William PFAFF

Punishing the Greeks

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 16:40:00 CET

Paris, February 14, 2012 When the first international effort to impose
an economic austerity regime upon Greece was completed George
Papandreou, the prime minister, surprised and infuriated the negotiators from the IMF, European Commission and European Central Bank by proposing that the draft agreement be submitted to a popular referendum. The negotiators and their governments knew very well that the Greek people would reject it. Mr. Papandreou was hustled out of the limelight, and foreign leaders, the EU, international financial officials, and right-thinking commentators in Europe and the United States all deplored his proposal, since democracy was not part of the deal.

If it had been, some forty-five buildings would not have been burned down in Athens last Sunday night and a hundred thousand or so Greeks taken to the streets, smashing the marble walls of banks and the show windows of luxury shops. If they couldnt express their opinions one way they would do it in another.

This gives reason to doubt that the international austerity plan, or the Diktat, as the Greeks prefer to call it, presented in Athens and reluctantly voted, will actually be carried out. (The vote was 199 members of the National Assembly for, 74 opposed, with 27 abstentions.) That will have the disastrous consequences for Europe, the monetary union and Greece that nearly all have predicted. The figures are such that of the money now promised Greece (assuming that the EUs other national parliaments approve), three-quarters will go to pay current debts. What remains is unlikely to stave off national bankruptcy this spring, and probably Greek exclusion from the Euro Zone. So what has it all been about?

In Greece the opinion is widespread that once again, as in 1917, 1940 and 1947 when, as they are convinced, they were ill-used by the Western great powers, they once again are victims of Western Europe, and especially Germany. They cannot deny the reproaches of economic mismanagement and corruption since joining the EU, but they did not need a German official to propose that a German Gaulieter be sent to take charge of Greeces economy which, after all, is only 2% of the European economy. Another German was overheard confiding to a Portuguese official that if Portugal, also in grave difficulties, needs help, there would be no trouble providing it -- implying that a certain racial hierarchy prevails in European and international economic circles.

Munich & Afghanistan; Signs of War & Peace

Wed, 8 Feb 2012 17:20:00 CET

Paris, February 7, 2012 The annual security conference
in Munich is regularly the scene for the complaints of American
official and semi-official participants deploring Europes failure
to pull its weight in defense, free-riding on American efforts,
and failing to spend more money on transatlantic arms purchases.
Instead they spend money on their own-make arms and military
aircraft, such as the French Rafale and EADs Eurofighter, which they
sell to such overseas markets as India, which otherwise might buy
American.

Courtesy restrains the European participants from asking
what this threat is, against which Europe is being defended by the
United States. The complaint reasonable Americans usually make in
this matter is that the U.S. is massively over-armed against any
existing or plausible future threat to the United States itself.
Surely eleven nuclear carrier groups with accompanying support is not
required to fight the remnants of al Qaeda, nor have they proven
decisive against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Western Europe is modestly and inexpensively armed
because its governments perceive only very modest threats to their
national security, nearly all of them appropriately dealt with by
police and other civilian agencies. The Europeans make combat
airplanes, ships, and other high-technology military equipment,
because on occasion they need them as in the Libyan intervention,
the Falklands affair, and Afghanistan and to maintain their design
capacity and technological and industrial means to manufacture such
things in quantity should they ever be needed, and because they can
be profitably exported.

Stephen Hadley, an former official in ex-Vice President
Rchard Cheneys office, said in Munich that Europe must spend more if
it wants to be a global player. The Europeans regard the George W.
Bush administration record, and now the Obama administrations, and
see the results of global playing: Iraq in wreckage and under
Irans sway, Egypt and Turkey hostile to the United States, Israel
claiming to live in fear for its national existence, and the NATO war
in Afghanistan being lost.

On Afghanistan, Washington is taking stumbling steps towards
accommodation with the Taliban. An American diplomat is now in Qatar
to prepare the ground for preliminary negotiations with the
Taliban. The government of Hamid Karzai has repeatedly threatened to
expel American troops and operations from his country, and the United
States and Pakistan, and its army, are at swords-drawn.

A Sad Story

Thu, 2 Feb 2012 17:10:00 CET

Paris, January 31, 2012 The framework in which most
Americans, including the foreign policy specialists, see the world
has totally changed in a decade. In February 2002 the United States
and Afghanistans Northern Alliance had just won their Blitzkrieg
unseating the Taliban government of Afghanistan, and a new client
government was being set in place. The Economist was to say of it a
year later that optimists believed Afghanistan more stable than at
any time in the past 24 years. Another war, against Iraq, was
confidently being prepared to avenge the Trade Towers
and Pentagon attacks (to which, it was to turn out, Iraq had no
connection), and to create a new Middle East.

Americans in 2002 believed themselves on top of the
world, capable of anything. They took progress for granted. A
leading neo-conservative of the time said we have an Agency for
International Development in the hope that someday Somalia might look
like Norway. Thats what the New Middle East was all about.

A decade, more than a trillion American dollars, and
uncounted thousands of lives later, the Afghan war continues, and the
Iraq war, nominally over, but (officially) with 6,000 American
staff plus their bodyguards left in the country, is not really
over at all. A third American war against a Muslim society, Iran, is
seriously likely.

At the same time Washington conducts and enlarges this
military involvement in the non-western world, the American public,
and again, many of its foreign policy experts and political leaders,
have decided that the United States is in decline, its social
coherence, its sense of unity and purpose lost, divided as never
before by economic class and a newly-felt and newlyexpressed hatred
between the one percent monopolizing its wealth and the excluded
99%. The American and Western economies are badly weakened by a
global recession and potential depression, wrought by Wall Street.
This is no illusion, nor is the widespread conviction that the
American government and its electoral system suffer a crisis of
function, accountability, competence, and venomous political conflict.

Today a leading figure in the policy community, Zbigniew
Brzezinski, writes in his new book that America is in serious
decline for domestic and/or external reasons and that its loss of
international authority risks stalling international efforts to deal
with issues of central importance to social well-being and
ultimately to human survival.

Is Israel's Warmongering Just a Decoy?

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:10:00 CET

Paris, January 24, 2012 The obsession of the American
foreign policy community, as well as most American (and a good many
international) politicians, with the myth of Irans existential
threat to Israel, brings the world steadily closer to another war in
the Middle East.

The debate over Iran takes for granted that the country
soon will have nuclear weapons, and would use them. The same debate
back in 2002-03 over Saddam Husseins alleged possession of WMD's
did the same. After the United States had gone to war against Iraq
no such weapons were found to exist.

The actual winner of the war that followed the American invasion of
Iraq was Israel, which saw Iraq, its principal regional rival,
destroyed at no cost to itself. The military victor of the war, but
politico-strategic loser, was the United States, which destroyed
Iraq, a country in no position to harm the United States, at a
trillion-dollar cost, enormous human suffering and waste, and the
effective transfer of Iraq to Irans zone of military and strategic
influence.

The present debate over Irans nuclear program, like the pre-2003
debate concerning Iraqs non-existent WMD program, has never extended
to the most important question in the matter. What difference would
it make if Iran did have nuclear weapons? What could it do with
them, considering the nuclear deterrent force possessed by Israel,
generally thought the fifth or sixth largest and most sophisticated
nuclear power in the world?

Between the start of the nuclear era to the end of the
Cold War, tens if not hundreds of thousands of earnest scholars,
strategists, pacifist activists, journalistic commentators,
politicians, and prospective victims of nuclear war brooded over how
nuclear weapons might be used in war or cold war. So far as I know,
the only conclusive answer we found (I was, on occasion, one of those
people) was that they were only useful as a threat to deter someone
else from aggression. They cannot stop the aggression, but they will
exact a serious penalty for it.

Wars are Back in Fashion in Washington

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:40:00 CET

Paris, January 17, 2012 Now that Americas primary
elections have eliminated the more implausible contenders for the
Republican presidential nomination, it is possible to take a clearer
look at what the electorate will be up against when the conventions
are over next August, and when the newly-elected president assumes
(or resumes) command of American foreign policy.

Barring the unforeseeable, the Democratic candidate will be Barack
Obama. If the polls, and the wishful thinking of old-school
Republicans, are right, the Republic candidate will be Mitt Romney,
who has displayed the least ignorance of foreign policy issues among
the surviving primary candidates. That does not say much. His
proposal that American policy in the Middle East be wholly submitted
to the approval of the present government of Israel differs from the
other candidates (Barack Obama included; Ron Paul excluded) only by
its degree of grovel and electoral pandering. He could, however, be
elected. That is why he said it.

Nicholas Burns, now of the Harvard Kennedy School, formerly George W.
Bushs Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, recently wrote
in the Boston Globe commending the presidential candidacies of Romney
and Jon Huntsman (now scratched) as representatives of the rich
Republican foreign policy strength in knowledge, judgment and
experience dating back to Dwight D. Eisenhower. One wonders what the General would think of this comment.

The Eisenhower administration, and that of the senior George Bush, who negotiated the Cold Wars end, undoubtedly constitute the peaks of modern
Republican statesmanship. The highest point was provided by Mr.
Eisenhowers premonitory, and fatally ignored, warning against
American militarism, of which we are now the victims.

If Romney succeeds, and does what all the Republican candidates (Paul
excluded) have promised, strike Iran, or sustain Israel in attacking
that country, the United States would begin 2013 in or at the edge of
a new Middle Eastern war, estranged from the European democracies, as
well as from much of the non-western world.

Leaving Afghanistan...

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:50:00 CET

Paris, January 10, 2012 The Afghan governments order a week ago to the United States to close its prison at Bagram Air Force base near Kabul, where it holds unidentified prisoners, came as a shock to Washington, although President Hamid Karzai has before invited the United States to cease its operations in his country because of what he considered infringements of Afghan sovereignty.

This time the demand reportedly was provoked by American acquiescence in the opening of a Taliban representation office in Qatar, interpreted as an American effort to deal directly with the Taliban, short-cutting the Afghan government.

President Karzai has earlier made it clear that he intends to control dealings with the Talabin, since their uprising takes place in his country, meant to replace his government. He also wants to control how American and allied forces leave his country, and on what terms. The Obama administration, which has said that it will pull out U.S. troops this year (although the Pentagon has indicated disagreement), naturally wants to control what happens.

The order to hand over the prison followed Pakistans closure late last year of the important American land supply route to U.S. forces that runs through Pakistan to the Khyber Pass. That decision came after persistent U.S. drone incursions and the unauthorized American raid in Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden.

One might think both Pakistan and Afghanistan are unappreciative of Americas well-meant wars in their countries, and would like us to go home.

Departure from Afghanistan on less than triumphal terms would stir an uproar at home among Republican party patriots. Yet everyone, presumably excepting those patriots, knows what will happen sooner or later. The U.S. will be forced out, directly or indirectly, and Afghan politicians or military leaders will assume control of their country, with or without sponsorship or assistance from the Pakistan or the Indian intelligence services. All that is taking place now is futile. Why not take Hamid Karzai at his word, and leave?

Ron Paul, The Troublemaker

Wed, 4 Jan 2012 19:10:00 CET

Paris, January 4, 2012 The third-place finish of Congressman Ron
Paul in the Iowa Republican caucus demonstrated that Robert Naiman
was justified in writing last Monday (in the web magazine Truthout)
that non-Republican crossover voters would shape the Iowa outcome.

Mitt Romney had narrowly led the pre-caucus
polls, ahead of the array of Christian conservative conformists
chorusing the Fox Television song. Running on a program dismissed by
most observers, Ron Paul led by far among voters 40 and younger, an
outsize lead in a generally older group of voters. The previous
Sundays poll by the Democratic Party-affiliated Public Policy
Polling group had predicted that Paul would attract twice the number of
under-45 voters as Romney, and one-third of the total vote of those
who identified themselves as independents or Democrats.

The main crossover vote-getter issue on which Paul has differed from
all the rest of the candidates is war: his hostility to the
commitment of both Democratic and Republican administrations to
prosecuting undeclared war in the Middle East, South Asia, and
everywhere else harboring what the American government has chosen to
identify as agents of terror, Islamic terrorists, or violent
extremists. Naimans argument was that in a close general election,
as this one may be, Pauls margin of anti-war voters could decide the
outcome.

Americans are not much commited to pacifism. We are a fairly bloody-
minded society, even though for many years given over to
isolationism, which is not at all the same as pacifism. Congressman
Paul is not a pacifist in the classical sense; he served as an Air
Force flight surgeon during the Vietnam War, and in the National
Guard. He is an old fashioned-mind-our-own business American of the
kind that opposes going abroad to seek out monsters to destroy, as
has been the American policy in the Middle East during most of the
last half-century, under both political parties.

The Arabs have Awakened to What?

Fri, 30 Dec 2011 17:34:13 CET

Paris, December 29, 2011 -- There are only three valid reasons why the Middle East, the focus of international attention as 2012 begins, is important to the United States and the European nations. These are energy, immigration, and Israel. Beyond that, there is no evident cause for paying more attention to this region than to such other areas in the world as Africa, Latin America, or Western Asia.

Those reasons themselves are seriously weakened today. The Arab oil states are no longer in a quasi-monopolistic position. There are many other regions with large present and future oil and natural gas reserves. They produce competitively for a diversified and open international market. The United States no longer needs to think that owning and militarily defending Saudi Arabia or any other oil-producer is essential to American security.

The idea of a politically motivated energy producers boycott was tried out by the Arabs in 1973-74 and was found not to work. It is impossible today. Italian, French, American, British and other oil companies may compete today to secure Libyan (or Iraqi) oil contracts, but this is commercial competition, not geopolitics.

Western Europe is under important migratory pressures from the Southern Mediterranean and North African populations. This has serious social and cultural consequences, but they are being managed. There has been a link between migration and Islamic terrorism but the latter is a minor, containable and probably ephemeral phenomenon, one which the post-9/11 American governments have treated, and continue to treat, with something resembling hysteria.

Finally, the Arab and Iranian Middle East is a center of potential military conflict because of the Israel-Palestine confrontation over the Palestinian lands, only because the United States is committed to defend Israel from all threats, thus implicitly underwriting the expanding Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. This now is under question in the United States, and Israel itself is changing in a way that weakens the link.

What exactly is it today that is awakening in the Middle East? It is the people. They demand justice. But are they capable of creating just and modern governments?

A Democratic Rival to Obama? And a Reply to Critics

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 19:00:00 CET

Paris, Dec. 20, 2011 A week ago, in the newspaper The Providence Journal (in Rhode Island), the publisher of Harpers Magazine, John R. MacArthur, wrote that President Barack Obama through expedient political compromises has lost the moral authority that an American president must command, and therefore has lost his right to a second presidential term. Mr. MacArthur quotes in support of his argument the veteran writer and journalist Bill Moyers, who was a member of President Lyndon Johnsons staff from 1965 to 1967, and since has become a prominent commentator on public television and as a writer in liberal and Democratic party circles.

American history is not beyond repeating itself. At the end of November 1967, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, a respected political figure but lacking a national reputation, declared that under the Lyndon Johnson Administration no end seemed in sight to the futile Vietnam war, and that he was going to challenge what seemed becoming a tragedy for Americans and for the people of Indochina. He declared his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination of 1968.

Almost exactly two months later the Tet Offensive occurred in Vietnam, a series of attacks across the country on Americans and on the South Vietnamese government. It took 26 days for American and South Vietnamese forces to retake the former imperial capitol city of Hue, one of the cities overrun by the insurgent offensive. This delivered an enormous psychological and political blow to Americans at home and to United States forces in Vietnam, even though the Vietnamese Communists suffered heavier casualties than the Americans. The response of General William Westmoreland, U.S. commander in Vietnam, was to request more than 200,000 men in reinforcement. There already were a half million American troops in the country. Washington refused the request, and Westmoreland was replaced and kicked upstairs to a desk command in Washington.

Lyndon Johnson, John F. Kennedys successor, had already indicated that he would be a candidate to succeed himself. In the New Hampshire primary, Senator McCarthy, until then taken by the press as a vanity candidate whose main supporters were students and impractical liberals, nearly defeated Johnson. As a result, on March 16, Senator Robert F. Kennedy announced that he too would run for the presidency. On March 31, President Johnson, who had always hated the war, announced his own withdrawal.

SPECIAL ARTICLE: How Much Progress Have We Made?

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 16:58:02 CET

How Much Progress Have We Made?
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
NOVEMBER 24, 2011

by William Pfaff

The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution
by Francis Fukuyama
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 585 pp., $35.00

It is natural to assume that we were meant to become what we are, and that human existence has an intelligible significance, purpose, or conclusion. Francis Fukuyama has long since apologized for his declaration in 1992 that

what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as suchand the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
Man had made his way from primeval slime through bands, tribes, states, and their variations, until arriving at the democratic state and liberal capitalist economy presided over by George H.W. Bush. This progression was what it had been all about from the start, and now it was over, with only boredom ahead, so Fukuyama warned at the time.

Being a reasonable man, Fukuyama soon acknowledged that it was not really all over, and that we certainly were not doomed to perpetual boredom.1 Au contraire, as not only the French would say. In 2006, in America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy, he wrote that he had newly concluded that

neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, [had] evolved into something that I can no longer support[having been used during the 1990s] to justify an American foreign policy that overemphasized the use of force and led logically to the Iraq war.
That 2006 book was a straightforward foreign policy essay rejecting a Bush administration foreign policy that rested on concepts like regime change, benevolent hegemony, unipolarity, preemption, and American exceptionalism. It dealt with how a different American policy intended to democratize the Middle East might employ soft power to obtain the reform of international institutions, with the aim of establishing a global order of democratic accountability, based on sovereign states.