.

Twice a week, Dominicans open the bridge, and thousands of Haitians rush across to buy goods that are scarce on their side: eggs, nails, flour, concrete, carrots, salami, juice, cooking oil, chickens and plastic chairs. Guards patrol the area, trying to ensure the Haitians’ return.

Bribery and violence are common. In a case now before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Dominican soldiers are accused of indiscriminately firing on a smuggler’s truck, killing six Haitians. Two dozen Haitians in a smuggler’s truck suffocated last year. Their bodies were dumped on the road.

Unwritten Rules

The village of Juan Gómez lies 35 miles east of the border, past three military checkpoints that search for illegal migrants. But its illegal migrants, like Mr. Moises, live in plain view. Their open presence points to the capricious unwritten rules: Haitians caught at the border are usually sent back, while those needed by employers are often left to stay, at least until someone objects.

“We do not intervene in the workplace,” said Carlos Amarante Baret, the Dominican immigration director. “We understand the needs of the agricultural sector.” He acknowledged that the situation “benefits the landowner.”

Gathered here at a small hilltop church squeezed among the shanties, the workers talked of the hardships they had fled and those they had encountered. Jacqueline Bayard said the threat of deportation left the workers powerless. Katline Auguste said the lack of legal papers had kept her from visiting her children in Haiti for three years.

Lorvil Seus said he lived in fear of vigilante violence, as in a famed incident in nearby Hatillo Palma, in which a Haitian pastor was killed — and 2,000 Haitians deported — after the murder of a Dominican woman. Reprisal killings spread, and three Haitians were burned to death near the capital, Santo Domingo.

Mr. Moises voiced gratitude as well as complaints, explaining that he had once walked from Haiti with his malarial daughter in his arms, and Dominican doctors had saved her. “We can only thank them because they helped us,” he said.

Dominican society, in his view, is complex. Some politicians want Haitians deported, he said, but employers “need us to work.” Poor Dominicans claim Haitians are stealing jobs, but refuse those jobs themselves. Officers sometimes order raids to curry political favor, he added, but low-paid soldiers want the Haitians around to extort bribes. “It’s a business they have,” he said.

“We are living in their country,” he said. “We have to take it.”

Colliding Interests

Dominican officials often say that the colliding interests that surround immigration are similar to those in the United States, but that poor countries like theirs have fewer resources to cope. Carlos Morales Troncoso, the Dominican foreign minister, said that the solution to the Haitians’ problems was to promote development in Haiti and urged the United States to do more. “The developed countries talk a lot about Haiti, but the necessary aid just doesn’t come,” he said. By providing jobs, he said, “we do more than the whole international community combined.”

Some south to south migrants are “pushed” by wars and political crises. Others are “pulled” by jobs and better wages. Some follow seasonal work. Some put down roots. Some countries — Argentina is one — have been quick to give amnesty to migrants. Others, including Nigeria and Indonesia, have subjected them to mass deportations.

Many countries simultaneously send and receive large migrations. One reason there are jobs for Haitians is that so many Dominicans have left for the United States. The president, Leonel Fernández, was largely reared in New York City.

That exposes what Dilip Ratha, an economist at the World Bank, calls a common double standard. “Many countries want good treatment for their own people abroad but they don’t treat immigrants well themselves,” he said.

Egyptian police officers killed 26 Sudanese migrants last year in an attack on their squatter camp. An Indian film star, Hritik Roshan, set off a deadly riot in Katmandu, Nepal, in 2000 when he was quoted as saying he “hated” the Nepalis. Costa Ricans sometimes deride Nicaraguans as “Nicas.” In 2005, two Rottweilers killed a Nicaraguan suspected of being a burglar, as an approving crowd watched. Jokes flooded the country, praising the dogs.

Still, Manuel Orozco of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington research group, warned against viewing south to south migration solely in a negative light. He estimates that Haitians in the Dominican Republic send home $135 million a year.

“Destination countries benefit from foreign labor,” Mr. Orozco said, while migrants get jobs. The challenge, he said, is to create policies that “promote development for both countries, while protecting migrants and their families.”

“Just letting migration happen is not good enough,” he added.

The Dominican Republic has no such framework. This year alone, the conditions of its Haitians have been the focus of two documentary films, a photo exhibit in Paris and a United Nations investigation that found “a profound and entrenched problem of racism.”

Who Is a Citizen?

One battle now playing out involves the right to citizenship, which the Dominican Constitution promises to anyone born on Dominican soil except the children of diplomats and visitors “in transit.” But in 2005 the Supreme Court ruled that illegal immigrants were essentially in transit — though some lived in the country for decades — and therefore their children had no citizenship rights.

Critics say that the ruling conflicts with international law, including a decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights two months earlier. They also said the government was using it to deny papers to Dominicans of Haitian descent, impeding their ability to work, study and vote.

Nationalists are trying to get the anti-citizenship provisions written into the Constitution.

“We could have hundreds of thousands of so-called Dominican nationals who on cultural, emotional and political grounds would see themselves as Haitian,” said Pelegrín Castillo, a leading nationalist legislator.

“Every day there are more Haitians in the Dominican Republic,” he added. “We are overwhelmed.”

For many Haitians, the journey ends where it began — in the muddy border town of Ouanaminthe, which receives scores of deported migrants each week. Most arrive penniless. Some sleep in City Hall.

Wesbert Sertil, 27, was among the unfortunates. Tired of hearing his in-laws complain that he could not feed his children, he borrowed $50 a year ago and boarded a smuggler’s truck. But the construction work he found was sporadic, and he sent money home just twice, totaling $90.

He was leaving work one day when military men asked for his papers. After a few days in a border-town jail, he was sleeping in abandoned houses, and asking a religious group for food.

His village was an eight-hour bus ride away, and the family that had urged him to go was unaware of his pending return. Smugglers approached him on the streets, but Mr. Sertil planned to use any money he could scrounge to buy a ticket home. “I got desperate and went to the Dominican Republic,” he said. “I’m not going back again.”

He noted that there were plenty of Haitians willing to take his place.

The Costs of Containing Iran
Washington's Misguided New Middle East Policy
By Vali Nasr and Ray Takeyh
From Foreign Affairs , January/February 2008
Summary: The Bush administration wants to contain Iran by rallying the support of Sunni Arab states and now sees Iran's containment as the heart of its Middle East policy: a way to stabilize Iraq, declaw Hezbollah, and restart the Arab-Israeli peace process. But the strategy is unsound and impractical, and it will probably further destabilize an already volatile region.
Vali Nasr, Professor of International Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Adjunct Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the Council on Foreign Relations, is the author of "The Shia Revival: How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future." Ray Takeyh is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of "Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic."

Over the past year, Washington has come to see the containment of Iran as the primary objective of its Middle East policy. It holds Tehran responsible for rising violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, Lebanon's tribulations, and Hamas' intransigence and senses that the balance of power in the region is shifting toward Iran and its Islamist allies. Curbing Tehran's growing influence is thus necessary for regional security.

Vice President Dick Cheney announced this new direction last May on the deck of the U.S.S. John C. Stennis in the Persian Gulf. "We'll stand with our friends in opposing extremism and strategic threats," Cheney said. "We'll continue bringing relief to those who suffer, and delivering justice to the enemies of freedom. And we'll stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region." Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has expressed a similar sentiment: "Iran constitutes the single most important single-country strategic challenge to the United States and to the kind of Middle East that we want to see." Meanwhile, Iran's accelerating nuclear program continues to haunt Washington and much of the international community, adding to their sense of urgency.

Taking a page out of its early Cold War playbook, Washington hopes to check and possibly reduce Tehran's growing influence much as it foiled the Soviet Union's expansionist designs: by projecting its own power while putting direct pressure on its enemy and building a broad-based alliance against it. Washington has been building up the U.S. Navy's presence in the Persian Gulf and using harsh rhetoric, raising the specter of war. At the same time, it funds a $75 million democracy-promotion program supporting regime change in Tehran. In recent months, Washington has rallied support for a series of United Nations resolutions against Iran's nuclear program and successfully pushed through tough informal financial sanctions that have all but cut Iran out of international financial markets. It has officially designated the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and the IRG's elite al Quds Army as a supporter of terrorism, allowing the Treasury Department to target the groups' assets and the U.S. military to harass and apprehend their personnel in Iraq. Washington is also working to garner support from what it now views as moderate governments in the Middle East -- mostly authoritarian Arab regimes it once blamed for the region's myriad problems.

Washington's goal is to eliminate Iran's influence in the Arab world by rolling back Tehran's gains to date and denying it the support of allies -- in effect drawing a line from Lebanon to Oman to separate Iran from its Arab neighbors. The Bush administration has rallied support among Arab governments to oppose Iranian policies in Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories. It is trying to buttress the military capability of Persian Gulf states by providing a $20 billion arms package to Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates. According to Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, one of the arms sales' primary objectives is "to enable these countries to strengthen their defenses and therefore to provide a deterrence against Iranian expansion and Iranian aggression in the future." And through a series of regional conclaves and conferences, the Bush administration hopes to rejuvenate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process partly in the hope of refocusing the energies of the region's governments on the threat posed by Iran.

Containing Iran is not a novel idea, of course, but the benefits Washington expects from it are new. Since the inception of the Islamic Republic, successive Republican and Democratic administrations have devised various policies, doctrines, and schemes to temper the rash theocracy. For the Bush administration, however, containing Iran is the solution to the Middle East's various problems. In its narrative, Sunni Arab states will rally to assist in the reconstruction of a viable government in Iraq for fear that state collapse in Baghdad would only consolidate Iran's influence there. The specter of Shiite primacy in the region will persuade Saudi Arabia and Egypt to actively help declaw Hezbollah. And, the theory goes, now that Israel and its longtime Arab nemeses suddenly have a common interest in deflating Tehran's power and stopping the ascendance of its protégé, Hamas, they will come to terms on an Israeli-Palestinian accord. This, in turn, will (rightly) shift the Middle East's focus away from the corrosive Palestinian issue to the more pressing Persian menace. Far from worrying that the Middle East is now in flames, Bush administration officials seem to feel that in the midst of disorder and chaos lies an unprecedented opportunity for reshaping the region so that it is finally at ease with U.S. dominance and Israeli prowess.

But there is a problem: Washington's containment strategy is unsound, it cannot be implemented effectively, and it will probably make matters worse. The ingredients needed for a successful containment effort simply do not exist. Under these circumstances, Washington's insistence that Arab states array against Iran could further destabilize an already volatile region.

NEW AND DISPROVED

Iran does present serious problems for the United States. Its quest for a nuclear capability, its mischievous interventions in Iraq, and its strident opposition to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process constitute a formidable list of grievances. But the bigger issue is the Bush administration's fundamental belief that Iran cannot be a constructive actor in a stable Middle East and that its unsavory behavior cannot be changed through creative diplomacy. Iran is not, in fact, seeking to create disorder in order to fulfill some scriptural promise, nor is it an expansionist power with unquenchable ambitions. Not unlike Russia and China, Iran is a growing power seeking to become a pivotal state in its region.

Another one of Washington's errors is to assume that Iran can be handled like the Soviet Union and that the Cold War model applies to the Middle East. Both Israel and Arab governments have pressed Washington to contend with Iran's nuclear ambitions and since the Lebanon war of 2006 have worried about the strengthening connections between Tehran and Hezbollah. They have responded by throwing their support behind the government of Fouad Siniora in Beirut and trying to break the collusion between the Iranian and Syrian governments. Washington has been supportive, building up its military presence in the Persian Gulf and using last year's surge in the number of U.S. forces in Iraq to roll back Iran's gains there. But the same Arab governments that complain about Tehran's influence also oppose the Shiite government in Iraq, which is pro- Iranian and pro-American, and favor its Sunni opponents -- leaving Washington having to figure out how to work with the Iraqi government while also building a regional alliance with Sunni Arab states. Washington's containment wall will therefore have to run right through Iraq and so inevitably destabilize the country as it becomes the frontline in the U.S.-Iranian confrontation.

The Bush administration's strategy also fails to appreciate the diverse views of Arab states. Arab regimes are indeed worried about Iran, but they are not uniformly so. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain decry Iranian expansionism and fear Tehran's interference in their internal affairs. But Egypt and Jordan worry mostly that Iran's newfound importance is eroding their standing in the region. The stake for them is not territory or internal stability but influence over the Palestinian issue. Even within the Persian Gulf region, there is no anti-Iranian consensus. Unlike Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, for example, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates do not suffer a Shiite minority problem and have enjoyed extensive economic relations with Tehran since the mid-1990s. Far from seeking confrontation with Iran, they fear the consequences of escalating tensions between it and the United States. Even U.S. allies in the Middle East will assess their capabilities and vulnerabilities, shape their alliances, and pursue their interests with the understanding that they, too, are susceptible to Iran's influence. A U.S. containment strategy that assumes broad Arab solidarity is unsound in theory.

Nor can it be implemented. For close to half a century, the Arab world saw Iraq's military as its bulwark in the Persian Gulf. Having dismantled that force in 2003, the United States is now the only power present in the Gulf that can contain Iran militarily. Shouldering that responsibility effectively would mean maintaining large numbers of troops in the region indefinitely. But given the anti-American sentiment pervading all of the Gulf today, none of the states in the region (except for Kuwait) could countenance the redeployment of a substantial number of U.S. forces in their territory. Thus, Washington would have to rely on weaker regional actors to contain a rising Iran, which is the largest country in the Persian Gulf in terms of size, population, and economy. Even major arms sales to the Gulf states could not change this reality.

Washington's reliance on reviving the Middle East peace process as the linchpin of its strategy to contain Iran is also problematic. Bush administration officials are assuming that resumed diplomacy between Israel and its neighbors will assuage the Arab street, rally Arab governments behind the United States, and lay the groundwork for a united Arab-Israeli front against Iran. But this hope disregards the fact that in their current state, Palestinian and Israeli politics will not support the types of compromises necessary for a credible breakthrough. Both Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are too weak to press their constituencies toward the painful concessions that a viable peace compact would require. The expectations of Arab leaders far exceed those of Israel and the United States: while they have been openly demanding final-status negotiations, Secretary Rice has been talking only about creating momentum toward peace.

Even if the peace process can be successfully relaunched, the notion that Arabs see the rise of Iran as a bigger problem than the decades-old Arab-Israeli conflict is misplaced. After years of enmity, the Arab masses and Arab opinion-makers continue to perceive Israel as a more acute threat. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad understands this well: he has been raising the heat on the Palestinian issue precisely because he wants to make headway among the Arab people and understands that they do not share the anti-Iranian sentiment of their governments. Along with his inflammatory denunciations of Israel and Tehran's assistance to Hamas and Hezbollah, Ahmadinejad's embrace of an Arab cause has garnered him ample support among the rank and file. In fact, Tehran enjoys significant soft power in the Middle East today. Washington assumes that its proposals regarding the Arab-Israeli peace process will redirect everyone's worries toward Iran; Tehran believes that current efforts will not satiate Arab demands. A careful reading of the region's mood reveals that Iran is on firmer ground than the United States.

Indeed, it is not the Palestinian issue that will decide the balance of power in the Middle East but the fate of the failing states of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon, where Iranian influence has found ample room to expand. The Palestinian issue remains important to Israel's security, stability in the Levant, and the United States' image and prestige. It is also a catalyst for regional rivalries. But the Palestinian issue is not the original cause of those regional contests, nor will it decide their outcome. For all its worrying about Iran's growing power, Washington has failed to appreciate that the center of gravity in the Middle East has indeed shifted from the Levant to the Persian Gulf. It is now more likely that peace and stability in the Persian Gulf would bring peace and stability to the Levant than the other way around.

For a government that so often invokes the past to substantiate its policies, the Bush administration has a curiously inadequate grasp of recent Middle Eastern history. The last time the United States rallied the Arab world to contain Iran, in the 1980s, Americans ended up with a radicalized Sunni political culture that eventually yielded al Qaeda. The results may be as bad this time around: a containment policy will only help erect Sunni extremism as an ideological barrier to Shiite Iran, much as Saudi Arabia's rivalry with Iran in the 1980s played out in South Asia and much as radical Salafis mobilized to offset Hezbollah's soaring popularity after the Israeli-Lebanese war in 2006. During the Cold War, confronting communism meant promoting capitalism and democracy. Containing Iran today would mean promoting Sunni extremism -- a self-defeating proposition for Washington.

The realities of the Middle East will eventually defeat Washington's Cold War fantasies. This is not to say that Iran does not pose serious challenges to U.S., Arab, or Israeli interests. But envisioning that a grand U.S.-Arab-Israeli alliance can contain Iran will sink Afghanistan, Iraq, and Lebanon into greater chaos; inflame Islamic radicalism; and commit the United States to a lengthy and costly presence in the Middle East.

A NEW ORDER

The Middle East is a region continuously divided against itself. In the 1960s, radical Arab regimes contested the legitimacy and power of traditional monarchical states. In the 1970s, Islamic fundamentalists rejected the prevailing secular order and sought to set the region on the path to God. In the 1980s, much of the Arab world supported the genocidal Saddam Hussein as he sought to displace Iran's theocratic regime. Today, the Middle East is fracturing once more, this time along sectarian and confessional lines, with Sunnis clamoring to curb Shiite ascendance. Again and again, in the name of preserving the balance of power, U.S. policy has taken sides in the region's conflicts, thus exacerbating tensions and widening existing cleavages. Beyond the Arab-Israeli conflict, the United States has shown limited interest in mediating conflicts, settling disputes, or bringing antagonists together. Washington sided with the conservative monarchies against Arab socialist republics, acquiesced in the brutal suppression of fundamentalist opposition by secular governments, buttressed Saudi power and the Iraqi war machine to temper Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's Islamist rage. It is now courting Sunni regimes to align against Iran and its resurgent Shiite allies. Every time, as Washington has become mired in the Middle East's rivalries, its goal of stabilizing the region has slipped further away.

Instead of focusing on restoring a former balance of power, the United States would be wise to aim for regional integration and foster a new framework in which all the relevant powers would have a stake in a stable status quo. The Bush administration is correct to sense that a truculent Iran poses serious challenges to U.S. concerns, but containing Iran through military deployment and antagonistic alliances simply is not a tenable strategy. Iran is not, despite common depictions, a messianic power determined to overturn the regional order in the name of Islamic militancy; it is an unexceptionally opportunistic state seeking to assert predominance in its immediate neighborhood. Thus, the task at hand for Washington is to create a situation in which Iran will find benefit in limiting its ambitions and in abiding by international norms.

Dialogue, compromise, and commerce, as difficult as they may be, are convincing means. An acknowledgment by the U.S. government that Tehran does indeed have legitimate interests and concerns in Iraq could get the two governments finally to realize that they have similar objectives: both want to preserve the territorial integrity of Iraq and prevent the civil war there from engulfing the Middle East. Resuming diplomatic and economic relations between Iran and the United States, as well as collaborating on Iraq, could also be the precursor of an eventual arrangement subjecting Iran's nuclear program to its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. If Iran enjoyed favorable security and commercial ties with the United States and was at ease in its region, it might restrain its nuclear ambitions.

Engaging Tehran need not come at the expense of the United States' relationships with Iran's Arab neighbors. Instead of militarizing the Persian Gulf and shoring up shaky alliances on Iran's periphery, Washington should move toward a new regional security system. The system should feature all the local actors and could rest on, among other things, a treaty pledging the inviolability of the region's borders, arms control pacts proscribing certain categories of weapons, a common market with free-trade zones, and a mechanism for adjudicating disputes. For the Gulf states, this new order would have the advantage of bringing the Shiite-dominated states of Iran and Iraq into a constructive partnership, thus diminishing the risk of sectarian conflict. A new security arrangement would be an opportunity for Iran to legitimize its power and achieve its objectives through cooperation rather than confrontation. And it would allow the Iraqi government, which is often belittled by its Sunni neighbors, to exercise its own influence and so expose the canard that it is a mere subsidiary of Tehran. Saudi Arabia and Iran, the region's two leading nations, could move beyond their zero-sum competition in Iraq and press their allies there to adopt a new national compact that would recognize the interests of the Sunni and Kurdish minorities in Iraq.

None of this, however, will come about without active U.S. participation and encouragement. The Persian Gulf states will require reassurance if they are to entrust their defense to a new regional order. For Iran, whose chief competitor for regional preeminence remains the United States, there would be no reason to participate unless Washington were involved. The United States, for its part, would have to show that it is seeking not to impose a new balance of power but to uphold a regional arrangement that all the relevant regimes can endorse. Ultimately, the paradoxical but beneficial result would be a new situation in which all the Persian Gulf states would not just cooperate with one another but also endorse the United States' continued presence in the region. The strategy would serve the interests of the United States' European allies as well as those of China and Russia, all of which require stability in the Middle East and reliable access to its energy supplies.

Engaging Iran while regulating its rising power within an inclusive regional security arrangement is the best way of stabilizing Iraq, placating the United States' Arab allies, helping along the Arab-Israeli peace process, and even giving a new direction to negotiations over Iran's nuclear program. Because this approach includes all the relevant players, it is also the most sustainable and the least taxing strategy for the United States in the Middle East.

Gingrich Warns of GOP Catastrophe

Monday, February 11, 2008 5:10 PM

By: Newsmax Staff
In a rousing speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Sunday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich called for a conservative “declaration of independence” from the Republican Party.

He also warned that Republicans face a “catastrophic” election this year unless the GOP changes course.

Gingrich pointed out that on Super Tuesday, 14.6 million voters took part in the Democratic races, compared to 8.3 million Republicans.

“There were 14.6 million Democrats who thought the presidential nomination was worth voting for, and there were 8.3 million Republicans on Super Tuesday,” Gingrich said.

“That is a warning of a catastrophic election. I was in Idaho this last week, and Barack Obama on last Saturday had 16,000 people in Boise. The idea [of] the most liberal Democratic Senator getting 16,000 people in Boise was inconceivable.

“And every person who cares about the conservative movement and every person who cares about the Republican Party had better stop and say to themselves, ‘There is something big happening in this country. We don’t understand it. We’re not responding to it. And we’re currently not competitive. And if we want to get to be competitive, we had better change and we had better change now.”

Gingrich stressed that he was not commenting on any of the current candidates for president.

Rather, he said, “this is a comment about the conservative movement, and it's a comment about the Republican Party, and all the candidates currently running fit within those two phrases. But it is about all of us. It is about our Congressman, our Senator, our governors, our county commissioners, our school board members.

“And let me make this very clear, I believe we have to change or expect defeat.

“And I believe that this is a time for the conservative movement to issue a declaration of independence…

“First of all, I think we need to get independent from a Washington fixation. There are 513,000 elected officials in the United States and the conservative movement should believe in a decentralized United States, where every elected official has real responsibility, and we should be developing a conservative action plan, at every level of this country, and not simply focused over and over again on arguments about the White House…

“I also think that we need to declare our independence from trying to protect and defend failed bureaucracies that magically become ours as soon as we are in charge of them. We appoint solid conservatives to a department and within three weeks they are defending and protecting the very department that they would have been attacking before they got appointed.”

Gingrich drew considerable applause when he continued with his “independence” theme:

“There is one other declaration of independence we need and this will startle some of you. And remember I say this from a background of having been active in the Georgia Republican Party since 1960. In a fundamental way, the conservative movement has to declare itself independent from the Republican Party.

“Let me make very clear what I'm saying here. I am not saying there should be a third party – I think a third party is a dumb idea, will not get anywhere, and in the end will achieve nothing.

“I actually believe that any reasonable conservative will, in the end, find that they have an absolute requirement to support the Republican nominee for president this fall…

“As a citizen, I would rather have a President McCain that we fight with 20 percent of the time, than a President Clinton or a President Obama that we fight with 90 percent of the time.”

But he warned: “If we run a traditional consultant-dominated tactical Republican campaign, like we’ve seen in the last eight years, we will be defeated this fall, and we will be having a CPAC meeting next year talking about how we rebuild for the future with either President Obama or President Clinton in charge.”

© 2008 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

WMD Catastrophes

By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | 2/12/2008

Frontpage Interview's guest today is John C. Wohlstetter, a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and part of the Technology and Democracy Project. He is a Washington D.C. attorney with a career of more than 22 years working in the telecommunications sector at positions that include corporate law, communications law, national security and strategic assessment. An accomplished writer, He has written and published articles on telecommunications, national security and America's space policy for such notable publications as The American Spectator and The National Review. His blog, Letter From The Capitol, is sponsored by Discovery Institute; it covers a wide range of topics, including national security, and economic and cultural issues. He is the author of the new book, The Long War Ahead And The Short War Upon Us.

FP: John C. Wohlstetter, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Wohlstetter: Thank you, Jamie. And thanks also to Frontpage for inviting me.

FP: What made you write this book?

Wohlstetter: As the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks approached, I found myself becoming more concerned that America's efforts were flagging. Partly it was because we had not seen a terror strike since 9/11. Partly it was because we were floundering badly in Iraq, with defeat appearing nearly certain--a defeat that would clearly energize jihadists worldwide. And partly it was because there are so many facets to this conflict that developing an intellectually coherent view of the full set of wars we are engaged in is difficult. I wrote the book in order to present such a cohesive view, and thus enhance readers' understanding of the various wars we fight and what might improve our chances of prevailing. I also felt that unless we motivate ourselves to devote more human and material resources we may suffer one or more avoidable WMD catastrophes.

FP: What is the Long War and the Short War?

Wohlstetter: The Long War is a war against militant Islamofascist ideology in its several forms, one that it likely at minimum several decades in duration. It is a civilizational war of survival, but not Professor Huntington's famous "clash of civilizations," because our enemies stand only for death and destruction, while all civilizations, including the great Islamic ones, celebrate life and creation. It is, simply put, a war of survival between imperfect civilization and perfect barbarism. The Short War is a war of prevention, aimed at reducing to the smallest possible chance a successful WMD attack on American soil, or the soil of our allies.

FP: What is the main argument of your book?

Wohlstetter: My main argument is that while we are likely to prevail in the Long War, as militant Islam alienates too many of its enemies to likely win, because we are not investing enough human and material resources in the Short War we may well suffer one or more WMD attacks that will so scar free societies that eventual victory in the Long War may seem hollow.

FP: Who and what is our enemy? What is the psychology of our enemy?

Wohlstetter: Our enemies are votaries of various strains of militant Islam. Most prominent among these are the Saudi Arabian Wahabbi sect, which originated in 18th century Arabian peninsula, from Sunni Islam, which advocates a global Sunni caliphate, and the Iranian Twelver Shia, which originated in the late 9th century, and which believes that a child messiah will return after 11+ centuries and bring about a fiery judgment day. There are other militant sects, notably, the Sunni sect of Deoband, which originated in 19th century India, and strongly influenced the Taliban, and Egypt's 20th century vintage Muslim Brotherhood, which influenced al-Qaeda's top leaders. Copycat terrorist groups have spun off from al-Qaeda, or used the information from the Internet to independently emulate al-Qaeda.

FP: What do you make of how the war in Iraq is going now? What are the dangers of withdrawing prematurely as someone like Obama might do if he gets into the White House?

Wohlstetter: Iraq is fluid: the range of potential outcomes include premature withdrawal that snatches certain defeat from the jaws of possible victory, to perseverance, plus Iraqi political reform, that creates a reasonably stable, non-terror state Iraq, with US forces allowed friendly basing rights and a limited presence. Our presence did, of course, anger Islamists re Saudi Arabia. But presence is necessary to show, by example, the locals that Americans aren't like the caricatures in Arab media. The key is being close to the population, not being isolated as we were in Saudi. We make friends locally, as we are doing now in Iraq, by doing good deeds.

If a President promises rapid withdrawal, or sets an arbitrary deadline, this will undermine progress in a still fragile Iraq. The surge, by expanding hugely the secure terrain in Iraq, creates a stable political space, within which political progress is possible. The key is to build from the ground up, locally, which is why provincial election reform is essential, to jettison the top-down corporatist structure that the Coalition Provisional Authority and the UN sold the Iraqis.

FP: What are two or three realistic scenarios of a WMD catastrophe? What are the most effective ways we can try to prevent these?

Wohlstetter: (1) One scenario is the electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attack I describe in the prologue to my book. An Iranian missile is fired from a barge in international waters, and detonates over Kansas at 300 miles altitude. The resulting EMP burns circuits in America's electric and communication networks. Within milliseconds, at least 70 percent of America's twin electrical infrastructures are destroyed. America is plunged instantaneously into the year 1875. Recovery takes many months, perhaps more than a year. Thousands of lives are lost, but not instantaneously. Trillions of dollars in market value disappear. Iran threatens to destroy 5 Arab and 5 European capitals if the US retaliates.

(2) Nuclear weapons transferred to terrorists are placed in shipping containers. America's largest harbors are targeted (6 - 8 ports). The nukes destroy the ports, and America loses two-thirds of its ship import capacity. With 90 percent of imports coming by ship, the result, besides massive loss of life, is economic devastation for many years. A group doing this would have to conceal origin, if possible, to minimize retaliation concerns. If there is no clear return address--a country we can target--retaliation is politically almost impossible, for risk of killing innocent millions.

(3) A bio-terrorist Unabomber develops a lethal super-pathogen with long latency, extreme contagion and high lethality. The pathogen is dispensed in airports around the world, infecting millions of passengers. After the latency period--long enough to enable the bug to spread to many millions of non-fliers--a pandemic results. A pandemic as lethal as the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed 20 million, would kill over 100 million today, based upon equivalent population percentage fatalities in a vastly more populous world.

All of these scenarios presume terrorist actors whose motivations are not rational (economic or political), but instead are extreme fanaticism of one sort or another. Unfortunately, there seems to be no shortage of such fanatics in today's world. They lack the full set of tools to carry out such attacks so far, but that situation can change dramatically in the future. We had better stop them.

FP: In 2009 a new President enters the Oval Office. He/She calls you on the phone and asks you your advice on fighting the war on terror. What do you tell him/her?

Wohlstetter: (1) Impose severe, broad economic sanctions on Iran, going outside the UN, where Russia and China will veto any strong sanctions, and engage with Iran's human rights movements; condition suspension of sanctions on Iran's verifiably ending uranium enrichment. Strongly support human rights groups in any event (as we did vis-à-vis the USSR during the Cold War).

(2) Wind down troop presence in Iraq only in accord with conditions on the ground.

(3) Apply sanctions against Syria until it stops trying to subvert Lebanon's Cedar Revolution.

(4) Broadly engage as many factions inside Pakistan as possible, so that America is not hostage to the fortunes of one party or leader; intensify Predator patrols over Waziristan, with delegated decision authority to take out senior al-Qaeda figures on sight or shortly after a sighting.

(5) Significantly expand and accelerate implementation of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, reducing US and Russia nuclear stockpiles.

(6) Significantly accelerate and expand defense spending across the board, increasing greatly both military manpower and modern equipment.

(7) Accelerate missile defense deployment and take measures to secure our military and commercial satellites, and accelerate hardening of infrastructures against terrorist attacks.

(8) Seek passage of federal legislation limiting the president to 30 days of plenary martial law authority after a WMD strike, renewable for 90-day periods upon Congressional approval.

(9) Begin public service ads informing Americans better on how to cope in the aftermath of WMD attacks, or "dirty bomb" attacks.

(10) Step up a non-apologetic public diplomacy that denies our adversaries free access to our media to propagandize, and covertly subsidizes moderate media organizations and leaders abroad (as we did during the Cold War).

FP: John C. Wohlstetter, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Wohlstetter: Thank you, editors of Frontpage, for the opportunity to share my views with your readers.

Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.

February 11, 2008
GLOBAL CLASSROOMS
In Oil-Rich Mideast, Shades of the Ivy League

By TAMAR LEWIN
DOHA, Qatar — On a hot October evening, hundreds of families flocked to the sumptuous Ritz Carlton here in this Persian Gulf capital for an unusual college fair, the Education City roadshow.

Qataris, Bangladeshis, Syrians, Indians, Egyptians — in saris, in suits, in dishdashis, in jeans — came to hear what it takes to win admission to one of the five American universities that offer degrees at Education City, a 2,500-acre campus on the outskirts of Doha where oil and gas money pays for everything from adventurous architecture to professors’ salaries.

Education City, the largest enclave of American universities overseas, has fast become the elite of Qatari education, a sort of local Ivy League. But the five American schools have started small, with only about 300 slots among them for next year’s entering classes. So there is a slight buzz of anxiety at the fair, which starts with a nonalcoholic cocktail hour, with fruit juices passed on silver trays as families circulate among the booths.

“I just came to get my mind together,” said Rowea al-Shrem, a junior in a head-to-toe black abaya who came to the fair on her own. “I wanted to know what to expect, so I don’t go crazy next year.”

At a time when almost every major American university is concerned with expanding its global reach, Education City provides a glimpse of the range of American expertise in demand overseas. Five universities have brought programs here, and more are on their way.

Cornell’s medical school, which combines pre-med training and professional training over six years, will graduate the first Qatar-trained physicians this spring. Virginia Commonwealth University brought its art and design program to Qatari women 10 years ago and began admitting men this year. Carnegie Mellon offers computer and business programs.

Texas A&M, the largest of the Education City schools, teaches engineering, with petroleum engineering its largest program. Georgetown’s foreign service school is the latest arrival. Soon, Northwestern University’s journalism program will come, too.

When the crowd files into the ballroom to hear about the admission process — first in English, with Arabic translation available through headphones, then later in Arabic — what it hears is much the same as at an information session for a selective American college.

“We want to see students who are passionate and dedicated,” Valerie Jeremijenko, Virginia Commonwealth’s dean of student affairs, tells the crowd. “It’s competitive, but don’t let that discourage you.”

She sounds all the familiar themes: Work hard this year, so you can get great recommendations. Participate in extracurricular activities. Do not obsess about SAT scores, because we look at the whole person.

Education City is so firmly ensconced as the gold standard here that many students apply to several of its schools, knowing that their career will be determined by where they are accepted.

When Dana Hadan was a student at Doha’s leading girls’ science high school, she wanted to be a doctor and applied to Cornell’s medical school. But Cornell rejected her, and her parents did not want her to go to a medical school overseas. So Ms. Hadan enrolled instead in the business program at Carnegie Mellon.

Now, as a third-year student, she is happily learning macroeconomics and marketing. “I was never interested in business, but now I’m passionate about it,” said Ms. Hadan, a lively 20-year-old.

She never considered the locally run Qatar University: “I knew I wanted Education City,” she said.

Admission standards, degree requirements and curriculum — complete, in most cases, with an introductory two years of broad liberal arts — at the Education City schools are the same as at the American home campuses. So is the philosophy of teaching.

“There are lots of programs in different countries that are ‘kind of like,’ ‘in partnership with,’ or ‘inspired by’ American education,” said Charles E. Thorpe, the dean of Carnegie Mellon in Qatar. “But this is American education. And for many of our students, that’s a very big change. Almost all of them went to single-sex secondary schools. As recently as six years ago, the elementary reader in Qatar was the Koran, so students learned beautiful classical Arabic, but they had no experience with questions like ‘What do you think the author meant by that?’ or ‘Do you agree or disagree?’ ”

Education City is in many ways a study in contradictions, an island of American-style open debate in what remains an Islamic monarchy, albeit a liberal one by regional standards. Education City graduates will be a broadly educated elite, who have had extended contact with American professors and American ways of thinking, and, in some cases, spent time at their school’s home campus back in the United States.

Although it is still small and new, it could be a seedbed of change, with a profound impact on Qatar’s future and its relations with the United States — and perhaps, some Qatari parents worry, on their traditional way of life.

Opportunities for Women

Education City represents broad opportunities for women, in a nation where many families do not allow their daughters to travel overseas for higher education or to mix casually with men. Cornell stresses, proudly, that it was Qatar’s first coeducational institution of higher learning.

The female students are very much aware of their new opportunities and the support they have received from Sheika Mozah Bint Nasser al-Missned, the emir’s second wife and a strong advocate of women’s education. She is chairwoman of the Qatar Foundation, which runs Education City.

“I don’t want my father’s money or my husband’s money,” said Maryam al-Ibrahim, a 21-year-old second-year student at Virginia Commonwealth. “I want to work for a private company and be myself, and I would like to become someone important here.”

Mais Taha, a Texas A&M petroleum-engineering student, glows as she talks about her classes, including Reservoir Fluids — hydrocarbons, she explains sweetly — and Drilling.

“I’m one of the first Qatari girls willing to go out in the field and put on a coverall,” she said. “All the technicians were treating me as a princess, because I’d come in wearing an abaya, and then go out in overalls. And I can’t wait until I can go out and work on a rig.”

No wonder, then, that some Qatari parents are wary of Education City. “I know some girls who applied here, and their parents said they were not supposed to be hanging out with guys, but when they came they realized they had to, because of homework and projects,” Ms. Hadan said.

Carnegie Mellon feels like an American institution, with Mental Health Month posters on attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and depression, Starbucks and the student bake sale, where Reem Khaled, preparing a business project, sells Betty Crocker brownies and pineapple cake and surveys customer interest in healthier options.

How much to localize the curriculum is an ongoing issue at the Education City schools, where officials sometimes find that problems and ideas transposed from America do not necessarily make much sense. “We had a problem that involved a boy whose after-school job was shoveling snow for so much an hour,” Mr. Thorpe said. The snow was not a problem, since Qataris had seen snow on television, he said. What was fundamentally unfamiliar was the concept of an after-school job.

The Education City schools often mirror American campus culture: Texas A&M holds the Aggie Muster every April, just like the College Station, Tex., campus. And at Carnegie Mellon, Ms. Hadan, working with the student government, helped organize “Crazy Week,” culminating in Tartan Day, when students wear the Carnegie Mellon plaid. “Everyone has at least a T-shirt,” she said. But on Pajama Day, the divide between Qataris and non-Qataris, a majority of Carnegie Mellon’s students, became clearer than ever. Some non-Qatari students arrived in full sleep regalia, complete with fuzzy slippers and teddy bears.

Ms. Hadan and the other Qataris remained in traditional dress, women in black abayas and head scarves, men in long white robes and headdresses. “Because of my culture, I couldn’t wear pajamas; it’s too embarrassing,” said Khalid al-Sooj, 19.

For many Education City students, one big draw is the opportunity to visit the American home campus, whether for a semester or a few weeks.

“I want to live that experience of studying abroad, because I believe it makes you grow,” said Ms. Hadan, who is spending the spring semester in Pittsburgh, with her parents’ blessing.

Whether the job market will view Education City graduates the same as American graduates of the same schools is not yet clear. The big test is approaching, as Cornell’s inaugural class applies for its medical residencies.

“We’re about to find out if they’re accepted the same as Cornell graduates in New York,” said Dr. Daniel Alonso, the dean of Weill Cornell medical school in Qatar. “They’ve been doing as well on the tests, but it remains to be seen.”

Cornell graduates in New York typically apply for 20 or 30 residencies to sure that they get a place, Dr. Alonso said. But uncertainty among the Qatar graduates prompted Khalid al-Khelaifi to apply to more than 60 American residency programs, just to be safe.

“We’re the first batch, so no one knows how we’ll do,” he said.Paying the Bills

Education City is an expensive experiment, made possible by Qatar’s immense oil and gas wealth. For the Cornell medical school alone, the Qatar Foundation promised $750 million over 11 years.

While American universities in other parts of the world look to tuition to support their overseas branches, the branches in Qatar depend on government largess: Qatar pays for the architecturally stunning classroom buildings, the faculty salaries and housing and transportation, and it has made multimillion-dollar gifts to the Education City universities.

“Had the Qatar Foundation not been willing to provide the level of support it did, we wouldn’t have considered going beyond a study-abroad site,” said Mark Weichold, dean of Texas A&M in Qatar.

Dr. Abdulla al-Thani, the Qatar Foundation’s vice president for education, declined to discuss specific gifts but said the foundation had often endowed chairs at the universities that have agreed to come to Education City.

Probably the biggest hurdle for American universities in Qatar is getting the right number and mix of faculty members. Even with free housing, bonus pay and big tax advantages, few professors want to relocate to the Persian Gulf, so many schools depend in good part on “fly-bys” who come for three or four weeks from the United States to give a series of lectures.

“We have half a dozen faculty who moved to Qatar, and 30 or 40 who go for a couple weeks,” said Dr. Antonio M. Gotto Jr., dean of Weill Cornell Medical School in New York. “We’re trying to recruit as many faculty as possible who will stay over there. About 15 percent of our lectures are through videoconferencing and ideally, I’d like to get that down to 5 percent.”

While the Qatar branches have a natural attraction for certain professors — Texas A&M’s petroleum engineers, say, or Georgetown’s experts in Middle Eastern politics — the Gulf does not interest everyone.

“You don’t get the full range of faculty here,” said Lynn Carter, a computer-science professor in his 19th year at Carnegie Mellon and his second of a three-year contract to teach in Qatar. “You get a lot of people at the end of their careers. It’s not good for young faculty with mortgages and young kids and tenure hopes. Coming to Qatar, where you don’t have graduate students and research grants, does you no good for getting tenure.”

While each Education City school offers a specialized program, Qatar hopes to meld them into a new entity, almost like a university whose departments are all independent. Students are encouraged to cross-register, so that Texas A&M’s engineering students can take art classes at Virginia Commonwealth.

“Personally, I like what the liberal arts do in the United States, but if you look at what our country needs right now, we need people trained in the oil and gas areas, we need doctors, we need media, so those are the programs we are bringing in,” said Dr. Thani, of the Qatar Foundation. “Now we are trying to create synergy between the different schools on campus, so it will offer more of what a large university would offer.”

In a nation where many Qataris, with their maids and drivers, live quite apart from the non-Qataris who make up most of the population, Education City mixes students of all nationalities. About half of the students are Qataris, and while they have some advantages — including a yearlong academic program to bolster the skills of those seeking admission — the Qatar Foundation supports non-Qataris, too, forgiving tuition loans to those who stay to work in Qatar after getting their degree.

“We think diversity is something very good, and we do not want to reduce our standards to admit more Qataris,” Dr. Thani said.

Opening Young Minds

Many Education City students are excited by their exposure to the broad array of cultures and new ways of thinking. At Georgetown, for example, “The Problem of God,” a required course, is immensely popular.

“It was amazing,” said Ibrahim al-Derbasti, a Qatari student. “We had Christians, Muslims, Hindus and an atheist. We talked about the difference between faith and religion. I had lived in Houston for four years, but I never understood the Trinity. Now I get it. Well, I don’t really get how Jesus is the son of God, but I understand the idea.”

In Gary Wasserman’s “U.S. Political Systems” course at Georgetown, a class on the 1977 litigation over neo-Nazis’ right to demonstrate in Skokie, Ill., quickly took a different course than it might have in an American classroom, with more students concerned with the problems of unfettered free speech. “It’s complicated, because in protecting civil liberties of one group you might be taking away the civil rights of others,” said Tara Makarem, a Lebanese-Syrian student, who had been troubled by the Danish publication of anti-Muslim cartoons in 2006.

And, a Saudi freshman wondered, if the A.C.L.U. defended the Nazis’ right to express hateful views in Skokie, why did no one protect Don Imus — he called him “Amos” — from losing his radio job for making racially offensive remarks of a kind accepted in rap lyrics?

Professor Wasserman, who previously taught in China, tried to find answers, talking about commercial pressures on broadcasters.

But Mohammed, the Saudi student who did not want his full name used, was still puzzled. “It’s almost like they added another thing to the Bill of Rights, the right for every American not to be offended,” he mused.

Such discussions make Qatar an invigorating place to teach, Professor Wasserman said.

“They come up with questions you hadn’t thought of,” he said. “You see how much they want to be a part of a globalized world, but you also see that they don’t want to have to give up their faith, their family, their traditions. And why should they?”