Eric Martin

by Eric Martin

Rich Lowry neatly summarizes the political advantages inherent in claiming the mantle of morality in foreign policy making, as Bush and his neoconservative supporters have attempted to do rather ostentatiously:

Bush’s emphasis on the inherent hunger for freedom is powerful. It clothes his foreign policy in an undeniable idealism. It puts his liberal opponents in a tight spot, because it is awkward for them to object to the kind of sweeping universalism they have always embraced. It might be simplistic, but that is often an advantage in political communication.

Lowry is right in as much as he decscribes a short-term, domestic, political expedient, and Bush has been able to capitalize on this uplifting narrative to great effect, especially early on in his tenure, both in terms of achieving his policy objectives and commanding the public’s support.  Part of this has to do with the attractiveness of the message, especially for those that have the luxury of thumping their chest from a safe distance.  As Rob Farley observed while reviewing an interesting back and forth between Stephen Walt (realist) and Joshua Muravchik (neoconservative):

Indeed; the moral component of neoconservatism has always been the appearance of moral rectitude, rather than any practical effort to achieve moral goals. This makes it particularly appropriate for creatures of the Beltway, who endure no real costs for their moral postures.

However, there are underlying contradictions that limit the effectiveness of using this facade of idealism and, in the end, the rhetoric itself can serve to box-in its purveyors and/or accentuate the hypocrisy.  Take, for example, the pervasive anti-Muslim bigotry amongst the population that Bush draws his support from – a demographic reality that co-exists, uncomfortably, with the fact that Bush’s policies are sold, at least publicly, on the basis of bestowing the gifts of freedom and democracy on various Muslim nations at great cost to the American people. 

Along these lines, Neoconservatives seem to have a tough time deciding if Muslims are uncivilized brutes, congenitally incapable of embracing democracy, or if, to the contrary, they are so ready for American-style governance that simply conducting airstrikes on Muslim nations will cause pro-American democracy to spring up organically like shoots through bomb-tilled soil. 

Then there is the inability of the Bush team to make accommodations for democratic expressions that go against predictions and preferences, such as the outcome in Gaza where elections that were pushed for on a rapid schedule by the Bush administration (against Israeli and moderate Palestinian warnings) resulted in Hamas coming to power.  The Bush administration reacted with hostility to the newly elected government, casting its democracy promoting agenda as a cynical, self-serving and highly contingent brand of idealism.

Iraq, too, has been an interesting case study neoconservative rhetoric on democratization confronting real world democratic outcomes and popular opinion. 

Recall, initially, that the Bush team hoped to put off elections in Iraq for several years, allowing for stewardship by viceroy (kicking it colonial school) and then later a limited sovereign.  However, relenting to pressure from Iraqi leaders like Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani, the Bush team first handed the reins over to CIA asset Iyad Allawi and, next, to an elected Iraqi government that, despite Bush administration hopes/predictions, did not include Ahmad Chalabi or, in any significant measure, Iyad Allawi.  Instead, a coalition, comprised mostly of religious fundamentalist Shiite parties with significant and long standing ties to Iran, emerged as the dominant force.

This was less than ideal from the Bush administration’s perspective, to understate the frustration of purpose: the new Iraqi government would not be a friend of Israel’s, would not countenance being a base for launching attacks on neighboring Iran and would, in fact, quickly open warm relations with Tehran.  And these were the positions of our "allies" – our adversaries were openly attacking our troops and civilian personnel.

Still smarting from the results of the Gaza elections and, to some extent, the Iraqi elections, the Bush administration took a more proactive role in trying to shape the political landscape ahead of regional Iraqi elections – targeting the factions most hostile to a prolonged US military presence (the Sadrists), while bolstering Maliki’s power and authority vis-a-vis the Sadrists and his other rivals.  These actions were pursued under the (most likely false) assumption that Maliki would welcome a prolonged US military presence.  While Maliki’s hand has indeed been strengthened by US efforts (to the extent that he has even begun challenging his closest Shiite allies in some arenas), the end result may be of little value to US policymakers seeking to establish an enduring military foothold in Iraq. 

Months ago Maliki began making noises opposing certain aspects of the rather one-sided strategic framework and SOFA agreements put forth by the Bush administration: specifically, Maliki demanded an actual timetable for complete withdrawal of US troops, control over important national security decisions (actions launched internally and externally, ie) and limitations on the immunity for US personnel sought by the Bush administration.  At the time (and since), there was much speculation about the source of Maliki’s assertiveness: whether he actually found the proposed terms repugnant, or whether he had been forced to oppose them because of their extreme unpopularity amongst the Iraqi population. 

As I wrote at the time: Regardless, our position is untenable in the long run.  Maliki will either push us to the exits as he desires or, eventually, be forced to respond to the dictates of the ballot box or other popular upheaval/challenges even if he would prefer to keep his bodyguards around for longer.  So how would the neoconservative set handle the fruits of its democratization efforts in Iraq when the outcome does not suit its long term designs? 

Unsurprisingly, the McCain camp prefers the "Maliki-is-forced-into opposing us for domestic political concerns" storyline.  As if this would be reassuring to those that favored a long term military presence in Iraq. "Don’t worry, he just has to say that to the Iraqi people to get their votes, but after elections, he’ll go back on his word and the Iraqi people won’t notice."  Or something.

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by Eric Martin

There are a few stories emerging from "Post-Successful Surge Victorious Iraq" worth mentioning.

First, some ominous signs surrounding one of the biggest (if not the biggest) impediments to the establishment of a peaceful, stable Iraq going forward: the resolution of the internal/external refugee crisis.  The population of displaced Iraqis numbers between four and five million (roughly 15-20% of the pre-war population).  Many of those who have fled were either forced out (by threats and/or the killing of family members) or chose to leave due to the instability and dangers present in their neighborhoods.

The problem is that, regardless of the motive for leaving, the residences of these refugees have been, in almost every case, taken over by either the evictors or Iraqis who were themselves evicted from other parts of the country.  As one could imagine, this creates an extremely fraught situation.  There are competing claims to home ownership, historical community ties being ruptured and potential for a new round of "corrective" displacements – all infused with sectarian tensions and a recent history of bloodshed.  Actually, the bloodshed is ongoing despite the success of The Surge: last month alone, there were 366 Iraqi civilian and security forces deaths from political violence that were reported in the press – actual numbers were likely higher as the media doesn’t catch them all.  That’s quite a complex knot to disentangle.

The Iraqi government is making some noises about addressing the problem, but thus far, there has been more talk than action. For example, the Maliki government recently declared that all those that took over homes illegally must vacate the premises, but enforcement of that decree has been non-existent.  Further, Maliki has been offering cash and other inducements to Iraqis abroad, and moving to shut down refugee camps in neighboring countries, but the follow-through on the assistance, again, has been underwhelming.  Marc Lynch offers his take on an article appearing in the Arab media:

Iraqi refugees from abroad: government not keeping its promises just giving us $120 and a pat on the back, instead of $700 and material support, they complain in story from Saudi al-Sharq al-Awsat. What, a gap between Iraqi government’s rhetoric and implementation? I’d be shocked, shocked to learn that.

According to McClatchy, the lack of more comprehensive financial assistance is not the worst of it:

Only a small fraction of the roughly 5 million Iraqis who’ve fled their neighborhoods in fear since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion have gone back, although returns have picked up since the Iraqi government last month began urging people home. […]

Many Iraqi families have returned to their old homes in peace, but a disturbing trend already is emerging: They’re being targeted and attacked, and in some cases killed, for trying to go home. Some have been threatened. Others have found explosives tied to their front doors. Some have had their homes blown up.

The trend, along with an uptick in sectarian and ethnic violence in northern Iraq and growing tensions among rival Shiite factions in the south, is a worrisome development for American political and military leaders who’re increasingly eager to declare victory in Iraq so more U.S. troops can be sent to Afghanistan.

This will, unfortunately, only get worse – and the alternative is equally unsavory.  If the Iraqi refugee populations residing in squalor in foreign countries remains exceedingly high, there is the potential for broader unrest.  Such refugee populations are historically fertile grounds for radicalization and, in turn, such beleagured refugee clusters tend to destabilize host and neighboring states. 

Speaking of sectarian violence, the plight of Iraq’s Christians shows no sign of abatement:

Christians in Mosul are fleeing their homes after a spate of killings this week that left 12 Christians dead in one of the largest Christian communities in Iraq.

The killings follow large protests by the community last month against the passage of the provincial elections law. An article that would give representation to Christians and other minorities was removed from the law before its passage.

Now the last safe haven for Christians is gone, said Canon Andrew White the vicar of St. George’s church in Baghdad.

After a spree of killings and forced evictions of Iraqi Christians in Baghdad last year, many fled to Mosul. But even there they could not escape the danger. In February of this year the Archbishop Paulos Faraj Raho of Mosul was kidnapped and killed. […]

Christians once were estimated to be about 3 percent of the Iraqi population or about 800,000 people.

But as Iraq grew bloody and violent the Christian community dwindled. Now some estimate that more than half of Iraq’s Christians have fled. White believes that the Christian community is about a quarter of the estimated 800,000.

Some have accused the Kurdish peshmerga militia of being behind the anti-Christian activities due to the Christians’ opposition to Kurdish obectives with respect to regional laws, but it is unclear exactly who the perpetrators are.

As for the democratic process, there are serious problems on that front as well:

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by Eric Martin

This brief excerpt from Sarah Palin’s speech at the RNC rather concisely encapsulates much of what is wrong with the Republican Party’s approach to Constitutional protections and individual freedoms:

Al-Qaida terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America … [Obama’s] worried that someone won’t read them their rights? Government is too big … he wants to grow it.

The second phrase highlights some of the internal contradictions in "small government" conservativism.  First of all, the government that is deemed "too big" by Palin is the same government that was enlarged exponentially under a Republican president and a compliant Republican Congress.  So the rhetoric, even in terms of fiscal discipline and budgetary matters, varies wildly from the actual policies.

Second, this statement betrays the lack of regard for individual liberties that undermines the GOP claim to the small government mantle.  For the modern Republican Party, there is little fear expressed with respect to a government being too "big" when it comes to employing police state powers that encroach on rights enshrined in the Constituion (other than Second Amendment rights, to be fair).  In fact, not only is the GOP mute on these matters, it is the party implementing the "big" government policies that weaken individual rights.  When it comes to the GOP’s views on executive authority and police powers, bigger is apparently better.

Getting back to Palin’s speech, the first phrase from that excerpt reveals one of the fundamental misconceptions about the purpose and effect of Constitutional freedoms.  Arguing that suspects deserve habeas corpus rights is not the same as arguing that al-Qaeda terrorists deserve habeas corpus rights (even if, in the process of granting such rights to the accused, some al-Qaeda terrorists will be granted them).  The argument is that when people are accused of a crime, they deserve the basic protections of a legal system that recognizes the incontrovertible fact that sometimes innocents will be detained, and thus the accused deserve a right to an attorney, the right to know the charges being leveled against them, the right to confront witnesses, etc.  You know, innocent until proven guilty.  Republicans, focusing on the reprehensible nature of the criminals sought ("terrorists"), seek to usher in a legal regime that treats anyone accused of terrorism as, by virtue of that accusation alone, an actual terrorist.

Hilzoy recently discussed the case of 17 Chinese nationals that were wrongly detained at Guantanamo and are might finally going to be released after a long an ongoing battle through a Kafka-esque legal system implemented by the Bush administration*.  These Chinese prisoners were not the only innocent people that we have detained at Guantanamo, and elsewhere, who were denied basic legal protections. 

This type of demagoguery in the service of curtailing liberty is not, by any logic, necessarily limited to the realm of law enforcement/executive action in response to terrorism.  It is easy to imagine a determined politician introducing rights-stripping legislation under an emotionally charged title like, say, the "Child Rape and Child Murder Prevention Law."  Under that law, those accused of the heinous crimes of raping and murdering children would be denied some or all of the following: habeas corpus rights, the right to an attorney, the right to confront witnesses and evidence and other protections that are currently denied "terrorists."

Think of the enormous potential for serious and irreversible injustice.  Countless innocent people would be destroyed, without recourse.  Yet, if and when some politicians oppose this Child Rape and Child Murder Prevention Law, the Sarah Palins and John McCains of the world could stand up and say:

Rapists and murderes still plot to savagely assault your children… [Obama’s] worried that someone won’t read them their rights?

And if you think my hypothetical is too fanciful, I invite you to review the recent "developments" in the area of anti-drug laws.

The same type of "presumed guilty" rationale, and commensurate demagoguery of opponents, underlies the push for warrantless wiretapping and other forms of domestic surveilance that erode our search and seizure rights.  Again, as should be obvious, these programs do not infringe on the rights of terrorists alone, so when one is concerned about their impact, that is not the same thing as concern for terrorists.  For example, earlier this week, we learned of this:

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by Eric Martin

The Washington Post reported on a disturbing new development on Friday of last week, but due to the poor timing of the story’s release it has received less attention than it deserves (not only was it released on a Friday, but the day after the highly anticipated vice presidential debate).  The WaPo article tells of a massive new propaganda effort undertaken by the Pentagon in Iraq and elsewhere, including, possibly, the United States itself:

The Defense Department will pay private U.S. contractors in Iraq up to $300 million over the next three years to produce news stories, entertainment programs and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media in an effort to "engage and inspire" the local population to support U.S. objectives and the Iraqi government.

…a lengthy list of "deliverables" under the new contract proposal includes "print columns, press statements, press releases, response-to-query, speeches and . . . opinion editorials"; radio broadcasts "in excess of 300 news stories" monthly and 150 each on sports and economic themes; and 30- and 60-minute broadcast documentary and entertainment series.

While the Bush administration has engaged in generating propaganda-masquerading-as-news in the Iraq theater previously, as Marc Lynch notes, this latest initiative contains a distinction:

In contrast to earlier efforts, where there was supposedly always a "produced by MNF-I" label, these efforts explicitly will not have such attribution.  As one official explains, "They don’t know that the originator of the content is the U.S. government. If they did, they would never run anything."

Maintaining such secrecy is nearly impossible, though, and the damage that inevitably results from the exposure of the scheme is as widespread and significant as it is enduring:

When the payments are exposed, as they inevitably are in today’s global media environment (for example, with page one stories in the Washington Post), they then discredit not only the specific messages but also every other pro-U.S. message which will quite reasonably then be dismissed as "paid for by the United States."  At our panel this week, [Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Support to Public Diplomacy] Mike Doran and others suggested that the key to success in the "war of ideas" is building up credible third party messengers.  Nothing could be more devastating to the credibility of third party messengers than this kind of program. 

At a deeper level, these efforts fatally compromise the long-term objective of building free, credible and independent media as the foundation of a democratic system.  I’ve argued many times that support for free and independent media should be at the center of all efforts to promote reform in the region.  Only a free and independent media can provide the flow of information, the transparency and demands for accountability, and the open contestation of political ideas necessary for real political pluralism and democracy.  Turning the media into a tool for spreading propaganda compromises not only the very media which we should be promoting but also our own credibility in arguing for a free and independent media. 

The other obvious point is that current "war of ideas" and COIN thinking explicity considers U.S. public opinion an important domain of information warfare.  The Post quotes from the contract solicitation this passage which should be deeply disturbing:  one goal is to "communicate effectively with our strategic audiences (i.e. Iraqi, pan-Arabic, International, and U.S. audiences) to gain widespread acceptance of [U.S. and Iraqi government] core themes and messages."  Presenting American audiences as a key target for manipulation through the covert dissemination of propaganda messages should be seen as scandalous, subversive of democracy, and illegal.

Lynch is right that such US-directed propaganda is illegal, but it is not unprecedented – neither for the Bush administration, nor its predecessors.  While the Bush administration famously hired journalists such as Armstrong Williams to shill, surreptitiously, for various domestic policies, some of the CIA’s efforts during the Cold War make the Bush administration’s malfeasance look tame by comparison (both in the CIA’s creation of fake media outlets to launder propaganda, and in influencing/coopting decision makers in charge of other major media organs in order to persuade them to disemmanate government dictated talking points).  But those were simpler times [sigh].

Even if government-paid propagandists refrain from deliberately targeting US audiences, there is no real barrier between foreign news and domestic news. In an increasingly globalized world, stories planted in the foreign press inevitably "blow back" on domestic audiences.  A bombshell, or simply a significant story, reported in the Iraqi press, for example, would be picked up by US media outlets reflexively and as a matter of course.  So the distinction enunciated above might not matter in the end.  Such propaganda will infiltrate our discourse regardless.

What is more troubling, however, is what this reliance on propaganda reveals about the so-called democracy promotion agenda of the Bush administration and the Bush team’s outlook regarding our public image in the region.  Subverting a free and fair press greatly undermines the foundation of democracy in myriad ways.  Further, in seeking to control the flow of information by corrupting the media and other opinion makers, the Bush administration casts a shroud of doubt over any outlet that takes a positive view of US actions.  Ultimately, in a modern setting where revelations regarding this arrangment are bound to find the light of day, the program has the opposite from intended effect. 

Even if undetected, however, it is dubious to what extent programs such as these would be effective in shifting public opinion on key issues.  But then, this is an administration that views public diplomacy as an exercise in convincing foreign audiences that policies which are unpopular for tangible reasons are actually just fine – based solely on the magic of slick marketing.

Back in May, I wrote a post discussing some of these themes while reacting to a claim by Paul Bremer that the use of the word "occupation" to describe the presence of coalition forces in the aftermath of the invasion was "in many ways more important" in generating anti-coalition attitudes in the Iraqi population than the physical presence, and associated, actions of the troops themselves.  A relevant excerpt from that post below the fold:

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