Swadesh M. Rana: Guantánamo’s Detainees — Diplomatic Quagmire or Security Risk?

Citizenship & IdentityRisk & Security

America’s European partners in its war on terror are not committing on when or whether to take in any detainees from Guantánamo. “There was nobody very hot about this, that’s perfectly true,” said Czech Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg on January 26, after a meeting of the European Union. His nation holds the rotating presidency of the 27 member EU which includes 21 of the 26 members of NATO.

Austria is against taking any released prisoners. The parliament of Finland is split on the issue. Denmark would need to change its asylum laws to accept any detainees. Sweden sees no political or national security benefit in admitting them. Poland has no experience in dealing with this kind of prisoners. Italy and Spain would consider a U.S. request only if endorsed by the EU.

European opposition to this plan is vociferous. “I do not understand why we give the impression that Germany needs to accept prisoners. Guantánamo was established by the U.S. We did not run it. We did not use it,” says Wolfgang Bosbach, deputy leader of the Christian Democrats.

“Don’t forget these inmates are not kittens-it’s a risk for us to bring them into Europe.” says the Dutch Foreign Minister, Maxime Verhagen. London has already made a “significant contribution,” said U.K. Foreign Secretary David Miliband. England has already accepted nine of its citizens and six of its residents formerly imprisoned at Guantánamo.

France has found little support for its plan to lead an EU fact-finding mission to Guantánamo to ascertain the background of the current detainees and assess the security risks in accepting at least 60 persons who, while they face no charges in the United States, are likely to be tortured or persecuted if returned to the countries of their origin.

Jonathan Power: Libya’s Lesson for Iran

Risk & SecurityTechnology

It is rapidly becoming a truism that the Middle East problems are so intertwined that they must be all negotiated into tolerance and disarmament at more or less the same time—not sequentially as before.

Still, it is better in an analysis such as this to single out Iran, because if Iran can be got right then a lot of the other dominoes will be easier to fit into place. It is Iran that Israel fears most. It is Iran that has so much influence on Hamas. It is Iran that can contribute significantly to peace in Iraq and Lebanon.

And to discuss Iran we must talk about Libya. Libya only a few years ago had many of the same problems as Iran today. Not only was it on the cusp of producing nuclear weapons—it was a terrorist state writ large. The downing over Lockerbie, Scotland, of a U.S. airliner was only the apogee of a continuous line of terrorist activity over a 30-year period. Yet, by careful diplomacy, its teeth were gradually withdrawn and, in September of last year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on a visit to Tripoli, declared that the rapprochement with Libya was ”an historic event.”

Former Vice-President Dick Cheney likes to assert that it was Iraq that did the trick; that Muammar el-Qaddafi finally got scared by American sabre-rattling. ”Five days after we captured Saddam Hussein, Qaddafi came forward and announced that he was going to surrender all his nuclear materials to the United States.” The record suggests otherwise. Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage flatly contradicted his boss. Libya’s concessions ”didn’t have anything to do” with Hussein’s capture, he said.

Jodi Liss: The Woes of Timothy Geithner

In The NewsRisk & Security

This may sound peculiar coming from someone in a job with no security and that pays about a fifth of what he earns, but I feel sorry for future Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and his tax problems over his past employment with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Actually, I would more surprised if he hadn’t had problems.

I, too, have worked for international organizations (in my case, the UN, UNDP, and UNICEF) and I too know what it is like to try to deal with the arcane rules that seem to be tailor-made for each individual short–term hire at these places.

At the UN, and apparently at similar places, what you pay in taxes depends on not only your nationality but on the kind of contract you have and its terms for the individual position. It is so convoluted that one of the first decisions you make at the start is to find a good accountant. No matter how clever you think you are, you immediately discover that you are but a babe in the woods.

Jonathan Power: Lead the World by Following?

Elections & InstitutionsRisk & Security

Hillary Clinton, the U.S. secretary of state, was harping on an old theme at her Senate confirmation hearing last week. She said her top international principle was to ”strengthen America’s position of global leadership.” This reminds one of her Clinton administration predecessor, Madeleine Albright, who famously said that ”America is the indispensable nation” and that we “stand tall and hence see further than any other nation.”

This swagger suggests that other nations are somehow dispensable, and that American indispensability is the source of all wisdom. ( So what about Iraq, global warming, Palestine/Israel, the International Criminal Court, and financial probity?)

In the United States, ”one reads about the world’s desire for American leadership,” a high British diplomat once told me. ”Everywhere else, one reads about American arrogance and unilateralism.” (And this was said before George W. Bush came to power!) Today, even the instinctively pro-Washington British Conservative Party has sought to step back from American hubris, which is clearly not a vote winner on this side of the pond.

Ian Williams: Pinochet’s Echoes Today

EconomyElections & InstitutionsRisk & Security

Ian WilliamsSeptember 11 is a day that will live in infamy: a terrorist attack on a landmark building whose aftermath left more than 3,000 dead. Yes, Chileans will always remember the coup of September 11, 1973, when their military commanders—with tacit, and indeed active, support from Washington—bombed their own presidential palace, setting up a repressive regime that imprisoned, tortured, and executed supporters of the deposed government while driving untold more into exile.

But while Osama bin Laden is being hounded around the North West Frontier, one of the architects of the Chilean coup, Henry Kissinger, is a revered advisor to governments; the other, Augusto Pinochet, died without facing trial for his involvement.

“He had taken full advantage of the rights guaranteed to him by due process—rights that his victims were denied—and postponed his day of reckoning indefinitely.” On the day he died, “My feelings of hate toward Pinochet and what he represented had waned through the years; instead I felt a serene contempt for the man,” concludes Heraldo Muñoz in The Dictator’s Shadow, a highly readable, fascinating, and revelatory account of the General’s career.

Muñoz, now Chile’s ambassador to the United Nations and one of those who had to flee his country in 1973, has written a remarkably restrained memoir assessing just how big a shadow Pinochet cast, both globally and historically.

Jonathan Power: Palestine and the War of Civilizations

EconomyPolarizing Political EconomyRisk & Security

Just what Barack Obama needs as he prepares to be the forty-fourth president of the United States: another Israeli/Palestinian war re-inflaming passions all over the Arab and Muslim world. Will that middle name of his count for something in this intense firefight?

Well, possibly—but only if he moves fast to change the long-time American emphasis on supporting, by both word and deed, the Israeli side at the Palestinian’s expense. It is as simple—and as complicated—as that. After the Bush years, during which the “clash of civilizations” became the de facto interpretation of American, and to some extent European, policy in the region, the West quickly needs to de-escalate its fixation with what it often interprets as the rabid policies of the Islamic world. The focus instead should be on restoring a sense of humility in dealing with the world-wide Muslim civilization, albeit one with its share of bad apples.

Comparison, even in the time of Al Qaeda, does not work in Christendom’s favor. The West should not overlook its near-takeover by the Nazis, whose attempt to eliminate the Jews was launched from a country that was in many ways the fulcrum of modern Christianity. It would be a mistake to forget the inroads that atheistic Marxism made in Europe; or the everyday crime rates in Western nations that far, far exceed those in Muslim countries, especially in the Middle East.

Jodi Liss: Down and Out in Zimbabwe

EconomyRisk & Security

These past weeks it has been hard to decide which politician is more completely out of touch with reality: Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, who apparently sought to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder, or Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who seems uninterested that thousands of his people are suffering and dying from cholera.

Of course, whatever Blagojevich has done is peanuts compared to Mugabe, who has driven his once-successful country into the ground with a 231 million percent inflation rate (which sounds almost comically impossible—unless you’re there), a ruined physical infrastructure, the destruction of property rights, commonplace violence, an economy that has contracted more than 40 percent in the past decade, and now epidemic diseases. And, of course, there is the fact that he lost the national election last spring. He stays in power because the Zimbabwean military and the ZANU-PF party thugs have an interest in keeping him in power.

Anyway, Mugabe’s days are numbered. His country is in a slow death spiral; he’s also 84. The question is what happens to Zimbabwe after his end. Sure, there’s Morgan Tsvangirai, the guy who more or less did win the elections—but members of the military are already engaged in an internecine struggle for supremacy. This week, one of the Zimbabwean military’s own, Air Marshall Perence Shiri survived an assassination attempt considered by many to have been an inside job. Whatever happens to Mugabe, these commanders will not quietly accede to change that will cost them prerogatives and power.

What is in the offing, according to U.S. Ambassador James McGee, is a collapsed or failed state.

In his recent book on development, The Bottom Billion, noted economist Paul Collier tells of being told why, after decolonization, the developing world’s governments turned out so inept: the homegrown technocrats (of which Africa had precious few) were shoved aside from power by those with a less educated, more military background. Those who could run a government competently were replaced with cronies.

Jonathan Power: Nuclear Matchsticks on the Indian Sub-continent

Elections & InstitutionsRisk & SecurityTechnology

However tense the relationship between India and Pakistan becomes, the government of Manmohan Singh is highly unlikely to initiate or participate in a nuclear war with Pakistan. That would go against the deeply held moral beliefs of the prime minister. Both he and the Congress Party chairman, Sonia Gandhi, have told me privately that they both are utterly repulsed by such an act.

Immediately after the Mumbai atrocities, tough talk towards Pakistan seemed to billow like smoke from the Taj hotel out of quarters of India’s military and foreign affairs establishment—but, to his credit, Singh quickly fanned it away.

On the Pakistani side, President Asif Ali Zardari appears to be in a peace-making mood. Not long before the atrocities in Mumbai, he publicly abandoned his country’s “first use” doctrine, which held that Pakistan could use its nuclear weapons even without an Indian nuclear attack. He has also, like General Pervez Musharraf before him, reached out to India for a deal on the central flash point: the disputed state of Kashmir. Neither this president nor Musharraf (once he was in power) ever showed they were the type to reach for their nuclear guns.

Nevertheless, Singh has had few qualms about supporting the build up of India’s nuclear deterrent—regarding it as an inevitable process given India’s place in the world—and has been a passionate advocate of the new nuclear deal with the United States, which has recently lifted its 30 year-old embargo on nuclear supplies for India.

But does that mean we don’t have to fear a nuclear war between India and Pakistan?

Jens F. Laurson and George A. Pieler: Continuity We Can Believe In

Elections & InstitutionsRisk & Security

When Barack Obama announced his Foreign Policy and National Security team, the best news was that journalists like Robert Dreyfuss, Leslie Savan, and Robert Kuttner weren’t impressed. Hoping for leftists in moderate’s clothing, they are now faced with a global affairs team that makes the President-elect look more like a moderate-conservative in liberal’s clothing. Hillary Clinton—judged by her Senate record and campaign positions on foreign policy—certainly appears more hawk than dove, though her all-too-clever triangulation on the Iraq did not serve her candidacy well. Either way, clearly she is someone most Republicans and Joe Lieberman Democrats (is there more than one?) can live with.

Naming James L. Jones, the trusty marine and former supreme allied commander in Europe, as national security advisor spells continuity. On Iraq he has been publicly non-critical of the war itself but pointedly critical of its implementation and forward strategy. If one believes Bob Woodward (a coin-toss these days), Jones always opposed the invasion in private counsel. More importantly, he is a tough customer who won’t be run over like Condoleezza Rice was by Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Company in her hapless stint as NSA. And finally keeping George W. Bush’s nonpartisan Secretary of Defense Robert Gates is the epitome of “continuity we can believe in.”