The Republic of Dissent

Great politics and the war on terrorism

The beginning of Noah Feldman's must-read article on Obama's war on terrorism :

Killing terrorists with drones is great politics. To the question, “Is it legal?” a natural answer might well be, “Who cares?”

But the legal justifications in the war on terrorism do matter -- and not just to people who care about civil liberties. They end up structuring policy. As it turns out, targeted killing, now the hallmark of the Barack Obama administration’s war on terrorism, has its roots in rejection of the legal justifications once offered for waterboarding prisoners.

For some reason, this worries me more than Wall Street's greed and it isn't because I think that greed is good.

Left and critical thinking

Quote of the week from Noam Chomsky:

We might ask ourselves how we would be reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound, assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic. Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s, and he is not a “suspect” but uncontroversially the “decider” who gave the orders to commit the “supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole” (quoting the Nuremberg Tribunal) for which Nazi criminals were hanged: the hundreds of thousands of deaths, millions of refugees, destruction of much of the country, the bitter sectarian conflict that has now spread to the rest of the region.

There are times when I wonder whether Chomsky isn't too smart for his own good to understand that the world isn't a MIT classroom. That's said what he affirms isn't irrelevant, he just went again too far.

Democracy and the use of force

The abomination of the day is from Neil Reynolds:

It’s the exceptional vulnerability of democracy that, in the end, justifies the use of force to defend or extend it – as the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights implicitly recognizes.

I guess that means that the UN should send troops to Iran and other places to 'install' democracies everywhere. But of course, the key issues here are one of definition and power. What is democracy and who decides when, how, it has to defended with the use of force? Sermons are great in church, but futile and even dangerous in international politics even though they may be inspiring.

Moralist like Tony Blair

Sugary excerpt from Lionel Barber's review of George W. Bush's memoirs Decision Points:

Like Tony Blair, painted in the book as a fervent supporter of the invasion of Iraq, Bush is a moralist. Like Blair, Bush insists all the major intelligence agencies thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and the threat of WMD falling into terrorist hands was too great to bear. Like Blair, he cannot understand why more people still do not accept the moral argument for removing Saddam. “I didn’t see how anyone could deny that liberating Iraq advanced human rights,” he writes.

I'm tempted to accept this excerpt with  a quote from John Steinbeck: only fools do not learn fro experience. However, neither Blair no Bush are fools, they are just complaisant moralists who believe that God made them kings because it/s/he knew they could make the right decision based on faith, on what it/s/he wanted them to do. What is the difference between Bush, Blair, other political leaders who believe religiously that God is on their side and  Ahmadinejad?

The meaning and creepiness of a fetus

Because I'm avoiding like the plague or just water-boarding the whole George W. Bush's 'I wasn't that bad' tour, I missed this:

Plugging his memoir Decision Points, Mr. Bush revealed the family secret (described in the book with his mother's permission) in an interview with NBC's Matt Lauer last night.

The former president said Barbara Bush asked doctors to save the fetus so she could show it to him. (He was a teenager.)

"There's no question that affected me, a philosophy that we should respect life," he told Mr. Lauer. "There was a human life, a little brother or sister."

I guess there is nothing stronger than the bond between a mother and her child. That said, I'm wondering whether 'values' can be said to be sacred and absolute when they are justified or rather legitimated without thought or analysis, but just with a 'being,' whether it is/was in itself or for itself.

Reality is no longer a tough dude

Sunday's sugary excerpt is from Scott McLemee:

In the 1970s, conservatives liked to say that their ranks were filling up with “liberals who had been mugged by reality.” That phrase suggested that reality is one tough dude -- totally indifferent to anybody’s mere opinion.

It was quite another matter when a leading Bush administration official (unnamed but often assumed to be Karl Rove) told a reporter for The New York Times Magazine in 2004: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Nor was this merely the judgment of a solitary solipsist. In his chapter "Creating Their Own Reality,” David Greenberg -- an associate professor of history, journalism, and media studies at Rutgers University -- maintains “the Right under Bush found itself promoting a view of knowledge in which any political claim, no matter how objectively verifiable or falsifiable, was treated as simply one of two competing descriptions of reality, with power and ideology, not science or disciplined inquiry, as the arbiters.” (Or deciders, if you will.)

There was no reality, only interpretations of reality -- and the existence of weapons of mass destruction was a function of who controlled the narrative. Little surprise that there were jokes about the rise of conservative postmodernism during the ‘00s. If Fox denied that climate change was taking place, who had the right to insist otherwise? Not some elitist, anyway.

The dangers of historical amnesia

Quote of the mid-day from Michael Bérubé's worth-reading on the Chomsky and Krugman lefts:

No one on the American left believes that the United States was a happy land of benevolence and ponies prior to 9/11. But I believe that the theory of the unitary executive, the practice of indefinite detention, and the justifications of torture mounted after 9/11 are, in fact, qualitatively different from the policies of the American government before 9/11 and that no good purpose is served by blurring the distinction.
Perhaps there are some historical amnesiacs out there somewhere who need to be reminded of the bombing of Cambodia, the overthrow of Allende, and the funding of death squads in Central America lest they lapse into the belief that the United States “lost its innocence” (yet again!) when the towers fell. But if you are calling for an investigation into the crimes of the Bush Administration, as Krugman was, then it is absolutely critical to understand—and to persuade your fellow citizens—why those crimes specifically are worth investigating, why they are not just the same old same old on a different day.

It takes a nut to change the world

Paul Sagar's latest post disappoints me because it is narrow-minded and more dangerously, it is expressing the self-fulling prophesy that a nut guided by Sarah Palin can destroy Obama and his plans for America

Remember: One lone nut got to Abraham Lincoln. One lone nut got to JFK. One lone nut got to Reagan and was unlucky not to succeed.*
It only takes one lone nut. My guess is that, right now, there are a great many nuts – lone or otherwise – laying their plans.

I'm disappointed because it seems to me that Sagar and others would have never expressed the same views about virulent and fanatical opposition to George W. Bush and to Ronald Reagan who got shoot by a nut. My complaint isn't that Sagar isn't right that there was a lot of nuts willing to harm Obama, it is that he implies both implicitly and explicitly that the America and the Americans who oppose Obama are nuts and willing to kill him.  These views coming from a man as honorable as Paul Sagar who knows better is disappointing and willfully ignorant.

Obama and America's allies

Robert Kagan has lost touch with reality and the following assertion shows:

The president who ran against "unilateralism" in the 2008 campaign has worse relations overall with American allies than George W. Bush did in his second term.

Kagan, without realizing it, is in fact praising Obama for he is asserting that Obama, in spite of his demagogic campaign,that he is doing what he feels is in America's interests even if it means being like or worst than George Bush.The troubling issue here is the fact there is a prevalent vision of America's interests that doesn't change from president to president because they are worried about being accused of weakening America. That said, for Obama to have worst relationships with America's allies than Bush, he would have to do something drastic such as invading unilaterally Iran.

Missed opportunity for American-led multipolirty

I would like to agree with Nikolas Gvosdev on this:

The attacks of Sept. 11 created a second opportunity. In the wake of the collapse of the Twin Towers and the destruction at the Pentagon, governments around the world were stunned -- the fruits of globalization, which had so advanced the cause of prosperity, could also be utilized by those who would seek to bring down the state. What's more, all governments were vulnerable -- democracies and non-democracies, developed and developing states alike. The shock to supply chains around the world in the attacks' aftermath, when interruptions in air travel and new security procedures impeded the flow of goods and services, made many realize how vulnerable the international system really was. And because the rising and resurgent powers had harnessed their chariots to the horses of global economic growth, they were amenable to finding common ground.
As a result, the anti-terrorist coalition could have become the basis for a new concert of powers. But the give-and-take of the classic concert system, in which a series of quid pro quos set the basis for collective decisions, was a mindset largely alien to both the Bush administration and Congress. With a new concert not in the making, and with the U.S. making clear it would act unilaterally in order to secure its own interests, other states began to find ways not to openly challenge the United States (...)

Hum, I'm reluctant to buy Nikolas Gvosdev's arguments because I'm wondering if power can really be shared when it hasn't be earned based on feel-good principles and charity. I'm starting to believe that the biggest failure for a hegemon is to use power in circumstances when it cannot help it and will therefore weaken it. Moreover, recent developments in international affairs have led me to question the concept of multipolarity. I don't think that the world can't ever be multipolar for it is always the powerful who make the decision not really in unison, but through real political bargaining, which reflects the reality of the day. Thus, the biggest mistake of the Bush administration wasn't really unilateralism, but ideology, incompetence, and a blindness to reality. It was so inflexibly ideological that in too many cases, it never took the steps that were required to win and to achieve its objectives because it as decided that reality didn't matter and was almost never going to get in the way of its ideology.When you are a Hegemon, failed demonstrations of strength will weaken you every time.

The Dutch, Afghanistan, and Srebrenica

Ian Buruma on the reasons for the Dutch retreat from Afghanistan:

Pacifism, however, does not really explain what happened in the Netherlands. The reason the Dutch are wary of carrying on in Afghanistan is not the trauma of World War II, but of a small town in Bosnia called Srebrenica. In the mid-1990’s, the Dutch volunteered to protect Srebrenica from General Ratko Mladic’s Serbian forces. Under United Nations rules, the Dutch, bearing only sidearms, could fight only in self-defense.
Air support, although promised, never came. Dutch hostages were taken and threatened with execution. The world then watched as the hapless Dutch allowed Mladic’s heavily armed Serbs to massacre about 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.

It seems to me that the key iss5z is also that American presidentskand their administration tend to view wars solely from an American viewpoint or rather through the prism of American politics even when they need Allies to win them. In short, what I'm trying to say for all the assertions that the Obama administration was going to do more listening and going to be more multilateral, it  behaved in Bushlike manner on the Afghan surge without not so much finding a way to address the concern of its allies, but simply acknowledging them.

Revisiting Compassionate Conservatism

Thomas Sowell takes on Compassionate Conservatism:

Compassionate conservatism meant that Republicans added to the housing problems created by the Democrats rather than mitigating them.
George W. Bush, for example, was for a law that allowed the Federal Housing Administration to do away with nuisances like down payments on houses. And even his father was for the notion that the federal government should intervene if there were statistical differences among groups in housing or mortgage approvals.
These are people who seem to think that the way to be clever politically is to accept some of the premises of Democrats but reach different conclusions. But if you accept the premises, in many cases you've accepted the conclusions.

In my opinion, Compassionate Conservatism was to Conservatism was Blairism was to the British Labour Party: a way to look to find the right balance between authority (Thatcherism, Reaganism) and empathy (Clintonism) that would be would appeal to the media and to the people who wanted to believe that politics is like the perfect product without side-effects  and with magical powers.

The dangers of toothlessness in American Foreign policy

Quote of the early morning from Michael Young of the Daily Star:

The reality is that the Obama administration these days provokes little confidence in its allies and even less fear in its adversaries. The US remains the dominant actor in the Middle East, but to what end? If Obama’s ultimate goal is to be different than George W. Bush, he hasn’t even managed that. As setback follows setback, he is increasingly finding himself constrained by the same dynamics that Bush faced. But at least Bush knew what he was supposed to be about. Obama just seems lost.  

Troubling American contradictions

I agree with David P. Forsythe on this:

The American penchant for at least the rhetoric of freedom and democracy morphed into the modern human rights movement after World War II under the leadership of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, and Harry Truman. During the Cold War U.S. alignment with brutal authoritarians like Mobutu in Zaire, or the overthrow of even elected governments, as in Chile in 1973, or the supervision of torture in Latin America never destroyed the dream of America as moral beacon. In public we accepted the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention Against Torture. In the shadows we played the game about as tough as anyone else.
9/11 accentuated this duality, perhaps schizophrenia. George W. Bush said al-Qaeda hated us for who we were, our personal freedoms in thought, including religious thought, and our gender-blind democracy. They hated us because we rejected their deferential and patriarchal theocracy. But in secret we engaged in forced disappearances, torture, cruelties arguably just below that level of abuse, denial of reasonable dues process in places like Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Force Base, and military brigs in South Carolina. In defense of our moral greatness we engaged in policies that undercut that greatness. As Winston Churchill paradoxically noted in World War II, truth was so important it had to be defended with a  bodyguard of lies. So for us after 9/11, the rule of law and personal rights were so important they had to be defended by secret detention and torture.

What is troubling me more than anything is that Bushism is winning by default, without any attempt by Obama to offer an alternative that doesn't involve solely giving a speech, changing the facade while performing the same acts. It was because for this reason, because I sense within Obama, a reluctance to be bold when it comes to policy not campaigning that I had couldn't force myself to get behind Obama during the election. I  have always believed that because Obama was thought to embody change, to epitomize it because he was part black,  that he was going to have no incentive, no effective pressure to change America for the better.

The perpetual utterance of self-applause

I agree with Damon Linker on this response to the now infamous Lowry's and Ponnuru's article:

Lots of conservatives turned on George W. Bush by the end of his presidency. But here we see that if Bush didn’t exist, the right would have had to invent him. His proud parochialism, his simple-minded and insecure suspicion of intelligence, his swaggering self-righteousness—all of it is the natural expression of contemporary conservatism's outlook on the world.
Alexis de Tocqueville, a hero to many on the right, noted with concern nearly two centuries ago that Americans were prone to “the perpetual utterance of self-applause.” For all of his prescience, I suspect the great Frenchman would be surprised and disappointed to find that all these years later, at a time when the country faces daunting long-term challenges, one of the nation's two governing ideologies has come to define itself by its singular dedication to the proposition that the standing ovation never stop.

Bush is still here

Well, I know that it won't be a surprise but I agree with Alex Massi's conclusion, but not necessarily all of his sentiments when he writes this:

Increasingly I suspect that George HW Bush may be one of the most under-rated American presidents since the Second World War. Politically, sure, he wasn't the smartest, sharpest or smoothest and some of his greatest achievements - most notably the management of post-Soviet eastern europe - owed something to a policy of what was, in some senses and to some extent, benign neglect. But there's a certain old-fashioned, perhaps patrician, wisdom in that too. The first Bushies got some things wrong and they got some kinds of lucky too but their reserve also helped them avoid too many self-inflicted mistakes.
It wouldn't be quite right to say that the Obama administration is Pappy's heir but its approach to foreign and security policy certainly borrows from the GHWB playbook.

I'm wondering what people would be saying if Hillary Clinton were in the White House and following the same course? I believe that Andrew Sullivan (who once said that she was Dick Cheney in pantsuit) and others would already be Sarah Palining her and saying that she is pure evil and that she killed the poor "Black" guy to become president and yet, cannot even bring real change to America. Well, I guess that foolish and thoughtless toughness only works for dudes.

Attacking American exceptionalism

Sugary excerpt from Richard Lowry's and Ramesh Ponnuru's essay which argues that Obama is attacking American identity by not embracing/repudiating American exceptionalism:

There have always been those who take exception to American exceptionalism. Europeans developed a cottage industry in travel writing about America, most of it — although not all, with Tocqueville the most important ex­ception — scandalized by the riotous freedoms of these restless, stubborn, commerce-crazy, God-soaked barbarians. The Amer­ica of these portraits was simultaneously primitive and decadent: “grotesque, obscene, monstrous, stultifying, stunted, leveling, deadening, deracinating, roofless, uncultured,” as James Ceaser summarizes the critique in Reconstructing America. Many of America’s European critics hoped that, over time, America would lose its distinctiveness. It would become just another developed Western country: more centralized, more elitist, more secular, less warlike, and less free. In short, a quieter, more civilized place.
The American Left has shared this maddened perplexity at its country’s character and this hope for its effacement. Marxists at home and abroad were always mystified by the failure of socialism in the U.S. They thought that, as the most advanced capitalist society, we would have had the most restive proletariat. Instead we have had a broad and largely satisfied middle class. Even our unions, in their early history, were anti-statist, their radicalism anarchistic rather than socialist.
(...) President Obama’s first year in office should be seen in the context of contemporary liberalism’s discomfort with American exceptionalism.
The president has signaled again and again his unease with traditional American patriotism. As a senator he notoriously made a virtue of not wearing a flag pin. As president he has been unusually detached from American history: When a foreign critic brought up the Bay of Pigs, rather than defend the country’s honor he noted that he was a toddler at the time. And while acknowledging that America has been a force for good, he has all but denied the idea that America is an exceptional nation. Asked whether he believed in American exceptionalism during a European trip last spring, Obama said, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exception­alism.” (Is it just a coincidence that he reached for examples of former hegemons?)
In this respect the president reflects the mainstream sentiment of American liberals. We do not question the sincerity of his, or their, desire to better the lot of his countrymen. But modern liberal intellectuals have had a notoriously difficult time coming up with a decent account of patriotism even when they have felt it. From Richard Rorty to Todd Gitlin, they have proclaimed their allegiance to a hypothetical, pure country that is coming into being rather than to the one they inhabit.

Given the liberal gestalt, it is perhaps unsurprising that every important aspect of American exceptionalism has been under threat from President Obama and his allies in Washington. Obama has frankly and correctly described their project as to change the country fundamentally.

To be blunt, I think that the reason why Lowry and Ponnury is so long is that they spent their time running away from or around their own arguments simply to express their differences with what they believe to be Obama's view of America and his foreign policy. Those differences are legitimate, but the fact that they exist doesn't mean that Obama is attacking America's identity by not embracing American exceptionalism as Lowry and Ponnury define it. All presidents when they come to power have to decide what message they want to give to the world and whether putting humility and soft power can provide accomplish faster policy goal than hard power. Lowry and Ponnury seem to forget that it was George Bush when he was running against Gore who talked about America's need to be humble and to believe that it can nation build any country. The point is that Obama isn't out of the mainstream of American politics or a leftist who want to Europeanize America for he doesn't know much about Europe and its different societies and ways of living (I suspect that this ignorance is shared by both Lowry and Ponnuru). My suspicion that Obama is simply struggling to find the right balance between assertive and soft power especially after the bellicose years of George Bush. Professor Anderson made this point better by quoting Raymond Aron and putting the emphasis on the idea that Hegemon cannot behave as though it isn't a Hegemon and expect to receive some accolades and thanks for its multilateral approach to power and its renunciation of the obligations of its status. Thus, American exceptionalism isn't really an issue, but a distraction from the fact that America is a Hegemon in a world with up  and coming hegemons and is dealing with issues which Obama believes it cannot resolve alone. Thus, the key question is whether America gains more by embracing its dominance, than by accepting the view that it will more by agreeable and multilateral. Cela se discute.

America is governable

The Economist's Editorial on the assertion that the American system of government is broken, and thus, America is ungovernable, its arguments have the merit to be, at the very least, more credible than the ones of Dominique Moisi about the state of America:

It is simply not true to say that nothing can get through Congress. Look at the current financial crisis. The huge TARP bill, which set up a fund to save America’s banks, passed, even though it came at the end of George Bush’s presidency. The stimulus bill, a $787 billion two-year package, made it through within a month of Mr Obama taking office. The Democrats have also passed a long list of lesser bills, from investments in green technology to making it easier for women to sue for sex discrimination.
A criticism with more weight is that American government is good at solving acute problems (like averting a Depression) but less good at confronting chronic ones (like the burden of entitlements). Yet even this can be overstated.(...)America’s political structure was designed to make legislation at the federal level difficult, not easy. Its founders believed that a country the size of America is best governed locally, not nationally. True to this picture, several states have pushed forward with health-care reform. The Senate, much ridiculed for antique practices like the filibuster and the cloture vote, was expressly designed as a “cooling” chamber, where bills might indeed die unless they commanded broad support.
Broad support from the voters is something that both the health bill and the cap-and-trade bill clearly lack. Democrats could have a health bill tomorrow if the House passed the Senate version. Mr Obama could pass a lot of green regulation by executive order. It is not so much that America is ungovernable, as that Mr Obama has done a lousy job of winning over Republicans and independents to the causes he favours.

Recent experience has shown that leadership at the top matters especially when the POTUS knows where he is going and is sure footed ideologically. One can find many faults with Reagan and George W. Bush (and I do), but they knew who they were and what they believed ideologically. They had no hesitations about leading on subjects, which mattered to them and to take no prisoners when dealing with Congress. The Health care bill has shown that Obama isn't as sure footed ideologically for he was unwilling to lead on a subject that is so central that any politicians with unshakable convictions would not have allowed the bill, which can transform the US for generations, to  become simply a piece of sausage that just had to be stuffed with anything as long as it was made.  Washington follows the lead of the president and imitates his best attributes while munching on his weaknesses. The situation  is uncertain, because Obama is yet to confront and to dismiss the idea that Obamamism is solely about Obama, and ensuring that he has a second term but not about America.

Continuity always trumps Change

It seems that more people, in this case Tariq Ali, are making the argument that the Obama administration is continuing the Bush administration's policies in the area of foreign policy:

If a textbook illustration were needed of the continuity of American foreign policy across administrations, and the futility of so many soft-headed attempts to treat the Bush–Cheney years as exceptional rather than essentially conventional, Obama’s conduct has provided it. From one end of the Middle East to the other, the only significant material change he has brought is a further escalation of the War on Terror—or ‘Evil’, as he prefers to call it—with Yemen now being sighted as the next target. Beyond, the story is much the same. Renditions—torture by proxy—are upheld as a practice, while their perpetrators continue to lounge at their ease in Florida or elsewhere, ignoring extradition warrants under Obama’s protection. Domestic wire-taps continue. A coup in Central America is underwritten. New military bases are set up in Colombia.
(...) If sonorous banality and armour-plated hypocrisy are the hallmarks of this Presidential style, that does not make it less functional for the task of servicing and repairing the imperial institutions over which Obama and Clinton now preside. Nothing grated more on international opinion than the lack of requisite unction with which Bush and Cheney all too often went about their business, exposing allies and audiences otherwise well-disposed towards American leadership to inconvenient truths they would have preferred not to hear. Historically, the model for the current variant of imperial Presidency has been Woodrow Wilson, no less pious a Christian, whose every second word was peace, democracy or self-determination, while his armies invaded Mexico, occupied Haiti and attacked Russia, and his treaties handed one colony after another to his partners in war. Obama is a hand-me-down version of the same, without even Fourteen Points to betray. But cant still goes a long way to satisfy those who yearn for it, as the award to Obama of what García Márquez once called the Nobel Prize for War has graphically shown.

I have to admit that I'm baffled that people did think that Obama wouldn't pursue America's national interests with the same means as Bush if he thought that it was in his own political interests. Why did so many assume that Obama was different and wouldn't be a conventional America's president? Oh that's right I forgot in America and elsewhere being black, biracial, means being different or rather possessing such a different identity that it cannot make one see the world or rather America the same way as members of the old boys network and be simply a typical member of the American Elites and that what Obama is just like most presidents before him. In other words, Obama is showing America everyday that "White" is the new black, which in a way is great news for it shows that one can have "black blood" and be a plain and normal American and not a mythical and exotic creature that has to change America and the world.

Bush isn't dead, he lives in Obama

Unsurprisingly, I agree with John B. Bellinger III  (hat tip: Julian Ku) when he makes the following point:

President Obama may be able to do more to translate his words into action with respect to international law and institutions in his second year in office. But given the continuing threat of terrorism against the United States and election-year politics, we should not expect dramatic shifts in U.S. policy. When it comes to international law, the international community may find that there will be more continuity than change between the Bush administration’s pragmatic second term and the Obama administration.

I'm starting to believe that the problem has never really being Bush (on the issue of international law), but rather that for too many American policy makers international law doesn't matter unless it serves uniquely American interests and that it can be superseded when it doesn't. It is neither a controversial nor an illegitimate point of view to have, but the trouble comes when the world becomes more interdependent and that it becomes necessary to have less American-centric arguments to defend international actions. The problem with the Obama administration now is the same as it was with the Bush administration: it believes neither in the relevance nor in the universality of International law, which in its eyes is solely the weapon of those fighting evil to humble/crush their enemies.

The disappointment des imbéciles heureux

Reading Johann Hari express his disappointment at Obama’s foreign policy choices reminds me of the tourists who go to every market in Morocco or elsewhere to buy all the old lamps expecting one of them to be magical and who, later on, explain that they were duped when none are :

The revelations this week about how the CIA and British authorities handed over a suspected jihadi to torturers in Pakistan may sound at first glance like a hangover from the Bush years. Barack Obama was elected, in part, to drag us out of this trap – but in practice he is dragging us further in. He is escalating the war in Afghanistan, and has taken the war to another Muslim country. The CIA and hired mercenaries are now operating on Obama's orders inside Pakistan, where they are sending unarmed drones to drop bombs and sending secret agents to snatch suspects.

Legalism and the definition of just wars

Brendan O'Neill has a thought provoking article on Elizabeth Wilmshurst and her arguments for the illegality of the Iraq war:

There are three irritating things about this strictly legalistic opposition to the attack on Iraq. First, it is delusional. It is based on the massive self-deception that international law and its brave defenders and practitioners – lawyers – kept the world in tip-top shape until that cowboy George W Bush and his heel-snapping poodle Tony Blair came along and ruined everything.
(...) The second irritating thing about the legalistic opposition to the war in Iraq is that it is deeply dishonest, duplicitous even. Many of those who moan about the illegality of Iraq were fervent supporters of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Yet that futile and fatal intervention also did not win the support of the UN Security Council, and thus was ‘illegal’. A Guardian writer penned the 10 Days to War drama, and the Guardian has been singing the praises of Wilmshurst’s performance at Chilcot over the past week. This is the same Guardian which in 1999 slated those who said Bill Clinton and Tony Blair should wait for UN backing before bombing Yugoslavia. The UN is not ‘the only legitimate law-giver’, the Guardian insisted. Indeed, the UN constitution is a ‘recipe for inaction’, and ‘its imprimatur cannot be the sole trigger for international action to right an obvious wrong’.
The third and most irritating thing is that the legalistic-not-political critique of war (well, of certain wars) is inhumane. Judgements about military interventions are made, not from the basis of what is good for humanity, or from any analysis of what terrible consequences the war might have for those on the receiving end and for international peace more broadly, but rather from the lawyerly approach of making sure that all the boxes are ticked and all the right procedures were followed. Legal niceties are elevated over people’s lives, over questions of democracy, sovereignty, stability, equality.

I agree with O'Neill on his main point that the law isn't the main tool to define just or rather unjust wars, that other factors have to be taken into considerations, and those who fail to at least, accept that the complexity of the concept of "just war" are ideologues and hypocrites. I think that even if the Iraq war could have been justified (my feeling is that it couldn't have been, but I'm willing to consider the possibility that I'm wrong) under the international law principles established by Wilmshurst and others, it would have still been an unjust and I'm making this statement, of course, with the help of hindsight. The main reason is that it was both unwinnable,  unnecessary, and too expensive since its most touted accomplishment is the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. International Law is a tool among many other indispensable to determine the justifiability of a war. If the French without the backing of the UN had intervened and had stopped the genocide, what would be the argument of legal scholars today who wouldn't have a crystal ball to know that that unlawful intervention had stopped the dead of hundred of thousands innocent people. The point is that even as a lawyer, I'm forced to accept the despairing realities that laws are minimal, but essential tools to address grave societal problems and that more often than not it doesn't provide an acceptable solution to issues, which politicians and the people should have the guts to confront directly.

Lies in political democracies

Interesting "stuff" from William Rees-Mogg:

We have been told by Sir John Chilcot himself that the Chilcot inquiry is not a trial, and that nobody will be either acquitted or found guilty; we all know that is not true. A public judgment is being made as each section of evidence is given. In particular a quiet judgment has been made of Tony Blair’s conduct. It may never lead to his being tried in any court, but there is nevertheless a public verdict of his responsibility for the British action in Iraq.
It was Mr Blair who was responsible; his evidence shows it. He was the Prime Minister who had won two landslide elections. He could cajole, coax, threaten, anger and flatter to get his own way, a war leader who was the nearest thing to a parliamentary dictator since the wartime Winston Churchill.

These assertions raise the essential point of accountability in a democracy. The electorate by electing/choosing its leaders should bear a lot of the blame for their mistake in judgment. It is too easy not to say what was not heard them or what didn't convince enough politics and media analysts to force a change of actions. The argument isn't that illegalities are justifiable in a democracy because political leaders get elected, but to make the point emphatically that when an act falls in that dangerous and frustrating gray zone, the people must turn the guillotine away from the elected and question their own judgment and the way their elective process and system of government work in those situation. I have the strong suspicion that in both Britain and America, the problem was that there stopped to be any counter powers when it was pompously declared that we were in the age of terror. At that moment, fear ruled and the populace and the elites who wanted to be protected at all costs stopped  caring about the morality of the means to achieve what was considered to be the most just of end: their survival.

Thus although it must feel good to hit on Blair, it is more instructive to realize and accept that there is a Blair inside of most of us, that is someone who becomes blinded by the necessity to fight just wars everywhere when they are potential dangers to avoid domestic catastrophes.

Going rogue too

I'm going rogue too: I  just borrowed a copy of Sarah Palin's book, which I'm going to skim. I'm just borrowed and skimming it because as a matter of principle, I almost never buy or read books that politicians write to talk about themselves especially when they are still trying to conquer power. In any case, I'm going to skim Palin's book because I'm trying not so much to understand why people hate her, but to have a better sense of what America is to her and why I have the conviction that she has a lot in common with Obama. As I have said before I like Palin as I like Obama and Sarkozy; when I use the work "like" what I'm saying is that I would shake their hands and even talk to them about my mother. However, I don't think that liking someone is enough to vote for them or to support their politics. It is for this reason that I never understood why people needed to hate Palin to attack her politics or to vote for Obama because they thought that he was the coolest thing since Coke Zero or since the last Air Jordan shoes. An Ambassador once told me a few years ago that George Bush was really cool and extremely personable as if that was supposed to make a difference and to change one's view of his politics. I'm trying to say that in our century if politics is solely about the person, the personal, the ME, then Politics with a capital P is doomed. Thus, I will skim Palin's book to remind myself that you don't have to believe that someone is retarded not to support their politics and there is something about our time that makes it easy to make women the epitome of dumbness and of anti-intellectualism.

Moving past Blair

I agree with Agnès Poirier on her conclusion that Blair wouldn't make a good president for Europe:

There is a stronger argument still against Mr Blair’s candidature: he’s not the intellectual heavyweight and above-all-parties moral figurehead that we Europeans need to represent our old and proud continent. (...)What Europe needs is a figure that can incarnate the very idea of Europe, not a schemer who can pull his weight in the negotiations of banana exports. What Europe needs is a wise leader whose personal experience of the ordeals and triumphs of the 20th century makes for a commanding figure in the world, somebody who makes people stop and listen. Who would a busy Barack Obama take immediately on the phone? An Einstein or a Blair?(...) Tony Blair may be a talented and savvy political figure, but he shouldn’t be Europe’s first choice. Let’s aim higher. Europe deserves it.

I don't think that Blair is lightweight. I just thinks that he represents the past and that Europe needs somebody who doesn't have all of his political baggage to help it move forward and not to go back to some of the gray zones of Blairism. When I think of Blair, the first thing to my mind is the Yo blair incident in which he accepted to be treated with too much nonchalance by Bush (At least Angela Merkel was repulsed when Bush rubbed her shoulders in an inappropriate manner ). That episode and his actions in the later years of his time at Britain's prime minister force one to question his ability to question wrong actions motivated by good intentions and to not be religiously ideological.

Losing the moral high ground

I agree with Glenn Greenwald on this:

I'm all in favor of applying disgusting political rhetoric and twisted political arguments to the purveyors of such tactics in order to demonstrate their hypocrisy and/or to neutralize those tactics.  If that's all that were going on here -- if it were made clear that these tactics are unacceptable and dumb but that the Rovians on the Right who have spent the last eight years wielding them should be hoisted on their own petard -- I wouldn't have any objections to it.  But, plainly, that's not all that is going on.  Instead, the DNC and these groups are clearly arguing that it's improper and unpatriotic to object to or even question Obama's award.
( ...)What's particularly bothersome about yesterday's attacks is the premise that it's improper, unpatriotic and even Terrorist-mimicking to do anything but cheer -- have a "national celebration" -- when Obama is awarded the Nobel Prize.  Whether Obama is actually pursuing policies of peace happens to be an extremely legitimate topic of debate.  The same is true for whether he's done anything meaningful yet to merit the award.  (...)  While there are arguments to make in his favor -- I even made some myself yesterday in the first two paragraphs of what I wrote  -- there is something unquestionably bizarre about awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to a leader who did not merely "inherit," but is advocating, actively prosecuting and escalating, a major war that is killing large numbers of civilians with no plans to stop, while at the same time building prisons to house people who will have no due process.
Unquestionably, those are and must be legitimate topics of debate.  Some smart people yesterday made some reasonable arguments for Obama's Prize.  But to insist that it's the patriotic obligation of every American to stand and cheer -- and that those who don't are "casting their lot with the Terrorists" -- is creepy and repugnant.  It's also a very dangerous game to play.

Obama as global prozac

The funniest reaction from Obama's big prize via Maria Farrell on Crooked Timber:

But this isn’t about domestic politics, or about what he’s done yet. President Obama has changed how the world feels about America. He’s lifted the planet’s mood. This guy is global Prozac.
There’s more to it than just the Bush presidency being a total downer for everyone in the world who cares about multi-lateralism or just wants to do business with the US. The tidal wave of bad faith Bush’s presidency created washed away any chance of progress in so many international initiatives.
Obama’s not a game changer per se, but he’s changed how people feel about playing the game, or whether they even want to.

Crazy God talk II

I just can neither bring myself to quote nor to comment this story because it is so crazy and so unfortunately so American that it scares the you know what out of me.

Crazy God talk

Another proof via Eliot Weinberger on the London Review of Book Blog that Bush and Chirac couldn't get along because the first was persuaded that he was elected to do God's work who had so little faith in him that s/he/it needed to lead him every step of the way:

In 2003, George W. Bush called Jacques Chirac to persuade him to join the Coalition of the Willing in the jihad against Saddam Hussein. Appealing to their ‘common faith’, Bush said:

Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East… The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled… This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.

A little hazy on his Book of Revelation, Chirac sought enlightenment from Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne. Romer told the story in the university’s journal, Allez Savoir, and Chirac himself later confirmed the conversation in an interview with the journalist Jean-Claude Maurice.

At least he is not the other guy

When I read Krugman writing this I have to wonder whether the fact that Obama isn't Bush is enough to accept less from him, no I'm not wondering, I'm just distressed by the fact that it seems to be sufficient for too many people to continue the cult of the personality:

To be fair, Obama is nothing like Bush; the stimulus was designed to solve a real problem, and the Obamanites, unlike the Bushies, don’t go around inventing crises to solve. But I still think that Obama’s greatest strength is precisely his obvious intelligence and ability to talk to Americans like adults; it’s a shame to see him and his advisers saying something they have to know isn’t quite right.

The winds of change

I didn't watch the Bill Maher's soft take down of Obama and his love of TV last week on his show because I stopped watching it more than a year ago. I thought that he had stopped to be funny because he wanted so much to believe in the audacity of hope. In an op-ed in the LA Times, Maher writes:

I'm still a fan, but there's a fine line between being transparent and being overexposed. Every time you turn on the TV, there's Obama. He's getting a puppy! He's eating a cheeseburger with Joe Biden! He's taking the wife to Broadway and Paris -- this is the best season of "The Bachelor" yet!
I get it: You love being on TV. I love my bong, but I take it out of my mouth every once in a while. The other day, I caught myself saying to a friend, "Don't tell me if he's fixed the economy yet, I'm Tivo-ing it."(...) It's getting to where you can't turn on your TV without seeing Obama. Who does he think he is, Dick Cheney? Come on, sir, you don't have to be on television every minute of every day. You're the president, not a rerun of "Law and Order." Save some charisma for a rainy day. (...)I'm glad that Obama is president, but the "Audacity of Hope" part is over. Right now, I'm hoping for a little more audacity.

I guess the fact that he can criticize Obama by daring to ask him to be more substantive rather than to act as if he were president in a Hollywoodian movie means that it may become easier for comedians even when they are first and foremost fans, to make fun of the president. Who knows may be change is coming...

The past is alive!

Well so much for letting go of the past :

Mr. Obama sought Thursday to distance himself from the policies of the past — and ended up reliving it.

The greatest political gift

Quote of the day from Daniel Drezner:

Politically, Obama has inherited George W. Bush's greatest political gift -- having adversaries more boneheaded than himself.

Power, civil liberties and intellectual dishonesty

Glenn Greenwald on Obama, War powers and civil liberties:

Even if it's due to perceived political necessity, the more Obama embraces core Bush terrorism policies and assumptions -- we're fighting a "war on terror"; Presidents have the power to indefinitely and "preventatively" imprison people with no charges; we can create new due-process-abridging tribunals when it suits us; the "Battlefield" is everywhere; we should conceal evidence when it will make us look bad -- the more those premises are transformed from right-wing dogma into the prongs of bipartisan consensus, no longer just advocated by Bush followers but by many Obama defenders as well.  The fact that it's all wrapped up in eloquent rhetoric about the rule of law, our Constitution and our "timeless values" -- and the fact that his understanding of those values is more evident than his predecessor's -- only heightens the concern.
So now, we're going to have huge numbers of people who spent the last eight years vehemently opposing such ideas running around arguing that we're waging a War against Terrorism, a "War President" must have the power to indefinitely lock people away who allegedly pose a "threat to Americans" but haven't violated any laws, our normal court system can't be trusted to decide who is guilty, Terrorists don't deserve the same rights as Americans, the primary obligation of the President is to "keep us safe," and -- most of all -- anyone who objects to or disagrees with any of that is a leftist purist ideologue who doesn't really care about national security.  In other words, arguments and rhetoric that were once confined to Fox News/Bush-following precincts will now become mainstream Democratic argumentation in service of defending what Obama is doing.  That's the most harmful part of this -- it trains the other half of the citizenry to now become fervent admirers and defenders of some rather extreme presidential "war powers."

What bothers me is that politics has indeed become about good and evil since it is no longer about actions, but about personality, about who people think the person in charge is or rather how good/evil he is. The recent months have shown at least one thing and it is that Democrats would have had no problem with the Bush policies if they had been enacted by Al Gore or any good Democrats. In a strange way, Bush was right, everything is about good and evil, good guys and bad guys, those in power who are scared out of their mind to have another 9/11 happen on their watch and the public who doesn't want to ask question so that it can be outraged at the excesses committed in their name, for their security later.

Our morality

I agree with Norman Geras on this:

It is important not to be a nation that tortures. But that is because of what torture is and what it does to people; it is because human beings have some rights from which there can be no derogation, not in any circumstances. It is because to torture is to violate a human right that is absolute and to violate a human being. For its own sake America - like every nation - should not want to be one that tortures, but the most fundamental reason for this is the violation of humanity that torture is. The nation that does it is degraded, but it is degraded through how others have been treated at its hands. While, for any 'us', it is about us, this is so because of what it does to some them.

Switching sides

I think the fact that Arlen Specter is switching from the  Republican party to the Democrat party in 2009 after remaining loyal during the Bush years, during the time when he would have had many reasons to switch sides or to become an independent confirms that politics is dead or rather that it is no longer about debate, but about solely power, image, story telling. How else is it possible to expect that a man who argues that his switch is about principle never loudly disagreed with Bush II especially when his administration was all-powerful and when dissenting meant hating America? The saddest thing is that Democrats and liberals are welcoming him with open arms without wondering what his defection means. Well thank god, I'm independent because nowadays,  the two american parties are in such a state of decay that they are useless.

Sense and sensibility

I agree with Paul Krugman on this:

The Bush administration was obviously — yes, obviously — telling tall tales in order to promote the war it wanted: the constant insinuations of an Iraq-9/11 link, the hyping of discredited claims about a nuclear program, etc.. And the question was, should you stand up against that? Not many did — and those who did were treated as if they were crazy.
I’ll never trust “sensible” opinion again. But for those who stayed “sensible” through the test, it’s a moment they’d like to see forgotten. That, I believe, is the real reason so many want to let torture and everything else go down the memory hole.

Atonement

Dorothy Rabinowitz goes overboard in her attempts to make the case that Obama blames America. She misses the opportunity to make the more simple and convincing argument that that Obama has decided for now to be in appearance not like Bush even though in substance it is another story.  The real question is what is going to happen when Obame faces the first political challenge of his administration, which requires him to be unpopular with the people who believes religiously that he was elected to atone for America's sins:

No sitting American president had ever delivered indictments of this kind while abroad, or for that matter at home, or been so ostentatiously modest about the character and accomplishment of the nation he led. He was mediator, an agent of change, a judge, apportioning blame -- and he was above the battle.
None of this display during Mr. Obama's recent travels could have come as a surprise to legions of his supporters, nor would many of them be daunted by their new president's preoccupation with our moral failures. Five decades of teaching in colleges and universities across the land, portraying the U.S. as a power mainly responsible for injustice and evil, whose military might was ever a danger to the world -- a nation built on the fruits of greed, rapacity and racism -- have had their effect. The products of this education find nothing strange in a president quick to focus on the theme of American moral failure. He may not share many of their views, but there is, nonetheless, much that they find familiar about him.
The same can't be said for the large numbers of Americans who caught up with the details of the president's apology tour. Presidents have been transformed by office, and Mr. Obama may yet be one of them. But on the evidence so far, he has, as few presidents before him, much to transform. Or, at least, to understand.

Obama neither blames America nor does he want to weaken it with his current strategy, he is just trying to build a legacy as the one who restored its image after two terms of Bush II, the trouble is that it may not the right focus for a president in these times of uncertainty. I'm not sure that Obama is going to be able to deny the fact that Bush actually did certain things that Americans agreed with and that he may even have sooner or later to convince Americans that his way is better or that not everything Bush did was horrific. In short, I don't it is going to be possible to keep saying implictly or even explicitly Bush bad, America good without doing much else.

Worrisome gap

Worth noting post on the Executive Watch from  Duke law School on the similarities between Bush and Obama when it comes to terrorism:

The gap between symbol and substance is also evident in recent litigation challenging the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance and rendition programs.  Even though Candidate Obama criticized these activities as unlawful, the Obama administration now endorses the Bush administration’s argument that the “state secrets privilege” bars lawsuits challenging these programs.  In the words of the ACLU, “Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama’s Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue.” (...) We have no particular quarrels with the substantive positions that the Obama administration has taken so far in the war on terrorism. Our point is simply that there is much less distance between those positions and the positions of the Bush administration than many people would like to acknowledge. Neither verbal gymnastics nor partisan hyperbole should obscure this fact.

Does this mean that Bush wasn't that bad or that Obama is just simply not the candidate of Change as so many thought he was going to be? Does the fact that he is actually a pragmatist a sure sign that all the idealists who worship will be disappointed? I'm wondering what my favorite law professor and Maryland State Senator , Jamin Raskin thinks of all of this.

Morbid fascination

I just saw W, Oliver Stone's movie about George W. Bush and I thought that it was a waste of time for two reasons. The first reason is that Oliver Stone doesn't have any distance from the main character, Bush, to make a credible movie whose goal isn't simply to justify its contempt for him and his policies. The second is that one gets the feeling that the goal of Stone isn't to be a filmmaker, but an historian by getting there first, that is by making his views of Bush part of history. For those of us who believe that Bush was a bad president for reasons more complicated than his conservatism and his alleged simple mindedness (which I never believed in ), W is a movie that is both depressing and alarming because it dumbs down the political discourse by making the people believe that the sole differences between a JFK (the greatest president in a Hollywoodized world, but not necessarily in real life) and a Bush are intelligence and righteousness.

The war on Terror and Africa

Bush is in Africa and yet, nobody seems to care probably because American doesn’t any real African politics or rather that its African politics is always 90% realpolitik and 10% percent good sentiments. Donald Steinberg has a great article on Bush’s visit in Africa in which he writes thoughtfully not only about Bush’s trip, but also about the impact on his presidency on Africa. More specifically, he argues, rightfully in my opinion that the war on terror has harmed Africa. Sugary excerpt:

Subsequently, President Bush made the “war on terror” our dominant foreign policy theme after September 11, 2001, which harmed American engagement in Africa in two ways:

First, it diverted attention, financial resources and military engagement from the continent and toward other priorities, especially the war in Iraq. While paying welcome attention to fighting HIV/AIDS and expanding trade with Africa, the Bush administration responded tepidly or not at all to the evisceration of democracy, good governance and social services in these anchors.

Second, Bush generally supported existing leaders who were smart enough to proclaim themselves “allies” in the fight against Al Qaeda and other terrorists – similar to the professions of anti-Communism that emanated from cynical African leaders during the Cold War – often through military aid that strengthened repressive regimes. The US has supported so-called anti-terrorist campaigns, such as the ill-advised Ethiopian invasion of Somalia in 2006-2007, no matter the consequences for regional stability, refugee flows and humanitarian impact.

The point is that separating terrorism from other issues can be detrimental to Africans because it ignores both history and the context. The point is that terrorism in Africa is tied to political and economical instability, which enables terrorists to have a safe haven in some countries as Bin Laden found one in Sudan for so many years. It is therefore impossible to cut off the terrorist issue from other issues.  More importantly, even though no one is interested in answering the chicken or the egg question, it is undeniable that even if it is hard to believe that terrorists aren’t born, but made, terrorism in Africa will continue as long as many of its countries enjoy neither political nor economical stability and continue to lack a strong civil society.

Finding a best friend

Alex Spillius explains why Sarkozy is Bush's new best friend in an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph:

The invitation to Mr Sarkozy underlines how far Gordon Brown has distanced himself from the unpopular Bush administration. The PM has shunned the chummy, open-necked diplomacy favoured by Mr Blair and Mr Sarkozy for a cooler, business-like approach.

But the speech the French leader delivers will also underline the differences between him and Mr Blair. It will, of course, reflect the dramatic improvement in relations between Paris and Washington after the bitter disagreement over the Iraq war with Jacques Chirac.

Aged 52, Sarkozy is of a generation that doesn't share the reflexive anti-Americanism of his predecessors. Comfortable with American culture, Mr Sarkozy - known back home as "Sarko l'Americain" - adores the US for its energy, optimism and weak trade unions.

The American story also fits his odyssey from the son of a Hungarian immigrant and a Jewish mother [It is Sarkozy’s maternal grandfather that is Jewish not his mother] to the Elysée Palace, and his message to the French to loosen their welfare safety net.

Well, most of it is true, but what isn’t said is that Sarko knows that he has a lot to gain by hugging a weak US president that is desperate to show his fellow Americans that he was right on Iraq and on everything else and that even the new French president is implicitly admitting for he isn't afraid to embrace him. As I've said before I doubt that Sarko knows much about America for what he likes it Hollywood, its skyscrapers and its riches. Sarkozy likes big toys and big things and so does America. I think that whether this love affair between Sarkozy and America lasts will depend on who becomes the next American president and on whether Sarkozy has really renounce the Gaullist Grandeur. In other words, Sarkozy hasn’t yet given America tangible proofs of his love yet. The real test will come if,  not if when his Atlanticism becomes a political liability (on the contrary to the conventional wisdom, Sarkozy didn’t run on his love for America, he ran on the French national identity and the need for France to get rid of those who couldn’t accept French traditions or who didn’t love France). What will he do then?

On Sarkozy and Blair

Arthur Goldhammer  who has a good blog on French politics has an interesting answer to the question whether Sarkozy has replaced Blair as America's best ally and Bush's best friend. He argues that the change that comes with Sarkozy is, so far, merely about form and not substance. Sugary excerpt:

Nothing has yet forced Sarkozy to stake out a position opposed to the US. He appears to believe that there is little to be gained from maintaining a staunch position against past U. S. actions. Chirac had hoped to lead a coalition of the unwilling, but it never materialized. Passive resistance is not really a viable foreign policy option. Thus far, Sarkozy has signaled only that he does not wish to stand on principle. He is willing to reconcile with the U. S., but that tells us nothing about which American policies he will support and which he will oppose. A judgment will have to await a defining event. The statements made thus far on Iran don't really indicate where the two countries are likely to converge or diverge. To say that one is opposed to an Iranian nuclear weapon is cheap talk until it comes to doing something about it, and how Sarkozy perceives the risks involved in possible courses of action is not at all clear to me. We constantly hear about how much he likes America, but so did Chirac, who was fond of telling stories about his Cadillac convertible and summer working as a soda jerk at the Howard Johnson's adjacent to my alma mater (HoJo's is now a MicroCenter computer discount store--times change, as do regimes). Nostalgia for halcyon days in Cambridge did not determine Chirac's policy when push came to shove; nostalgia for jogs in Central Park and speedboating on Winnepasaukee won't determine Sarkozy's policy either.

I agree with Goldhammer for I think that Sarkozy can afford to remain vague and can surf on his love for America, but simply declaring it because of the weakness of an ending Bush administration. The test for the US American relationship is going to come at the beginning of the new American president term unless something drastic happens with Iran. 

From yo Blair to yo Sarko

Roger Cohen imagines what a conversation between Bush and Sarkozy will be like in the White House when he starts his visit in the US this week:

BUSH (laughing): Yeah, amigo, maybe I’ll leave that to Giuliani. What’s French for 9/11? Well, this is déjà vu all over again! As I said up in Kennebunkport, we’ve had our good disagreements on Iraq, but I never allowed disagreements to not find other ways to work together — or not.

SARKOZY (puzzled): Your philosophy is too clever!

BUSH: But don’t call me a Ph.D.-type!

SARKOZY: No, no! The important thing is we are family. Iraq is ancient history. Between old allies there can be no divorce.

BUSH (startled): Divorce?

SARKOZY: When husband and wife split.

BUSH: You know, I don’t hold it against her, the way she trashed my Maine burgers and blueberries, but ...

SARKOZY (interrupting): Speaking of history, I’m going to decorate six of your World War II veterans with the Légion d’Honneur.

BUSH: That’s just outstanding, Sarko. Look, you and me are levelers who level with people. There’s still this opinion that the French are ungrateful wimps who have the opinion they won the war when, in our opinion, we won it for them. So dishing out those legions is good.

SARKOZY: Merci, George. I’m determined to change France’s image. You know, more than 200,000 new businesses were started in France last year.

BUSH: No surprise there, buddy. I’ve learned since taking office that the French for “entrepreneur” is “entrepreneur.” And since you took office, I’ve learned the French for “weekend” is not “long weekend.”

SARKOZY: The French want to work and make money. The American way! That’s why I just gave myself a $200,000 raise. Before, politicians were afraid, but my theory is we’re just as greedy as Anglo-Saxons!

I always knew that one of the problems with Cohen was that he has a limited imagination.

Toasts over baguettes

Patrice de Beer writes the following on Sarkozy and France’s “new” foreign policy:

If the traditional French arrogance remains and "Sarko" looks as much at ease in putting pressure on his European colleagues to follow French unilateral initiatives as were his Gaullist predecessors like General de Gaulle or Jacques Chirac, his unabashed closeness to America and her values, including its TV series, is quite new in French politics.

In respect of Nato, Sarkozy is keen on a full return to the integrated structures of an organisation France had left under de Gaulle in 1966. He has called for France to play "her full role" in the Atlantic alliance. His defence minister has added that if France is one of Nato's best pupils she is not drawing from it all the benefits she feels entitled to. The new president is also keener in having Nato concentrate more on military issues and not growing global.

Nicolas Sarkozy evidently wishes to avoid appearing as subservient to Washington as, for instance, Tony Blair was. He has publicly fixed his own limits to the French-American alliance - by pushing for stronger measures against global warming or by saying (in his first speech after being elected) that if France was America's closest ally, her support could not be taken for granted on all issues.

Sarkozy's hard line is likely to please a Bush administration which is short of foreign friends while domestic opposition to the war in Iraq keeps growing. His position on Iran, while toughening, remains that diplomacy is still the priority of the day and that all steps must be taken to avoid war; but it is nevertheless moving closer to Washington's strategy to put all options - including war - on the table. True, there is an Iranian threat which could destabilise the whole middle east and spread to the rest of the world, but the new French diplomacy seems to have shifted from its traditional multilateralism towards unilateralism a la Bush.

Patrice de Beer is unable to see the forest through the trees. Sarkozy isn’t George Bush and he isn’t agreeing with him on Iran and on other issues because he wants France to be closer to America, but because his vision of the world is Manichean. Sarkozy believes that the world is separated between the West and the rest and that the West has the duty to defend the world against extremism and fundamentalism by any means necessary. This is what Sarkozy meant when during his visit to Maine with Bush he asserted that the United States and France were part of the same family. This assertion was a way to say that blood is thicker than water and that when your family is under attack, you defend it, and you don’t fight over petty things such as style and values because your survival is as stake. The fundamental change that has occurred in France is that Sarkozy, much like Blair, believes that France must stand with the United States and that it is never grand for it to stand against the US. After the second war, there were numerous confrontations between Churchill and de Gaulle during which Churchill told bluntly the French president that the UK would always chose the United States over France and during which, de Gaulle emphasized always stubbornly the idea of French Grandeur, which meant that France had to be itself to be FRANCE. Sarkozy is simply taking a different course of action, by choosing to be Churchill and by showing with his actions that le général made a historic mistake for after all Gaullism led France astray.

The West and power

Niall Ferguson has an interesting take on the relationship among Bush, Sarkozy, and Brown, the leaders of the United States, France, and Britain. He argues that their biggest challenge is not to get along with Bush with each other and to develop strong alliances, but rather to face up to the fact that the West is weaker and that therefore the sphere of influence of their different countries is as narrow as it has ever been:

France, Britain, America: They each have had their era of hegemony. Now, however, they all belong to the club of developed debtors, with combined current account deficits of $970 billion last year. Other members of this club are Australia, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain. Apart from Iceland, it reads like a list of ex-empires, with the former members of the British Empire (energy-rich Canada excepted) in the lead.
Collectively, the developed debtors had to borrow about $1.3 trillion last year. On the other side of this great global equation is the club of emerging exporters. According to the International Monetary Fund, more than 40% of the developed debtors' funding requirement last year was met by China, Russia and the Middle East.
The problem for the deficit countries is essentially that their people think the world owes them a living. Their politicians pander to this assumption by making a series of more or less incompatible promises: that expenditure on healthcare and education will always go up; that direct taxation will never go up; and that the assets against which voters borrow will never go down. The only way to fulfill these promises is to pump out ever more printed paper: bank notes, bills, bonds, stocks and the rest. The emerging exporters buy these. The net result must be a creeping transfer of financial ownership from West to East.
[…] So the big question is not whether Sarkozy or Brown will get along better with Bush, but what China's sovereign wealth fund will buy when it embarks on its first investment spree. By comparison with these sovereigns, the traditional sovereigns of the political world are starting to look about as powerful as, well, professors.
And the really bad news for these presidents and prime ministers? Not only are the stakes getting lower all the time, you guys don't even have tenure.

A meaningless day at the UN

Gideon Rachman writes about the day of the big three, Sarkozy, Bush, and Ahmadinejad at the UN. He analyzes their “performances,” which is I believe the appropriate term to call a reading of a speech in front of an audience just for the purpose of being applauded and receiving brownie points from the press. In other words, the contents of these speeches almost never matter unless they are bellicose, provocative, and vitriolic as was the speech Hugo Chávez gave last year. It is ironic, but the UN is never as mundane as when heads of state and of governments make their annual trip to New York to take the opportunity to grandstand and to reassure themselves and their home political base of their own importance. Sugary excerpt:

It was fascinating to sit through an entire Ahmadinejad speech and press conference for the first time. I thought he pulled off the difficult trick of being simultaneously boring and sinister. Boring because he goes on and on about religion. I don't know why this surprised me - it is the Islamic Republic of Iran, after all. But the religious rhetoric is usually wisely edited out of the compressed version of his remarks. Having to listen to it all in full, is a bit like being trapped on the doorstep by a Jehovah's Witness. On the other hand, I also found his performance sinister because it is clear that he is genuinely obsessed by Israel. These are not stray remarks, forced out of him. He can't keep off the subject.

[…] Sarko maintained his current tough line on Iran. But - for the rest - his speech was a bit of a disappointment. In fact, I thought it was in the worst tradition of windy, high-falutin' French rhetoric. Sample quote: The UN is "a dream of the human conscience against all who threaten to destroy humanity." It's a shame - I thought he was better than that. Maybe a diplomat wrote the speech.

Bush's performance was also a little odd. The speech was terse and well-delivered, apart from the usual problems pronouncing foreign names (Aung San Suu Kyi was a bit of a tonguetwister.) But he all but avoided the big international questions that clearly will dominate the rest of his term - Iraq, Iran and the Middle East peace process. Instead he talked a lot about development and malarial bed-nets. He has left it rather late to show the UN his softer side.

The New York Sun writes that there was a role reversal between Bush and Sarkozy for it was Sarkozy who took on the difficult task of adopting a serious and harsh tone on Iran. I thought that Sarkozy’s speech was fine, but that he was careful and that he was fighting his nature, which is too be direct and confrontational. He reminded me of the voluntary self-restrained Sarkozy of the debate with Ségolène Royal. Sarko didn’t want to seem too abrupt and too eager to battle, but rather as a president capable of providing steady, fair, and also tough leadership. The trouble is that when Sarko isn’t himself, he is boring, and painful to watch but again it is always safe to be boring on the international scene.

France is always guilty

I’ve read several articles on Bernard Kouchner’s visit to Iraq and too many of them show a worrying trend, which is a stubborn and illogic insistence that France or rather Chirac’s France doomed the Iraq war. The argument is that because France was opposed to the second Iraq war is divided the West, which crippled the war effort. I know that it is hard to follow but the point that many article are making is that Sarkozy is rectifying Chirac’s mistake, which was not only to refuse to participate in the war, but to weaken the western alliance for anti-American reasons when France’s participation would have made Iraq a success story. In the New York Post for example, Amir Taheri writes the following:

ONE key promise that Nicolas Sarkozy had made during his presidential election campaign last spring was to "correct foreign-policy mistakes" made by his predecessor Jacques Chirac.

Chief among these was Chirac's desperate efforts to prevent Iraq's liberation from Saddam Hussein's regime of terror. Chirac failed to save his friend's regime but managed to sour relations with the United States, Great Britain and more than 40 other democracies that joined the Coalition of the Willing to liberate Iraq in 2003.

Sarkozy's moves to correct the mistake started before his election, when he met President Bush at the White House in 2006 and described Chirac's policy as "arrogant."

The surprise visit paid to Iraq by France's new foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, this week is another move by Sarkozy to shed Chirac's legacy. No better man than Kouchner could have been chosen to signal France's change of policy. For Kouchner is one of a handful of people in the West who recognized the murderous nature of Saddam's regime and called for its overthrow as early as the 1980s.

In the Times of London, Bronwen Maddox continues the same line of argument by stating that,

Kouchner’s arrival follows the corncobs-and-hamburger informal summit between George Bush and Sarkozy. It shows that Sarkozy intends to put clear distance between himself and his predecessor Jacques Chirac, even on the most sensitive subject of Iraq, where Chirac had broadcast to the world his satisfaction at having foreseen the US’s predicament.

[…] What is there for France in involving itself in Iraq? A lot, given that it has no need to take responsibility for the outcome. It stands to gain the step forward on the world stage which Chirac had been seeking by opposing the Iraq invasion, wanting to set up France as an alternative pole to that of the American superpower. At that time Kouchner was a rare French voice in at least tolerating the invasion, calling his fellow officials “America-phobic”.

Chirac succeeded in shrinking support for the invasion to a devastatingly slender column, but the strategy then backfired.

The instinctive deep support for the US from Central and Eastern European countries, and at the start for the invasion itself from Italy and Spain, isolated him in his antiAmericanism, with his lone companion Gerhard Schröder, then German Chancellor. Both have been replaced by pro-US leaders.

Grandstanding aside, what can France contribute? It is helpful to have a country other than the US, Britain, or Iraq’s immediate neighbours, try to seek out common interests among Iraqis. US attempts to broker a deal are inextricably bound up with its urgent desire to reduce troops; the pressure on Bush – and his successor – is visible to the world.

I’m not buying it. I think that a lot can be said about Chirac and France’s refusal to participate in the Iraq war. It is possible to say that the French suspicion toward American power played a role in Chirac’s decision to say no to war. However, to focus merely on that is to offer a partial account of history for it is to say that France was solely responsible for the Iraqi crisis, which led to the war in 2003 and that Chirac had no other motives, but to want to hurt the American effort in Iraq. The point is that Chirac even if he may have right for the wrong reasons was right and that Sarkozy and even Kouchner never dared to say that they were in favor of the war in Iraq because they couldn’t defend it by simply arguing that the opposition was America-phobic. I agree that Sarkozy is signaling that he isn’t Chirac and that he indeed believes that he sees the world as divided between the West and the rest meaning that he would rather be wrong, but on the side of Bush than right, but on the side of the side of the rest of the world. That fragmentation of the world worries me. It is a reaffirmation of the so-called clash of civilizations, which implies that the West and the rest of world are so different that it is always preferable to be on the side of those who shares your values and your “blood” than to be on the side of those who don’t share those values and have a different culture. In other words, allegiance is absolute no matter the issue and no matter right and wrong. I don’t agree. The world isn’t divided between the West and the rest. Moreover, America is larger than the West because it is the symbol of the extraordinariness of human potential. I believe that the world needs America not just to stand there and to survive, but to be itself: to be good and to continue to be idealistic and to believe in difficult and sublime dreams. America isn’t just a country. It is a grand and sublime idea, which is that anything, even the impossible can happen with hard work and good deeds. It is for that reason that I thought that Chirac and Villepin went too far in expressing their rightful opposition to the war, they forgot that America was larger than the Bush administration and its childish rhetoric on French surrender and old Europe.

A fine romance

The meaning of a lunch

Nicolas Sarkozy is having an informal lunch with President Bush in Maine (Kennebunkport ) in the Bush family residence. The Boston Globe has an interesting article on the “Lunch” in which Sarkozy says the following:

France is friends with democracies, not with dictatorships. […] Do we agree on everything? No. […] Because even in family, there are disagreements. But we are still the same family.

Ah! I think that it isn’t necessary to comment on that quote. Nevertheless, as I have always said, although I liked Sarkozy’s Americanism, I don’t think he knows much about America, but rather likes it because too him, it is synonymous with power and money. There is nothing wrong with that, but to me, America is about more than that, much more than that otherwise, it wouldn’t America, but just another materialistic country, which never wonders about existential purpose and never questions its actions. Well, because I believe in small victories, I hope that they had some French wine and that it means that it is a beginning of a new and less confrontational relationship between the US and France. Well, I am allowed to dream or am I?