Avuncular American

You've Been Volunteered to Iraq

As you may have seen in the Director General’s May 27, 2008 [message] “Announcing the 2009 Iraq/Afghanistan Cycle” and in the Secretary’s personal message to the field, the Department has begun recruiting for summer 2009 openings in Iraq. I am writing to inform you that the Department considers you among those particularly well qualified for the key positions listed below and is asking you to seriously consider volunteering for an opportunity to tackle our nation’s top foreign policy priority.

Excerpt from State Department email of 30 May 2008 to American diplomat "M," cited in the blog Life After Jerusalem

The above is not a draft notice, but these days few people outside the US military receive such explicit hints that it would behoove them to consider spending time in body armor in Baghdad.  In the Army, as my father used to say, it was "We need three volunteers: you, you, and you."  The State Department, diplomatically of course, "considers you particularly well qualified."  The result is the same.  Our diplomat-blogger contents herself with reproducing the Friday morning email.  Like the good career professional that she is, she provides no editorial comment.  But you can bet that there is much soul-searching going on in the "M" household this weekend.

In the fall of 2007, much was made of the State Department's difficulties in filling its personnel slots at the US Embassy in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq, though after the initial flurry of publicity, in fact no one was actually "directed" (or, in non-State speak, forced) to go to Iraq.  But "asking you to seriously consider volunteering," while not literally forcing, has a different meaning when you're an individual employee having to deal with the juggernaut of Washington's personnel establishment.  The American Foreign Service Association (AFSA, the professional association which advocates for American diplomats with their employers at the State Department, USAID, as well as the Departments of Commerce and Agriculture) has monitored this issue, and its monthly magazine, the Foreign Service Journal, has documented the nuanced meanings of "volunteering."

Consider the typical case of an officer with school age children, who has to follow increasingly restrictive rules that narrow choices down to places like Iraq (Green Zone or PRT?) and Afghanistan (Kabul or a Provincial Reconstruction Team?).  One such officer outlined his dwindling options, and illustrated how in the end, his "voluntary" assignment to Afghanistan was simply a choice of lesser evils.  And it's not just Iraq and Afghanistan.  According to AFSA, "two thirds of the Foreign Service is deployed overseas at all times and 70 percent of them are at hardship posts (meaning locations with difficult living conditions due to terrorist threats, violent crime, harsh climate, or other factors)."  Like the military, many Foreign Service families are separated during entire tours of duty.

Scott McClellan's current media blitz over his book "What Happened" has been the focus of stinging comment of the sort "If you didn't like the policy, why didn't you just resign from the White House?"  A legitimate question, though last night's "Anderson Cooper 360" on CNN, where he described the former White House Spokesman as a "civil servant," missed the mark.  No, White House Spokesmen are Political Appointees.  Unlike "M" and other career diplomats, who don't have the easy option of a high-level resignation followed by six or seven figure book advances.  Three American diplomats made timely, principled resignations over the Iraq war, and I do not believe any of them became wealthy.

Back to "M'" and her "opportunity to tackle our nation’s top foreign policy priority."  I guess I'm just not convinced of the validity of the Administration's priority list.  Which I liken to a pyromaniac who chooses to set Iraq ablaze while the fire department is busy trying to extinguish the 10-alarm conflagration of al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan: "Okay, maybe it is a bigger fire now, but it was arson, and you're the arsonist."

In the remaining months of the Bush Administration, while it rushes to put a "Status of Forces Agreement" with the Iraqi government in place - one that many Iraqis oppose and about which the US Congress has many questions - American diplomats will continue to get more "volunteer notices" like the one above.  But far-thinking people in the "shadow cabinet" that I hope the Democrats will soon form should consider the changes needed to prevent American diplomacy's core skills from atrophying.  For service in all those countries in the world where, though they may be tough places, you still don't require a flak jacket, and where the host government has a presence outside a Green Zone perimeter.  And where the safety of your embassy does not depend on the indefinite presence of the US Army.

Living Like Europeans

Last week Paul Krugman wrote "Stranded in Suburbia" in the New York Times.  His dateline was Berlin, and he marveled at the sheer livability of many urban neighborhoods:

To see what I’m talking about, consider where I am at the moment: in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood consisting mainly of four- or five-story apartment buildings, with easy access to public transit and plenty of local shopping.

It’s the kind of neighborhood in which people don’t have to drive a lot, but it’s also a kind of neighborhood that barely exists in America, even in big metropolitan areas. Greater Atlanta has roughly the same population as Greater Berlin — but Berlin is a city of trains, buses and bikes, while Atlanta is a city of cars, cars and cars.

Krugman laments that "many Americans [are] stranded in suburbia — utterly dependent on their cars, yet having a hard time affording gas."

(images: STIB Brussels Transport)

As expats familiar with both suburban American and urban European lifestyles, we can relate to Krugman's depiction of the dilemma.  We live in a leafy part of Brussels, in the kind of apartment building and neighborhood described by Krugman.  We have a car, and it is parked in the building's underground garage.  Unless we take a ride in the country (and even then, we can reach greenery by public transport), we only use the car to do major food shopping about once a week.  Everything else is by tram.  We can use the same ticket for Brussels' metro or bus systems, and for those train lines that cross the city.

This is not to gloat - far from it, since we do all this on a declining dollar - but to illustrate Krugman's point about the oil-induced reasons for Americans to change, the "strong incentives to start living like Europeans."  My fellow Americans... it's not that hard, "living like Europeans."  Once freed from the tyranny of the internal combustion engine, possibilities open up.

Last week a delegation of Brussels regional officials traveled to Malmo, Sweden, just across the water from Copenhagen, Denmark.  They saw Scandinavian examples that some would like to emulate, like urban planning that incorporates energy efficiency in building design, something which is now catching on in Brussels and elsewhere in Belgium and in Europe.  Though Brussels has a long way to go before it can resemble Malmo or Freiburg in Germany, it at least has a massive head start in its integrated public transport network.  And it didn't make the monumental mistake made by Los Angeles and other cities in ripping up their "quaint" tramway/trolley lines for "modern" freeways, like LA did in the fifties ("At its peak, the Pacific Electric Railway was huge: 1,150 miles of track covering four counties and 900 cars. 1944 marked the highest ridership: over 109 million passengers)."  Imagine the cost of recreating that.

No, living like Europeans doesn't mean abandoning the car, but it does mean embracing what's best in urban life, recognizing that it requires public investment, and is sustained by improvements to the infrastructure.  It is the opposite of the throwaway car culture.

Memorial Day Where It Counts

Ninety years ago, 368 Americans were buried in what was named Flanders Field Cemetery, one of the smallest of the overseas cemeteries run by the American Battle Monuments Commission.  We went there yesterday to help represent Democrats Abroad Belgium, whose wreath was placed at the foot of the white stone chapel in the center of the headstones.

We have been attending Memorial Day, Veterans Day, and other commemorations at ABMC cemeteries for years (I encourage you to visit their website and take a virtual tour).  Americans who have not had the honor of seeing these hallowed sites in person should be proud that their nation continues to take such good care of American soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines (and merchant marines) buried abroad.

My father survived World War II with only a couple of tiny shrapnel wounds, but his memories of harrowing battles in places like Guam, the Philippines, and Okinawa stayed with him until he passed away.  The soldiers buried in places like Flanders Field have only one surviving comrade, Frank Woodruff Buckles, the last American "doughboy."

Look at the picture.  American and Belgian flags at the foot of each cross or Star of David.  Every World War I and II American cemetery in the European Theater, whether in Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, England, Italy... or in Tunisia, for the dead of the 1942-43 North African campaign... have the same array of flags, usually placed by local people or overseas Americans who keep the memory alive.  Further afield, in Latin America and in the Pacific, other cemeteries unvisited by me continue the same tradition.

Private Harry Volz of Wisconsin, whose Flanders Field grave is pictured here, died on November 10, 1918.  Students of history will know that 24 hours later, on the "eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month," Armistice was declared and the guns fell silent.  A day too late for Pvt. Volz...

Edward G. Lengel, Associate Professor at UVA and author of "To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918," knows something about remembrance, and wrote this in yesterday's Washington Post:

The Civil War and World War II seem to lend themselves to good storytelling, as long as one avoids the ugly, depressing bits. They appear to have clear beginnings and endings, with dramatic heroes and villains. They move. World War I, by contrast, with its images of trench warfare and mustard gas, is not so easy to manipulate in a marketable manner. Popular historians consequently avoid it. As one trade publisher recently told me, World War I has "poor entertainment value." Attempts to discuss it, even with avid students of military history, often end with the same comments that veterans heard back in 1919: "It's all too dreadful," and so on. So powerful is this perception that even genuinely exciting stories -- those of Medal of Honor winners Charles W. Whittlesey, Alvin C. York, John L. Barkley and Freddie Stowers -- are ignored.

We should step back and think for a moment about what this says about Americans as people. Do we honor our veterans for all their sacrifices, or do we care only if they can tell us a good story? And who, then, is guilty of ingratitude?

World War II marked the end of this noble tradition of interring American war dead where they fell.  No Korean War, Vietnam War, Iraq War gravestones for Americans on those Mekong or Mesopotamian battlefields.  Maybe, to borrow Dr. Lengel's phrase, those conflicts lacked "clear beginnings and endings, with dramatic heroes and villains."  I have no doubt that there are heroes, and we've been told plenty about the "villains," but those "clear beginnings and endings?"  It's all so murky, so wrapped up in controversy over contrived incidents and confused war aims.  The Iraq War's "poor entertainment value" has been reflected in box office flops - it's pretty "dreadful" too.

Listening to yesterday's speeches (Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme, himself from the World War I-ravaged town of Ypres-Ieper), gave a thoughtful speech in flawless English referring to the WW I foundations of transatlantic cooperation), I had the impression that there was a mite less triumphalism in the speeches by the official American representatives.  As if five years into another murky war without "clear beginnings and endings" have induced a certain realization that the endgame is unknown, and that the ending, while it certainly may not be clear, will be accomplished by a President other than the one who started it.

John Kerry asked, as a young Vietnam combat veteran who had turned against that divisive war: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"  Private Volz from Wisconsin, who 90 years ago in Flanders Field died a day before peace was declared, can rest in peace, as should the dead from Vietnam and Iraq, whatever we think of the merits of the wars in which they fell.  But before we ask a soldier to be the last one to die in Iraq, we had better clarify why we are still there, fighting for whom?

Cheat & Retreat: My Personal Clinton Red Line

While, admittedly, I am a white, fifty-something, male, expatriated American...
... I am most definitely not:

• a misogynist;
• a racist;
• a religious sectarian;
• an ageist (that would be self-defeating);
• a snob (though I do like to use big words).

That said, I want to make the following points about Senator Hillary Clinton:

• When she shed a tear in New Hampshire, I thought it may have been a normal human emotion, though it could have been a calculated move at a crucial moment.
• Then there was the innuendo that only candidate Clinton (well, maybe McCain too) could take care of the little sleeping children at 3:00 AM when foreign-looking men came to call.
• I gave her the benefit of the doubt, given her long record favoring civil rights, when she equated white, working class, and hard working with support for her, as opposed to, what?  “Black welfare recipients for Obama?”
• But I draw the line at her Huckabee-like juxtaposition of the words “Kennedy,” “convention,” and “assassination,” as if there weren’t millions of Americans who fervently pray lest a similar fate befall their chosen candidate.

Each one of these electioneering “eruptions” (a throwback to an earlier Clinton era) has been followed by an apology or a hurried explanation of the "context," whether from Senator Clinton herself or from an acolyte.  Such is the case with yesterday’s assassination reference.

But then we also get a flurry of editorials complaining – as Hillary Clinton was doing yesterday when she let the Kennedy (Obama?) assassination allusion rip (not slip: there’s nothing chance about Mrs. Clinton’s public utterances) – about all the calls for her to cease and desist from the electoral race.  And equating them with misogyny.  Make no mistake: there is misogyny out there, and I loathe it as much as I despise racist attacks on Barack Obama.  But to call for an end to this destructive spiral is not in any way misogyny.  I don't want her reputation to be further tarnished by Senator Clinton's misguided verbal assaults on her fellow Senator.

So, taking into account what I am not (see paragraph 1), I hereby join the ranks of those saying Basta.  That’s enough, Senator Clinton.  Nothing more to be gained – nothing – from your continued nasty-nice, nice-nasty campaigning.  Only heartache and consternation in the Democratic camp, joy and relief in the Republican ranks. 

Please declare a victory of whatever sort you wish – breaking glass ceilings as the first woman presidential candidate, inspiring generations of young Democrats to register to vote, raising consciousness on key platform issues like health care – you name it.  But please leave, and end this very discernible “pattern” of cheat & retreat, slime & “Sorry!”  So that you leave an honorable legacy, before it’s too late.

Bridges to the Democratic Convention

(Photo source: © Tamara Rafkin 2008)

This post is simply a vehicle to display a couple of nice pictures taken the other day by some fellow Obama supporters in Belgium.  Part of the "Bridges for Obama" effort, people in Brussels and the leafy suburb of Tervuren gathered on a glorious Wednesday evening on a couple of bridges.  They joined people in cities across the world, doing the same thing.  All for the purpose of showing support for their choice for President.

The futuristic walkway on the left is at the Marolles Elevator in the center of Brussels, linking the more recent "Upper City" to the historic "Marolles" district.  Below right, a few suburbanite expats posed in front of the Africa Museum, a repository of everything imaginable from the days of the Belgian Congo and "Ruanda-Urundi."

The outing was fun, and garnered some free local publicity.

I will try to abstain from editorial comment and inference about the symbolism of past and future, of bridges to the 21st century (oops, that's a Clintonian phrase), etc.  Sorry, but I'm opinionated.  That's why I blog!

Suffice it to say that this very picturesque initiative comes from Obama supporter Meredith Wheeler in rural France, and that the pictures will be part of a collage shown at the Democratic Convention.  The Convention at which - at least those of us in the photos hope - Senator Barack Obama will be officially consecrated as the nominee of the party.

Unless something else happens, that is.  No, I will end on a positive(ly naive?) note: even the Democratic Party cannot allow internecine warfare to scupper all these good people's hopes.  The next weeks will be full of "nuclear option" talk, and suggestions of deals, but if the millions of people who have taken the trouble to register, vote, or caucus are able to focus on the big picture - who do you want in November, Senator Bomb Iran or our guy? - then all of the angst will have been just that.

Culture Wars, European Style - May '68

I would be remiss in my duty as an observer of the European scene if I let the month of May pass without a comment on May 1968.  Since I was a pimply teenager in Pennsylvania at the time, I cannot speak from personal experience.  But you cannot be alive in Europe in the spring of 2008 without being bombarded with documentaries, books, commemorations - nostalgia of the most maudlin to the intelligently reflective.  At most recent count, 100 books (!) have been published in French alone.

One of the most thoughtful TV programs (now out on DVD), one of the few to put the street protests in France into their international context, is Patrick Rotman's "68."  Francophone readers can listen to an RTL radio interview with Rotman here.  Rotman, as a 19 year old student at the Sorbonne, was a participant and witness.  It was definitely a turbulent year, worldwide.

Anniversaries, especially those ending in round numbers like 40, are fair game for reflection.  Especially when many "soixante-huitards" (in the States, we would say baby boomers) are themselves in their sixties.  In France, there is a particularly contemporary - political - slant to these recollections: President Nicolas Sarkozy is an anti-68, conservative politician, in a country where the dominant intellectual strain grew up in the shadow of the May '68 protests.  Shadows of the US, where "what did you do during the Vietnam War?" continues to fuel political debate, and where the Republican Party would like to program the national DVD player to skip the tracks between Eisenhower and Reagan.

But just like America's boomer hippies have morphed into Wall Street lawyers and Washington politicians, so too have many soixante-huitards joined the establishment.  Probably the best example of a student leader keeping his youthful ideals while succeeding in the political world is "Danny The Red" Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament for Germany's Green Party, though he has as much of a profile in France (born there while his parents fled Nazi persecution, he's perfectly bilingual and bi cultural).  Cohn-Bendit was recently shown chatting with the long-retired chief of the Paris police, who he credits with saving lives (and perhaps French democracy) by holding his fire during the student/labor protests.

"'68" is perhaps most resonant now because of the current existential crisis in the world economic system, with financial, food supply, environmental, and societal (immigration, aging, unemployment) pressures causing many to question the way the Western world organizes itself.  It's another nostalgia "industry," for sure.  But without necessarily offering answers, this season's European retrospectives serve a purpose in forcing introspection of the most useful type.  For the US too, this will be most evident once the Democratic Party finally sorts out its candidate to face John McCain.  Will it be '60s vs. '70s? (age, not decades).  Or will it be McCain national-security-means-guns vs. Obama's more inclusive definition of security through diplomacy, economic strength, and inclusiveness?  The Culture Wars in the United States are not over yet.

It’s My Party – Israel’s Nakba Denial

It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to
Cry if I want to, cry if I want to
You would cry too if it happened to you

Lesley Gore, "It's My Party," 1963

In Europe, some countries outlaw Holocaust Denial, that despicable practice of far right parties (France’s Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has insisted on calling the Holocaust “a detail of history” and has made other outrageous outbursts.  He's had to pay stiff fines).  I know of no law against Nakba Denial, though Israel would like to outlaw talking about the Nakba at the United Nations:

Israel's UN mission is seeking to outlaw use of the term Nakba, after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon telephoned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday night and expressed empathy with the Palestinian people in honor of Nakba Day.  Deputy head of Israel's UN mission, Daniel Carmon, complained that the word Nakba is meant to undermine the legitimacy of Israel's founding and, therefore, use of the term should be should be forbidden.

“Nakba,” or catastrophe, is the term used by Palestinians and other Arabs to describe the loss of their homes and the refugee exodus that accompanied the birth of the state of Israel.  Palestinians, whether they are among the hundreds of thousands who stayed behind in what became post-1948 Israel, or the million-plus who are now living under one sort or another of Israeli control in the Occupied Territories since 1967, or the hundreds of thousands living as refugees (most in camps) outside of historic Palestine – most of these Muslim and Christian Palestinians, whatever their passport (if they even have one) says, must have felt like crying at Israel’s party.

To get some idea of what was lost, just read or listen to the May 15 interview on Democracy Now! with Palestinian doctor and writer Ghada Karmi.  Karmi, who was eight years old when her family “went away for a couple of weeks” from violence in her West Jerusalem neighborhood in 1948, has a unique view of this period, and has written about it in “Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine.”  She explains the unusual title:

The reason it’s called that is that I’ve taken that out of an anecdote... At the end of the nineteenth century, when the Zionists in Europe ... held a very big congress, a conference in Basel in Switzerland, at which they decided ... to create a Jewish state... And they decided that that state was to be in Palestine.

Now, they didn’t know what Palestine was like ... so they sent a couple of rabbis to this place called Palestine, and they said, “Let us know if this is a suitable place.” The rabbis went, they had a look, and they sent back this message to Vienna: they said, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” Now, of course, it’s clear what they were saying is, yes, the land is very suitable, it’s wonderful, but it’s full of other people, it’s already taken. And, of course, it was taken by my ancestors. I mean, that’s who it was. That’s who the ‘other man’ was.”

It’s worth letting that anecdote sink in a while.  Those who have read their history books know about the 1917 Balfour Declaration expressing the opinion of His Majesty’s Government that there should be a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, which became operative when Great Britain was given a mandate to govern the former Ottoman province at the end of the First World War.  As James Parkes, in his classic “Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine” wrote, the Balfour Declaration “recognized that there existed already a historic Jewish right, not to but in the country.”  No matter; the Declaration led eventually to the United Nations Partition Plan, and the rest is – history.

Ghada Karmi concludes with devastating logic: “Without Britain, there would be no Israel.”  She takes issue with the notion of Jews In, Arabs Out:

And if you think about it, that has been the basis of the conflict ever since, that the Zionists wanted a territory free of non-Jews in a territory full of non-Jews, and therefore, they had to get rid of the non-Jews in order to make it a territory for Jews. Now, those non-Jews, i.e. the Palestinians, of course didn’t want to be dispossessed, they resisted being dispossessed, and hence, you have a conflict.

... Married to Another Man... had the Zionists said, “This is indeed married to another man. We can’t go here, because the land is already “married.” We can’t be bigamists. We’re going to move on. We’re going to look for somewhere else”—they didn’t. They were determined to do it, and they did it at the most enormous cost to us as Palestinians, because we were dispossessed and displaced in order to make room for the Jewish state, and of course it had a tremendous effect on the whole Arab region.

So, Israel, have your birthday party.  But don’t begrudge the Palestinians their right to commemorate their nation’s tragedy.  In Lesley Gore’s big hit “It's My Party,” she’s crying about Judy taking away her Johnnie.  She lost a boyfriend.  Palestinians lost a country.

You would cry too if it happened to you

Lemon Trees On the Green Line

Once, when we lived in Oman on the Arabian Peninsula, we visited a village perched in the rocky hills of the interior.  We were there to see a falaj, one of the ancient irrigation canals cut into the stony hillsides, carrying precious water to small gardens and orchards.  An Omani farmer took a liking to our small children, and offered us lemons plucked from one of his dozen or so trees.  In hot, arid climates, these bright beautiful yellow fruit, standing out against the dark green leaves, are things of beauty.

And so it is in the West Bank – or more precisely, on the “Green Line” that on paper separates Israel from the Occupied Territories – where Eran Riklis’ Lemon Tree is filmed.  Never has a glass of fresh lemonade looked so inviting.  That’s what visitors to the home of lead character Salma are offered, from her father’s orchard that she has inherited.  From trees that she must protect when politics intrude into her simple life.

Riklis has visited this human terrain before, notably in his 2004 masterpiece, The Syrian Bride.  Watching Lemon Tree, you have to remind yourself that this is an Israeli film, or rather, a film made by an Israeli director.  But, as Riklis said in a Tikkun interview apropos of The Syrian Bride, when asked if it was a “political film”

First and foremost, this is a humane film. It deals with people who are caught inside politics, inside a political world. It’s a pro-people film. On the other hand, of course it contains political elements. In the Middle East in particular, almost everything that you do and refer to is political. Everything has consequences.

The same could be said of Lemon Tree, though it is “political” to a much greater degree.  When you have the “Separation Barrier,” the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, and an Israeli cabinet minister as backdrops or characters in a film, it is political.  Everything is political in Israeli-Palestinian relations.

Just as Riklis is sensitive to the nuances of the complex relationship between occupier and occupied, he is a particularly talented observer of the relationships between men and women, in both Israeli and Arab cultures.  Nazareth-born Hiam Abbass, who has already appeared in Riklis’ films, plays Salma with innate grace and intelligence.  Not only does she have to confront Israeli neighbors bent on separating her from her lemon trees, but also has to navigate a male-dominated Palestinian society.  Palestinian officialdom is shown as more troubled over matters of propriety than demonstrating any concern for this defiant widow’s attempts to protect her property.

On the Israeli side of the fence (literally), there is tension in the Minister’s household, where wife Mira (played by revelation Rona Lipaz-Michael) begins to see for herself the human costs of occupation.  Eventually they must face the question: is it better to look out onto a luscious orchard (owned, admittedly by Palestinians of unknown security credentials) or to “enjoy” the security offered by watchtowers and the Separation Barrier?

Today’s “sneak preview” of Lemon Tree was sponsored by the women of Brussels film club “Cinefemme” (whose website has an insightful interview with Riklis), and whose members have been invited by the film’s distributor to provide commentary for a DVD “bonus” segment.  They will have much to discuss.

We Are Not Appeased

"Never ask publicly for a favor unless you know it will be granted"

Picking up where I left off yesterday on the matter of appeasement, now that Saudi Arabia has sent President Bush packing without his hoped-for oil production increase, I defer to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, not known for its anti-Bush sentiments.  In "Beseeching the Saudis," the WSJ lets the administration have it:

A cardinal rule of presidential diplomacy is never to ask publicly for favors unless you know in advance they will be granted. The same request by Mr. Bush had already been rebuffed by the Saudis during his visit to Riyadh in January. This time around, the Saudi response was particularly blunt and condescending: "If you want more oil, you need to buy it," said Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister.

Anyone who watched the video clip of the royal audience would have seen a jocular, squirming Bush in the presence of a wooden, unamused King Abdullah.  If ever there was a filmed testament to the sunset of a failed administration, this one will vie with "Mission Accomplished."

The WSJ suggests that the White House fire whoever put Bush up to "this second presidential humiliation" at the hands of his Saudi buddies.  Neither the newspaper nor the President need look very far: Vice President Cheney, whose ties with the oil industry rival the President's own oil credentials, was there on a similar mission in March (see the International Herald Tribune "Bush Hopes Cheney's Mideast Visit Will Rein In Oil Prices").  Oops.

We are reminded by the WSJ of another particularly galling aspect of the Saudi rebuff:

The Administration is defending its decision to sell the House of Saud billions of dollars in advanced weapons, over the increasingly hectic objections of New York Senator Chuck Schumer. The Administration is also proposing to help the Saudis develop civilian nuclear reactors to provide for their energy needs. That may help the Kingdom export more oil by easing its domestic requirements. But we await the explanation for why the world needs another politically unstable Islamic theocracy in possession of radioactive fuel rods.

Need anyone remind the lame ducks on Pennsylvania Avenue that investing billions in arms for unpopular, unstable Gulf monarchies has a way of backfiring on the US?  And, given the "Want more oil? Buy it" response of the Saudis, what have these risky arms deals been "buying" for the US?  Good will?  Try again.

Talking to rivals: squarely in the tradition of American diplomacy

Luckily, there is another type of foreign policy realism being propounded by Senator Barack Obama, whose call for engagement with Cuban, Iranian, or Palestinian leaders has been the target of the "appeasement" slur.  In the wake of the much-criticized Bush remarks, brandishing partisan internal American politics in front of a foreign audience, Senator Obama noted that his approach has been in the mainstream of "the history of U.S. diplomacy until very recently."  "Recently" would be post-January 2001.

When John McCain taunts his Democratic rival about a supposed "endorsement" from Hamas, he is treading on very thin ice.   There's a parallel to the 2004 argument over Osama Bin Laden's supposed preference for Kerry vs. Bush.  In this prophetic piece in London's The Observer of February 15, 2004, Henry Porter notes:

The rather chilling thing is to consider how bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants view the election. Would they rather have a President Kerry or Edwards, who would make overtures to Islam, embrace the UN and heed world opinion, or would they prefer four more years of a man who had done so much to isolate America from the rest of the world?

Osama needs George, and to a degree George needs the mystical fear that Osama evokes. And it is this fear that will see this second-rate, isolationist, spendthrift President re-elected to the White House.

Fast forward to 2008.  If you were Iranian President Ahmadinajad and you wanted to gain domestic popularity and rally your beleaguered citizenry against a foreign foe, would you prefer a conciliatory Barack Obama whose overtures might threaten opening up your regime to outside influence, or a fire breathing John McCain, singing Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran...?  I don't really care who Bin Laden or Ahmadinajad want for president - but I really don't want Americans falling for fear mongering and electing presidents who are their enemies' dreams come true.

When Is It Appeasement?

Is it appeasement (dictionary definition: “1. to bring to a state of calm; pacify: to appease an angry king”) when President George W. Bush flies from Israel to Riyadh to beg King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (source of 79 % of 9/11 kamikazes) to lower the price of his crude oil?

2. “To satisfy; relieve: The fruit appeased his hunger.”  Does sniping at Senator Barack Obama (and then denying that he targeted the Democratic front runner) from the Israeli Knesset satisfy the Republican appetite for Swift-Boating?  Nope, it just whets it – this is an opening salvo in the next phase of a stomach-churning American election campaign.

3. “To yield to the demands of in a conciliatory effort, sometimes at the expense of one’s principles.”  It’s this last definition (courtesy of Random House Webster’s College Dictionary) that Bush presumably had in mind when he warned against “the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

But the root of appeasement is peace, and Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to stave off World War II only gave the word a negative connotation because he failed.  Luckily, this signal failure didn’t give peacemaking a bad name forever, or else we wouldn’t have the Middle East Peace Process as an eternal source of Presidential ambition.

The notion that an American president – a President Obama, for example – would be practicing appeasement if he had an open dialogue with leaders like Iran’s Ahmadinajad and the (elected, as Senator McCain reminds us below) Hamas government in Gaza is very selective, and almost entirely a function of American politics.  President Bush’s favored Palestinian interlocutor, PA President Abbas, hails from the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was for years anathema as a terrorist organization.

Luckily, some elements in the US government have long thought it politic to open up discreet channels of communication.  I once worked for a Republican political appointee ambassador who, in a previous life as a Senate staffer, was a regular interlocutor with Yasir Arafat’s Fatah and the PLO when us diplomats couldn’t even be in the same room as a Palestinian official.  Those back channel contacts eventually led to Oslo and Camp David, and to the modicum of Palestinian self-rule that is allowed to exist.

Bush has been castigated for criticizing (albeit not by name, but he’s kidding no one) the Democratic presumptive candidate while traveling abroad.  From the podium of Israel’s parliament, no less.  But Israel, more than most countries, can claim a “special interest” in the outcome of the US presidential elections.  Often dubbed “the 51st state,” many Israelis hold dual Israeli-US citizenship, and the settlements in the West Bank are especially popular with transplanted American Jewish emigrants.  Bush probably felt sufficiently at home to inject a bit of partisan politics into his address.

But after blasting Obama for supposed “appeasement,” Bush then hops on a plane for Saudi Arabia, where appeasement is happenin’ big time.  You don’t have to be a Michael Moore to note that US consumers help appease Saudi Arabia every day by paying sky-high prices for its oil.  And that of all people, George W. Bush, who owed his pre-presidential oil wealth to his family’s Gulf sheikhdom connections, should now lecture Obama about kowtowing (Webster’s: “1.  To act in an obsequious manner; show servile deference”) to foreign leaders.

And what of Senator John McCain, that “clean” campaigner who touched off the latest firestorm by equating Senator Obama’s openness to discussions with pariah states and organizations with weakness against terrorism?  Today’s Washington Post carries a stinging op-ed by former Clinton Administration official James P. Rubin, who assails McCain’s “guilt by association” attack as hypocrisy of the worst sort.  He recalls a Sky News TV interview with McCain two years ago, after Hamas won freely-contested Palestinian elections, when he asked The Maverick "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"  McCain then:

They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy.  Fatah was not giving them that.

Apparently it wasn’t appeasement then, when the Straight Talk Express was rolling.  Huffington Post has a nice video of the Rubin-McCain interview.  Now, if Michael Moore just had a video of Bush and Abdullah...

(Photo source: "House of Bush, House of Saud," by Craig Unger)