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ABKHAZIA, KOSOVO, EAST TIMOR AND SOUTH OSSETIA: HERE WE GO AGAIN (and will again somewhere else)
September 2, 2008
Jim de Wilde
www.jimdewilde.net
There are many tragedies in the Caucasus this month. There are the obvious tragedies of the people of the region. There is the second order tragedy of the stresses on Georgian democracy which will lead to the empowerment of “hardliners”, those invested in border struggles which has led to the Kashmir issue dominating Pakistan or the Eritrean boundary dispute distracting Ethiopia from its democratic development and own route to sustainable prosperity.
But there are also two tragedies for western foreign policies as we seek to expand the number of people living safely under the rule of law and the role of the rule of law in arbitrating international disputes. First, we have lost (in this instance irretrievably) an opportunity to decontaminate toxic post-colonial residues, to detonate landmines of political neglect and to create a rule of international law in a complex dispute. Secondly, the word of the United States, which has made arrogant promises it couldn’t keep to the Georgians is now worth less. This has undermined even further the credibility and clout of the United States in the world and despite the schadenfreude which is so tempting, this is not good for the world, as actors like Sarkozy seem to understand. It is a final legacy of the Bush Administration and a reason that an Obama Administration is now the only way U.S. credibility might be restored and, in the language of U.S. electoral politics, U.S. reputation and security increased.
There are offsetting optimistic signs, an innovative Finnish foreign minister, Alexander Stubb whose moral role is enhanced by the unique historical role of Finland in global affairs, the continuing ability of Sarkozy-Kouchner to attempt to fill the vacuum of failed American policies in the promotion of democracy, the strong moral presence of the Polish, Ukrainian, Latvian, Estonian and Lithuanian Presidents in Tbilisi.
At the time of this writing, though, the story of Georgia is a story of extraordinarily incompetent American foreign policy with great worries for the ongoing promotion of democracy. By its unwillingness to understand how NATO expansion, the bizarre preoccupation with U.S. manufactured missile shields in eastern Europe and the significance of the Kosovo precedent, the Bush Administration left Georgia exposed and raised for another generation the eerie specter of how American undermines its allies whether Kurds in the 1980s, Shia Arabs in the early 1990s or now Georgians.
Putin’s Russia is obviously complicated. Putin’s behaviour is worrying, but hardly surprising. His historical role is now almost like that of Napoleon, and will be is as controversial in two centuries time. He has restored a broken Russia to a major place in global politics. He has produced more democracy than ever before and has also allowed a petro-state to develop. Russia has little to thank the Americans for, given their disastrous ‘big bang’ privatizations of the 1990s, but has behaved responsibly enough for a “Great Power” when asked (e.g. on the Iran nuclear file, where Great Power interests have been balanced with a moderately responsible multilateral role). But the key to this crisis is the desperate need of the U.S. neo-conservative movement to invent enemies, turning adversaries into mortal threats and Putin is the target of the day. Abkhazia and Ossetia, like Tibet and Taiwan should have been strategically negotiable. Instead, they were ignored and the Americans encouraged Georgians, who have their own extreme nationalists, to believe they could poke the bear without consequences.
In entrenched disputes, right and wrong quickly become confused as lake-bottom mud turns clear waters into murky ones. It is not even with the reinterpretation of history: was William Wallace (Braveheart) good or bad? Was William Tell good or bad? How about Napoleon, while we are on the subject? Entrenched nationalist disputes blur “right” and “wrong”. The only “right cause” in cases like South Ossetia and Abkhazia is a process which produces negotiation and compromise.
In Abkhazia and South Ossetia, to the reasonable observer, the Russian case made sense in the abstract. Abkhazians had been integrated into Georgia in a moment of Stalinist cartography with many motivations, none of which were “democratic”. The situation regarding South Ossetia is less clear in legal terms, but, at minimum, South Ossetia was not consulted about its future in the break-up of the former Soviet Union. The landmines of decolonization (discussed in From Durand to Ahtisaari on my website) have contributed to the crises of Iraq and Afghanistan. On the Somali-Ethiopian “border”, the Uzbekistan-Kyrghizstan “border”, and the India-Pakistan “border”, the next generation of foreign-policy makers will confront many more toxic residues of a colonial past. Americans constantly want to fall back on issues of “territorial integrity” as a way to avoid confronting complex historical dilemmas.
U.S. foreign policy has always been reluctant to look at the creation of new states as anything other than a last resort. For this reason alone, the U.S. backing of Kosovo’s independent status was an encouraging sign for the new global politics. Even then, the Americans lost an opportunity to put this in a global rule of law driven context. Kosovo was treated as a special case (i.e. “we like these guys”) and the opportunity for the precedent was lost. Abkhazia and South Ossetia have been as distracting to Georgia’s political and economic development as Kashmir has been to Pakistan’s. Since the arguments (viewed from 10,000 kilometers away) are the kind of arguments that all extreme nationalists like to make, it is ironic that in the same month that we celebrate the dispatch of Karadzic to the Hague and the emergence of an independent Kosovo, separate from both Serbia and Albania, this crisis in the Caucasus heats up. If only they had approached Abkhazia and South Ossetia as strategic issues which Georgia could benefit from if they were resolved successfully.
This moment has been lost, to the great tragedy of lives lost in the last week. It also is the political tragedy of the embarrassment suffered by the inspiring heirs to the Rose Revolution in Georgia. If western democracies fail to confront how we got into this mess, we face a prospect of the worst of both worlds. On the one side, we have a Georgian nationalism fed towards self-defeating extremism because the Americans over-promised and under-delivered. On the other side, we have a Russian arrogance being empowered because no one took the legal claims of Abkhazia to be analogous to those of East Timor or Kosovo. This is the final act of incompetence by a U.S. Administration that wanted to do well, but was so limited in competence, intellect and world experience that it almost always made bad situations worse. If there was ever a game-set-and-match argument for the need for a new paradigm in U.S. foreign policy, this is it.
In the short term, diplomatic efforts have to minimize the damage. Russian interests in South Ossetia and Abkhazia should not be turned into an excuse to destabilize Georgia. The mistake of “building the Georgian military” as a taunt has to be admitted. The accountability of the Russian government for smuggling activities in areas of their now de facto control has to be underlined. The failure of the west to deal with legitimate arguments in Abkhazia and South Ossetia has to be subtly acknowledged. Our commitment to the emerging Georgian democracy must be unconditional; the commitment to the inclusion of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in that new state has to be based on the consent of those to be governed, or conditional. This will require imagination, subtlety, and a great bit of political courage.
Most importantly, before we end up having our next crisis next year, people serious about using foreign policy to create a safer and more democratic world should start familiarizing themselves with the details of Ogaden and Kashmir. Maybe these landmines of arrogant decolonization can be detonated relatively harmlessly if we confront them now. Then maybe the rule of international law can start to expand so more people live under the protection of legal principles and not the arbitrariness of the decisions of people long gone like Churchill and Stalin.
Some useful discussions of Georgia-Russia can be found on the following websites (not all of whom would agree with this analysis):
James Joyner in Outside the Beltway
Ari Rusila in Atlantic-Community.Org
Rob Farley of the University of Kentucky in Lawyers, Guns and Money
This essay is intended to address the immediate issues of Georgia-Abhazia-South Ossetia in the context of the dangers to global security created by unresolved residues of 20th Century decolonization and 19th Century colonization. The related, but separate, issue of influencing Russia has to be addressed in a subsequent piece. In seeking to apply rule of law principles, it is clear that Abkhazia sets no precedents for the Russia-Baltic State relations. In realpolitik, this argument has to be reinforced and the consequences of cyber-intimidation, energy blackmail and the deviation from the rule of law (as it is manifested in the BP case) have to be confronted. The market response to BP is a first level warning. The superb piece by Chrystia Freeland in the Financial Times on August 22, 2008 makes an innovative leap on how to influence Russia by de facto a mix of market signals (disinvestment) and oversight of the Russian oligarchs who have a stake in globalization and integration. As we sort out these relationships and learn a foreign policy technique which influences Iran, China, and Russia as opposed to intimidating them, Freeland’s piece will stand out as one of the clearest statements of a new approach to foreign policy. Nothing in this essay should be read to suggest that Russia doesn’t need serious “influencing”. The Abkhazia-South Ossetia disputes are not the best place to convince the next generation of Russians that global rule of law is not just superpower intimidation by another name.
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March 19th,
2007:
The following are notes for a speech I gave last Friday
at McGill’s Center for Developing Area Studies. It
focuses on the major points of Canadian foreign policy issues
towards Somalia:
(i)
The obvious issues of nation-building and the
need for a permanent peace-making police force without which
there can obviously be no democratic stability and
prosperity.
(ii)
The need for academics to
focus on the issues of From Clans and Tribes to Markets and
the transformative institutions required to do
this.
(iii)
The necessity of
confronting the issues of democratic self-determination for
Somaliland and recognition of
incubators of democratic process in the international
community.
(iv)
The
importance for a (very) long term focus on Northeast African
economic integration, to share prosperity that comes from many
source, including the discovery of oil in the Ogaden (the
Somali-speaking region of Ethiopia).
CANADIAN
FOREIGN POLICY STRATEGIES TOWARDS
SOMALIA
Centre for Developing Area
Studies, McGill
University
Montreal March
16th,
2007
Such a long-term, resumed
“trusteeship” is required to return
Somalia to good governance. That implies a
new rule of law, whether under sharia or, preferably, under
the mixed system that the transitional regime seems to
support. It also requires jump-starting the country’s
ruined economy, refurbishing its schools and almost
non-existent health system, opening airports and harbours and
building roads – while the same time nurturing greater
political freedom. At some point a fully participatory meeting
of clan elders and other leaders should be convened to chart
and charter the political future of
Somalia.
Robert Rotberg, Harvard, Financial
Times, December 2006
Traditionally,
Islamic finance has been widely thought to be against the use
of interest-based transactions such as those provided by
mainstream conventional banks. Rather, Islam seeks to promote
the idea of partnership-type structures, where depositors
provide money through a bank or other institution and
borrowers use that money for investment purposes. Profit or
loss from the investment is supposed to be shared between the
provider and the borrower, with the bank charging a fee for
managing the transaction.
Other obvious
prohibitions include investments in anything considered a vice
under Islamic law, such as pork, investments in hotels where
alcohol is served and outlets for gambling, as well as
businesses involved with the trade of
arms.
Farhan Bokhari, Financial Times
December 15, 2006
It
is worth recalling that, in the spring and summer of 2005, a
broad coalition of civic groups, clans, Islamists, women’s
groups and businesspeople in Mogadishu briefly succeeded in
eliminating militia roadblocks in the city, in what was
described locally as a “people power” initiative to bring
public safety to capital. Likewise, in the first half of 2006
Mogadishu-based clans broke with their “warlords” and
supported the Islamists out of frustration with the
criminality and lawlessness those militia leaders fomented.
This suggests an intriguing pattern — namely, that leaders of
whatever stripe whose policies produce insecurity for their
constituencies are now quickly losing the support of the
community. Business and real estate investments in
Mogadishu
have grown considerably in the past decade, and may be
producing a strong preference on the part of investors to
avoid instability and war.
In
sum, the Mogadishu
of 2007 is not the Mogadishu
of 1993. If this evolution of interests “from warlord to
landlord” continues to occur within
Somalia’s
commercial, political and traditional elite, and if potential
external spoilers can be convinced to allow real political
dialogue to proceed,
Somalia
may yet emerge from its long
nightmare.
Ken Menkhaus www.harowo.com
I am very committed to
Somalia,
a place I have never visited. It is partly because
of friendships.
But it is also because of the need to recalibrate the
foreign policy of democracies towards areas where
international neglect and the selfishness of geostrategic
realism has produced negative consequences. It is also
opportunistic, because this is where
Canada
can do some good, adapting abstract principles of
nation-building to the practical demands of solving complex
social and political problems in the 21st
Century.
The exercise of
Iraq
obscures the successes of
Sierra
Leone and
Liberia. The
issues that underlie all these areas are with us today. The
challenge is one that is important because Somalia, as
Afghanistan, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Kosovo, Darfur is
intrinsically important, but also because it is a test of a
new style of Canadian foreign policy, one which does not hide
behind abstract and well-intended principles of
internationalism, but one which seeks to deal with the
problems of the world in a tough-minded
manner.
There are three things that Canadians can
do:
(1)
Bring clarity to the
discussions of self-determination and democratic consent and
innovative thinking to the design of political institutions
that facilitate the movement from clan and tribe to
market.
(2)
Innovate in the
creation of educational institutions which provide the kinds
of policies which can bring sustainable prosperity to an area
like
Somalia.
(3)
Show that
we understand the relationships between capital market
innovation and prosperity in countries like
Somalia and reflect this in our international development
policies.
I learned from my father about the residue of European
colonialism and the injustices done by making the battles of
European proxies somehow the moral currency of international
law. From
Biafra,
Bangladesh,
Northern Cyprus, to
Somalia,
the Ogaden, Baluchistan,
Kashmir and all the unresolved issues
of the early 21st Century, the convenience of
European powers produced a situation which produces complex
challenges to practitioners of 21st Century foreign
policy. The
questions have become more intense since the extraordinarily
ill-concocted (and semantically oxymoronic) War on
Terror. What
are the legitimate options available to a Tibetan nationalist
or an Uzbek democrat or an Ogaden Somali or an Igbo
nationalist in the new world order? What are the
appropriate ground-rules for political mobilization? It is to
the credit of the Harper government that the extraordinary
rendition of a Uighur-speaking Canadian citizen from
Uzbekistan
to
China
is being challenged. The rest of our
lives will be spent disentangling communities from the residue
of the past and extricating individuals who civil rights have
been abused as an historical convenience. For these reasons
alone, the future of northeast Africa
is paramount.
The vicissitudes of European history should not lead to
a justification for the realpolitik of 2007. To foreign
policy makers, the challenge is: what is an Ogaden
Somali who made no consent to live in
Ethiopia
to do legally?
What are the citizens of
Somaliland or Puntland to do? How are
the resources and heritages of this region to be organized in
a manner that provides an opportunity for sustainable
prosperity?
For Canadian foreign policy, these issues are of great
moral relevance.
The change from the Trudeau notion on Biafra that all
states are frozen in some kind of amber regardless of the
legitimacy or illegitimacy of their formation, to the
post-Bangladesh recognition of a realpolitik-driven redrawing
of boundaries, to the statement of democratic principles
embodied in the Clarity Act of 1997 in Canada shows the
importance of Canada’s voice on these issues. Our first
foreign policy duty is to articulate a Global Clarity Act
which establishes the circumstances and processes under which
communities can reorganize their post-colonial political
circumstances.
Without this, the 21st Century will be an
endless replay of the attempts to reconstitute viable
political entities from a world which colonial administrators
in Brussels,
Paris,
London and
Rome created.
The second task is to create a framework for regional
economic integration.
The only way that complex sovereignty functions in this
multicultural planet is if we create new instruments for
collaboration. It is not just a Marshall Plan we need for
Africa. It is a Monnet plan.
The Marshall Plan is about capital formation; the Monnet Plan
is about efficient use of capital once formed. Economic
integration is a prerequisite to democratic transformation.
The complexity of
the oil exploration of the Ogaden only makes this
issue more urgent.
The strategic objectives of economic integration and
capital market formation meet the practicalities of
globalization and the development of corporate vehicles to
explore and commercialize oil resources. Malaysian and
Swedish companies have to work with the Ethiopian government
on Ogaden oil. The profits from these operations require that
international investment banks and multilateral development
agencies ensure that this commercialization produces benefits
for the entire region. Without
the establishment of some transnational vehicle for investing
profits in economic development (a Horn pension trust), oil
will be again a curse which exacerbates the post-colonial
geographies of the region.
The third objective of Canadian foreign policy in the
region is to create the preconditions for personal security
and the right to search for prosperity. No one
believes this will be easy. Few believe it is even
possible.
The experiences of rule of law construction elsewhere
raise some questions which talented thoughtful political
scientists of the next generation have to consider. One of the
problems of conventional approaches to security is that the
view which I will call Rumsfeldian (to discredit it) that the
entire state has to be secured has come to dominate
international thinking.
Security strategies based on incubation and containment
has much better longterm chances of success. I have advocated
in a number of contexts that we must never allow democratic
energies to be dissipated or democracies to be attacked. Nicholas
Kristof made an eloquent pledge that constitutes a basis for a
new kind of Monroe Doctrine:
We can do far more
to train armies in Africa. The deal we offer African presidents
should be along these lines: You run a country cleanly and
tolerate dissent, and we’ll help ensure that no brutal force
come out of the jungle to create chaos and overthrow you. (“Aid Workers
with Guns”, New York Times, March 11,
2007).
.
In the real world, we have already accepted the notion
of incubated democracies or peaceful fortresses. In countries
like
Pakistan,
we accept that there is modern, globally-oriented elite which
makes Lahore a
potentially prosperous place to invest. The
geopolitics of the 1980s and 1990s made the incubation and
containment approach unrealistic post 2001, putting
extraordinary strains on the Pakistani elite. In
Somalia,
there are geographical pockets where efficient capital markets
and collaborative rule-of-law based decision-making might be
incubated. One
hopes that one moves out from there to create the potential
for expanding the scale of this zone of prosperity. At minimum, it
must not be contaminated by other kinds of activities.
The construction of peacekeeping
forces which permit the development of prosperous zones of
activities without resolving all external sources of conflict
brings to mind the 60-year effort to create co-prosperity
initiatives in Jewish and Arab Palestine, a challenge we are
still trying to meet.
Israel
is, at one obvious level, evidence at what an incubated free
market can accomplish in a region, which, if it became part of
a Palestinian-Israeli zone of economic prosperity could serve
as a significant economic development model. (The
Peres
Centre and the Aix Working
Group are templates for this kind of vision).
The tasks of building functional arrangements between
clans, tribes, organized interests around state operations
remains one of the great challenges of contemporary political
science and public policy. In
Canada,
we are still experimenting with models of coalition-building
between regional interests. The
controversies about globalization and economic modernization
confused much public policy discussion in the 1990s. The
controversies about global security and counterterrorism
strategies have preoccupied public policy discussions in the
early 21st Century.
Somalia
provides, not in some laboratory sense, but because of its
unique history and potential role, an opportunity for a more
strategic policy-making and institution-building than
before. The
international community has learned from successes in
Sierra
Leone and Kosovo, and the
challenges in
Afghanistan.
First, we need to disarm private militias which require
a courage and a military discipline from peacekeeping
forces. While the
Nigerians and Ugandans have played a courageous and
self-sacrificing role, there is no doubt that we need a
permanent peacemaking capability to deal with situations like
Somalia. Without
policing, there can be no prosperity.
Second, we need to invent incentives for
coalition-building.
That is why models of economic integration are so
important.
Tigre-speaking northeast Africans and Amharic-speaking
northeast Africans have to be incented to participate in
projects. All
forms of collaborative institution building are beneficial in
this regard.
An
Ethiopia
and Eritrea World Cup soccer team, a northeast African soccer
league, a
music label that built across linguistic groupings are all
private sector and social entrepreneur backed concepts worth
pursuing. But at
the end of the day, the preconditions for sustainable
prosperity rest or fall on a rule of law based legal system
which agrees on the process by which disputes are resolved,
and an efficiency-oriented capital market which gives all
players an incentive to participate in economic growth
activities.
This will take a while, but the blueprints do
exist.
The incentives for global security require that these
activities take place as rapidly as possible, without creating
distortions as individuals and small groups use the power of a
post-colonial state to consolidate financial advantages and
privileges.
Economic growth is not simply a western or Chinese of
Indian concept; it underlies human activities and the
application of intellectual capital to commerce. By bringing
together economic talent in northeast
Africa in a single location, like an
IMD to bring Swiss, German and French business minds together,
Canadians could play a significant role in creating the
preconditions for global prosperity. A business
School, located in northeast Africa, modeled on IMD, inviting
participants from all the cultures and clans of northeast
Africa and designing a curriculum which not only linked
talented young Somalis and Ethiopians to global leadership,
but which was customized to the unique situations of northeast
Africa and its specific requirements for institution-building
is well worth the time spent designing it. Canadians have
to focus our foreign international development activities on
things we do well and can export. Concentrating
our expertise in managing the global economy and in creating
the preconditions for entrepreneurial growth is a worthwhile
CIDA initiative, more focused and disciplined than much of our
international development activity.
The 1970s
produced a generation of academics who believed that
statistical analysis was objective and removed the
universities from the complex interaction of ideas, interests,
strategies and coalitions which are the ingredients political
change. I am
greatly encouraged by my sampling of new thinking in academic
life as I have started to read the work of people whose ideas
were formed in the 1990s and 2000s. There are
some extremely important themes that can only be addressed
from universities and intellectual communities like the Centre
of Developing Area Studies at McGill. The work I
will call “Beyond Clans and Tribes: Citizenship and Social
Capital in a Global Society” can only be done by a mix of
thoughtful people, oriented towards issues like
“nation-building” or “civic institution-building” in
Somalia. Only then can we
overcome the specialization and over-quantification of issues
which has made most people outside the bubble of the
university highly skeptical about the value of much of the
“research” done in politics, economics and business. In looking
to the future,
Beyond Clans and Tribes requires that political
scientists understand the incentives to cooperate in search of
a greater good, growth patterns, integration into the
global economy, the elimination of insect-born diseases, the construction of
distribution systems for medical care. Task-oriented
and result-oriented initiatives build functioning
organizational systems.
That is what we have to concentrate on. A customized curriculum
at a NE African B-School would have a customized curriculum on
From Clans to markets. The design of
these case studies alone is an exciting project. From this project, we
need to develop a new approach to building political
institutions: one which creates incentives to build alliances
beyond clans and tribes. Why do
Slovakia
and
Slovenia
work today despite all the dire predictions a decade ago? In significant part,
it is because they built social capital , the community values
which fostered democratic
institutions. In
addition, the excuse of blaming someone else for economic and
social failures was removed. We need to approach
institution-building in Shiva Iraq, in
Somalia
and throughout the world with a similar logic. Our first task is to
build social capital and organizational systems that produce
focused results.
Somalia
is a good place to start this process and
Canada’s
role in
Somalia
requires that we facilitate this.
The development of economic models that are appropriate
to the region remains a test for strategic decision-makers
looking at the Horn of Africa and NE
Africa. It has
taken half a century to develop models of economic integration
in Europe which have produced business
models for cross-border investment. But there
is a way that a customized business school could facilitate
economic integration and open markets. To arrive
at this political destination, the international community has
to develop a serious strategy for moving from clans to
markets. This
will require sustained infrastructure investment and the type
of concerted policing activity called for in Robert Rotberg’s
Financial Times piece (reproduced below). Without
that commitment, there is no point of talking about economic
integration and Ethiopian and Somali capital market structure
innovations.
The cost of even doing East
Timor has proven to be a test of international
resources.
The permanent policing infrastructure required for
Somalia
requires the contribution of Canadian, NATO but also
Indonesian,
Malaysia,
Chinese, Indian activities. The need for a global
peacekeeping force was made apparent by events in
Afghanistan
before Darfur and before the events in
Somalia.
I opened with three quotes from articles, Rotberg’s
excellent analysis of the need for innovation in global
peacekeeping, Bokhari’s perceptive Financial Times article on
the need for an Islamic MBA and the role of the
Gulf States in
promoting such an exercise, and Menkhaus’ analysis of the
current situation in
Somalia
from www.harowo.com .
There is
the ingredient here for a strategy. Capital
formation will be easier to do in a stable
Somalia
than in an equivalently stable
Afghanistan
because of the role of the Somali diaspora in remitting cash
from
Italy
or
Canada
or the
UK. The challenge is to
find ways to make remittances a more predictable source of
investment capital, and in the case of a sharia law society,
to do it in the manner of private equity or venture capital
firms.
These are starting points.
Somalia
is a challenge to the world conscience. It
may be the 21st Century equivalent of
Italy,
integrated, but highly regionalized a century and a half after
the Risorgimento.
Somalia
might end up like the German-speaking countries of
Europe, with
Somaliland as
Austria,
and Puntland as German-speaking
Switzerland.
Somalia
may end up like
Congo,
but its geography makes it unlikely that western governments
will accept that.
APPENDIX 1:
Ken Menkhaus’
February 13th analysis of the situation in Somalia
has been extremely helpful to me in the formation of ideas for
this speech.
APPENDIX
2:
See following for
materials and commentaries on North East Africa:
An earlier essay on
Somalia appeared on my website.
A critical view of
the role of the Ethiopian leadership under President Meles by
Paul Wachter appeared in the Nation.
On the complicated
issues of the role of the Ogaden in North East African
politics, the Ogaden
website contains much
information.
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|
January 7, 2007: U.S.
foreign policy after Baker-Hamilton :
U.S. foreign policy and Canadian responses to it will enter a new stage
post-Iraq. The
tremendous mistakes of
U.S.
decision-makers vis-à-vis
Iraq
were not based on their bad intentions as so many would like to
argue. They were
based on a tragic mix of obsolete assumptions (Cheney and Rumsfeld
formed their views in the 1970s) about the post-Cold War arena and
U.S.
lack of self-awareness about its rule as the sole superpower. Fueled by a narrow
view of
U.S.
“exceptionalism”,
U.S.
foreign policy ignored the virtues of
America
and
emphasized its weaknesses.
The
U.S.
spirit makes Bill Gates a role model and a hero in
Hanoi
or
Africa
, and made Gorbachev seek the
managerial excellence of McDonald’s as he tried to overhaul the
Soviet Union
. This spirit was
replaced by the same blundering
U.S.
foreign policy which had made mistake after mistake in trying to
manage South African democratization in the 1980s, Iranian
democratization in the 1950s and the
Middle
East
forever. Instead of
relying on the things that the U.S. does well (marketing, economic
growth-oriented economic strategies, the celebration and promotion
of entrepreneurship), the United States responded to the post 9/11 world with the
things its does badly: a reliance on technology for things that technology is
ill-suited to solve, a reliance on military strategies for
complicated political situations, an ahistorical “New World”
approach to human relations which made U.S. democrats look, at best, naïve.
Throughout the post-1945 world defined by the process of
decolonization when viewed from places other than
Washington
, the
United States
has developed a track record
for backing the wrong horses. Samantha Power’s
superb recounting of the story of
U.S.
foreign policy toward genocide lists a series of inconsistencies and
self-defined contradictions by American decision-makers. The
U.S.
supported either weak local leaders in
Cambodia
in the 1970s or the discredited warlords of
Mogadishu
in the 2000s
with catastrophic consequences. In
Iraq
,
it backed Hussein before it didn’t back Hussein and looks
hypocritical, and even more damaging, incoherent around the
world. The
U.S.
consistently misses the paradox of “American-backed” regimes. If groups with a
democratic backing are seen to be pro-U.S., they lose nationalist
legitimacy. In
Vietnam
, nationalist anti-American
regimes with strong domestic support are inevitably drawn into a
Citicorp-Microsoft world because stable regimes aspire to global
standards of living. But
U.S.
foreign-policy makers keep on missing this point. The
America
which works and is admired is an
America
of commerce and enterprise. The
America
which consistently fails is one which believes it has an
“exceptional” democracy and a unique role as the world’s only
superpower. (The replacement of the notion of
U.S.
self-interest with the idea that the
U.S.
has a special role to “create” democracy is
at the core of the tragedies of the Bush Administration. In most of the world,
Finnish or Icelandic democratic practices have as much claim to
“exceptionalism” as American habits. We can debate in legal
theory classes forever whether a politicized judiciary is
“democratic” as the Americans believe. But in a world
where the effectiveness of the delivery of social welfare and the
notion that a democratic state does not condone capital punishment,
the U.S. argument for a special role, superior to Finns or Germans,
is difficult to sustain.)
When it is pointed out to American decision-makers that their
involvement transforms a situation, that being pro-American
discredits actors in Persia or Somalia or Iraq, they view this all
too often as a statement of European anti-Americanism. However, if one looks
at the French, German and many Canadian views on the Iraq war in
2002-3, the warnings and predictions made by many who were not
anti-American and certainly not anti-democratic have proven to be
correct. A staggeringly unpopular regime in
Tehran
has been
strengthened by being seen to “stand up to
America
”. A terrible situation
in
Somalia
has been made worse by the failure of the
U.S.
to support the democratically-oriented Baidoa government, or more
effectively, to let the Swedes and Europeans do it.
The
United States
often succeeds when soft
power in used. It
is better at making 20something Filipinos or Bengalis excited about
Microsoft than it is about making the preconditions for democracy
work in
Baghdad
or
Mogadishu
.
U.S.
foreign policy has now been reduced to being a casual observer of
scenes around the world, missing the big story of
Somalia
,
while hundreds of billions are spent on
Iraq
. Let us ask the
counterfactual: if the
U.S.
and
Dubai
had spent 10%
of the expenditures on the
Iraq
war on building a Somali ports facility and infrastructure for the
economic development of northeast
Africa
,
would the
U.S.
be more or less secure from the rise of Middle Eastern
fundamentalisms? Then let us ask the academic question, why was this argument
not possible within the current
U.S.
decision-making model, a model, which incidentally still wants to
discuss issues like an anti-ballistic missile system for continental
defense. To use
the overused expression, paradigms shift and when one is caught on
the wrong side of a paradigm shift, one ends up looking as complete
a failure as Cheney and Rumsfeld now do.
The mistake of the Democrats and the European opposition to
the
Iraq
war is to see the individual practitioners of the Bush
Administration as evil or flawed instead of seeing them as trapped
within an obsolete paradigm. The successes of
Sierra Leone
and Kosovo had convinced the
world community that rule of law could be established, genocidal
regimes or warlords could be contained and that the nightmares of
Srebrenica and
Kigali
need not be repeated. Liberal interventionism became
fashionable as a political short-cut without really being understood
in the overall context of post-Cold War international politics. In both cases,
U.S. involvement had been either non-existent, or minimal. A new framework for a
post-Cold War world had been etched in draft form.
Iraq
permanently changed this calculation, making interventions in
Burma
or Dar Fur even more difficult than they would otherwise
be.
In nation-building exercises, Canadian and other non-American
democrats have to understand the rules of nation-building. A Turkmen dissident, Yovshan Annagurban, is
quoted in the New York Times as saying: “He (Niyazov) corrupted
everything and everyone around him. People at the top as well as
ordinary people do not trust anyone and everyone”.
Nation-building starts with the invention of trust. If one likes the
expression building social capital or civil society, then this is a
necessary condition of the rule of law. One must be prepared
to delay gratification (invest/save) and trust others
(delegate/collaborate) or there can be no democracy. There has to be peace
(the restoration of order in
Sierra
Leone
or
Liberia
)
before there can be markets. The tremendous
challenge of nation-building becomes the philosophical exercise of
building trust, decision by decision, event by
event.
What applies to
Turkmenistan
applies to
Iraq
. The
United States
(and its friends) has now a
crossroad. The strategies which have the least chance of not working
(given where we now start from) are the ones which allow oases of
trust to build.
The first responsibility
of the democratic world is to protect pockets of democracy. Therefore, the first
foundation for a new
Middle east
is to
protect the democratic Kurdish revolution. To do that,
U.S.
troops will have to be committed indefinitely to the Kurdish area
where they will reassure understandably nervous (and democratic)
Turks about the sanctity of their borders. From a Korea-type presence,
the
U.S.
will, at minimum physical risk to the courageous and disciplined
U.S.
military, whose sacrifices have to be acknowledged by all of the
U.S.
friends and allied, significantly increase the chances for stability
in the
Middle East
. Market-oriented and
democratic Kurds will establish a prototype of an Islamic
democracy.
The second task is to
create a financial vehicle for the management of
Iraq
’s
oil wealth. The Clinton-Ensign proposal
for an Oil Trust Fund, similar to those that have been proposed for
the
Gulf
of
Guinea
oil revenues,
provides the chance for an economic partnership between the
market-oriented elites of Shia and Sunni Iraq and the Kurdish
zone. Turning oil
revenues into pensions and productive long term investment
instruments is a critical need for the entire global economy from
Central Asia
to
Angola
,
from
Madagascar
to
Brunei
.
It is essential that this be one of the positive consequences of the
Iraqi misadventures.
The third step is to
remove the
U.S.
presence as rapidly as possible from the zones of conflict,
following the new rule of post-Cold War national building, insulate
and incubate democracies. If Shia
cities in the south can build and manage sewage and power systems,
they have taken the first step toward democracy. The Americans and the
British can no longer be blamed for things that go wrong.
The fourth step is the
security issue for the remaining, predominantly Sunni Arab parts of
Iraq
. This is
obviously the most complicated of issues, but one where boldness of
vision is required. If Sunni states (
Palestine
,
Jordan
,
Saudi Arabia
) want to have a role in
policing this area, then so much the better. This is, of
course, the de facto partition of
Iraq
along the lines that Peter
Galbraith and others have advocated. If partition is
a democratic choice, then it should be encouraged and it will
provide a framework for the development of democratic cultures
(societies of trust and effective management) that cannot exist in a
fragmented and conflict-ridden society. This
is a difficult step and one which creates many complexities as the
continued role of the Saudi state should cause more concern to the
next generation of foreign policy makers than the
Iraq
state. For
decades, decision-makers have made the calculation that a flagrantly
undemocratic Saudi state was a price worth paying for some kind of
regional security. That calculation needs eventually to be revisited in the new
paradigm before another complicated set of military decisions has to
be made in the future. (For the goal of
building democracies in the Islamic Middle East, it should have been
addressed first. That
is water under the bridge, but another word for water under the
bridge is a lesson learned). In the short term,
however, Saudi commitment to policing Sunni Iraq might be a
necessary byproduct of a removal of
U.S.
forces.
The
United
States
is brilliant at many things,
but struggles with the complexities of dealing with
post-decolonization nationalism. Its unwillingness to focus on
the role the Americans had in the construction of the Saudi state
and its role in administrating all of Islam’s holiest sites is a
form of naiveté which is more than simply ignoring the elephant in
the living room. Its inability to see that its involvement weakens democratic
nationalist forces (in
Persia
,
in
Somalia
and elsewhere) because of its less-than-stellar (however
understandable) track record in “promoting democracy” during the
Cold War are all features of the old paradigm.
Friends of the
U.S.
can hope that the next U.S. President will be able to bring to the
international table an instant credibility in multilateralism. The next U.S.
President must have a perspective on the world which is formed not
from inside the worldview of American “exceptionalism” or
military-based foreign policies. The next U.S.
President must be prepared to frame a world view which is based on
effective incubation and insulation of democratic individuals and
groups around the world. It will be a 20-year project to create a political culture of
trust in
Turkmenistan
. It took that
long in
Korea
and
Japan
,
for the record. Barack Obama, because of his heritage and life experience may
be best positioned to provide this leadership. His challenge is to
turn his brilliance and charisma into a coherent foreign policy view
that others in the
United States
and around the world can
work with. If not him, then one of the
other Presidential contenders will have to grow into this role in
the arena of the Presidential campaign. From this
a new approach to
U.S.
foreign policy must emerge.
It starts with understanding
the limits of U.S. power, in criticizing not the intention |
