ForeignPolicy – Page 19 – The Wrongologist

Military Sales Complicate Our Middle East Strategy

The Hill quotes President Obama’s impromptu press conference on July 16:

We live in a complex world and at a challenging time…And none of these challenges lend themselves to quick or easy solutions, but all of them require American leadership. And as commander in chief, I’m confident that, if we stay patient and determined, that we will, in fact, meet these challenges.

Of course it is a complex time. But we make our lives much more complicated by the arms deals we make with other countries. In the last three years, the US has provided tens of billions of dollars in military weapons through Foreign Military Sales (FMS) to the United Arab Emirates (UAE); Qatar; Kuwait; and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).

Some are designed to protect against airborne missile retaliation and air attacks. For example, the US supplied Qatar ($9.9 billion), Kuwait ($4.2 billion), and UAE ($1.1 billion) with Patriot anti-missile systems and UAE also acquired a $6.5 billion theater anti-air defense (THAAD) system. The US also sold KSA $6.7 billion worth of KC-130 aerial refueling tankers, the UAE $4 billion and KSA $6.8 billion of munitions including “bunker buster bombs,” typically used to attack hardened targets like nuclear facilities (are you listening Iran?). Qatar received a $1.2 billion early warning radar; KSA $1.3 billion for 30 patrol boats for use in the Gulf of Hormuz; Qatar spent $3 billion on Apache attack helicopters used for special operations insertions. The list also includes Javelin missiles, F-18’s and F-16’s, and Sidewinder anti-air missiles.

Israel is the largest recipient of US Foreign Military Financing (FMF). For FY 2015, the President’s request for Israel adds up to about 55% of our global FMF funding. Annual FMF grants to Israel represent about 25% of the overall Israeli defense budget. We also agreed to sell Israel 19 F-35s in 2010, with options to increase that order to 75 planes. We have recently approved the only foreign sale of the V-22 Tilt-rotor Osprey aircraft to the Israelis for $3 billion.

Business Insider reports that we may have made our lives more complicated by weapons sales to Qatar. You probably are not aware that Qatar is one of Hamas’s reliable international partners:

Last week, Qatar closed the largest sale of American weaponry so far this year, purchasing $11 billion worth of Patriot missile batteries and Apache attack helicopters. The sale revealed that Qatar hasn’t exactly been lacking in strategic daring in the wake of its failed bet on Muslim Brotherhood-linked political movements throughout the Middle East.

Qatar is about the size of Connecticut. It has fewer than 300,000 citizens. The rest of its 2.1 million inhabitants are expatriates and foreign workers. Why does it need all these weapons?

The Israeli-Hamas fight shines a light on Qatar. The New York Times reported on the Qatari Emir’s 2012 visit to Hamas-controlled Gaza:

The emir, Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, pledged $400 million to build two housing complexes, rehabilitate three main roads and create a prosthetic center, among other projects, a transformational infusion of cash at a time when foreign aid to the Palestinian territories has been in free fall.

He was the first-ever leader of a country to meet with Hamas in Gaza. Business Insider quotes Jonathan Schanzer, the vice president at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who said that Qatar is “believed to be the primary financier of Hamas,” which has estimated annual operating expenses of around $1 billion. In June, Qatar attempted to transfer money for long-unpaid civil service salaries for Gaza-based Hamas members through the Arab Bank, a transaction that the Bank disallowed after apparent US pressure.

Qatar is arguably a counter-productive actor in the context of the biggest Israeli-Palestinian crisis since the Second Intifada of a decade ago. Business Insider reports that David Weinberg, a scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said that Congress hasn’t been concerned enough with Qatar’s policies to put a hold on weapons sales, and it confirmed the Obama administration’s recent nominee as ambassador to Doha without controversy:

It’s not clear whether Congress has the stomach for a fight over these issues with an ostensible ally when…the administration seems to be vouching for Qatari conduct.

Yes, we vouch for conduct we can’t control, or in some cases, really influence. Why is it that the first thing our lawmakers think of is “send them more arms”?

The powder keg of the Middle East has been filled in part by our policymakers’ conflicted views of Middle East politics, but largely by the political influence of America’s military contractors.

Thanks to our Congress and President, it waits only for another spark to set it off. If and when that happens, count on someone in the administration or in Congress saying: “who could have anticipated THAT happening?”

Friday Music Break – July 25, 2014

Today we say hello and goodbye to Black 47. The band got started in 1989 by Larry Kirwan and Chris Byrne. Its name comes from the traditional term for the summer of 1847, the worst year of the Great Irish Famine. They developed a niche, playing a combination of traditional Celtic music infused with Rap and other contemporary rock genres.

B47 is an unblinkingly political band, playing rock ‘n’ roll based on Irish roots, with songs covering topics from the Northern Ireland troubles to US civil rights, Iraq and urban unrest in contemporary New York.

Heart, intellect and a high value on freedom, is what Black 47 is all about. The Wrongologist has been a fan since the early 1990’s. The group will amicably disband on November 8, 2014, exactly 25 years after their first gig in the Bronx.

Right after 9/11, Black 47 appeared regularly at Connolly’s Pub in Manhattan, playing what Kirwan has described as intensely emotional shows in order to provide fans who had lost loved ones an outlet for their grief and loss. Those shows were channeled into their album New York Town.

But let’s go back to an earlier time. Here is “Green Suede Shoes” off their 1996 album of the same name:

Lastly, here is “Downtown Baghdad Blues” from their CD IRAQ. IRAQ came out in 2008 and was popular with troops serving in Iraq and it was written in part, from soldiers’ letters:

Here are the first and last stanzas of Downtown Baghdad Blues’ lyrics:

Got a buddy in Najaf, he’s playing it straight
Prays to the Lord Jesus Christ every night
Got a homey in Samarra goin’ up the wall
Every time he hear an Islamic prayer call
Me, I don’t care much for Jesus or Mohammed
They don’t stop bullets to the best of my knowledge
Later for the both of you, catch you in eternity
Hopefully, towards the end of this century

I didn’t want to come here, I didn’t get to choose,
I got the hup, two, three, four Downtown Baghdad Blues.

Mission accomplished, yeah, up on deck
Got no armor for my Humvee, left facin’ this train wreck
Shia don’t like me, want Islamic Revolution
Sunni say civil war is part of the solution
Maybe someday there’ll be peace in Fallujah
McDonald’s on the boulevard, Cadillac cruisin’
I’m tryin’ hard to keep this whole thing straight
But will someone tell me what am I doin’ here in the first place?

What Can America Learn from its Competitors?

(This is the third column about US foreign policy. The other two columns are here and here.)

The past two columns have argued that our foreign policy does not employ any non-military strategies in areas where we compete with other nations or where there is local or regional conflict.

We have an insular view of our competition. We tend to see Vladimir Putin as a military strategist, massing his troops on the border of Ukraine, rolling over Crimea, providing the missiles to shoot down civilian airliners. Some, or all of that may be true, but Mr. Putin is a busy man who also uses soft power and commercial power. China, our great Asian competitor, follows a similar strategy to Russia’s.

We could learn a lot from our competitors. Last week saw Russia and China making soft power and commercial initiatives in South America. The Economist reports that Brazil’s President Rousseff hosted Mr. Putin, and China’s Xi Jinping as part of a summit of the BRICS group of emerging countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa).

While in South America, Mr. Putin also visited Cuba where he announced plans to re-open an intelligence base. Russia also agreed to write off 90% of Cuba’s $35 billion Soviet-era debt. Putin then went on to pitch the export of Russian nuclear technology to Argentina and a $1 billion anti-aircraft missile defense system to Brazil.

Mr. Xi met with the leaders of CELAC, a club of all 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries. In Venezuela he met with officials regarding China’s $50 billion in oil-backed loans. Chinese trade with the region has grown more than 20-fold in this century:

China has become a big investor, trading partner and lender in the region. While Latin America’s ties with China are far more recent than those with Russia, they are also much more important. Russia, which had made major inroads into Latin America in the 1960’s and 1970’s is now playing catch-up in many countries, and is closest to Venezuela.

By contrast, the US has a history of attempted and successful overthrows of governments, and meddling that have kept South America suspicious of our motives for decades. We have diplomatic problems with Brazil stemming from the NSA’s tapping of Ms. Rousseff’s personal mobile phone. We are deeply involved in a debt default to private US hedge fund lenders by Argentina, which was heard by our Supreme Court, who found in favor of the lenders not the country. We continue to view Cuba through a Soviet-era lens. The region no longer looks only to the United States and Europe.

While the BRICS countries were in Brazil, they agreed to establish a New Development Bank (NDB) at their summit meeting. The NDB will have a president (an Indian for the first six years), a Board of Governors Chair (a Russian), a Board of Directors Chair (a Brazilian), and a headquarters (in Shanghai). They also created a $100 billion Contingency Reserve Arrangement (CRA), meant to provide additional liquidity protection to member countries during balance of payments problems.

The BRICS wanted a vehicle that matches their rising economic strength, and they wanted a bigger voice than they have in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Although the BRICS are one-fifth of the global economy, they are just 11% of the votes at the IMF. The BRICS bank/CRA could challenge World Bank-IMF hegemony. The new bank’s partners already lend more than the World Bank, which made $52 billion in loans last year, while China made loans of $240 billion and Brazil made $88 billion.

The WaPo Monkey Cage reported that Mr. Putin extolled the NDB and CRA as a way to prevent the “harassment” of countries whose foreign policy clashes with America or Europe (like his annexation of Crimea, perhaps?). They also observed that Mr. Xi Jinping sees a geopolitical role for the BRICS as part of his push to set up a new alternative to US ‘hegemony’. Mr. Xi has a vision of China as a leader of the non-aligned nations, a concept first developed in the 1950s. He says this despite taking an increasingly militarized stance on disputed maritime borders in Asia.

Taking a step back, China and Russia are seeking economic dominance of huge swaths of the world, while the US is trying to maintain its current dominance of the same swaths.

And one way China and Russia attempt to do this is through trade, investment and lending, while the US uses military and currency dominance. One major issue in the next decade or two will be whether the dollar can remain the world’s reserve currency. Although at this moment there is no contender in sight, the BRICS’ NDB and CRA could be the first step in China and Russia’s grand plan.

How we respond with soft power, how well we solve our domestic economic problems will go very far towards determining whether the US can blunt the geopolitical challenges from China and Russia.

Guns ain’t gonna get it done.

Can We Learn from Our Middle East War?

Yesterday, the Wrongologist wrote that we do not have a non-military response to any foreign geopolitical problem, that we fail to recognize what is defeating us, or why things are happening that are beyond our control.

Andrew Bacevich has an article in Notre Dame Magazine, entitled: “Lessons From America’s War for the Greater Middle East” that opens the door to understanding how to begin to make things better. He makes the point that for well over 30 years, the US has been engaged militarily in various parts of the Islamic world, and no end to that involvement is in sight. Bacevich asks:

What is the nature of the military struggle we are waging?

After 9/11, we called it the Global War on Terror. Bacevich says we should be calling it America’s War for the Greater Middle East. The original premise was that the Islamic world poses a growing threat to vital US national security interests, and the application of hard power would enable the United States to check those threats and thereby preserve the American way of life. Bacevich points out:

At the time President Carter declared the Persian Gulf a vital national security interest — that was the literal meaning of the Carter Doctrine — he did not intend to embark upon a war. Nor did he anticipate what course that war was going to follow — its duration, costs and consequences.

What Carter and his presidential successors found in the ME caused them to initiate a sequence of military actions that collectively should be called a war. The dots connect. Seemingly disparate events such as the Beirut bombing in 1983, the “Black Hawk Down” debacle of 1993 and the Iraq invasion of 2003 (plus others) form part of a single narrative. Acknowledging the existence of that narrative — seeing America’s War for the Greater Middle East as a whole — is a prerequisite to understanding where we are today. From Bacevich:

Let me state plainly my own overall assessment of that war. We have not won it. We are not winning it. And simply pressing on is unlikely to produce more positive results next year or the year after

Bacevich lists “10 lessons” we should take from the “Middle East War” if we are going to make our future different from the past. Let’s review a few:

First, the center of gravity:

The center of gravity refers to the factor upon which a war’s outcome ultimately turns. It could be a valuable terrain, an army or a city. Bacevich says that Carter and George H. W. Bush thought the terrain was the desert. But the key terrain in the ME War is urban, and people are this war’s center of gravity. That means we can’t just kill adversaries, but we must influence urban populations to succeed. When American soldiers venture onto this key terrain they are alien intruders. They arrive in cities like Baghdad or Kabul as heirs to a Western civilization that has seldom furthered the well-being of Muslims.

The phrase “Anglo-American” for us, conjures up glorious memories of a partnership forged to free a continent gripped by Hitler. Islamic residents of the Middle East inevitably see “Anglo-American” purposes as a desire to conquer.

Sixth, the US military system:

9/11 revealed defects in America’s approach to raising its military forces. Notwithstanding the virtues of a professional military, notably durability and tactical prowess, the all-volunteer army has failed. It encourages political irresponsibility. It’s undemocratic. It turns out to be exorbitantly expensive. And it hasn’t won a war.

It makes the relationship between the US military and US society dishonest. Rhetorically, we “support the troops”, but the support is seldom more than skin-deep. As authorities in Washington commit US forces to wars that are unnecessary, or ill-managed, or unwinnable — Americans seem close to indifferent. The bungled rollout of Obamacare generated both public attention and outrage, while a bungled military campaign would only elicit shrugs.

Our reliance on professional soldiers relieves citizens of any responsibility to contribute to the nation’s defense. Can that be a good thing?

Seventh, the political economy of war:

Washington’s appetite for waging war in the ME has exceeded the willingness of young Americans to volunteer for military service, and the ability for the standing army to continue the fight for 12+ years. This has created a gap: Too much war, too few warriors.

This gap has created an opening for profit-minded “private security firms” in the war zone. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, contractors ultimately outnumbered uniformed military personnel. The results have fallen well short of being satisfactory. Waste and corruption have occurred on a colossal scale — so much so that the Pentagon is literally unable to say where all the money went. War has always created opportunities for some people to make money. America’s War for the Greater Middle East has become a means for many private firms and individuals to get rich.

Ninth, our regional allies:

The longer America’s War for the Greater Middle East drags on, the more apparent it becomes that Washington has done a lousy job of picking allies. Consider Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, for example. The United States seeks to reduce the prevalence of violent Islamic radicalism. The governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia actively promote it. It’s time to stop pretending otherwise.

Then there is Israel. US interests and those of the Jewish state have diverged. To ensure the security and well-being of its citizens, Israel vigorously employs its military muscle to preempt perceived threats and ensure Israeli control of vital terrain and resources.

The chief US interest in the region lies in promoting stability. Anything else falls into the category of “nice to have.” In that regard, the US has an interest in responding to the grievances of the Palestinian people. Yet the government of Israel will respond to those grievances only on Israeli terms. In the meantime, the persistence of those grievances provides either a genuine cause of, or a pretext for, anti-American and anti-Western attitudes across much of the Islamic world.

When it comes to waging the War for the Greater Middle East, Israel belongs in the same category as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan: As allies, all three are unhelpful.

Bacevich closes by saying:

Does the Islamic world pose a problem for the US? You bet, in all sorts of ways. But after more than three decades of trying, it’s pretty clear that the application of military power is unlikely to provide a solution

His Tenth issue is religion. But, he has a simplistic view of the role of religion in the failure of our military strategy for the Middle East. Read his comments and then draw your own conclusions.

The solution, if there is one, must be found by looking beyond the military realm. If we were for example, to become the primary supplier of humanitarian aid to the displaced people in the Middle East, we could position ourselves as a positive force for change among many millions of Muslims, not just another country in a long line of infidel conquerors.

Read his entire article here.

Did 9/11 Change Everything?

“He didn’t know what was defeating him, but he sensed it was something he could not cope with, something that was far beyond his power to control or even at this point in time comprehend.” –Hubert Selby Jr.

The Wrongologist has changed the blog’s “Quotes We Like” sidebar to add the quote above. The quote is from Selby’s Requiem for a Dream. He also wrote Last Exit To Brooklyn. These are two gritty American novels of their time and place. Exit was published in 1964 and presents a view of 1950’s Brooklyn NY. Requiem was published in 1978. Both were made into movies. Selby died in 2004.

In a Salon article in 2000, Selby is quoted about Requiem:

The dream I’m referring to in the book, of course, is the great American dream: prosperity, property, prestige, etc. And the fact that it’ll kill you dead. Striving for it is a disaster. Attaining it is a killer. It takes many forms, and the results are not happy. It’s not a feel-good thing

Selby continues:

‘Requiem’ is about the cancer of that dream…Of course, there are a lot of people who are successful who work very hard. They’re not all George W. Bush. But the point is they’re misguided. That’s not what life is about. We believe, probably more than anywhere, that life is getting all this material stuff. It’s a case of misguided ambition and desire

We can take this further. Today, America doesn’t know what is defeating it. America senses that it can’t cope, that there are things happening that are beyond our control or comprehension:
• We can no longer solve our domestic problems
• We are powerless to deal with the Malaysian airline disaster in Ukraine
• We can’t resolve the tri-partite struggle in Iraq
• We can no longer restrain Israel in its non-proportional response to Hamas
• We are no longer on the same side as our long-term Middle East allies, Saudi Arabia and Egypt
• We can’t figure out a non-military response for China’s initiatives throughout Asia

In fact, we no longer have a non-military response to any foreign problem. The power strategies that we employed throughout the 1950’s, continuing down to the end of the Soviet Union no longer work. Back then, we played chess, moving pieces across the board. We used whichever proxies or allies were at hand, we overthrew elected governments, thereby violating our own ideology. We supported and installed dictatorial governments. We promised freedom and prosperity, while helping to deliver hegemony, based on our military intervention, or the threat of it.

Today, we have no answers, only posturing from all of our leaders. We have become the kind of people who criticize, not the kind of people who can solve problems.

We are no longer king-makers in the third world, the neo-conservative approach of use of military power cannot stand in the face of asymmetric warfare and the devastating superiority of IEDs to up-armored military vehicles.

From Ian Welsh:

Deny the fruits of western ideology to those who reach for them, and of course they will turn against you. Pervert them even within your own countries by undermining your own democratic principles and by concentrating wealth and income in the hands of a few, while impoverishing the many; make it clear that modern neo-liberal capitalism doesn’t spread prosperity to even the core nations, and you have set up one of the preconditions of not just hegemonic collapse, but of internal collapse of a civilization

And here is Welsh’s money quote:

People who do not believe in the genuine goodness of what they are fighting for, hardly fight for it at all

That is what we see in Iraq. More importantly, that is what we see in America. Today, no one believes in the genuine goodness of what they are fighting for, be they job-hunting Millennials, unreconstructed 1960’s liberals, or today’s money-grubbing Republican and Democrat politicians.

When you no longer know how to solve problems, you turn to what is easy. You buy the next shiny object, you live through the lives of the rich and famous. Snark and incivility replace facts and discussion.

There was a display in the 9/11 Museum that showed a piece of debris about 3’ high by 6’ wide and 12’ long. It was rusty and seemed to be sedimentary in nature, visibly comprised of metal, concrete, and wires. It is actually part of 5 floors of the Trade Center, compressed by weight and softened by intense heat. Nothing of the desks, computers, phones and people are distinguishable in this artifact. The Museum calls it a “composite”. It brings home the destructive power of the falling towers on 9/11:

Photo is from before the “composite” went on display

After the Towers’ fall, the news media said that 9/11 changed everything, and we believed it. But changes to our view of the world, and its view of us, had started long before that. We stopped learning about geopolitics in the 1960’s, substituting false analogies and military aid to local strongmen for true knowledge of how to change the world.

Since then, we have been compressed by the heat and weight of events we cannot understand. If you think about it, our decline after 9/11 came because we panicked, spent all of our money on pointless wars, and gave up our core values in the name of an illusion of safety, and pure vengeance.

So, yes, America doesn’t know what is defeating it. America senses that there are things happening that are beyond its control or comprehension.

But these things are knowable, and fixable. Hopefully, by Americans.

Bigger Threat: ISIS or Congress?

What is behind the fear of ISIS in the West? The ISIS crisis in Iraq and its parallel in Syria challenges both governments as well as the status quo in the Middle East. But why would people believe that this band of fighters is an existential treat to the West? Attorney General Eric Holder shared his alarmism yesterday that the threat from ISIS is:

…more frightening than anything I think I’ve seen as attorney general

ABC News headlined “See the Terrifying ISIS Map Showing Its Five-Year Expansion Plan,” with the black flag of the Caliphate spreading like spilled crude oil across Africa, Central Asia, the Balkans, and Spain.

Lt. Gen. Joseph L. Votel, head of the Joint Special Operations Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last week:

There’s risks to allowing things just to try to resolve themselves, particularly when there are interests that could affect our country…

All of this jowl-shaking goes on while the Obama administration is tumbling to the fact that there is no on-the-ground military option for us. According to a classified report leaked to The New York Times, our top brass believe:

That only about half of Iraq’s operational units are capable enough for American commandos to advise them if the White House decides to help roll back the advances made by Sunni militants in northern and western Iraq over the past month

Since Iraq’s political deadlock doesn’t look like it will be broken anytime soon, the US can’t take Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Shiite-sectarian side in a war against Iraq’s Sunnis without real repercussions from the billion Sunnis around the world.

But how serious is the ISIS threat? Most estimates say they have a core of perhaps 10,000 soldiers and maybe another 10k of new recruits. They are fighting the Syrian Army, Iranian-backed militias, the YPG, the Peshmerga, Al Nusra Front, the Free Syrian Army, in addition to the “Iraqi army” and Iraqi Shiite militias.

Let’s remember that we couldn’t hold Iraq with 168,000 troops, and the most advanced military equipment on earth. So the chance that ISIS can seize or even temporarily hold portions of Baghdad with some fraction of 10,000 is zero. From Gary Brecher at Pando News:

ISIS is about as scary as your neighbor’s yappy Shih Tzu: all noise and no teeth. Let’s just sober up, for Christ’s sake, and remember we’re talking about a half-assed Sunni militia that couldn’t face up to Assad’s mediocre Syrian Arab Army and still hasn’t found a way to occupy Sunni Iraqi towns that were outright abandoned by the [Iraqi] Army

ISIS is spread quite thin, but the Pentagon’s report says that Iraq’s armed forces and security apparatus are so badly run, so infiltrated with Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen and informers from ISIS, that there isn’t much of an opening for greater US involvement. The report is based on the findings of six teams of American Special Operations forces who were tasked with assessing the Iraqi Army that America trained and equipped at a cost of more than $25 billion.

Yet, in a show of cognitive dissonance, James Dubik, the retired Army Lt. General who oversaw the training of the Iraqi Army in 2007 and 2008, said that Iraq’s security forces could make gains against ISIS even if only half its divisions were effective, but that an advisory effort was very important:

Even if half was whipped into good enough shape, that would be enough to turn the tide

At a July 3rd Pentagon news conference, General Dempsey noted that, while Iraqi security forces were capable of defending Baghdad, they were not capable on their own of launching a counteroffensive and reversing the ISIS gains. So today, the three factions—Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shia Arabs—are holding their own, consolidating their turf, not trying very hard to occupy the other groups’ territories.

This is an existential crisis for America?

Did we liberate Iraq, or did we destroy it? If we destroyed Iraq, are we responsible for restoring the infrastructure to its previous capabilities? Taxing ourselves to restore Iraq might teach us that we shouldn’t attack countries that are not threatening us, but we can’t afford to pay that bill.

We have the most advanced military in the world, there is no real second place to us in military might. Yet as a nation, we are failing ourselves. We are down the global ladder when it comes to healthcare, public education, repairing our infrastructure and providing social services. We can’t get out of our own way on policy because of our divided politics. We are the global leader in incarcerating our own citizens.

Why do we look at ISIS and say that they are our existential threat?

Like Pogo said: “we have met the enemy, and he is us”.

An Inept Foreign Policy Team

A ton of issues confront America’s foreign policy these days, and it seems that the success of the Obama-Kerry team worsens by the week:
• We back the Ukrainian government in a shooting war with its own citizens
• We can’t get on the same page with Europe regarding Russian sanctions
• Kerry couldn’t get a ceasefire deal in Israel for the current crisis
• Iraq shows that our huge expense on military and police training was a sham. We are now backing a failed state
• Kerry is trying (along with the 5 permanent members of the Security Council + Germany) to close a nuclear deal with Iran by July 20th – yet talk has moved on to debating the length of an extension to the deadline, not just the substance of the deal
• Kerry moved to defuse the electoral crisis in Afghanistan , but his effort had little effect

We could add to this list Syria, Egypt, Libya and China. Oh, and our little spying problem with Germany, or our little banking problem with France.

It is tempting to say President Obama and his Secretary of State are accident-prone, given to stumbles on the international stage. There may be some truth to that. We can say they inherited a set of policies with enough inertia that no single administration could completely alter the outcomes.

That’s all true, but we cannot point to a situation where things have gotten better.

Let’s focus on Afghanistan. Jim White at Emptywheel on Mr. Kerry’s trip to resolve the Afghan electoral crisis:

Three short weeks from tomorrow marks the date on which Afghanistan’s new president is to be sworn in. The problem, though, is that Abdullah Abdullah refuses to believe that he could have beaten Ashraf Ghani by a million votes in the first round and then lost to him by a million votes in the runoff a few weeks later

Kerry did not solve the crisis, but he did lay hands on the next ruler. Pictures can say much more than the words. Check out this photo of Kerry with the two candidates.

Reuters carried these photos of Ghani and Abdullah with Kerry In their story on Kerry’s visit to Kabul. Standing in front of the same backdrop of US and Afghan flags, the photo of Ghani and Kerry could pass as a propaganda photo with Ghani at his inaugural as the new president.

The photo with Abdullah, on the other hand, shows an uncomfortable Abdullah in a sideways glance at Kerry, who seems uninterested in shaking hands, as he did with Ghani.

Perhaps Abdullah and Kerry did shake hands, but Reuters selected a photo that seems to capture the essence of the current political crisis.

Kerry and the UN proposed a special audit of suspected fraudulent votes. Outgoing President Hamid Karzai is backing the proposal, which involves an audit of votes from 8,000 polling stations, or about 43% of the 8.1 million ballots cast. From the New York Times:

…within minutes, Mr. Abdullah’s campaign said it had already made clear to UN officials that the plan was not acceptable…A senior aide to Mr. Abdullah said the campaign had its own plan, which would entail audits of votes from about 11,000 of the roughly 22,000 polling stations

So, two plans. What could go wrong? More from Jim White:

The huge problem that Afghanistan faces is that there is no real way to audit this election after the fact… outside of Kabul, Afghan society is structured around village life and women often live their entire lives without going outside the walls of the family compound. Village elders carry huge influence for all residents of the village…

White quotes Anand Gopal, from his book, No Good Men Among the Living, pg. 261, on the 2009 election:

The goal was to ensure that women cast ballots, or, even better, that their husbands did so on their behalf. The men…performed the valuable work of liaising with the village elders and maleks, for whom a vote was not an exercise of democracy but a down payment on access, an effort to ensure that the right people were in power when the time came to call in a favor

So votes typically came in blocks, and apparently, it isn’t unusual for a village to report 90% support for a single candidate. Just how could the UN go about auditing these ballot boxes?

All of our money and all of our young peoples’ lives lost, for dueling ballot box-stuffing, with each side claiming the other is at fault, while vaguely threatening some kind of military force.

Kerry is smiling at the guy who is a member of the majority ethnic group and has the backing of Karzai. And of course, Kerry won’t look at the guy who doesn’t want to do what Kerry did in 2004 – go away quietly.

Apparently, from the perspective of the conventional American viewpoint, Ghani is the “legitimate” winner with a million-vote lead. Backing Ghani offers the Administration and the Pentagon an option to delay US withdrawal from Afghanistan to assure a peaceful transition.

Regardless of Mr. Obama’s true intentions, it appears corporate contractors and military suppliers will get another feed at the trough.

Go Team Kerry!

Republicans Want To Repeal Obscure Tax Law

Reuters reported last week that the Republican National Committee (RNC) approved a resolution that adds the repeal of an Obama administration law to its 2014 platform. The law is designed to crack down on offshore tax dodging.

The legislation that the Republicans are targeting is called the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA). What is FATCA? According to Wikipedia, FATCA requires US citizens, including individuals who live outside the US, to report their financial accounts held outside of the US, and requires foreign financial institutions to report to the IRS about their American clients.

Although FATCA was passed by Congress in 2010, it will go into effect on July 1, 2014. It requires foreign banks and investment funds to report to the IRS all assets they hold that exceed $50,000 belonging to US citizens – whether those citizens are living in America or abroad.

The genesis of the law was a 2010 tax-avoidance scandal involving a Swiss bank. One result of FACTA was that last August, Switzerland signed a separate treaty with the US, ending a longstanding tax dispute between the two countries, that gave the IRS unprecedented access to
Swiss accounts held by Americans and US green card holders.

Banks in most tax havens are planning to abide by the new rules because of hefty fines (the IRS can withhold 30% of dividends and interest payments due to the banks from US accounts) since failure to comply with these regulations could seriously impact banks’ ability to do business in America. A successful indictment could bar the bank from the US marketplace. Because of that threat, FATCA is driving a rapid expansion of a network of bilateral, tax-related information-sharing agreements, negotiated by the US Treasury and its overseas counterparts amid heightened global concern about tax dodging.

So, do Republicans want to allow rich individuals and wealthy companies to continue to hold money in off-shore banks without subjecting these monies to federal taxes? Apparently,
and they also want to attract votes and funding from Americans living abroad. The US expatriate community is violently opposed to the law, and some have legitimate concerns about losing
their banking relationships in the foreign country where they live. Their banks are concerned that the costs of flagging the accounts of Americans and maintaining separate reporting formats for them may too high for the less-than-$50k accounts that the US is not interested in. In 2013, nearly 2,400 expatriates gave up their US citizenship or turned in their green cards, some at
least, in an effort to avoid US taxation.

Reuters quotes Solomon Yue, an RNC official from Oregon:

I see FATCA just like Obamacare…It will attract American overseas donors

So, Republicans are eager to use FATCA as a campaign and fundraising issue against the Democrats in the Congressional mid-term elections in November. Repeal seems unlikely, but another issue that raises the political temperature could help defeat Democrats.

The RNC has set up a petition site at MoveOn.org that has about 2200 signers, quite a few from overseas. They have also set up a Repeal FATCA site. Here is a quote from the disinformation available there:

All this supposedly is justified by FATCA’s claim to “recover” lost taxes of less than $1 billion per year – enough to run the government for about two hours. (In fact, the way the U.S. Treasury plans to enforce FATCA, it would probably lose more money than it would take in!)

The Republicans seem to be saying that we don’t need $1 billion if it causes increased tax payments. Politically, it seems strange that this issue should become a hot issue for the Republicans, who are taking a beating in the polls over their stand on income inequality.

On the other hand, US wealthy individuals (Mitt Romney) and corporations that are able to use tax havens and have been able to hide behind account secrecy, would be very happy to see Mr. Boehner take up a bill to repeal FATCA. Foreign banks, many of which contribute to US political campaigns would also like to see the bill repealed

No one is asking the rich to pay unfairly – they already get all kinds of tax breaks − but
to encourage tax evasion seems to be far beyond the Republican’s usual pale.

How about having the rich simply pay their fair share and watch the federal deficit which they
are so concerned about, fall, without requiring Americans to give up food stamp subsidies or funding for long term unemployment benefits? So next time you hear Republicans talking about cutting the deficit, ask them why they are for tax evasion as opposed to tax compliance.

Hopefully, someone will ask Mr. Boehner why repealing a law that will promote the harboring of hidden money and continued tax avoidance is in our best interest. We know it is a key loophole for Mr. Romney. So Mr. Speaker, please tell us again why repealing laws is more important that strengthening them? They were passed for a reason. Maybe you should start pushing for our laws and regulations to be followed, rather than repealed.

Many other countries are striving for better education, better healthcare, a more engaged attitude about our planet and environment, a willingness to regulate guns and business with an eye toward the best interests of the people.

Thanks to US conservatives, we’ve headed in almost the opposite direction.

For Republicans, as long as rich people don’t pay more, undermining our country is okay. There’s just no restraining Republicans if the restraint we need involves the rich. And if responsible politicians try, the conservatives cry, “government overreach” or “socialism.”

But that’s just a red herring, an excuse so that they can continue to pillage America
for all they can get.

Postcard from Cuba, Part III

Cuba’s Future and its Relationship with the United States

The Wrongologist did not become an expert by spending 7 days in Cuba. Just like all countries, Cuba is a complex set of equations. A few truths did emerge though:

Ideology and Intellectual History:

Cuba is organized around the intellectual legacy of Jose Marti. Statues of Marti and quotes from his writings are everywhere in Cuba, including in many homes and public buildings. He was 42 when he died in battle against Spanish troops at the Battle of Dos Ríos, in May, 1895. After his death, one of his poems from the book, “Versos Sencillos” (Simple Verses) was adapted to the song “Guantanamera“, which has become the definitive patriotic song of Cuba.

The Wrongologist was struck by a quote on the wall of the Hogar Materno he visited in Old Havana. Here is his translation:

When you struggle for your country and life, division and rivalry are crimes – Marti

Those are words to live by. For Cubans, the revolution was not an event; it is a national continuous improvement process that is still moving forward, 55 years after the overthrow of the dictator, Batista. Here is a billboard just outside of the Jose Marti International Arrivals building that makes the point:

Cubans have internalized the ideology of the Revolution. It comes through in their speaking in a matter-of-fact way,
similar to the way Evangelicals speak about being Christians. This is not an equivalency; while Cubans are somewhat religious, the Revolution is a part of Cuban life, both in practical and ideological ways.

Cubans are steeped not only in the ideology of the July 26th Revolution, but in the writings of Marti and Che Guevara. Che was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary and is a common symbol of rebellion and global insignia in popular Cuban culture.

Here is a
photo of a wall in Old Havana. Che played a central role in training
the militia forces that repelled the Bay of Pigs Invasion and in bringing the Soviet
missiles to Cuba, precipitating the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. He was executed by
Bolivian troops in 1967 after he joined their revolution.

Havana’s Revolution Square is the political and cultural center of the city; it is the site where Fidel Castro has addressed the Cuban people, occasionally with more than 1 million people participating.

The Square has a 55’ tall statue of Jose Marti at its center. The Square is surrounded by buildings housing the major ministries of the Cuban government, including the Communist Party, Armed Forces, Communications, and Economic and Planning, the National Theater and the Jose
Marti Library.

Here is a photo of the Informatics and Communications Ministry in Revolution Square:

The Cuban Revolution was a turning point in Cuban/American relations. In August 1960, the Eisenhower administration froze all Cuban assets on American soil, severed diplomatic
ties, and tightened its embargo of Cuba. The embargo, called “the blockade” by Cubans, is the longest-lasting single foreign policy in American history. It remains in force today, although there have been efforts, notably by the Obama administration, to loosen it in recent years.

What is the status of Cuba’s economy?

According to the Council on Foreign Relations, the economy is divided into the following revenue streams:

Export of Healthcare Services – as described in the Wrongologist’s Postcards from Cuba -Part II, Cuba earns $9 billion/year in hard currency by exporting health care services.
Nickel − Cuba has the third-largest nickel reserves in the world. Nickel is the country’s biggest material export, bringing in roughly $2.7 billion in 2007
Tourism − Now the economy’s 2nd largest source of revenue, tourists–primarily from Canada and the European Union—brings more than $2.7 billion into the country.
Remittances − Academic sources estimate remittances total more than $1 billion a year, most coming from families in the US. If limits on remittances are lifted, this figure could increase substantially.
Sugar − Sugar was long the primary industry in Cuba, but production has plummeted due to outdated factory equipment.
Foreign investments − Cuba receives hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign investments from China,
Venezuela, and Spain.

Food security is a major problem for Cuba. According to the Miami Herald:

Cuba saw a steep and unexplained drop in the harvest of vegetables and fruit in the first three months of the year [2013] despite government reforms to increase production in a country that spends more than $1.5 billion on food imports

Overall agricultural production, not counting sugarcane, dropped by 7.8% in the first quarter of 2013 compared
to the first three months of 2012. But some sectors saw far bigger plunges. Plantains dropped by 44.2%, potatoes by 36% and citrus by 33.9%. Part of the decline is attributed to Hurricane Sandy, which slammed into the eastern city of Santiago de Cuba on Oct. 25. Eastern Cuba is known for its fruit production.

This grim outcome is despite President Raúl Castro’s 2007 campaign to increase domestic food production by leasing fallow state lands to private farmers, hiking the prices
that the government pays for agricultural goods and easing state controls on the distribution networks. Food production on the island dropped in 2011 to pre-2007 levels and dropped again in 2012, when agricultural food prices were
reported to have spiked by about 20%.

Cuba now imports an estimated 80% percent of the food its people consume, at a cost of more than $1.5 billion per year. This
is hardly a sustainable scenario, and while there does not appear to be starvation in Cuba, food shortages remain a problem.

The Wrongologist visited a predominantly farming area in Pinar Del Rio and saw a farm that did not use agricultural chemicals, relying instead on organic fertilization and pest control.

One issue that leads to inefficiency is the reliance by small independent farmers on animals for plowing. Here is a tobacco farmer in Pinar Del Rio:

The lack of tractors is very obvious in this agricultural region that is less than 2 hours from Havana. Most tractors that we did see were Soviet-era imports.

What are the issues that prevent normalization of US-Cuba relations?

Human rights violations − In March 2003, the Cuban government arrested 75 dissidents and journalists, sentencing them to prison terms of up to 28 years
on charges of conspiring with the United States to overthrow the state. There are reports that the government has in recent years used other tactics
besides prison, including firings from state jobs and intimidation, to silence opposition figures. Despite a 2005 UN Human Rights Commission vote that condemned Cuba’s human rights record, Cuba was elected to the UN Human Rights Council in 2006.
Guantanamo Bay − Cuban officials have seized on the US prison camp as a “symbol of solidarity” with the rest of the world against the United States.
Cuban exile community − The Cuban-American community in southern Florida traditionally has heavily influenced US policy with Cuba. Both political parties fear alienating a strong voting bloc in an important swing state in presidential elections.

According to the BBC, Edward Alex Lee of the US State Department said: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

The United States is ‘very open’ to building a new relationship with Cuba but that any improvement should go hand-in-hand with more political freedom [in Cuba]

Lee went on to say that the two countries had held “very constructive” talks on migration and other issues last week, but he declined to give any details of what he called “substantial progress”. Lee added that the
two nations would seek to continue their negotiations:

Despite our historically difficult relationship…we have been able to speak to each other in a respectful and thoughtful manner…

So maybe there is hope that normalization of relations can take place. Most Cubans that the Wrongologist talked to about this feel it will happen in about 3 years. This may be unconsciously tied to their estimate of when Fidel Castro
will die. Perhaps they believe that the attitudes of Cuban-Americans who control much of America’s agenda regarding Cuba will soften when Fidel dies.

According to the Pew Research Center, there are about 1.9 million Cuban-Americans in the US. 70% of Cuban-Americans live in Florida, making them the most geographically concentrated of the 12 largest Hispanic origin groups.

We know that the younger generation of Cuban-Americans voting bloc took a major shift toward the left during the 2012 election. According to Dan Moffett, an immigration writer:

According to exit polls by Bendixen & Amandi International, President Obama got 48% of the exile community’s vote and Republican candidate Mitt Romney received 52%. Four years before, when Obama ran against John McCain, he got only 35% of the Cuban-American vote

Polling done by Bendixen & Amandi was trying to measure the generational shift within the Cuban community. The pollsters found that President Obama in 2012 won 60% of the votes of those Cuban-Americans who were born in the United States. Romney, meanwhile, won 55% of the vote among Cuban-Americans who were born in Cuba.

However, politicians remember that in 2004, John Kerry was able to get only 29% of the state’s Cuban-American vote in losing to George W. Bush. In 2000, Bush got about 75% of the bloc’s vote in defeating Al Gore. Cuban-Americans were
the difference in Bush winning Florida, and Florida was the difference in his winning the White House.

Conclusions:

Thinking that Cuban-American relations could be normalized within three years or when Fidel Castro dies is overly optimistic. It’s really a bit silly that the US continues to hold a cold war grudge against Cuba. The US could most readily help the people of Cuba by opening up trade between the two countries. A communist government with horrible human rights record hasn’t stopped America from dealing with China, so why not trade with Cuba? (Not that the Wrongologist is a supporter of communist governments or states that lack commitment to human rights)

How can trade with Cuba be wrong because the country is communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to economic progress and a spirit of international harmony?

The US is happily in bed with the “democracy” that is Saudi Arabia, but cannot abide the Cuban state? Our hard line position is more about those Cuban-Americans who feel that the embargo will eventually return the houses that they abandoned 55 years ago when they left Cuba for Miami.

That isn’t about ideology, or about the human rights of the Cuban people.

It’s time we change our strategy. Our policies haven’t broken the Cuban government in 55 years, so it may be time to give up the sanctions and help ourselves and the Cuban people.

The alternative is for the US to cede that relationship to China.

The US State Department is not afraid of a “special relationship” between Venezuela and Cuba, but a “special relationship” with China will remind our old guard political realists of the terribly flawed geopolitical position the US had when the Soviet Union made Cuba into an economic client.

Yet, Cubans should be careful what they wish for. Fast food restaurants, more high-rise hotels and golf courses may create tin shack shanty towns when American developers are allowed into Havana.

Good luck to the Cubans, lovely people, and a lovely country.

(This is the final installment of the 3-part series on the Wrongologist’s visit to Cuba.)

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: ForeignPolicy