American Footprints

Via Adam Serwer, Spencer Ackerman on just the most recent findings of extreme misconduct, and law breaking, on the part of Blackwater:

Employees of the CIA-connected private security corporation Blackwater diverted hundreds of weapons, including more than 500 AK-47 assault rifles, from a U.S. weapons bunker in Afghanistan intended to equip Afghan policemen, according to an investigation [...]

In a recent piece in Foreign Policy magazine, James Traub struggles to divine the true nature of the Obama administration’s foreign policy posture – in particular, the quality of the Obama administration’s predisposition to pursue engagement with other regimes and institutions, regardless of the makeup of said organizations.  In this, Traub agonizes over the potential willingness of the Obama team to compromise core values in the pursuit of perceived vital interests:

Virtually all conversations with Obama administration foreign-policy officials, no matter where they begin, come to rest at “engagement” — that vexing, mutable, all-purpose word. The U.S. president has “engaged” with rogue states, civil society, the United Nations, and citizens around the globe. Iran vindicates the policy of engagement — or discredits it. China is a failure of engagement, Russia a success. Inside the Obama realm, engagement has come to mean “good diplomacy.”

Barack Obama himself arguably encouraged this view during his 2008 presidential campaign by criticizing George W. Bush’s moralistic bluster, by regularly expressing his high regard for archrealists like James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, and by stipulating his willingness to meet “without preconditions” with even the worst tyrants. And since becoming president he has muted criticism of the regimes in Sudan and Burma, and referred respectfully to “the Islamic Republic of Iran.” [...]

But is [Obama-style engagement] not, still, a realist bargain, trading away those universal values that the president so often evokes in the hopes of geostrategic wins, whether on Iran or climate change or the global economy? [emphasis added]

Given that Traub recently penned a book on the subject of the role of democracy promotion in U.S. foreign policy, it would be hard to fathom that he is naive on such matters, and yet, so much confounding naivete is communicated in this piece (I prefer that interpretation to deliberate obfuscation).

The short rebuttal is that Obama, like every single President that preceded him, is likely willing to trade away values that are extolled rhetorically in exchange for “geostrategic wins.”  This is how it has always been. Treating it as a new development is ahistorical at best. 

Further, how curious to fret about mere diplomatic engagement with Iran’s regime – which Traub includes under the rubric, “worst tyrants” – when we not only engage on a diplomatic level with brutal, oppressive, undemocratic regimes in the region like Pakistan (until recently, a military dictatorship), Saudi Arabia (monarchy), Jordan (monarchy), Egypt (de facto hereditary dictatorship), etc., but we often lavish those same despotic regimes with generous aid packages, including top-of-the-line military equipment. 

Not to mention that our closest ally, Israel, whose relationship with the U.S. is sacrosanct and whose conduct we never criticize (or even allow the UN to criticize), currently oversees an apartheid state, and commits grievous human rights abuses against the beleaguered populations in the occupied territories, as well as war crimes in its maintenance of control thereof.

And yet, the continuation of those relationships receives far less scrutiny and is not treated as an existential moral crucible for sitting Presidents in the same way that potential negotiations with North Korea and Iran are (see, also, U.S. government relations with China, Vietnam and other communist countries, but “principled” refusal to “appease” the Castro regime because…it’s communist). 

In fact, though imperfect in obvious ways, Iran’s political institutions are more democratic, and less tyrannical, than most of our longtime favored allies in the region.  Not to mention that before the Iranian revolution in 1979, we did engage the Shah’s regime (which, tyrannically, maintained power with the aid of the notoriously brutal SAVAK secret police) and favored him with money, state of the art military aid and other niceties.  To tell the whole story, we not only supported his regime, we helped stage a coup in the 1950s, toppling the democratically elected regime in Iran, and replacing it with the Shah’s dictatorial rule.

But let us ponder whether Obama’s decision to engage the Iranian regime represents some serious compromise of American values.

It’s almost as if Traub is confusing Bush’s bluster for actual policy, and seeking to draw a contrast between Obama and his predecessor, when in reality, little has changed over the past century or so of U.S. foreign policy.  Don’t be fooled by a couple of old-school, self-interested military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan that were packaged with a flimsy veneer of magnanimous “democracy promotion.”  

Dick Cheney might have intoned, defiantly, that “we don’t negotiate with evil” with respect to the regimes in Iran and North Korea (and Iraq, presumably – after Saddam was a favored ally during the Reagan administration), but those words were uttered at the same time that the Bush administration was maintaining the aforementioned relations with regional despots, as well as pursuing a working relationship with Islam “Boil Dissidents Alive” Karimov for purposes of facilitating the war effort in Afghanistan – not to mention implementing policies of preventive war, torture, detainee abuse and indefinite detention that were themselves tyrannical.

One way that various U.S. regimes have tried to paper over the persistent hypocrisy between word and deed is to stuff wads of propaganda between the widening gaps between rhetoric and reality.  In pursuit of this, regimes/groups that are amenable to our particular foreign policy goal are arbitrarily described as “democratic” and “moderate” (like Saddam when he was fighting Iran), while those regimes/groups that oppose our agenda are, by nature, “extremist” and “tyrannical” – even though there is often little rhyme or reason to the classification beyond our own ulterior preferences.

It is when we confuse the facade created by spackling the cracks with smooth reality that we look most foolish to foreign populations that are less mesmerized by our self-gratifying, exceptionalist propaganda. I’m reminded of a recent Rami Khouri piece in the Daily Star: Read more »

Imagine if the Surge didn’t work, and we didn’t achieve victory in Iraq?  Then you might read stories such as these:

An English based group called Maplecroft that studies human rights, the environment, terrorism, and politics issued its latest Terrorism Risk Index that found Iraq the number one country in the world most at [...]

It is not uncommon to hear pundits, politicians and commentators color their warnings about withdrawal from Afghanistan by hearkening back to the period following the withdrawal of Soviet forces from that same country.  According to the narrative offered by these concerned historians, the United States “abandoned” Afghanistan in the wake of the Soviet defeat there, and [...]