Mark Kleiman has some random thoughts:
Posted by DeLong at March 19, 2003 06:30 PM | TrackBackMark A. R. Kleiman: SOME RANDOM NOTES,
WHILE WAITING FOR THE OTHER SHOE TO DROP
Notes from two long conversations yesterday with pro-war, pro-Bush foreign policy experts:
1. Even if this goes well, it's going to be bloodier than the first Gulf War. But the country hasn't been prepared for that. Saving up trouble.
2. Will Bush really impose a peace deal on the Israelis? He could, and doing so right now, or as soon as the rubble stops smoking in Iraq, would yield some big dividends diplomatically without hurting him much politically. But it would be very uncharacteristic.
3. Good chance SH actually uses chem and bio weapons in the field, and blows the oilfields.
4. Once we win, we're going to start digging up tons of forbidden, which is going to make the doubters look pretty silly.
5. An Afghan-style in-and-out occupation isn't going to make Iraq a democracy. On the other hand, it's not clear that the Iraqis, or the other Arabs, would really hold still for a German or Japanese-style long occupation. Anyway, who do we have who could do the job? Powell could, but would he take it? Clinton might do it well, but Bush would never give him a chance to rehabilitate himself politically.
6. Going back to the Security Council seemed like a good idea at the time, but in retrospect it was a disaster. What Napoleon said about war is right about diplomacy: "If you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna."
7. Not getting France to go along is understandable; a vote of 12-1 with two abstentions would have been a technical defeat, but a diplomatic victory. Not getting Mexico and Chile to go along is astonishing.
8. Turkey was mishandled six ways from Sunday. We should have pulled out all the stops to get them the EU entry date they so desperately wanted last year, putting a chit in our favor bank with them, rather than just trying to pay them off at the moment when we needed them.
9. The theory that Bush was gunning for Iraq from the git-go isn't consistent with his behavior about Kyoto, the International Criminal Court, and the ABM treaty. Given that we were going to need other countries to go along, why annoy them? "It's hard to negotiate effecively when you spend all your time giving people the finger."
10. On the other hand, shafting Fox and Castaneda on the immigration issue happened after 9-11, with Iraq clearly in view. Maybe the real story is a characteristic failure to think ahead and to consider the stakes of other players.
11. Rice and Powell both come out of this looking bad, especially Powell. But he's probably too loyal to quit and to big to fire.
12. Iraq is the easy problem. North Korea is the hard problem. Taking out SH won't be a huge strain, and leaving him in power for a couple of years wouldn't have been very risky. Taking out Kim Jong Il would be extremely hard, and leaving him in power would be extremely risky. The border-crossing precedent we're setting in Iraq isn't important; the precedent that your first nuke makes you invulnerable, which we seem about to set in Korea, is frightening. The case for doing to Yongban what the Israelis did to Osirak -- and doing so without tipping our hand in advance, or asking anybody's permission -- is very strong.
Turkey was mishandled six ways from Sunday. We should have pulled out all the stops to get them the EU entry date they so desperately wanted last year, putting a chit in our favor bank with them, rather than just trying to pay them off at the moment when we needed them.
Um, how?
Turkey really isn't ready for membership in the European Union--yes, it's certainly much richer than Romania or Latvia or Bulgaria, and on par with the Visegrad states, Slovenia, and Estonia, but it fails the political qualifications quite badly.
The Turkish military has far too much power; Turkish ethnic minorities are able to assimilate, but they can't exist as separate entities (never mind the Kurds; consider the Laz for one);
the Turkish police are rather too addicted to torture; et cetera.
Just as importantly, it looks like there won't be much east-to-west migration from central to western Europe; living standards are improving rapidly enough to ensure that populations which are fairly reluctant to migrate within a coutnry won't move elsewhere. Romania and Bulgaria are exceptions to this rule. Even in Romania and Bulgaria, potential immigrant populations are shrinking, if only because national populations are falling; in Turkey, on the other hand, the national population is continuing to grow at a fair clip, and the Turkish population seems as a whole more likely to migrate to western Europe than (say) the Polish. (Never mind the fact that it's uncertain whether Turkey's frontiers are policed well enough to prevent illegal immigration from further afield.)
Pressuring the European Union to admit Turkey before the Turkish state can meet all of the qualifications necessary for membership is about as likely to work as pressuring the United States to admit Cuba to NAFTA before Cuba can get its affairs in order.
(Well, not really, since the European Union is much more than a simple free-trade zone. Mexico could be a liberal one-party state in the first years of NAFTA; a military-dominated Turkey electing representatives to the European Union is simply impossible.)
I'm not sure that the United States could have done anything. Providing the money needed to compensate Turkey for war-related economic disruptions was probably the only thing that could be done. Even then, though, Turks proved to be just as reluctant to support the war as French or Germans. The United States could--and apparently has--try to undercut the elected government by dealing directly with the military, but that would wreck Turkey's chances for EU admission. And so on.
Posted by: Randy McDonald on March 19, 2003 08:53 PMUpon reading these notes, I would have thought that they were the comments of some pragmatic foreign policy observers who did not take sides. But it turns out that these comments are from pro-Bush analysts? Oy veh.
Posted by: andres on March 19, 2003 09:47 PM"9. The theory that Bush was gunning for Iraq from the git-go isn't consistent with his behavior about Kyoto, the International Criminal Court, and the ABM treaty. Given that we were going to need other countries to go along, why annoy them? 'It's hard to negotiate effecively when you spend all your time giving people the finger.'"
This assumes that Bush was wanted or believed that he needed international help. The cockiness of this administration (eg. the term "preponderance") is frightening. Bush has great success domestically with a mix of bluffing, tough talk, bullying, and slogans, which works especially well with his core constituency in the peanut gallery.
It doesn't work in international politics, but he seemed to have expected it to -- if he cared, anyway.
#9 should be translated "I can't believe some of the things that guy did". It's rhetorical -- Bush did do those things.
Posted by: zizka on March 20, 2003 09:26 AMi agree completely with Andres - if these are the thoughts of someone who is pro-bush and pro-war, what does that tell us?
Posted by: howard on March 20, 2003 10:32 AMJust because someone is pro-administration doesn't mean that they can't indulge in armchair quarterbacking like the opposition. They complain about going to the Security Council, they complain about how the Security Council was handled, they complain about the Turks and everything else that didn't go perfectly. I do find the - didn't push hard enough to get the Turks into the EU line - amusing because had this push been even stronger these "experts" would now talk about how this pressure alienated the EU members so much that they didn't support us. Comment No.11 is pure grousing by people who probably think they should have those jobs. Finally I certainly hope that Irag is easy, but if they think that North Korea is difficult because of its nuclear proliferation rather than because it has enough artillery in position to destroy Seoul in a day - well then they are certainly not foreign policy experts with or without the quotation marks.
Posted by: drew craft on March 20, 2003 02:17 PMIf you really want to criticize Powell, why not pick on his handling of Aristide in Haiti? Powell, after all, (with accomplice Jimmy Carter and under the direction of then-President Clinton.) arranged for Aristide's return to power in 1994. Aristide has since engaged proxies (Preval) and thugs to maintain a grip on the little nation, and the problem of "boat people" fleeing and seeking refuge throughout the Carribean and Florida coast is as bad now as it was in '94. Those enamoured of "multi-lateral" solutions may note that the Organization of American States has this past week given Aristide the same sort of deadline the U.S. (and some 40 other "uni-lateralist" nations) gave Saddam of Iraq -- step down NOW. (I think Aristide actually got 10 days instead of 2 -- that's multi-laterism for you...) Also the U.N. Human Rights Commission has deplored conditions in Haiti and proposes to impose a solution: The UNHRC should open an office in Port-au-Prince! That'll help...
As long as we ignore the lost opportunities between '94 and January 2001, the ineffectual diplomacy and multilaterism that Powell has attempted in Haiti make him look really inept.
Or one could argue that his (and Dept State efforts in general) to forge multilateral OAS consensus to clean up festering messes are just being overlooked by the media. Is that oversight is due to liberal media bias or the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy being unable to credit any accomplishment to a black man?
I dunno. I just think that the U.S. relationship to the Carribean, Central America, South America, Korea, China, etc all are part of Powell's (and Rice's) scorecard. It'd be nice if we could spare a few minutes for discussions of topics other than Iraq.