tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64159220814287917212024-03-13T12:01:32.712-07:00The Self-Hating GentileA blog covering contemporary international relations with a focus on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Israeli politics and Northern Ireland and Asian interstate politics. Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.comBlogger238125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-3154609876684443072014-05-16T10:02:00.000-07:002014-05-16T10:02:42.496-07:00"How the mighty have fallen." Ehud Olmert to Prison<div style="text-align: justify;">
This week former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert<a href="http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=17479"> was sentenced to six years in prison f</a>or taking bribes from property developers in the Holyland Development scandal when he was mayor of Jerusalem before becoming prime minister. He will be the first former prime minister in Israeli history to go to prison. Olmert served for ten years as Jerusalem's mayor, from 1993 to 2003, before becoming a minister in Ariel Sharon's second government. When Sharon broke away from the Likud in late 2005 to form Kadima Olmert went with him as his number two. Sharon then suffered a massive stroke two months later in early January 2006, which put him into a coma from which he never recovered, and Olmert became head of Kadima and then prime minister following elections in March 2006. Olmert only served as Kadima leader for 2.5 years until late 2008 when he was forced to give way to Tzipi Livni, his foreign minister, because he was under indictment for corruption. Tzipi Livni failed to form a new government and elections were called for early 2009. These resulted in Kadima winning one more seat than the Likud but going into opposition because of its inability to form a coalition government. Olmert then retired from politics.</div>
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Olmert began politics as an ambitious young political activist in the Herut Party. When Shmuel Tamir challenged Begin's leadership of the party and was suspended he split off to form the Free Center party in early 1967. Olmert went with him and at age 28 was elected to the Knesset on December 31, 1973 at age 28--the youngest ever MK. He <a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/172674/olmert-anti-corruption-crusader">began his career as an anti-corruption c</a>ampaigner. But as mayor of Jerusalem, following the 28-year tenure of internationally-renowned Mayor Teddy Kollek of Rafi/Labor, he developed a reputation as one of the more corrupt figures in Israeli politics <a href="http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=17541">eating in fancy restaurants, smoking expensive cigars, and wearing tailor-made suits. </a></div>
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Ironically, Olmert had beaten an earlier corruption charge that was demonstrated to be politically motivated in order to prevent him from negotiating a peace deal with the Palestinians. But his former private secretary Shula Zaken revealed to prosecutors all the corruption deals in exchange for a plea bargain that resulted in a mere 11-month sentence for her, although she was a prime participant in the schemes. With time off for good behavior Olmert is likely to serve at most three or four years in a minimum-security prison. </div>
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Besides going to prison, Olmert is likely to be remembered by future historians for three things. First, the Second Lebanon War occurred on his watch in July 2006 and resulted in a degradation of Israel's deterrent power and hundreds of thousands of homeless Lebanese who fled southern Lebanon and tens of thousands of Israelis who fled northern Israel. Second, in 2008 he engaged in direct peace talks with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that resulted in an Israeli offer to withdraw from 94 percent of the West Bank and swap territory for the remaining six percent. But because Abbas and Olmert were both very politically weak leaders, Olmert did not feel comfortable giving up a Palestinian right of return and according to some Israelis, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni advised Abbas to wait until she was prime minister before signing a peace deal. So the negotiations collapsed after eight months in the early fall of 2008. <a href="http://972mag.com/ehud-olmert-is-going-to-jail-for-the-wrong-crimes/90794/">Third, in late December 2009 Olmert launched Operation Cast Lead--a war on Hamas </a>and Gaza that resulted in over a thousand Palestinian deaths with literally two handfuls of Israelis killed. This was resulted in the Goldstone Report from UN appointed former South African Judge Richard Goldstone that was very critical of Israeli conduct during the war. </div>
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Abroad Olmert was feted and celebrated by liberal peace activists like J Street, where he was the guest of honor a<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwIIAQMAAgs">t J Street's third conference in 2012</a>. But this will now end and reality will set in. Olmert should use his prison time to write his memoirs and explain what really happened to the peace deal in 2008, which no Bush administration official has yet adequately explained. J Street will now have to search for another credible Israeli peace partner for lame duck Palestinian President Abbas. Good luck with that. </div>
Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-60538235532584279012014-05-13T18:01:00.001-07:002014-05-13T18:01:43.455-07:00The Middle East Blame Game and the Truth<br /><div style="text-align: justify;">
After the op-ed writers and foreign policy bloggers began writing their obituaries on Secretary of State John Kerry's Israeli-Palestinian mediation effort, some<a href="http://972mag.com/the-blame-game-then-the-shame-game/90763/"> began assigning blame.</a> The chief culprits demanding on which side of the partisan divide one stood were <a href="http://972mag.com/u-s-post-mortem-on-peace-talks-israel-killed-them/90371/">Israeli settlement activity</a> and Palestinian intransigence. But in this <a href="http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-miller-mideast-talks-failure-20140511-story.html">op-ed piece former State Department Middle East negotiator Aaron D. Miller,</a> deputy to Dennis Ross in the Oslo era, dismisses this and simply states that the two sides were too far apart on all the issues. I made the same prediction for the same reason last August during the release of my most recently-published book, <a href="http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-7597-1"><i></i></a><i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null">Israel/Palestine and the Politics of a Two-State Solution</a></i><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null">, </a>before the Madison chapter of J Street. In fact I made a Venn diagram to illustrate that there was no overlap between the Israeli and Palestinian positions on the aggregate of issues. In fact in the most serious previous negotiation between Israel and the Palestinians in 2008 the two sides never reached agreement on any of the four main issue areas: borders, security, Jerusalem, and refugees.<br />
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While it is true that settlements are very harmful to the negotiating process because they demonstrate that the Israeli government is not serious about negotiating a solution to the conflict, no new settlements would not provide a solution to the problems of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees. These issue areas would still remain problematic in spite of settlement activity or Palestinian terrorism. Palestinian terrorism demonstrates to Israel the same thing that settlements demonstrate to the Palestinians--that their negotiating partner is either not serious, not in control of his side, or both. I'm afraid that the sad truth is simply that the conflict must continue for quite some time and probably get much bloodier before the two sides will be ready and the situation will be ripe for settlement. We can only hope that the U.S. government will be ready to mediate when that occurs. </div>
Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-76906970646477591282014-04-24T18:01:00.001-07:002014-04-24T21:11:04.354-07:00Kerry Should Give Up<div style="text-align: justify;">
The fact that Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government used the Palestinian unity pact as an excuse to pull out of negotiations with the Palestinians was very predictable. In fact, Netanyahu said many times in the past that he would do so. Why is this? Palestinian unity is what Bibi fears. As long as Hamas is outside of peace talks with Israel and is reasonably strong, it will have an inhibiting factor on Palestinian negotiating positions. This will serve as a wonderful excuse for Netanyahu not to make peace--a peace that would break up his ruling coalition. In 1999 Netanyahu lost power when a limited surrender of West Bank land to the Palestinians mediated at Wye River Plantation in October 1998 by Clinton led to a collapse of his rightist coalition. When running for reelection in 2013 Netanyahu claimed that he had learned his lesson. The lesson was not, as some in Israel thought at the time, do not form a coalition with parties of the right. Rather, it was not to agree to give up territory to the Palestinians. </div>
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Netanyahu faced a dilemma: surrender the last set of prisoners that he agreed to release and see his coalition collapse or refuse to release them and come under American pressure. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas relieved the pressure by going to the UN and then by agreeing to unity with Hamas. If Secretary of State John Kerry tries to revive the peace talks while Palestinian unity is still in its early stages he will risk killing off that unity. If the unity takes hold it will mean that President Abbas's freedom to maneuver in the talks will likely remain very limited. And as<a href="http://www.timesofisrael.com/abbas-embraces-the-islamists/"> journalist David Horowitz writes,"</a>He's no Anwar Sadat, no King Hussein."</div>
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In 1976 the great mediator Henry Kissinger discovered his limitations when he attempted to negotiate an end to the African nationalist liberation struggle in Rhodesia before the situation was ripe. There were four separate African nationalist leaders that were all struggling to be dominant. Two of them had armies and two did not. The most radical and intransigent one, Robert Mugabe, set the tone for the other three in negotiations in the fall of 1976. White settler leader Ian Smith soon left the negotiations after having agreed shortly before to majority rule in theory<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger#Africa"> after being pressured by Kissinger </a>and his South African allies. President Ford lost the presidential election, Kissinger remained in Washington during the transition. It then took another three years for the four nationalist leaders to sort out the power struggle. Two--those without armies--aligned themselves with the whites in the war. Finally the situation was ripe for mediation and a peace agreement emerged.</div>
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An effective secretary of state must know that even if his energy and goodwill are infinite, his time and political capital are very finite. They should be saved for those efforts most likely to succeed. These include the nuclear talks with Iran, NATO talks about what to do about Putin, and possible alliance talks in the Far East. Kerry should let the next secretary of state have a go at the Israelis and Palestinians. </div>
Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-60120966610236333832014-04-24T17:11:00.001-07:002014-04-24T17:13:56.290-07:00What Questions Obama Should Ask About Ukraine<div style="text-align: justify;">
When I was an undergrad in the late 1970s it was taken for granted that appeasement was always a bad thing. I imagine that it is still the same today. I was surprised when I read British iconoclast diplomatic historian<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._P._Taylor#The_Origins_of_the_Second_World_War"> A.J.P. Taylor </a>when he wrote that<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._J._P._Taylor#The_Struggle_for_Mastery_in_Europe_1848.E2.80.931918"> sometimes appeasement is</a> a good thing in diplomacy. Then when I studied counter-insurgency theory it clicked. In counter-insurgency (COIN) warfare, as in dealing with mutinies, the idea is to defeat the enemy's military effort and then defuse the popular discontent that led to the rebellion in the first place. This was classically carried out by Britain in defeating the Arab Revolt in Palestine in 1938-39. Britain combined an alliance with Zionist forces, reinforcements from elsewhere in the Empire, and appeasement of Palestinian Arab grievances against Britain and the Zionists to end the rebellion. In the spring of 1939 Britain agreed to end land sales of Arab land to Zionists, limit Jewish immigration to 100,000 over five years and then limit it by giving the Arabs a veto over future Jewish immigration. This secured Britain relative quiet in Palestine during World War II--relative because this caused a revolt by Zionist extremists of the Lehi and Irgun. From this I took away that the key question as to whether or not appeasement would be successful was: Does the leader being appeased have finite limited goals that can be assuaged? Or does the leader have an appetite that grows with eating, as the French saying goes? Hitler is the classic example of the latter in the late 1930s and the British and French conservatives who attempted to appease him should have known this from his own book, <i>Mein Kampf </i>(MyStruggle) written while Hitler was in prison briefly for his 1923 attempted coup in Munich. Napoleon was another example of a leader who had expansive goals. Those who are good candidates for appeasement are nationalist leaders who have long-defined irredentist goals such as the Irish towards Northern Ireland or the Hungarians towards Transylvania. </div>
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So what about Putin? Are his territorial goals limited? Putin is no Communist, but he is also no democrat. He is a Russian nationalist whose long-term territorial goals seem to be the recovery of Russian territory under the late Russian Empire (Czarist, not Soviet) and lost since then. This means the Ukraine and Belarus, Kazakhstan and Central Asia, and the Baltic States, possibly even Finland. No naturally he has priorities. The core of the Russian Empire consisted of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine--Great Russia, White Russia, and Little Russia. As <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/04/22/nationalism_not_nato_is_our_great_ally__122360.html">Patrick Buchanan points out </a>throughout the entire history of the American presidency from Washington until Clinton, Ukraine was part of the Russian Empire. </div>
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The next question to ask is: Can we reasonably reverse or resist the territorial ambitions of the leader at a reasonable cost? I never supported the inclusion of Ukraine or the Baltic States within NATO. I thought that they would be too difficult to defend because of their geographical location and that many established European countries ("Old Europe" in Rumsfeld's parlance) would resist going to war over Russian encroachment over its former territories. Because the Baltic States are now part of NATO they must be defended. When Britain and France went to war over Poland in September 1939 it was not so much to protect the independence of Poland as to defend the balance of power in Europe against Germany. This is why the West was willing to surrender control of Poland to Stalin in 1944-45. Stalin had the Red Army in Eastern Europe in 1944 and no one wanted to prolong World War II in order to defend Polish independence. The alternative was to make the Soviets pay for absorbing Eastern Europe into the Soviet Empire. This should be the approach towards Ukraine. Putin should understand that there will be a severe price to pay in terms of economic sanctions if he goes on to occupy eastern Ukraine. </div>
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We should then defend the Baltic States by deploying NATO troops in them and possibly even tactical nuclear weapons if the Balts are agreeable to this. If Putin goes ahead with his plans for Ukraine he may give NATO a real political purpose for the first time in over twenty years. We will also be back in a cold war, but one limited to Europe because of the limited exportability of Russian nationalism as an ideology. </div>
Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-7406776875297497232014-04-08T12:48:00.000-07:002014-04-12T12:09:22.193-07:00Kerry, Obama, and the Middle East Peace Process<div style="text-align: justify;">
This week commentators in Israel, the Arab world, and the United States have been writing the obituaries for Secretary of State John Kerry's attempt to negotiate some sort of peace agreement between the Palestinians and Israel. I was one of those commentators who wrote the obituary on the talks when they began last summer. I did this because the situation was not ripe for peace. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu heads a party and a coalition that still supports the idea of a Greater Israel created through the ongoing settlement of the West Bank. In 2009 he mouthed his acceptance of the two-state solution in a speech at Bar-Ilan University. But since then he has done nothing to indicate that he really believes in the necessity of such a solution or of Israeli territorial concessions in order to arrive at one. Members of his coalition such as Deputy Defense Minister Dani Danon have spoken out openly against a two-state solution with no punishment from Netanyahu. Meanwhile the Palestinians are divided between the corrupt Fatah Party ruling the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and the Islamist Hamas ruling in Gaza. Hamas, and resistance within his own Fatah prevents PA President Mahmoud Abbas from making the necessary concessions on such things as a right to return to Israel for Palestinian refugees that would be necessary to reciprocate territorial concessions from an Israeli government interested in peace. Both Netanyahu and Abbas were content to rule in peace with no thought towards peace until Kerry came to disturb their tranquility.</div>
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Kerry came into office in January 2013 as a replacement for Obama's first choice for secretary of state, Susan Rice, after Rice was hobbled by the Benghazi scandal. Kerry, a long-term member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Democratic Party's 2004 presidential nominee, took the State Dept. as a concession prize for losing the presidency to George W. Bush. He had three high-profile items</div>
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on his agenda, all in the Middle East: negotiating an end to Syria's civil war that had been ongoing since the spring of 2011; negotiating an end to Iran's nuclear weapons project in exchange for a lifting of Western economic sanctions; and negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. He has very little hope of negotiating either an end to the civil war or an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and at best a 50-50 chance of negotiating a deal on Iranian nukes that Iran will honor and carry through with. </div>
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Obama, an ambitious domestic reformer, sees his 2008 mandate as one to end American involvement in two wars in the Greater Middle East, keep the United States out of further wars, pursue a covert drone war against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and pass whatever domestic reforms a Republican House will allow him. In such circumstances, Obama sees the State Dept. mainly as the top patronage prize in his administration to give to either potential future opponents (Clinton) or worthy members of the Democratic Party as a reward for past service. Obama will probably go into serious foreign policy mode following this year's midterm election--especially if the GOP takes control of the Senate. Until then he allows Kerry a fairly-loose leash as long as Kerry pulls no surprises or otherwise embarrasses him. </div>
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Kerry is in many ways similar to Republican Secretary of State William Rogers in Nixon's first term in office. Nixon was suspicious of the State Department and so he hired Henry Kissinger to run his foreign policy for him through the National Security Council in the White House. Kissinger regularly consulted with Nixon and the two together planned foreign policy, which Kissinger then executed. Rogers was kept out of dealing with the Soviet Union, China, or the Vietnam War and was allowed to deal with secondary issues like the Middle East--until there was a crisis--and Western Europe. Rogers attempted to negotiate a comprehensive peace agreement with Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Israel. Rogers wanted Israel to return all of the territory captured in 1967 in exchange for peace. Damascus refused to go along with the diplomatic effort. Prime Minister Golda Meir refused to agree to give the West Bank back. By early 1970 Rogers had converted his quest for a comprehensive settlement into one to negotiate a ceasefire in the War of Attrition along the Suez Canal between Egypt and Israel. </div>
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Seven years later President Carter repeated the same trajectory after a few months after President Sadat flew to Jerusalem in order to avoid a re-convening of the Geneva Conference for a comprehensive peace. Decades of peace making have demonstrated that Jerusalem can only make peace on one front at a time and that to attempt more than that overloads the circuits. Jerusalem will only make peace with Arab leaders that Israel trusts because of their conduct. Jerusalem also prefers dealing with Arab dictators who rule states than with Palestinian leaders. This is why everything being equal, Israel will prefer to move on the Syrian track rather than the Palestinian track. </div>
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Washington will only put pressure on Israel to negotiate when there is a credible partner for peace with whom to negotiate. An American president can seriously attempt to negotiate peace in the Middle East only when he has a Congress controlled by his party or when he is popular enough to compel Congress to go along with him. Obama's popularity ratings in the polls now hover around 40 percent. This is why Obama was content to let Kerry play William Rogers without himself auditioning for the part of Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Obama's idea of serious peace making is to travel to the Middle East and make a speech in Cairo or Israel. </div>
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The biggest American development in the Middle East peace process over the last decade or so was the creation of a liberal pro-peace Jewish lobby as a counterweight to AIPAC. A group of Jewish Democratic activists got together in the fall of 2002 to create <i>Brit Tzedek vaShalom </i>(Alliance for Justice and Peace). With a headquarters in Chicago and chapters in every major city with a large Jewish population, Brit Tzedek created a grassroots support organization for presidential peacemaking. But as long as Bush was president this was no good. In 2008 former Clinton staffer Jeremy Ben-Ami started a small office in Washington to lobby for American involvement in the peace process. The new lobby, J Street, merged with Brit Tzedek in early 2010 to form a lobby with grassroots chapters around the country. It is still only a fraction of the size of AIPAC, the America Israel Public Affairs Committee. But that is not its biggest handicap.</div>
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The biggest handicap of J Street is a flawed strategy. It is based on the premise that whoever controls the American Jewish community can dictate American Middle East policy. But the most relevant religious community for the Arab-Israeli conflict is not American Jews, but Evangelical Protestants. Jews make up only about two percent of the total population of the United States, but are concentrated in those states with the largest electoral votes like New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Florida, California, and Connecticut. Because Jews were more politically mobilized than many other ethnic or religious communities they had a greater clout than their share of the population would indicate. But Evangelical Protestants became mobilized in 1980 to support Ronald Reagan. During the time of George W. Bush they became a key constituency in the Republican Party. And because Evangelicals are fundamentalists who take the Bible literally they tend to support Israel as part of the necessary means of bringing about the Second Coming. </div>
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During the early 1990s Benjamin Netanyahu formed an alliance between his Likud Party and the Republican Party in America. This alliance is based on the support of several factions within the GOP: neo-Conservatives, Evangelicals and other social conservatives, and many ordinary rank and file Republicans. For the last 30 years divided government has been the norm in the United States with many voters voting a split ticket. Unlike as recently as the George H.W. Bush administration in 1992, no Republican administration is likely to support a peace process that will require putting pressure on Israel for territorial concessions. As long as the Republicans control either house of Congress, they can prevent the administration from either pressuring Israel or prevent it from compensating Jerusalem with additional aid for territorial concessions. Such aid was the basis for American mediation of peace agreements in 1975 and 1979. Thus, J Street does nothing to help a Democratic president make peace in the Middle East that that president did not have before its existence. Here is <a href="http://972mag.com/what-progressive-jews-can-do-for-mideast-peace/89529/">a link to a similar article </a>of mine on the <i>972 Magazine </i>website that puts these arguments more succinctly.</div>
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Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-30988243003210925432014-04-08T11:02:00.001-07:002014-04-12T12:04:46.878-07:00What to Watch For in India's Elections<div style="text-align: justify;">
Elections for the lower house of parliament, Lok Sabha, began yesterday in India. The elections are in stages across the country starting in northeast India near Bangladesh. They don't end until May 15 when counting begins. The purpose of the staggered dates is to allow police and poll workers to move from one state to another. Here Peter Bergen<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/06/opinion/bergen-india-elections-11-things/index.html?hpt=op_t1"> explains </a>some of the unique features of Indian elections. </div>
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In the nineteenth century the United States also held elections on different dates according to when the various states decided to hold them in September through November. This way the president could monitor the results and see if he was likely to be reelected or not. But in the twentieth century elections were reduced to a single common Tuesday in November and the president in a close election would spend an anxious evening watching or listening as the returns came in to the White House over the radio or television. If you watch the election results on one of the networks or on a cable station like CNN, the command center has an array of fancy electronic screens to display the data and the political correspondents advise the viewers on what key indicators to watch for in the battleground states during the evening.</div>
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Here is my list of things to watch for during the next five weeks.</div>
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1) Do Muslims vote as a bloc or vote individually in the various states? </div>
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With Narendra Modi, the chief minister of the state of Gujarat, the likely prime ministerial candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or Indian National Party, Muslims are keen on keeping him out of office. In 2002 there were anti-Muslim race riots in Gujarat that killed some 2,000 Indian Muslims and Modi did little to prevent them or to protect the victims. Until now he has been denied a visa to enter the U.S. as a result of these riots. Traditionally Muslims have supported the ruling Congress Party. But with Congress widely expected to perform poorly and lose, Muslims could either split their vote or go for the new Aam Admi (Common Man) party. Here is <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/lok-sabha-elections-2014/news/Muslims-turn-to-AAP-upset-Congresss-poll-calculations/articleshow/33574470.cms?">an article </a>from the <i>Times of India </i>giving early indications that Muslims are eschewing Congress in favor of Aam Admi and other parties. </div>
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2) If Muslims do vote as a bloc, is it for Congress, for Aam Admi or for some combination of local parties?</div>
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3) Who do younger voters, especially new voters, seem to be voting for? </div>
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It is expected that most young voters will not vote for Congress, which is considered to be hopelessly corrupt and economically incompetent. But they could vote for either the BJP, whose virile brand of ethno-religious nationalism, Hindutva (Hinduism) tends to appeal to younger voters or for the Aam Admi. </div>
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4) Do either of the two main parties, BJP and Congress, indicate who its candidate is for the prime ministry before the election cycle is over and the results are known?</div>
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Neither Narendra Modi of the BJP nor Rahul Gandhi of Congress has been officially designated as the prime ministerial candidate. Modi as chief minister (governor) of Gujarat is the most visible candidate for the BJP in this election. Rahul Gandhi is a fifth-generation scion of the ruling Nehru-Gandhi dynasty that has lead the Congress Party since the 1930s. Rahul is the eldest son of the martyred Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1989 while campaigning for a comeback, and Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv's Italian-born widow who took over leadership of the Congress Party after Rajiv's murder without ever becoming prime minister. Rajiv earlier had inherited the leadership of the Congress Party after his mother was assassinated in October 1984 and her heir, his older brother Sanjay, was killed in a stunt plane crash. As Rahul was being groomed for the leadership lesser-known ministers served as prime minister while his mother served as the head of the party. </div>
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5) Does the BJP build up an unbeatable lead in the states of the "cow belt" of northern India where most Hindus live?</div>
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Here is <a href="http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2014/04/09/the_most_likely_outcome_of_indias_election_is_unmitigated_chaos.html">one prediction </a>that the elections will result in diffuse power and chaos. </div>
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Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-40146994178066692622014-03-27T16:42:00.000-07:002014-03-30T08:26:23.338-07:00Alliance Party and the Unionists<div style="text-align: justify;">
Last week there were two events that highlighted what unionists care about or, more accurately, what they fear. First, the leader of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), a loyalist paramilitary party linked to the Ulster Volunteer Front (UVF), Billy Hutchinson,<a href="http://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/regional/my-murder-of-two-catholics-helped-prevent-united-ireland-pup-leader-billy-hutchinson-1-5945099"> gave an interview in which he said</a> that he did not regret the two murders for which he was convicted and served time in prison because they helped prevent a united Ireland. The murders were of two Catholic teenagers, picked out at random and killed for being Catholic. Both the UVF and its smaller satellite Red Hand Commandos and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) had a strategy of killing random Catholics as reprisals for republican terrorist and guerrilla actions on the theory that this would put pressure on ordinary Catholics to not cooperate with republican paramilitaries. <a href="http://belfastmediagroup.com/anger-at-comments-by-pup%E2%80%88leader-hutchinson/">Here is </a>some nationalist reaction to the interview. </div>
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A few days later Anna Lo, the Alliance member of the Assembly for South Belfast and its candidate in the upcoming European Parliament elections, gave an interview in which she said she was in favor of a united Ireland and that she saw Northern Ireland as an "artificial colonial entity." Guess which of these two interviews was more upsetting to unionists?</div>
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A member of a victims' organization, a key unionist constituency, contradicted Hutchinson and said that the murders <a href="http://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/regional/billy-hutchinson-s-actions-were-neither-for-god-nor-ulster-says-victims-champion-1-5954126">were "neither for God nor Ulster" </a>(a reference to the UDF's motto and coat of arms). But there was much more heated reaction by both unionists and nationalists to Lo's interview. Unionists were offended by the colony remark and members of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) feared that Lo was attempting to poach soft nationalist supporters of the party. For many years both nationalists and unionists had regarded Alliance, which has always been agnostic on the border, as a "soft" unionist party. The leader of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), the ruling unionist party sharing power with Sinn Fein at Stormont, <a href="http://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/regional/analysis-anna-lo-s-united-ireland-stance-down-to-honesty-not-cunning-1-5954128">Peter Robinson, accused Lo of fishing</a> for nationalist votes. But Robinson might be biased against Lo as her colleague Naomi Long took away the parliamentary seat that Robinson had occupied for 30 years in the 2010 general election. A few days later at Alliance's annual general conference <a href="http://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/regional/david-ford-northern-ireland-is-better-off-within-the-union-1-5954121">party leader David Ford said</a> that he preferred to see Northern Ireland remain part of the UK. </div>
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In the fall of 2012 the DUP retaliated for Long's victory by publishing an anonymous flyer calling for protests against Alliance for voting along with Sinn Fein and the SDLP to fly the Union flag at Belfast City Hall on about 17 designated days a year rather than 365 days a year. This practice was actually in line with practice in Britain, endorsed by a body dealing with British symbols and in line with the province's equality legislation. But many unionists, particularly loyalists--veterans of the paramilitary organizations and supporters of the PUP, the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV), a DUP splinter party, and the DUP, objected violently and spent months protesting the change in flag policy with the result that Belfast merchants lost tens of thousands of Euros in trade. </div>
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Alliance has seen its fortunes go up and down in the decades since its founding in April 1970: from a high of 14 percent of the vote in a local government election in 1977 to a low of five to six percent in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But Alliance's fortunes have soared in the last five years. First, David Ford was chosen as justice minister when justice functions <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ford">were devolved to Northern Ireland </a>from London in April 2010. The following month Naomi Long replaced Robinson as MP for East Belfast<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_general_election,_2010"> in the British general </a>election. In the next Assembly election Alliance did well enough to win a government ministry in its own right and unionists were upset that Alliance now had two ministries more than the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). </div>
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But the question is: are the party's fortunes about to dramatically change soon? In the 1970s Alliance had councilors throughout Northern Ireland both in unionist and nationalist areas. In 1980 and again in 1981 republican prisoners in the Maze Prison outside Belfast went on hunger strike. In May 1981 the sitting independent MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone died and a by-election was held. IRA leader in the Maze Bobby Sands was one of the hunger strikers and was put forward as Sinn Fein's candidate. He won the seat by died on hunger strike soon afterwards and his election agent then won the seat for Sinn Fein in a second by-election. By 1982 Sinn Fein had been transformed from the public relations wing of the IRA into a paramilitary party running candidates in elections across the province. It was winning about 40 percent of the nationalist vote before its rise was halted by the Anglo-Irish Agreement that gave Dublin a formal consultative role in the running of Northern Ireland. As soon as Sinn Fein began contesting elections Alliance's nationalist voters began shifting their votes to the SDLP to make up for those SDLP voters who defected to Sinn Fein. Soon Alliance's territory shrunk to a "donut ring" around Great Belfast: South Antrim, East Antrim, Carrickfergus, North Down, Strangford, South Belfast and East Belfast. </div>
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With the flag protests Alliance territory could also shrink in Belfast. Naomi Long was elected in special circumstances--Peter Robinson was caught up in a sex scandal (of which he was an innocent victim) involving his wife Iris, also a DUP politician, who was having an affair with a much younger man and using her influence to win him a business loan. Peter Robinson was forced to temporarily step down as party leader until he was cleared of any wrongdoing and his wife was forced to give up her political career and resign all her offices. Robinson then concentrated his activity on his role as first minister at Stormont. Many unionists who "loaned" their votes to Alliance in East Belfast in 2010 may call back the loan and vote for the DUP. DUP candidate Gavin Robinson (no relation to Peter). Lo's remarks are likely to anger unionists across Alliance's traditional territory and may cause liberal unionists to shift their votes to the new NI21 party or to the ailing Ulster Unionist Party. Alliance claims to have set recruitment records in the last year by people sympathetic to the party's being targeted by loyalist protesters for threats and attacks. Anna Lo's fate in the European election should be a good indicator of the party's fortunes in next year's Assembly election. </div>
Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-80178603597444533502014-03-15T09:35:00.001-07:002014-03-15T09:35:11.939-07:00The 3:00 A.M. Call and the Crisis Test<div style="text-align: justify;">
During the 2008 campaign Hillary Clinton famously challenged then Sen. Barack Obama's readiness for the presidency with her "3:00 phone call" ad about a president receiving a call in the middle of the night waking him up to deal with a crisis. Crises have traditionally been the real test of a president since 1945. All presidents feared being labeled as "soft on Communism" during the Cold War or appeasers and so many failed the test by over-reacting. </div>
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President Johnson reacted to the Tonkin Gulf incident by ginning up a resolution that was a virtual declaration of war and then turning the Vietnam War from a low-level counterinsurgency campaign into a huge conventional war without the enemy accommodating his plan. Nixon handled the 1972 North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam by mining Haiphong Harbor, bombing Hanoi and daring Leonid Brezhnev to cancel his May summit. Nixon stopped the invasion, got his summit and signed the SALT I agreements. Ford's crisis was the Khmer Rouge government of Cambodia taking over an island and taking some Americans hostage. Ford stormed the island for the loss of many Marines and the hostages were later freed unharmed. Carter had two major crises: the Iranian capture of the American embassy in Tehran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Although Carter appeared weak in his handling of the crises he got all of the hostages back unharmed and he started the policy of supporting the mujahideen in Afghanistan that Reagan then took over. Reagan's two crises were the nearly simultaneous bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and the invasion of Grenada. The Marines paid the price for Reagan taking sides in a civil war in Lebanon while the Marines were vulnerable. But he managed to extricate himself politically from the fallout from that by taking advantage of the request by the Association of East Caribbean States following a coup in Grenada within the Marxist government. Reagan installed a friendly government and rescued a few hundred American medical students who probably were not in any real danger. That was the last real crisis of the Cold War. </div>
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The first President Bush came into office very prepared to be a Cold War president but the Cold War soon ended with the collapse of Soviet rule in Eastern Europe and Bush handled the aftermath very well. Bush faced two real crises in his presidency. The first was the acting out of Manuel Noriega against American troops in the Canal Zone. Bush possibly over-reacted by invading, but he managed to get rid of a troublesome dictator who was involved in cocaine trafficking. The next crisis was Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Bush set the standard for crisis response by organizing an international response that ousted Saddam's forces and he had the Japanese and Gulf Arabs pay for the effort. But then he set his successor up for failure by intervening in Somalia in his final weeks in office without any clear exit strategy. Clinton then failed in Somalia, but the failure was really Bush's. Clinton's "big" crisis was the military takeover in Haiti. Clinton sent Jimmy Carter and Colin Powell in to negotiate with the junta backed by an invasion force. It was soon resolved. But Clinton failed the test early on in Bosnia, largely because he relied on the Europeans to respond and they failed. He then failed the test in Rwanda--largely by responding to the lessons of Somalia--where intervention by a small American or international force could have quickly ended the genocide. </div>
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George W. Bush faced his big crisis test with 9/11. He responded magnificently by organizing the ouster of the Taliban government from Afghanistan. But then he decided to build his entire presidency around the Global War on Terror. In Trumanesque fashion he created a Homeland Security Dept. and then invaded Iraq to finish the job that his father left, without ever having a realistic exit strategy. So as a result Obama inherited two wars when he came into office--wars that enabled a novice state politician to assume the presidency as the antiwar candidate. Obama organized his foreign policy around shutting down Bush's wars while responding to the remainder of Al Qaeda through focused efforts. Obama managed to successfully extricate the United States from the Iraqi civil war in a way that Nixon failed at because of Watergate. This earned him reelection. The retreat from Afghanistan has proved a bit more difficult but still doable. </div>
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Now Obama is faced by an expansionist bid by a post-Soviet Russian dictator in Europe. The record of American presidents responding to crises in the Soviet sector of Europe is rather mixed. Truman used the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia to organize NATO as a Western alliance to halt the spread of Communism in Europe. Eisenhower ignored the brutal suppression of revolt in East Germany in 1953. Eisenhower flubbed the Soviet invasion of Hungary three years later--but there was little effectively that he could have done. He did oppose the Franco-British invasion of Egypt and forced Israel out of Sinai and Gaza. But he did it in a way that kept peace for another decade. Today some hold that up as an example of how to behave in the Middle East. In 1968 Johnson reacted to the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia by cancelling scheduled arms control talks that were then left to the Nixon administration to start. Reagan could do little about the Polish government crackdown on Solidarity in December 1980. Reagan's effective resistance to Soviet rule in the East bloc was his "tear down this wall" speech in 1985. Reagan supporters have since taken credit for the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 as if Reagan's speech rather than Gorbachev's decisions were responsible. </div>
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In 1947-48 American diplomat George Kennan originated the strategy of containment. He later deplored the overly military interpretation of his strategy. Kennan saw military alliances as merely one part of the strategy. He later became a foe of nuclear weapons. The other parts were intellectual engagement, economic recovery in Western Europe and time. As long as Kennan lived, he did not make it to the present crisis. I have a feeling though that he would have urged Obama to allow time to do its trick. Russian habits of despotism and obedience have twice in the last century defeated attempts to democratize the Russian Empire. The first time, during and in the aftermath of World War I, a far worse form of despotism took hold and ruled for three quarters of a century, in effect the "short Twentieth Century" from 1918 to 1992. In the second instance in the late 1990s a form of Russian kleptocracy, Orthodox nationalism, and authoritarianism that may in time be labeled Putinism began. Putin skillfully consolidated his rule within Russia relying on rising oil prices to create a trade off between economic freedom and democracy. </div>
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American liberalism and idealism is now pitted against geopolitical realities. During the 1990s the West consolidated its control of Central Europe by assimilating traditional parts of Europe into it by expanding NATO and the European Union. I thought that including the Baltic States was going too far--that we would never be able to defend them in a crisis against a resurgent Russia. The same is true of Ukraine. We should recognize that Ukraine is a deeply-divided entity with a historic consciousness of Ukrainian nationalism only in the Western half where parts of it were ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Empire (Ruthenia). This nationalism was then intensified by the Soviet-induced famine of the 1930s known in Ukraine as the kholodomor (hunger death) that accompanied forced collectivization. </div>
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Obama's foreign policy agenda for the remainder of his presidency<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/why-its-so-hard-for-obama-to-be-tough-on-russia/284394/"> is now dependent upon </a>the good will and cooperation of Putin. Europe is <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/why-its-so-hard-for-obama-to-be-tough-on-russia/284394/">unlikely to initiate and sustain meaningful economic sanctions </a>against Russia or even against individuals within the Russian ruling class. The toughest part of answering that 3:00 a.m. call may be deciding to do nothing. But doing something for the sake of doing something does not always work out for the best. </div>
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Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-5287187989292224252014-03-06T10:36:00.000-08:002014-03-06T10:38:22.226-08:00The foreign policy of the 1980s--South African style<div style="text-align: justify;">
In a snarky retort during the 2012 presidential campaign Obama told Republican nominee Mitt Romney that the 1980s wanted their foreign policy back after Romney said that Russia was America's greatest national security threat. Obama should have told Benjamin Netanyahu that Pretoria wanted its 1980s foreign policy back. From 1978 to 1989, during the period of State President P.W. Botha, the ideology of the ruling National Party in Pretoria was that of the Total Onslaught/Total Response. This was a sort of neo-apartheid gloss on traditional apartheid. All of Pretoria's critics and enemies were clumped together as one threat led and controlled from Moscow: this meant the Western anti-apartheid movement advocating economic sanctions against South Africa in the United States and Europe, the white liberal opposition Progressive Federal Party, the liberal English-language press, the Third World countries supporting sanctions and voting against Pretoria in the United Nations (UN) and the African National Congress (ANC) liberation movement and its de facto internal wing, the United Democratic Front, and the South West Africa People's Organization (SWAPO) liberation movement in Namibia and its Angolan and Cuban protectors in Angola. All part of the same conspiracy. Part of a vast left-wing conspiracy--it would almost make Hillary Clinton blush.</div>
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Although Democratic and even Republican presidents made critical comments about apartheid in South Africa, their real concern was ending Pretoria's illegal military occupation of Namibia. To that end the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations all sat down with South African representatives and carefully dealt with their diplomatic and security concerns. First Henry Kissinger in 1976 came up with a plan for Namibian independence, but it was rejected by SWAPO, which did not want to subject itself to the rigor of free elections. Then American UN Ambassador Donald McHenry and the representatives of four other Western countries on the Security Council dealt with a series of South African objections throughout the Carter administration. Pretoria came up with one loop after another that the diplomats would have to jump through. </div>
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Then with the advent of the Reagan administration in 1981 the new Assistant Secretary of State for Southern Africa Chester Crocker came up with the plan of bribing Pretoria to leave by making the Cuban presence in Angola linked to that of the South Africans in Namibia. It took several years to get first Pretoria and then the African Frontline States to accept this linkage. And what it really took was a series of epic battles in southern Angola in which a brigade-size South African expeditionary force fighting alongside its UNITA guerrilla allies blunted a major Angolan incursion into UNITA-controlled territory. Fidel Castro made a big show of claiming a major victory over the South Africans in the siege of Cuito Cuanavale, but Pretoria had not tried to capture the town but merely to restrict the Angolans to their side of the river bank. </div>
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In late 1988 over several months Crocker mediated a deal by which South Africa traded Namibian independence for the Cuban presence in Angola and Pretoria and Luanda both agreed not to support guerrilla forces against the other. This led to Namibian independence in early 1990 and the start of the end of apartheid in South Africa.</div>
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In the Middle East we are at the stage comparable to that of the late Carter administration. Netanyahu paints a picture of a vast conspiracy led by Tehran and including the BDS movement in the West, the liberal Meretz opposition and several Israeli NGOs and the liberal <i>Ha'Aretz </i>newspaper in Tel Aviv. Meanwhile John Kerry dutifully attempts to satisfy every new condition that Jerusalem comes up with for starting peace talks with the Palestinians. The latest is the demand for Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Once that is agreed to, Netanyahu will no doubt come up with a new demand.</div>
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In South Africa the Total Onslaught theory was meant to disguise the fact that the major problem was apartheid and minority rule. In Israel the Israeli version is meant to disguise the fact that the problem is the ideology of Greater Israel and its accompanying settlement and occupation. In the case of South Africa the West did not feed Pretoria a constant stream of assurances about its security but rather patiently negotiated on the basis of international law. The big change happened in the 1980s when the Reagan administration eventually ended up--with the assistance of the Democratic Congress--with a carrot and sticks approach. The carrot was the removal of the Cuban presence and the sticks were American and European economic sanctions that were voted upon in 1985-86 in reaction to the internal unrest in South Africa. The closest Middle Eastern counterpart to the Cubans are Hezbollah. A repeat of the South African solution would require another Israeli invasion of Lebanon and a prolonged occupation. It would also require some sticks from Washington and Brussels. </div>
Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-73901486001134584812014-03-03T17:54:00.000-08:002014-03-03T17:54:47.380-08:00Two Reflections on Ukraine <div style="text-align: justify;">
The present standoff in Ukraine makes me think of two things. First, in 1994 Ukraine voluntarily gave up its control of Soviet nuclear weapons then stationed on its territory under American pressure. Kiev wanted to please Washington, which wanted only one nuclear successor state for the Soviet Union rather than four (Belarus and Kazakhstan were the other two republics with nuclear weapons). For the sake of the nuclear non-proliferation regime, Washington wanted Moscow to assume complete control of all Soviet nuclear weapons. I remember thinking that given Russian history, Ukraine was crazy to give up control of its deterrent to Moscow--the capital that had twice in the past strangled Ukrainian sovereignty. Had I been an adviser in the Clinton administration I would have urged Clinton not to pressure any of the three republics to give up their weapons for a few years until Moscow had proved its good intentions.</div>
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The other thought is that the situation in 1991-92 in the former Soviet Union as the Soviet Empire collapsed was very similar to the situation in Ireland in 1921 as British control of Ireland collapsed. Britain partitioned Ireland in two creating a Northern Ireland and a Southern Ireland. As part of the peace treaty that ended the Irish War of Independence in December 1921, the unionists who were a majority of the population in Northern Ireland were given the option of opting out of the Irish Free State by petitioning the King to remain part of the United Kingdom. This meant that the nationalists could claim that Northern Ireland had seceded from the Free State while the six Ulster counties that made up the new province of Northern Ireland never experienced Irish rule since the union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801. When Northern Ireland was created by partition in the summer of 1921 in preparation for a settlement in the South, it was created in order to maximize the amount of territory that the unionists could rule without fear of losing control to an Irish majority. Traditionally Ulster has consisted of nine counties: the six that made up Northern Ireland in the east and center of the province and Co. Cavan and Co. Monaghan to the south and Co. Donegal to the west. The two westernmost counties in Northern Ireland, Fermanagh and Tyrone had always had a majority nationalist (Irish) population, but in 1921 the margin between the nationalist majority and unionist minority was only about five percent. It is now claimed that nationalists are a majority in four of the six counties (all but Co. Down and Co. Antrim) of Northern Ireland due to a higher birthrate and greater emigration by Protestants to Britain. </div>
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Had Yeltsin demanded, he would have been in a good position to redraw the borders of Russia to reflect areas in the republics that were predominantly ethnic Russian such as in eastern Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula and mostly in the eastern part of the three Baltic States. In the Baltic States it would have been more problematic as Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia had all been independent countries until 1940 when Stalin invaded and annexed them under cover of World War II and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Vilna, Riga, and Tallinn would have objected and Washington would have supported them. I think these two issues worked against each other. Yeltsin had to promise to respect the independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan in order to get all the Soviet nuclear weapons back. Had this not been the case, he might have been able to redraw some of Russia's borders to better reflect demographic realities as London had done in Ireland during decolonization. This is clearly an instance where nuclear weapons worked against the interests of a country having them. </div>
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Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-13694520029426598292014-03-01T21:30:00.002-08:002014-03-05T19:34:40.037-08:00Putin the Bumbler<div style="text-align: justify;">
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Putin once said that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the greatest disaster of the Twentieth Century. Putin was a man formed by the Soviet Union, by the secret police that he spent his career in. Unlike Boris Yeltsin who appointed him prime minister in December 1999 he was never comfortable with the idea of freedom. Unlike Aleksander Solzhenitsyn who looks back to Russian history before the Soviet Union, Putin's scope of history is limited to the period after November 1917. So which Soviet leader does Putin see as his model? There are several who might come to mind. </div>
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It is doubtful that Putin sees himself as another Stalin--Stalin's memory has been too discredited by the revelations starting with those made by Khrushchev at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956 and continuing afterwards especially during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin periods. And Putin is not a revolutionary at heart, wishing to overthrow the state or at least its regime--so we can rule out Lenin. And Boris Yeltsin's alcoholism, boorish behavior and general incompetence in the last years of his relatively short reign rule him out. So this leaves a limited number of possible models: Nikita Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, Konstantin Chernenko, and Mikhail Gorbachev. We can probably rule out Chernenko: a gray party functionary who was only in power for about thirteen months before he died in early 1985. We might rule out Andropov as well on the same grounds--he lasted a month longer, but Andropov was once head of the KGB and thus Putin's former boss and a "reformer" in Soviet terms. So we might consider him.</div>
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Putin is like both Khrushchev and Brezhnev in that he wanted to expand the area under Moscow's control. He starts from a low point in modern Russian history with Russia having lost control of its Cold War empire in Eastern Europe and of the republics of the former Soviet Union so that Putin today can only really claim to control Russia and neighboring Belarus. Since he came to power at the turn of the century, Putin has been attempting to consolidate power in what Russians refer to as the near abroad, the former republics of the Soviet Union. He has supported separatist movements in Georgia to undermine the sovereignty of the Georgian government in Tbilisi. In 2008 he went to war against Georgia after the Georgian leader was foolish enough to provoke him. Now he is attempting to regain power in Ukraine by means of using the Russian-speaking ethnic Russian minority in the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine. </div>
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But in more ways, in his situation he resembles Gorbachev near the end of Gorbachev's seven years in power. Gorbachev came to power as a protege of Yuri Andropov and attempted to implement the vision of Andropov to reform the economy within the parameters of Communist ideology in order to make it more efficient in order to better compete with the capitalist West. Gorbachev wanted to end alcoholism by heavily taxing vodka and other spirits. He also wanted to introduce computers into the Soviet Union. But Gorbachev found that the system was unreformable. In the end he tried merely to keep the republics within the Soviet Union by crushing independence movements in the Baltic States. Gorbachev ended up pleasing no one. </div>
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Putin was blessed in that Yeltsin freed him from having to work within Marxist-Leninist ideology. Putin could appeal to Russian patriotism and imperial pride without having to justify it in revolutionary terms. This allowed him to make deals with the Russian mafia on a scale that Brezhnev never dreamed of. Yeltsin by privatizing the economy created a class of crony capitalists who made their wealth and power on the basis of connections rather than either entrepreneurial skill or wise management. This class of crony capitalists are allowed to operate as long as they stay out of politics and don't criticize Putin publicly. </div>
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Putin probably sees the younger Andropov as his model and imagines that he is doing what Andropov would have done had Andropov come to power five or ten years before he actually did. Had Andropov come to power in the 1970s at the height of Soviet power he might have been able to partially reform the economy, instill greater discipline among workers, and stopped the rot that set in during Brezhnev's eighteen years in power. When Putin schemes in Ukraine and in Georgia he is following the model set by Andropov in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Andropov#Crushing_the_Prague_Spring">Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.</a> Andropov as head of the KGB also headed up the efforts to suppress the political dissidents by having them declared mentally ill and locked up in insane asylums. Putin has used various laws limiting freedom of speech and has allied himself with the Russian Orthodox Church to promote his brand of Russian nationalism against those promoting democracy or even just liberal tolerance. </div>
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Putin's plan is to consolidate Russian power on Russia's southern border in the Caucuses and in Ukraine and then retire. Will he succeed? That depends on how successfully he exploits internal divisions within the target republics. He did a good job in Georgia in 2008. <a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/02/28/putins-anti-olympic-creed/">Not so good a job in Ukraine </a>in 2014. So far. He has managed to<a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2014/03/vladimir-putin-is-losing-the-battle-for-ukraine/"> alienate the government in Kiev.</a></div>
Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-70485379042419578382014-02-23T11:44:00.000-08:002014-03-01T20:37:03.937-08:00The Next Step in Ukraine<div style="text-align: justify;">
President Viktor Yanukovych, the ally of Vladimir Putin of Russia, signed an agreement with the opposition that provided for anmesty for the protesters, freed political opponent Yulia Tymoshenko from prison, and generally eased the way towards a genuine transition to democracy--if the Ukrainians are capable of it. At<a href="http://www.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2014/02/22/springtime-in-kiev-or-just-another-winter-storm/"> last report Yanukovych</a> was said to be in Kharkov (Kharkiv in Ukrainian), the main city in the eastern half of the country, which is home to the Russian-speaking population. He fled his palace in Kiev (Kyiv in Ukrainian). Former Prime Minister <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/23/world/europe/ukraine-yulia-tymoshenko-profile/">Yulia Tymoshenko</a> is likely to try to return to power. But <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116724/yulia-tymoshenko-shes-back-euromaidan-revolution">many of the protesters from Maidan square in Kiev reject her as both corrupt and autocratic. She was also closely linked to Putin.</a></div>
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I remember years ago a conversation with a fellow military linguist who had just returned from some time spent in Ukraine shortly after independence. He was Polish-American and a Russian linguist and told me that Ukrainian seemed to be about halfway between Polish, a western Slavic language, and Russian, an eastern Slavic language. The same thing could be said of Ukraine itself. Poland is clearly a western country that has identified its place with the West. Russia is a mixture of Asian and European influences and culture. Ukraine is <a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/02/21/a_house_still_divided">somewhere in between these two </a>(and Belarus, which is like Russia) in terms of readiness for democracy and political culture.</div>
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Historically Ukraine and Russia have been linked. The first Russian state, which existed around the turn of the millennium in 1,000 A.D., had as its capital Kiev, the capital of present-day Ukraine. Under the Czars Ukraine was the breadbasket of Russia providing it with the grain for its population as the Midwest does for the United States. It was known to imperialists as "Little Russia" signifying that they considered it to be both Russian and subordinate. During 1918 the western part of Ukraine was occupied by the German army as part of the settlement of Brest-Litovsk. Under German occupation Ukrainian nationalists came to power and the country gained independence from Russia during the Russian Civil War. There was a three-way war taking place between Ukrainian nationalists, Russian monarchists, and Bolsheviks. But in 1919 the Bolsheviks managed to reconquer most of the country. In November 1920, the Red Army conquered the Crimea ending the monarchist threat to Communist rule. During World War II much of <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/mar/20/fascism-russia-and-ukraine/?insrc=hpss">the manpower for the Soviet Red Army </a>was provided for by Ukrainians and Belarusians and it was in these now independent countries where much of the fighting took place from 1941 to 1944. </div>
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During both the Czarist and the Soviet periods, the Black Sea provided Russia with its only warm-water ports that did not freeze over during the winter. The Russian navy was anchored in Crimea, which although attached to Ukraine was <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimea#In_the_Soviet_Union">a Russian enclave until 1954. </a> So the Big Three Yalta Summit of February 1945 took place in Russia in a place that is now part of Ukraine. Khrushchev gave Crimea to Ukraine as a birthday present to<a href="http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/02/28/putins-anti-olympic-creed/"> mark the 300th anniversary of Russian control </a>of Ukraine, never suspecting that in less than 40 years Ukraine would be independent again. Today the Russian and Ukrainian navies share the Black Sea (along with the Romanian and Bulgarian navies) and both share anchorage at Sevastopol, the old Russian and Soviet naval base. When the Soviet Union broke up Moscow claimed Sevastopol under the argument that it was never integrated into the Ukrainian Republic. In 1997 Ukraine agreed to share the port with the Russian navy until 2017, and in 2010 this was extended by Kiev for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevastopol#Russian_naval_base_and_ownership_dispute">another 25 years as part of a gas deal between Moscow and Kiev. </a>If Russia under Putin has been so reluctant to give up Ba'athist Syria with its Russian anchorage at Tartus, just think about how Putin will feel about sharing the Black Sea with an anti-Russian, pro-Western Ukrainian government in Kiev. Putin can afford <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/robert-fisk-ukraines-future-is-tied-up-with-syrias--and-vladimir-putin-is-crucial-to-both-9145523.html">to lose control of Syria, he cannot afford to lose </a>control of Ukraine. <br />
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<a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/02/21/a_house_still_divided">In Georgia Putin was quite willing </a>to exploit ethnic divisions to back minority groups against the Georgian government. In Ukraine where some 45 percent of the population is made up of native Russian speakers, these groups will not be hard to find. Expect the battle for Little Russia to continue. </div>
Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-76091140434955863422014-02-13T18:14:00.000-08:002014-02-24T08:34:20.176-08:00Polls Point to a Change in Government in India and a Stable Coalition<div style="text-align: justify;">
Two recent Indian polls point to a change in ruling coalitions in the Lok Sabha or lower house of parliament in India. A <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/BJP-will-get-highest-ever-Lok-Sabha-tally-Congress-lowest-Times-Now-poll/articleshow/30359227.cms">Times Now-CVoter poll projects</a> 202 seats for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which ruled India from 1998 to 2004, and 25 additional seats for its allies in the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) for a total of 227 seats in the 543 seat lower house. By contrast the now ruling United Progressive Alliance is projected to <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/BJP-will-get-highest-ever-Lok-Sabha-tally-Congress-lowest-Times-Now-poll/articleshow/30359227.cms">win a little over a hundred seats</a> with its leading member, the Congress Party, winning 89 seats. If this holds true, an NDA coalition should prove to be quite stable. </div>
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A <a href="http://www.dawn.com/news/1086335/indian-youth-call-for-change-of-government-survey">second poll of Indian youths who are smartphone users</a> had 72 percent stating that politicians' children should not themselves enter politics, suggesting that they will not be allowed to vote for Rahul Ganhi, the prime ministerial candidate of Congress. According to the Economist magazine <a href="http://www.dawn.com/news/1086335/indian-youth-call-for-change-of-government-survey">there are 120 million new voters aged 18 to 22.</a> These new voters and other young voters are likely to vote for the BJP, led by Narendra Modi. The Clinton administration got along well with the BJP, as did the Bush administration. But Modi may be a different matter. Modi is considered responsible for sparking an anti-Muslim riot/pogrom in his native state of Gujurat several years ago. As a result he has been barred from entering the United States. Now after the recent diplomatic spat between Washington and New Delhi over the arrest of an Indian consul official in New York who allegedly lied on paperwork about the salary of her Indian domestic servant, the United States will likely face the prospect of dealing with a new prime minister who likely will not be well disposed towards Washington. Interesting times are ahead.<br />
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<a href="http://thediplomat.com/2014/02/in-indias-national-election-dont-trust-the-polls/">Here Jonah Hill i</a>n <i>The Diplomat </i>points out the limitations and shortcomings of Indian political polling. </div>
Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-83823894500315846892014-01-29T16:39:00.000-08:002014-02-21T10:03:09.219-08:00The Cultural Faultline in Ukraine<div style="text-align: justify;">
The recently ended anti-government demonstrations against the government of President Yanukovych in Ukraine points out the existence of a major religious and cultural fault line that runs through Eastern Europe. Europe is divided by religion into three cultural zones: a Catholic zone in southern Europe and Ireland, a Protestant zone in northern and Western Europe, and an Orthodox zone in Eastern Europe. The differences between Orthodox Christians on one hand and both Catholic and Protestant Christians on the other are much greater than those between Catholics and Protestants. This is primarily due to two causes. First, the split between the Orthodox and the Catholics predates that between Catholics and Protestants by nearly five centuries: the former occurred in 1054 and the latter in 1517. Second, democracy has been present in Western and Central Europe much longer than it has in Eastern Europe, so Christian denomination no longer serves as quite the marker for political differences in Western and Central Europe that it does in Eastern Europe.</div>
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Ukraine is divided both on religious and national grounds. Western Ukraine is predominantly composed of ethnic Ukrainians who are Catholics; eastern Ukraine is predominantly composed of ethnic Ukrainians who are Orthodox and ethnic Russians. Although it is true that pockets of all three groups exist in both areas. Thus, the majority Catholics in the West are culturally oriented towards their fellow Catholics in Poland and Hungary. Both of these countries are today successful democracies and their populations were on the front lines fighting for freedom during the Cold War. In the East the Orthodox are oriented towards Russia. I want to emphasis that these differences are not due to theological differences between Orthodox Christianity and Catholicism but rather due to cultural orientations. The border between Orthodoxy and Catholicism/Protestantism runs horizontally through Eastern Europe and then vertically through the former Yugoslavia and Ukraine. Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and Croatia are all mainly Catholic or mixed Catholic and Protestant. Bosnia, and Macedonia feature a three-way religious split among Catholics, Orthodox, and Muslims. Albania and Kosovo are predominantly Muslim but have Catholic minorities and even a small Orthodox Serb minority in the case of Kosovo. Greece, Serbia, Romania, Moldova, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Belarus and Russia are Orthodox. Ukraine is divided between Catholics and Orthodox.</div>
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So, the big question that those in the European Union and Washington should be asking is "Will Ukraine split on religious lines like Yugoslavia did in the 1990s?" This is hard to answer with any certainty. What is clear is that many Ukrainians do not want to become another Belarus--a satellite of Russia. They do not want a return of Communism or even just Putin's brand of authoritarianism. Ethnic Russians and Orthodox Ukrainians do not seem quite so worried about this prospect. Journalist Anne Applebaum <a href="http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2014/02/21/anne-applebaum-the-definitive-ukrainian-dictionary/">argues here </a>that the standoff is mainly one of political orientation rather than of ethnicity or religious denomination.</div>
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What is also clear is that Ukraine is much closer to Russia than Yugoslavia was and that Washington, Paris and London were unable to keep Ukraine out of the Soviet Union in the early 1920s. Russia was also much weaker in the early 1990s when Yugoslavia broke up than it is today due to rising oil and natural gas prices and a process of consolidation of post-Communist rule under Putin that escaped Yeltsin. The United States is also much weaker now than it was in the 1990s. This is due to over a decade of not very productive warfare in the Greater Middle East. If Ukraine is to be kept out of Moscow's orbit it will be largely up to Brussels to do so. Is Brussels united enough and strong enough to do so? It was not in the case of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, which drove Washington to intervene starting in 1995. Just as Washington has used the time since then to overreach abroad, Europe has used the time to overreach internally by creating a common monetary zone without the proper political infrastructure to back it up. Now the Eurozone is on the edge of collapse financially with division running geographically with southern Europe, France and Ireland in dire financial straits and Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands doing much better.<br />
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<a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/178344/distorting-russia">Here is an article </a>by Stephen F. Cohen in <i>The Nation</i> that basically echoes by analysis while taking the American media to task for not reporting it. I'm not a big fan of Cohen's: in the late 1980s he was an apologist for Gorbachev and quite critical of Yeltsin, because he wanted a more liberal Soviet Union and not an independent democratic Russia. </div>
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Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-66915973429632984362014-01-22T10:36:00.000-08:002014-04-30T11:45:40.467-07:00Jordan and Lebanon: The Next Dominoes in the Arab Spring/Winter?<div style="text-align: justify;">
Earlier this month I predicted that there will be more countries affected by the drive for freedom in the Arab world.<a href="http://selfhatinggentile.blogspot.com/2014/01/2014-predictions-for-international.html"> I predicted t</a>hat in my humble opinion Lebanon and Jordan are the two most likely candidates. This is not because I'm an expert in the internal workings of either country. My knowledge of Jordan relates mainly to its foreign policy and my knowledge of Lebanon is historical--from the period of the Lebanese Civil War of 1975-90. So on what basis do I make my predictions? </div>
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Both countries are neighbors of Syria and both are affected by the civil war in Syria. A 2007 Jordanian estimate was that there were <a href="http://www.irinnews.org/report/98180/amid-syrian-crisis-iraqi-refugees-in-jordan-forgotten">450,000 Iraqi refugees in Jordan,</a> and small numbers of refugees <a href="http://www.irinnews.org/report/98180/amid-syrian-crisis-iraqi-refugees-in-jordan-forgotten">continue to arrive in Jordan each month </a>due to continued fighting in Iraq. This puts strains on Jordanian resources and Jordan has never been a rich country in terms of natural resources. It lacks oil and natural gas unlike Iraq and the Gulf countries and even Syria, and its main natural resource is phosphates in the Dead Sea region. Jordan's economy is based primarily on agriculture, tourism as part of the Holy Land, and light industry. Jordan provides free health care and education for the Iraqi refugees. Now it has to provide for Syrian refugees as well who number <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/29/us-meast-investment-jordan-idUSBRE99S0PN20131029">more than 600,000 </a>or almost a third of the more than two million Syrian refugees who have fled since 2011. The Jordanian Central Bank <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/29/us-meast-investment-jordan-idUSBRE99S0PN20131029">has already noted that their presence is a strain </a>on the economy. Here is a <a href="http://www.latimes.com/opinion/commentary/la-oe-martinez-jordan-stability-20140213,0,5792531.story#axzz2t8oozXBo">recent <i>LA Times </i>article </a>that echoes the above analysis. </div>
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Turkey is also a destination for Syrian refugees and the government has an interest in opposing the minority Alawite Ba'athist Assad regime in Syria. With it becomingly increasingly clear that the West has no interest in intervening, it is possible that if the outflow of refugees becomes too large for Jordan and Turkey to cope with, they could take a lesson from India's past and invade their neighbor in order to put an end to the refugee crisis. This is what Indira Gandhi's government did with East Pakistan in December 1971 turning it into the independent country of Bangladesh. Such a move would likely find financial support from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states who view the Assad regime primarily as an Iranian pawn. Such an action by two Muslim countries--one of whom is Arab--is much more likely to find sanction by the Arab League than Western intervention.</div>
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The other country most critically affected by the Syrian civil war is Lebanon with Hezbollah, the main armed rival to the national army, intervening on behalf of its Syrian ally and Iranian sponsor. This has enraged some Sunni elements in Lebanon who have set off bombs attacking Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. The Lebanese government is too weak to be able to intervene in Syria, but it could certainly turn a blind eye to Lebanese leaving the country to cross the border and fight with the rebels. Today <a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/170956/sykes-picot-is-not-the-problem">a third of the population </a>of Lebanon consists of refugees from Syria. </div>
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If there is no Muslim military intervention in Syria, it is possible that the continuation of the civil war in Syria could lead to an outbreak of unrest within Jordan against the government, which represents primarily the Bedouin minority rather than the Palestinian majority. Lebanon could see the Syrian civil war jumping the border and fighting break out between Hezbollah and Sunni Muslims in areas near the Syrian border. </div>
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Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-34345365401266190082014-01-20T13:01:00.003-08:002014-02-23T23:36:02.943-08:00Sharon and De Gaulle<div style="text-align: justify;">
My article comparing Ariel Sharon's Gaza disengagement with Charles de Gaulle's exit from Algeria is now <a href="http://972mag.com/sharon-was-no-de-gaulle/86039/">up at 972 Magazine.</a><br />
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<span style="font-size: 20.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Sharon and
De Gaulle: A Comparison</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Ariel Sharon was Israel’s most politically successful
military politician. His political career was a full decade longer than those
of Yitzhak Rabin, who entered the Knesset at the same time as Sharon, and
Dayan, and a half-decade longer than those of Yigal Allon and Ezer Weizman. But
what have Sharon and Israel to show for it? Sharon’s political career had four
major accomplishments in terms of deeds: the disastrous 1982 invasion of
Lebanon, the settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, the crushing of the Al-Aksa
Intifada from 2002 to 2004, and the Gaza disengagement of 2005. The Gaza
disengagement, unilateral rather than negotiated, led to Hamas rule and the
Palestinian duality that has let Israel off the hook from negotiating seriously
with the Palestinian Authority on statehood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The settlements remain on the West Bank. Sharon settled the territories
as agriculture minister while Begin and Shamir gave him political cover. And as
prime minister he gave cover for a massive expansion of the settlements during
his five years in office.</span></div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When
contemplating withdrawal from Gaza in 2003 Sharon already had many models to choose
from accomplished by other military politicians in Israel, South Africa, and
even France. Dayan, Allon, and Rabin all negotiated with Anwar Sadat for
political agreements that allowed Israel to withdraw from the Sinai and still
retain security. Defense Minister Magnus Malan, like Dayan and Rabin a former
chief of staff, negotiated with the Angolans and the Cubans an agreement that
allowed South Africa to pull out of Namibia, which then gained independence, in
exchange for a Cuban withdrawal from Southern Africa and the closing of the
African National Congress’s guerrilla training camps in Angola. This deal then
gave President F.W. de Klerk so much security that he felt able to negotiate an
end to apartheid and the start of majority rule in South Africa. But Sharon did
not trust the Palestinians so he ignored these examples. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There is one
other example that is relevant and I will detail it in much greater depth. In
May 1958 part of the French army in Algeria revolted and demanded with the
backing of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pieds noirs </i>settler
community that General Charles de Gaulle be appointed prime minister of the
Fourth Republic. De Gaulle then demanded before agreeing to take office that he
be given <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">carte blanche </i>to write a new
constitution. The politicians of the Fourth Republic agreed because the
Republic was mired in the mud of Algeria—Algerie francaise. An insurgency
headed by the National Liberation Front (FLN) had broken out in November 1954
only months after France had managed to extract itself from Indochina. Because
Algeria was legally considered a part of France overseas rather than merely a
colony—somewhat similar to the status of Northern Ireland within the United
Kingdom, no politician had been willing to agree to the FLN’s terms for
peace—complete independence. De Gaulle, who had led the Free French from London
during World War II and then wrenched control of France from the largely
Communist resistance in 1944, held a special place in French politics. It was
similar to that of Yigael Yadin in Israel before Yadin spoiled it by entering
Begin’s coalition in 1977. De Gaulle, who had briefly been minister of war in
June 1940, founded the Fourth Republic in 1944 and then retired from politics
to write his memoirs in January 1946. Most Frenchmen in 1958 thought of De
Gaulle as a figure of the Right, rather than of the Left, just as most Israelis
thought about Sharon in 2003. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The first
thing De Gaulle did was write a constitution from his village of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Colombey les Deux Egleses</i> that
transformed France from a parliamentary democracy into a semi-presidential
system in which the president was in charge of foreign affairs and the prime
minister was in charge of the economy and other domestic matters. It was
designed for his own temperament. Once De Gaulle was installed in the
presidential palace in early 1959 he began figuring out what to do about
Algeria by interviewing the experts: the generals, the party leaders, the administrative
heads within Algeria, etc. When he made public statements they were
masterpieces in ambiguity so that the Right was convinced that he intended to
defeat the insurgency and retain Algerie francaise and the Left hoped that he
was open to other paths. De Gaulle also went ahead in conjunction with Israel
scientists to build a nuclear weapon. This was tested in the Algerian desert in
1960. Now the French nationalists would have status compensation for the lost
empire when he began to decolonize. In early 1961 the French army in Algeria
revolted and this time De Gaulle crushed the rebellion and cashiered the
rebels. He then began feelers to the FLN about opening negotiations towards
independence.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The actual
peace negotiations took about six months. Algeria was granted independence in
May 1962. The bloodiest year of the war was that final year between the revolt
and the peace agreement as members of the Secret Army Organization (OAS)
carried out acts of pro-state terrorism against ordinary Algerian Arabs and
Berbers in Algeria and France in an attempt to destroy the peace process and
prevent independence. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sharon was
quite aware of the Algerian precedent. Probably more aware of it than he was of
the Namibian independence negotiations that occurred while he was a minister in
the Israeli government. He explicitly rejected comparisons between the French
in Algeria and Israeli control of the Palestinian territories. But he was also
rumored to sleep with Alistair Horne’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A
Savage War of Peace, </i>the leading English-language account of the Algerian
war, by his bedside while he was prime minister. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sharon would
not have lasted as prime minister long enough to carry out a withdrawal from
both Gaza and the West Bank a la de Gaulle, but the fact that he never made any
serious move to reform Israel’s dysfunctional electoral system with its low
two-percent entry barrier indicated that he was not interested in taking De
Gaulle’s route. For twenty-two years from 1989 until 2011 every time that a
peace plan was seriously put forward a government crisis would either topple
the government or destroy the forward momentum. Sharon with his status as a war
hero of both the 1967 and 1973 wars was probably the last Israeli with the
status to single-handedly reform the electoral system. This was a goal that
eluded Ben-Gurion as Rafi leader in 1965 and Yadin as the leader of Dash in
1977. There were already plans in existence worked out by Israeli politicians
like Gad Ya’akobi and Israeli academics on how to do it through a mixed-franchise
system that would either mix regional multimember constituencies with the
existing PR-list system or mix single-member constituencies with the PR-list
system. All Sharon had to do was review the various plans, pick one, put his
weight behind it and push in the Knesset for its adoption.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Why was the
architect of the Battle of Abu Agheila in 1967 unable to design a plan to get
Israel out of the territories in 2005? There are several reasons. First, there
is no indication that Sharon wanted to withdraw from the West Bank. The Gaza
disengagement was designed to allow Israel to retain the West Bank and not lose
its demographic majority in the short term. Second, Sharon was only 39 in 1967
and only 45 in 1973. He was at the height of his intellectual creativity when
he was a general in the IDF. De Gaulle was in his early fifties when he was the
Free French leader in London battling with his senior allies to prevent them
from making more expedient alliances with Vichy figures prior to the invasion
of North Africa in 1942 and the invasion of France in 1944. In this challenging
political environment De Gaulle developed his political skills that would later
serve him in exiting from Algeria two decades later. Sharon by contrast had a
relatively easy operating environment while leading the settlement effort in
the late 1970s and 1980s. Sharon’s main strengths as a politician were his
military past and his energy. He would charge straight ahead earning himself
the nickname “the bulldozer.” By the time that he really needed to be both
devious and diplomatic it was too late to learn how. He used deception in
Operation Peace for the Galilee in June 1982, but his deception was soon
uncovered and it cost him his job months later when the cabinet voted to
support the findings of the Kahan Commission. To get out of the West Bank
Israel needs a politician with the energy and reputation of Sharon and the
political skills of De Gaulle. Does such a figure exist? Is such a combination
possible? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Thomas Mitchell is the author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Israel/Palestine and the Politics of a Two-State Solution </i>(McFarland,
2013) and the forthcoming <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mr. Security:
Israeli Military Politicians from Dayan to Barak </i>(McFarland, 2014).</span></div>
<br /></div>
Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-1422585033883701452014-01-15T15:22:00.000-08:002014-01-15T18:14:40.557-08:00Israel's Leadership Vacuum <div style="text-align: justify;">
Veteran Israeli political reporter Ben Caspit, who has co-authored biographies of both the recently deceased Ariel Sharon and Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, had this <a href="http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/01/ariel-sharon-benjamin-netanyahu-leadership-crisis.html">interesting column f</a>or the Israel Pulse of the Al Monitor of the <i>Christian Science Monitor. </i>I agree with it in general with one major disagreement: Caspit groups both Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir together with the Likud princes. The Likud princes were the children of prominent Revisionist Zionist and Herut figures and include figures like Netanyahu, Benny Begin, Ron Milo, Ehud Olmert, and Tzipi Livni. Shamir and Sharon were from a different generation--that of the princes' parents who served in the underground and founded Israel. Shamir was a contemporary and colleague of Benny Begin's father, Prime Minister Menahem Begin, and arrived in mandatory Palestine several years before Begin did. Shamir became of the trio leading the Lehi underground from 1943 to 1948 when Begin was leader of the Etzel (Irgun) underground. Shamir did, however, head the faction within the Likud that the princes belonged to. Sharon was in opposition to that faction as the head of his own faction within the Likud after 1983. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
Caspit's thesis is that the demise of the generation of Israel's founding fathers (and mothers in the case of Golda Meir and some other women) due to mortality has left Israel with a leadership gap. Actually the founders consisted of three separate generations: that of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister from 1948-53 and 1956-63, who arrived in Palestine during the Second Aliya or wave of immigration following the abortive Russian revolution of 1904-05; the generation of Moshe Sharett, Pinhas Sapir, and Golda Meir, who arrived in Israel in the 1920s; and finally the 1948 generation that fought Israel's War of Independence and were born in Israel from 1915 to 1930 or who arrived in Palestine as children during the 1930s in the case of Shimon Peres. The first two generations ruled Israel and the Zionist Yishuv from 1935 to 1974. The third generation took over in 1974 when Yitzhak Rabin was elected leader of the Labor Party and prime minister to replace Meir. Sharon and Peres are the last members of that generation. Sharon left office due to his stroke in March 2006 and Peres was elected president by the Knesset in July 2007 and is set to leave office later this year at age 90.</div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
This is comparable to the situation in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s. The last two members of the American Revolutionary generation were John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quincy_Adams">Adams, the son of second President John Adams, </a>was a teenage diplomat during the American Revolution and died in the House of Representatives in February 1848 at the end of the Mexican War, which he had opposed. His bitter political opponent Jackson had served as a messenger boy in the Revolutionary War in South Carolina at age 13. He was seven years younger then than Sharon during the 1948 war. Adams served as secretary of state under President James Monroe during the early 1820s. He was then elected president in a very controversial multi-candidate election in which no single candidate received an electoral majority in 1824, but in which Jackson had a plurality of both electoral and popular votes. Adams, like his father before him, served one term as president and then had a second career in the House of Representatives from 1833 to 1848 where he was the leader of the antislavery faction of the Whig Party. Jackson was elected in his own right in a direct two-man race against Adams in 1828 and served for two terms.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
After Jackson left the presidency in March 1837 (in the 19th century the presidential term began and ended in March), he was followed as president by his vice president, Martin Van Buren, who was the creator of the modern Democratic Party in the late 1820s. Van Buren was a regional politician from New York who had his career in Albany. Jackson then intervened in 1844 to replace Van Buren, who had lost to William H. Harrison, another hero from the War of 1812 like Jackson, with another protege <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_K._Polk">James K. Polk </a>because Polk like Jackson favored the annexation of Texas and Van Buren did not. The opposition Whig Party consisted of members of Adams's National Republican faction and former Democratic supporters of Jackson who fell out with Jackson. Between Jackson in 1837 and Lincoln in 1864, no president was elected to a second term and most modern presidential historians rate these presidents, with the exception of Polk, very low compared to the founding generation and presidents during the Cold War. There were 24 years between Jackson and Lincoln and then 36 years between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. I expect that the same will be true of <a href="http://972mag.com/when-sharon-was-great/85420/">Netanyahu </a>and his immediate successors. </div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-72429696510464450732014-01-15T12:42:00.000-08:002014-01-15T12:43:14.497-08:00Ariel "Arik" Sharon, 1928-2014<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 16.0pt;">Ariel 'Arik' Sharon, 1928-2014: Hardliner Who Ended
Otherwise</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: 14.0pt;">By Thomas G. Mitchell and Ralph Seliger</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
After almost exactly eight years
in a coma, the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon finally succumbed on
Jan. 11, 2014.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He was known for bold, even
reckless moves, both as a career military officer and as a politician.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Reviled by the Left as a hawk and worse, for
most of his life, he ended up seen as a traitor by the extreme Right, while
considered a moderate and potential peacemaker by many others. Over decades, he
championed Israel's extensive settlement of the West Bank and Gaza Strip
(viewed by most of the world as illegal and counterproductive to peace), but
also stunned the world by unilaterally evacuating settlers and soldiers from
Gaza and part of the West Bank in August 2005. </div>
<a name='more'></a><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sharon
was born Ariel Scheinerman on February 27, 1928 in the cooperative farming
village of Kfar Malal in the coastal plain of Palestine known as the Sharon,
from which he would later take his name.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He is said to have inherited a life-long distrust of Arabs from his
father during their rough-hewn frontier existence. He joined the mainstream
Hagana militia as a teenager in 1945 and fought in Israel’s War of Independence
in 1948 as a platoon leader. Severely wounded during the battle of Latrun in
May 1948, he barely made it off the battlefield. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
In 1953, he was
chosen to lead Unit 101, commandos tasked with responding to Palestinian
attacks on Israeli civilians. In October of that year, he led a reprisal raid
on the West Bank Jordanian village of Kibya—following the brutal slaying of a
mother and her two children—in which 69 Palestinian civilians died when their
homes were dynamited. Sharon claimed that they hid in cellars and ignored
warnings to evacuate. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
Three years
later, Sharon opened Israel’s Sinai Campaign by charging his brigade into the
Mitla Pass, but was accused of exceeding his orders with an overly aggressive
advance that resulted in massive casualties for his unit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In June 1967, he led an armored division back
into the Sinai Peninsula in Israel’s victorious Six Day War, making him a
national hero. And in the early 1970s, as head of Israel's Southern Command, he
suppressed guerrilla activity with ruthless efficiency in the citrus orchards
of the Gaza Strip. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
In the summer of
1973, having entered politics for the first time, Sharon engineered the
creation of the Likud out of four smaller parties of the nationalist and
economic Right. When war broke out on October 6, 1973, Sharon returned to the
Sinai front as a reserve general. He maneuvered his armored division across the
Suez Canal, to cutoff Egyptian forces and threaten Cairo. This again made him a
national hero. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
Elected to the
Knesset on Dec. 31, 1974, he quit less than a year later in a futile bid to pursue
his dream of becoming chief of staff through a reserve command. During Yitzhak
Rabin’s first term as prime minister in the mid 1970s, Sharon served as his
personal anti-terrorism advisor for eight months. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Barely elected to the Knesset on his own list
in 1977, he served Menahem Begin as minister of agriculture and spent the next
four years working closely with the National Religious Party to settle the West
Bank. The NRP settled the West Bank for religious reasons; Sharon settled it to
(in his view) ensure Israel’s security against Arab threats from the east.
Sharon chose the sites for settlements and coordinated with other ministries to
support them with infrastructure.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not
atypically, Sharon also gave Begin the support he needed to give up settlements
in the Sinai as part of the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
Begin appointed
Sharon as his defense minister after he was reelected in the summer of 1981.
Sharon immediately began planning for an invasion of Lebanon to be carried out
as soon as he had an excuse. He wanted to expel the Syrians from Lebanon,
destroy Palestinian bases in southern Lebanon—known as Fatahland—staging areas
for occasional attacks on Israel, and leave pro-Israel Christian allies in
charge of the country. That excuse came in June 1982 when a renegade Fatah
splinter group attempted to assassinate the Israeli ambassador in London.
Sharon won cabinet support for a limited invasion of southern Lebanon, but
exceeded this mandate to drive into Beirut. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
In September
1982, Christian militiamen carried out a massacre of hundreds of Palestinian
civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut after being
allowed into the camps by Sharon. An Israeli commission of inquiry found Sharon
“indirectly responsible” and forced his resignation as defense minister in
February 1983. For the next fifteen years, Sharon was relegated to minor
ministerial positions in Likud governments. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
Sharon’s
comeback began in October 1998 when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed
him as foreign minister.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Following
Netanyahu's electoral defeat by Ehud Barak in 1999,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sharon was elected the new leader of Likud.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
On September 28,
2000, Sharon was unwisely permitted by Prime Minister Barak to tour the
religiously sensitive area known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as
the Noble Sanctuary, escorted by hundreds of security personnel. This prompted
Palestinian rock-throwers who were soon met by lethal force from Israeli
police—and so began the Second or “Al-Aksa Intifada,” named after one of the two
mosques on the Temple Mount. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
In February
2001, Sharon decisively beat Barak, by a worse margin than Barak had defeated
Netanyahu two years earlier in the greatest electoral victory in Israeli
history. Sharon then spent the next years suppressing the Intifada, most
critically by reinvading the West Bank, following the March 27, 2002 bombing of
a Passover seder at a hotel in Netanya, which killed 30 Israelis and wounded
140. He also approved construction of Israel's separation barrier in the West
Bank, known to its detractors as “the Wall” or “Apartheid Wall”—after initially
resisting the idea.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But instead of the
purely defensive measure along the Green Line as envisioned by Israeli
left-wingers who had proposed it, Sharon made the barrier into an instrument
for further confiscations of Palestinian property and the division of its
population, as it wended its way snake-like around the most thickly-populated
settlement blocs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
In February
2003, Sharon led the Likud to a decisive general election victory, but after
failing to win majority Likud support in an internal referendum, he relied on
backing from the Labor Party, Meretz and others to carry out the Gaza
“Disengagement” in August 2005. Sharon began to consciously borrow the language
of the Left, referring to Israeli rule in the West Bank as an occupation over
another people. He then broke with his party and took thirteen members of the
Knesset with him into his new Kadima (forward) party in November 2005, claiming
the center of the political spectrum by recruiting prominent Laborites,
including Shimon Peres. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
Sharon suffered
a massive cerebral hemorrhage on January 3, 2006. Later that month, Hamas won
legislative elections for the Palestinian Authority. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
Sharon’s most
devoted followers felt betrayed by his forced evacuation of 8,000 settlers, yet
he refused to negotiate or even coordinate this withdrawal with the leadership
of the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This handed Hamas a political victory by seeming
to substantiate their claim that only “armed struggle,” rather than
negotiations, could liberate Palestinian territory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike his predecessors Rabin and Barak, he
never made the tough decision to attempt to trade strategic real estate for a
negotiated peace. </div>
<div class="Quotations" style="margin-bottom: 14.15pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
Sharon was a brilliant
military tactician, but a very flawed strategist, and a political maverick
rather than a died-in-the-wool ideologue. That's why he could change course at
the end of his active life, famously explaining that "Things look
different here [from his perch as prime minister] than there." But his
ruthless maneuverings—with no regard for the rules he broke, the authorities he
disobeyed or the people he ran over in pursuit of his goals (fully earning his
appellation as "the bulldozer")—did much to poison relations between Jews
and Arabs over the decades; a few months of a new direction, not even fully
defined when he fell ill, could hardly begin to repair this damage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sharon was probably the last Israeli
politician with the gravitas to be able to enact a major reform of Israel’s
dysfunctional electoral system, which is a prerequisite for peace with the
Palestinians, but there is no sign that he even contemplated such a move. </div>
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Still, it's interesting to
note that the true inheritors of his legacy are not Israel's extreme Right,
some of whom actually believe that he was struck down as divine retribution for
his forceful actions against the Gaza settlements (much as they see the hand of
God in the murder of Yitzhak Rabin for his turn toward peacemaking). They were
his direct successors as leaders of Kadima (now nearly defunct as a party),
Prime Minister Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni, former Likud hardliners who pursued
a negotiated two-state solution, even as they also allowed themselves to be
lured into bloody military confrontations with Arab hardliners in Lebanon and
Gaza. A badly flawed legacy has produced an imperfect progeny, but far from the
worst in Israel's political spectrum today. </div>
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<br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thomas G. Mitchell, Ph.D., is an
independent scholar and blogger on a number of subjects, including Israel and
its conflict with the Palestinians. He blogs at the </i><a href="http://selfhatinggentile.blogspot.com/">Self-Hating Gentile</a><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.</i> http://selfhatinggentile.blogspot.com/</div>
<div class="Quotations" style="margin-bottom: 14.15pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<b><i><span style="background: #FFFEF5; color: #111111; font-family: "Source Sans Pro"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Source Sans Pro";">Ralph Seliger </span></i></b><i><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "Source Sans Pro"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Source Sans Pro";">specializes in writing about Israel and Jewish cultural and
political issues. The final editor of Israel Horizons, discontinued in 2011 as
the print publication of Meretz USA (now Partners for Progressive Israel), he
currently serves as an administrator of the Partners' weblog </span></i><a href="http://partners4israel.blogspot.com/"><span style="font-family: "Source Sans Pro"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Source Sans Pro";">http://partners4israel.blogspot.com/</span></a><i><span style="color: #111111; font-family: "Source Sans Pro"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Arial Unicode MS"; mso-hansi-font-family: "Source Sans Pro";">. </span></i></div>
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Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-21216203543124235542014-01-05T11:50:00.000-08:002014-01-08T08:10:25.366-08:002014 Predictions for International Relations<div style="text-align: justify;">
Having previously enjoyed myself immensely on New Year's Eve when on ABC's <i>Nightline </i>various pundits had their political predictions played back to them before blithely charging once more into the breach of ignorance, I will now entertain anyone willing to read this blog with my own predictions for 2014.</div>
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1) Narendra Modi will defeat Rahul Gandhi in national elections in India later this year. This will be the third electoral defeat for a member of the Gandhi dynasty--Rahul's grandmother Indira was defeated in 1977 after having declared a state of emergency in 1975 and ruled for 18 months in a highly-autocratic fashion. She came back to win again and served as prime minister from 1980-84. Her son Rajiv, Rahul's father, followed her as prime minister following her assassination in October 1984. He was defeated in 1989 and campaigning for a come back when he was himself assassinated in 1991 only a week before the election. If the Congress Party in 1989 was like the Israeli Labor Party in 1977, today it is like the Labor Party in 2001. Merely having another Gandhi on the ticket will not be enough to save Congress from defeat this year. <a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/comment/barkhadutt/pm-s-rare-press-conference-was-about-nothing-much/article1-1169173.aspx">Here is why</a>.<br />
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I don't know much about Modi or how he will behave in office. But the 1998-2004 BJP government was much more moderate than would have been predicted solely from their rhetoric and campaign actions over the years. This was due largely to the actions of Prime Minister Atal Vajpayee and Jaswant Singh, the latter of whom served in a number of ministerial capacities including defense minister, foreign minister, and finance minister. If we look at Israel's Likud Party, predictions about it were much more dire before it took office in May 1977 than turned out to be the case in practice. Both Menahem Begin and Ariel Sharon proved to be much more moderate as prime ministers than their previous political careers and rhetoric would have led one to expect.<br />
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2) John Kerry's mediation effort in the Middle East will be practically disowned by President Obama leaving the initiative an orphan. Neither Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas want to make peace at this time. Netanyahu is opposed to giving up the West Bank for ideological reasons. He also does not want to imperil the stability of his ruling coalition. President Abbas does not have the support to give up the Palestinian "right of return" for refugees to Israel. Without this concession, the Palestinians would never get an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Obama will decide that he cannot afford to antagonize independent voters before the 2014 elections, and afterwards he will need the support of Republicans in Congress. </div>
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3) With the failure of the private mediation effort by former Bush diplomat Richard Haass and Harvard Professor Meghan O'Sullivan at the end of 2013, the five parties in the Executive will muddle on. The peace will remain intact but cooperation between the nationalist Sinn Fein and the unionist Democratic Unionist Party will remain limited and loyalists will remain worried about a united Ireland. Elections for the Assembly will increase this instability.</div>
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4) The territorial dispute between China and Japan over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands will escalate verbally but stop well short of actual warfare. Neither China nor Japan is interested in actual war, only in mobilizing their respective publics. If accidental collisions occur, they will be resolved by diplomacy as was the conclusion between Chinese and American aircraft earlier this century.</div>
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5) There will be further terrorist attacks by Pakistani terrorist groups in either Kashmir or India proper in order to help destabilize and weaken civilian rule in Pakistan. The Pakistan military does not want civilian rule to become a success--or a habit. This will lead to contingent and limited cooperation with the jihadists by the military over Kashmir while the military and Pashtun Pakistani Taliban continue to battle in the Federally Administered Territorial Areas. </div>
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6) The Syrian civil war will continue with the ruling Baathist regime increasing its control over the corridor between Damascus and the Alawite area on the Mediterranean coast and the jihadists increasing their control over the military opposition especially in far northern and southern Syria. The Geneva Conference on Syria will either never convene or will quickly fail as the Syrian National Council/Free Syrian Army backed by the West continues to lose support within the country.</div>
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7) The Syrian civil war will expand into Lebanon leading to a weakening of Hezbollah's position within Lebanon. But Lebanon will stop short of returning to the all-out civil war that raged from 1975 to 1990. </div>
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8) Political maneuvers by the Afghan government will lead all but a few American troops being withdrawn from Afghanistan by 2015. The Afghan state security forces will begin to fall apart leading to further expansion of areas under the control of the Taliban and the Haqqani network. </div>
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9) Following the<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/can-obama-raise-his-job-approval-ratings-enough-for-a-political-recovery/2014/01/05/405a3268-7624-11e3-af7f-13bf0e9965f6_story.html"> 2014 midterm election, </a>Obama will make the traditional transition to a seventh-year president concentrating on foreign policy. If an agreement with Iran is reached this year, he will concentrate on relations with Russia and on salvaging something out of Afghanistan. Otherwise, he will concentrate on reviving diplomacy with Iran and reaching some sort of agreement on Iranian nuclear efforts before he leaves office. </div>
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10) If Republicans and a few Democrats succeed in passing additional sanctions against Iran, efforts at reaching an agreement on Iran's nuclear activities will collapse. If the sanctions bid fails, there is a 50/50 chance of reaching an agreement--too close for me to call. </div>
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11) The Arab "Spring" will advance to another Arab country in 2014--possibly Lebanon, possibly Jordan. Egypt<a href="https://medium.com/war-is-boring/4d0ca34375e4"> will continue to experience</a> instability and the Muslim Brotherhood will go underground <a href="http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/01/al-qaeda-terror-spread-iraq-lebanon.html">and be supported by al-Qaeda.</a></div>
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12) The merger between Avigdor Lieberman's Israel Beitenu and Netanyahu's Likud--Likud Beitenu--will fail to lead to a new party and Lieberman will become Netanyahu's most serious threat in Israeli politics. Lieberman will attempt to coordinate with Naftali Bennett of Jewish Home (the old NRP). </div>
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13) The Israeli Labor Party under the leadership of new leader Yitzhak Hertzog will experience a limited revival, but it will not be a potential threat to rule by the Israeli Right. Kadima will not revive and will not long outlast its founder, Ariel Sharon, who will not live through the middle of January. </div>
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Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-84345751662349971472013-12-29T16:38:00.000-08:002014-01-22T09:52:09.067-08:00India and Japan: Natural Allies<div style="text-align: justify;">
Vivek <a href="http://pragati.nationalinterest.in/2013/12/the-rising-tide-of-india-japan-relations/">Sengupta has an article </a>detailing the increasing economic and political ties between Japan and India. The two are<a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/home/opinion/edit-page/A-politically-rising-Japan-has-become-a-crucial-economic-and-security-partner-for-India/articleshow/29123114.cms"> natural allies </a>as they have a common enemy (China) and increasingly a common ally and superpower patron (the United States). They are also both rising naval powers with New Delhi and Tokyo both expanding their navies in order to better safeguard the sea lanes of communication and counter Beijing's expansionist claims in the South China Sea and East China Sea. India has a common land border with China, but as it is along the high-altitude Tibet plateau, it is not something that India can really use as a pressure point against China. But otherwise the Indian-Japanese partnership has much in common with the Entente Cordiale between France and Russia before World War I. And today Washington plays the same role that London played a century ago.<br />
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In the article Sengupta talks about a strategic quadrangle of Canberra, New Delhi, Tokyo and Washington. In this quadrangle Australia can be compared to the British overseas Empire in World War I: Canada, Australia and South Africa. That is Australia is the natural junior partner of the United States in keeping the balance of power between China on one hand and the countries of South East Asia and East Asia that have territorial disputes with Beijing. The quadrangle is a concept of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.<br />
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Here is <a href="http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2013/09/09/india_will_never_become_a_superpower_105433.html">an article,</a> which establishes the many limitations on Indian power.
Because of its large relatively-poor rural population, its urban
working-class population, and its lack of a sophisticated domestic arms
industry India today resembles Russia in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. This is why India needs an Asian France to help counter the
rise of an Asian Germany. </div>
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As with the Soviet Union in Europe during the Cold War, China today has few willing local allies. China's main source of potential allies are countries, like North Korea and Burma, that are economically dependent on it. Do not expect another great war to break out tomorrow, but do expect New Delhi and Tokyo to tighten their linkages and expect India to improve its ties to the United States. This will occur naturally as Washington's ties to Islamabad sour over Pakistan's activities in Afghanistan. As the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency of Pakistan continues to act in a way that make it a de facto enemy of the United States rather than an ally in the "global war on terror," Washington will see its way to increase its ties with India. Kashmir will lessen in importance.<br />
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Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-61547456785027229602013-12-18T20:24:00.001-08:002013-12-29T16:13:35.220-08:00Nuclear Arms Control for South Asia?<div style="text-align: justify;">
In 2012 veteran nuclear strategist and arms control theorist Paul Bracken wrote a book entitled <i>The Second Nuclear Age </i>dealing with the spread of nuclear weapons beyond the original five nuclear states grandfathered into the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in 1968. He discusses in some detail the problems created by nuclear proliferation efforts by Israel, Iran, Iraq, India, Pakistan, and North Korea and the problems and complications that these introduce into international relations in the Middle East, South Asia, and Northeast Asia. He claims that whereas the first nuclear age was bipolar and involved the superpowers the second nuclear age is multipolar and involves several regional powers. Furthermore, instead of following chronologically after the first nuclear age, the second nuclear age overlapped with it and could be said to have several different starting points ranging from 1964 when China acquired nuclear capacity to 1974 when India did so. </div>
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Bracken suggested that a return to nuclear arms control for the Third World might be in order. Nuclear arms control began with a number of multilateral treaties in the early 1960s that prohibited above ground nuclear testing, prohibited nuclear weapons in Antarctica, on the ocean floor and in outer space--basically in all the places where the superpowers had no interest in stationing nuclear weapons. Then after the NPT in 1968 that prohibited the spread of nuclear weapons beyond those states that already were declared nuclear powers, nuclear arms control became a bilateral process between the two superpowers in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) and the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START).<br />
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I think that nuclear arms control talks are not really feasible at present for either the Middle East or for Northeast Asia. This is for two reasons. First, there is simply too much suspicion between Iran on one hand and both Israel and the U.S. on the other for arms control talks to work. Second, with Iran not even possessing nuclear weapons yet and Israel being a mature nuclear state with an arsenal probably roughly comparable in size to the United Kingdom's there is simply too big an imbalance for arms control to work. The same is true between North Korea on one hand and Washington on the other. But what about the one other Third World region with a nuclear balance--South Asia? India and Pakistan have probably both had nuclear weapons since roughly the mid-1980s or roughly between a quarter century and thirty years. India first produced a "peaceful nuclear explosion" in 1974--what elsewhere would be known as a nuclear test. Pakistan did not test nuclear weapons until the end of May 1998--in retaliation for a series of Indian nuclear tests two weeks before. But China gave Pakistan a design for a nuclear weapon and Pakistan had enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) to build a nuclear weapon sometime in the late 1980s. </div>
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India developed its nuclear weapons in response to China going nuclear in 1964; the two countries fought a short war along their mountainous border in late 1962. India developed nuclear weapons to deter China and Pakistan began developing nuclear weapons in the early 1970s after a massive conventional defeat of Pakistan by India in December 1971. After officially becoming a nuclear weapons state in 1998 (even if not recognized as such by Washington or New York), New Delhi announced a no first use policy. In other words India would only use nuclear weapons in war after being attacked with nuclear weapons. Pakistan has not made a similar declaration because it wants its nuclear weapons to deter conventional attacks by India in the event of a conventional war over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Both nuclear powers have developed ballistic missiles and aircraft as delivery vehicles. India is also developing a nuclear submarine and submarine launched missiles so that it can deter China with a seaborne deterrent force.</div>
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What would the goal of nuclear arms control in South Asia be? One goal would be to enhance crisis stability by prohibiting or limiting weapons systems that encourage either side to strike first in the event of a war. Multiple independently-target able reentry vehicles (MIRVs) encourage one side to strike first because by attacking first one side can destroy many more of the other side's nuclear weapons then it itself uses in the attack. MIRVs were limited in the SALT process by a sub-ceiling for MIRVs in SALT II, after the opportunity to prohibit them in SALT I was lost. The most dangerous situation is one in which both sides are encouraged to attack first out of fear that their own forces will be wiped out by the opponent's first strike. The talks might also prohibit technologies that the two countries consider to be too expensive to develop and deploy. </div>
Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-90932507400961980542013-12-10T18:42:00.000-08:002013-12-11T16:06:56.089-08:00Was Mandela A Terrorist?<div style="text-align: justify;">
Watching the Sunday talk shows I heard a conservative (possibly Mary Matlin) refer to Mandela's "terrorist past" as one of the reasons why conservatives were so wary about him in the 1980s. Nelson Mandela was the founder and leader of the African National Congress's (ANC) armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation) or MK for short. MK began its sabotage campaign in December 1961 and it lasted for about 18 months before the South African Police managed to discover the headquarters of the organization at a farm in the Rivonia suburb of Johannesburg. During the sabotage campaign the MK attacked mainly symbolic targets such as electrical pylons, postboxes, and other infrastructure. Pro-German Afrikaner organizations carried out a similar campaign during World War II. At the Rivonia treason trial in 1964 Mandela and his comrades were sentenced to life in prison (except for a couple one of whom was white who received ten-year sentences). Mandela had actually been in prison since the second half of 1962 when, having been betrayed by the CIA, he was arrested for going abroad without a passport--which the government would not have issued him--and sentenced to five years. </div>
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So in the period in which Mandela actually had control over the organization it only engaged in sabotage. I like to divide organized political violence, or armed struggle as it is euphemistically known, into three different categories: sabotage, guerrilla warfare, and terrorism. Sabotage involves attacks on property but not attacks on people. Guerrilla warfare involves attacks on "legitimate targets," which are normally considered to be police and military personnel--those directly responsible for guarding the regime in power. Terrorism involves attacks on random civilians. Now there are grey areas: assassinations of government officials can be seen as guerrilla warfare rather than terrorism, but some consider this to be terrorism. Mao Tse-Tung listed terrorism as the second stage of revolution followed by guerrilla warfare--so obviously the two types of warfare are not incompatible. Historian Walter Lacqueur defined any movement that was not attempting to replicate itself on a large scale and control territory as terrorist. By this definition MK was a terrorist organization. But he is in the minority, most academics define terrorism in term of targeting and legal norms: targeting of ordinary civilians is terrorism, targeting of military or economic targets is not. </div>
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Later after the Soweto Rebellion of late 1976 the liberation movements abroad got a new influx of young South African volunteers eager for revenge against the regime. They were specifically trained that ordinary whites were not legitimate targets and that the goal of the armed struggle was to eliminate white supremacy without replacing it with African or black supremacy. In the late 1970s the armed struggle amounted to a few guerrilla attacks on police stations, but nothing that was really a threat to the regime. In June 1980 MK managed to blow up one of South Africa's Sasol coal-to-oil conversion plants, which used technology developed by Germany during WWII to help evade sanctions. For the next decade MK carried out an armed struggle that did have some spectacular moments such as the bombing of Air Force headquarters in Pretoria and an attack on a nuclear plant. But they still were not a real threat to the regime. </div>
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The real terrorism in South Africa was not carried out by MK. It was carried out by state agents involved in a campaign of assassination against anti-apartheid figures, both black and white, inside South Africa and in the surrounding countries and even in Paris. The details confirming that these acts were carried out by state agents were revealed under oath before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission from 1997 to 2002. During the 1980s there was also terrorism carried out by black youths in the townships who murdered suspected informers and some local black officials, usually by necklacing--the setting on fire of gasoline-soaked tires hanging around the necks of the victims. This was not encourage by ANC officials, at least not publicly, but some connected with the United Democratic Front, the legal internal front for the ANC, including Winnie Mandela did encourage these killings. Winnie Mandela was arguably a terrorist; her husband was never a terrorist.</div>
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But there is another interesting question that conservatives worried about. From the 1940s onwards the ANC had a strategic partnership with the South African Communist Party. Many Communists held important positions in the ANC, some openly and some covertly. No biography of Mandela has ever acknowledged his membership in the SACP. But noted South African scholar R.W. Johnson <a href="http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/the-mandela-myth-9528?page=1">here</a> claims that Mandela had always been a Communist. If this is true, it gives some credibility to conservative fears about the ANC in Britain and the United States in the 1980s. But it should be remembered that it was Thabo Mbeki, the Moscow-trained economist who was the son of SACP leader Govan Mbeki, who as president after Mandela and vice-president under Mandela instituted the policy of forming a partnership with business. </div>
Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-61101551777953931932013-12-06T19:41:00.002-08:002013-12-10T17:46:11.845-08:00Mandela: A Cross Between Lenin and Tutu <div style="text-align: justify;">
I was not sad to hear of the passing of Nelson Mandela. Not that I had anything against him, but he was 95 and I never thought that he was immortal. I was sad when Chris Hani was assassinated in 1993--I thought that it might lead to serious consequences and it would have had Mandela not exercised his restraint and control over black public opinion in South Africa. I was very sad when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, but relieved to learn that his murderer was a Jew and not an Arab.<br />
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President Obama said that we will never see another person like him. I disagree. After Galileo, the great physicist and astronomer, came Newton, the great mathematician, physicist and astronomer. And then Einstein the great physicist. After Lincoln came Disraeli in Britain, Franklin Roosevelt in the United States, David Ben Gurion in Israel, and Mandela in South Africa. Mandela's greatness was that in a single person he combined the personal integrity and courage of a figure like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or Archbishop Desmond Tutu with the political acumen of a great revolutionary leader like Lenin or Michael Collins of Ireland. It is rare to find these traits in a single individual. To be a great revolutionary requires an understanding of politics and history--and this requires detachment. Usually this detachment leads to moral remoteness and the tendency to see others as means and not ends, thus denying the principle of the great philosopher Immanuel Kant. Conversely getting too close to the subject usually compromises analytical ability. I respected and admired Tutu's personal courage in saving suspected informers from mob deaths, but I thought him a fool as a tactician. <br />
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Unlike President Obama I was not an anti-apartheid activist. When the anti-apartheid movement became big in the United States I was busy pursuing a doctorate in International Relations. I wrote my dissertation on the political counterinsurgency of white settlers in Southern Africa. For this I had to understand both white politics and black politics. I thus read the first biography of Nelson Mandela, written by Mary Benson, a white South African who was close to the African National Congress, published in 1986. Having read her biography I was not surprised by anything he did subsequently once he was released from prison. What surprised me was his release and the unbanning of the ANC and the Pan-Africanist Congress, a rival liberation movement, and especially the South African Communist Party. I expected F. W. de Klerk to behave like the conservative Afrikaner politician that he had been all of his political career and make the same mistakes of Prime Minister Ian Smith of Rhodesia and President P.W. Botha of South Africa. He did not. He demonstrated that even racists can learn from history and the mistakes of others.<br />
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Had De Klerk turned out to be another P.W. Botha, Mandela could have died in prison or at least been too old to play a real political role upon his release. Botha had astutely agreed to a political bargain in 1988 that gave South African-occupied Namibia independence in exchange for a Cuban withdrawal from Angola and a cutoff of South African support to the rebel UNITA movement of Jonas Savimbi in exchange for an end to Angolan support for the ANC. This meant that the last of the ANC's guerrilla camps in Southern Africa were closed and guerrillas were have to traverse a thousand miles from camps in Uganda and Tanzania to infiltrate South Africa. De Klerk unlike Smith, was smart enough to make concessions from a position of strength and negotiate a new political order in South Africa with the ANC. Had De Klerk not done this white rule in South Africa could easily have lasted into this century. But De Klerk knew that when the whites handed over power to the black majority the economy would be destroyed and his own Afrikaner people would have a grim future as another African tribe living in poverty in the country while the English-speaking whites departed for Britain, the United States, Australia, Israel, etc. <br />
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But Mandela who had 27 years to think about what he wanted free from distractions, proved to be a much better negotiator than De Klerk or anyone else from the National Party. Mandela spent his time in prison well. He learned Afrikaans, educated a new generation of black revolutionaries in the principles of non-racialism, and befriended his guards both in order to ease his own situation and that of his comrades and as practice for the future. The diet of grains and vegetables was very healthy and combined with the hard labor and exercise served to keep him fit and healthy. While his white countrymen were dying of heart attacks and cancer he was prolonging his own life. <br />
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He knew how to manipulate his own celebrity and use world opinion against De Klerk. But once he had the constitution he wanted he was wise enough to include De Klerk and rival African leader Mangosuthu Buthelezi of KwaZulu in a government of national unity. He also decided to keep the free enterprise system, which had been so abused by the social engineering of Afrikaners over the decades, as fortunately his colleagues in the ANC had learned from their time in exile in other African countries with command economies and in Moscow.<br />
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Several years ago I toured the American South and visited several civil rights museums in Alabama and Memphis. I came to appreciate that the movement was successful not just because of Martin Luther King Jr. but because of his colleagues in the leadership and the ordinary blacks who marched, boycotted, and suffered for the sake of victory. The same can be said of Mandela. With him in prison he had Walter Sisulu and Govan Mbeki. Unlike Winnie Mandela, Nelson's second wife, Albertina Sisulu did not become embittered by the imprisonment of her husband. She provided leadership to the United Democratic Front. While Mandela was in prison his former law partner, Oliver Tambo, led the ANC from its headquarters in London. The sons of both Sisulu and Mbeki played key roles in the ANC and the UDF. Thabo Mbeki became one of Mandela's vice-presidents and his successor. Mandela increasingly turned to him to run the economy of the country as Mandela grew older. Mandela was a lawyer by training and Mbeki an economist. <br />
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Benson's biography has now been overtaken by a new authorized biography by Fatima Meer of the ANC, very fine biographies by journalists like Anthony Sampson and Martin Meredith, both from England but who spent decades in Southern Africa, and by Mandela's own autobiography, <i>Long Walk to Freedom. </i> </div>
Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-63863263590011957862013-11-22T11:37:00.000-08:002013-11-23T08:06:29.214-08:00Richard Haass, John Larkin, and Northern Ireland's Past<div style="text-align: justify;">
<a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-25034317">Richard Haass is back in Northern Ireland </a>speaking with various political players from the five parties represented in the Executive as well as community groups in an attempt to reach a comprehensive deal on parade, flags and emblems, and the past before the end of the year. His task has possibly been made more difficult (and possibly simpler) by a trial balloon floated by Attorney General John Larkin calling for an end to all investigations into the past. Larkin, who does not belong to any political party but who was briefly connected to the <span id="goog_1906459685"></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/">non-sectarian Alliance Party some three decades <span id="goog_1906459686"></span></a>ago, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/20/john-larkin-troubles-killings-northern-ireland-david-davis">said that in his opinion </a>it was simply too difficult to secure convictions with the passage of time. His personal legal opinion has <a href="http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/for-once-main-parties-are-united-in-their-criticism-of-attorney-general-29772287.html">provoked fury from all the established </a>parties. Only the brand new and tiny NI21 has supported his proposal. </div>
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His proposal comes amid revelations about a "shoot-to-kill" policy that allowed British army soldiers of the Military Reaction Force (MRF) unit to disregard rules governing the use of force that pertained to other British forces. There has been <a href="http://www.newsletter.co.uk/news/regional/army-not-above-the-law-and-can-be-probed-says-donaldson-after-panorama-revelations-1-5700103">one news documentary in which former members </a>of the MRF said they opened fire at republican figures without first ascertaining if they were armed. The force operated in Northern Ireland in <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-25048162">1972 and 1973 during the height of The Troubles. </a></div>
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Victims groups have been solidly against Larkin's proposal to "draw a line" on the past. Sinn Fein can count on journalists to produce revelations about British atrocities and violations of declared policy while hiding IRA atrocities not already prosecuted from further scrutiny. Loyalists are in a similar position but have much less political interest in attacking the British forces. Decommissioning legislation specifically ruled out using weapons turned in for destruction to be tested for links to terrorist incidents. As part of the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 that ended The Troubles there was an early release of security prisoners that amounted to a conditional amnesty with subsequent prosecutions for offenses committed before 1998 subject to a two-year maximum sentence. With witness testimony becoming more unreliable over time, Larkin simply decided that it was prudent to avoid more investigations with so little to gain at stake. Haass will now have to address this very controversial topic. </div>
Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6415922081428791721.post-46240362063096507742013-11-22T10:59:00.000-08:002013-11-24T19:44:14.246-08:00Afghanistan's Future<div style="text-align: justify;">
It was announced on Thursday November 21, 2013 that<a href="http://www.pbs.org/newshour/topic/world/index.html"> Washington and Kabul had reached </a>an agreement to allow limited American training forces and anti-terrorism personnel to remain on after the scheduled departure of American combat personnel from Afghanistan in 2014. The deal has yet to be approved by the Grand Council or Loya Jirga, which has the power to approve or reject a deal. Afghani President Hamid Karzai is using his weakness as a strength to attempt to manipulate Washington into granting more concessions to him by making the deal subject to the Loya Jirga. <br />
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The Afghanistan insurgency is really an ethnic war between the Kabul government, which is based on the former Northern Alliance of Tajik and Uzbek forces against the Afghani Taliban, a Pashtun (Pathan) force. The Pashtun is a tribal group straddling the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. They are by far the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the largest ethnic group in the North West Frontier Province, the Pakistani province that borders on Afghanistan. They are also the third largest ethnic group in Pakistan after the Punjabis and Sindhis and ahead of the Baluchis. The Pashtun are a warrior culture based on a code of Islam, loyalty to guests, and resistance to outsiders. They have resisted Western forces since the British first reached the area in the 1830s. Usama Bin-Ladin's Al Qaeda was the guest of the Taliban and perceived by them to be fighting for Islam against the infidel foreigners. </div>
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Ending the war in Afghanistan is dependent on reaching a diplomatic solution with elements of the Taliban that will exclude Al Qaeda. Unfortunately for Washington, Islamabad sees controlling access to the Taliban to be in its interest. The war has provided Pakistan with billions of dollars in economic and military aid since 2001 that the Pakistani military has used to help fund its war in Kashmir, which it really cares about, against India. India has supported the Kabul government as a means of balancing Pakistan by forcing it to concentrate on Afghanistan as well as Kashmir. </div>
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America's national interest in Afghanistan is minimal. The rationale for backing the Northern Alliance in the fall of 2001 was to prevent Al Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a sanctuary and to capture or kill Bin-Ladin. Bin-Ladin is now dead and most of Al Qaeda's senior leadership has been killed or captured. There is no shortage of failed Muslim states in the Middle East, North Africa, and South-East Asia that can serve as alternative sanctuaries for the remnants of Al Qaeda. In the late 1990s American pressure forced Al Qaeda to move from Sudan to Afghanistan--the net effect was to make it that much less accessible to American forces. Somalia, Mali, Yemen, and parts of Indonesia and the Philippines can all serve as alternative sites for Al Qaeda or similar Islamist terrorist groups. </div>
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Meanwhile the war in Afghanistan risks the stability of Pakistan, a country that is much more strategic and populous than Afghanistan as well as being a nuclear weapons state. Better to cut our losses as soon as possible rather than keep funding the treacherous and unpopular Karzai regime. </div>
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Thomas G. Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15126928750407404626noreply@blogger.com0