The lesson from Vietnam is to listen to the people on the ground
Martin Woollacott
Friday June 28, 2002
The Guardian
Anybody who has done some foreign reporting knows that the views of correspondents on the nature of the crisis or war which has brought them to a particular place tend to be similar. Day-to-day experience, constant discussion, and the weight of numbers produce a consensus which only a few resist. Thus most of the correspondents who covered Vietnam felt that the war was in some way wrong, a feeling reflected in their stories, and thus today most of the correspondents who cover the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians would agree that Sharon is more of an obstacle to peace than Arafat. The point here is that the consensus is multinational and, especially, that there is not that much divergence between Americans and non-Americans.
The picture painted for readers of, for example, the New York Times, Le Monde, or the Guardian by the reporters on the spot in Israel and the territories is in essentials the same. Comment, put together in the metropolis, is a very different matter, as are the stories reporting on the views and decisions of policy makers in capitals, above all Washington. But this argument from journalism on the ground is of interest because it contradicts the notion that an almost genetic difference can now be seen between Americans, as citizens of the imperial centre, and non-Americans, and it reminds us that we have been in similar situations in the past, long before anybody was talking of the single superpower. The difference it suggests is not that between Americans and everybody else but between the sensible conclusions of people on the spot and the overly abstract, unreal and sometimes fantastical conclusions of people in power.
The Vietnam war in Washington was a construct shaped by ideology and national pride, constantly being refashioned by rival institutions, personalities, and factions. The Vietnam war in Vietnam was a terrible fight in which men, women, and children were extinguished every day, and that touched the consciences, sharpened the minds, and inflamed the passions of those reporting the conflict. Although less free to express their views publicly, soldiers, diplomats, and intelligence people were affected in the same way. The views of the working press and others on the ground in Vietnam, first that the war was being fought in the wrong way and, later, that on balance it had better not be fought at all, did eventually reach Washington and affect decisions there.
America is not of course fighting in the Middle East, and this administration's refusal to fully engage is clear, yet most see success there as vital to its wider interests. If the question that the press in Vietnam initially raised through its reporting was "is this the right way to make war?" that for their successors in Israel and Palestine is "is this the right way to make peace?" The answer of the reporters today, with many nuances, is no, and they may be discreetly joined in that by diplomats and others. But this scepticism, as President Bush's speech this week makes clear, is not getting through to the centre. Elements of a response to reality mingle with elements of what was so evident during the Vietnam years - an insistence that reality conform to ideology or to the compromises worked out between Washington schools and factions, and anger at those who point out that it does not.
Thus the Bush administration does not ask whether it is possible that the Palestinians pass through the eye of the needle in order to attain the heaven of a state, it merely asserts that they must. It does not attend to the evident readiness of the Sharon government to sabotage any progress toward a political settlement, but assumes a goodwill in that respect which simply does not exist.
The Bush administration may be especially prone to fantasy in many fields. The Republican campaign in opposition for national missile defence, based on the claim that the right technology, with enough effort and money, was just around the corner, has become in office an $8bn research programme without the slightest chance of producing an effective defence for years to come, the Carnegie Endowment specialist Joseph Cirincione has argued convincingly. The administration has in effect admitted as much by its new doctrine of preventative attack but the expensive NMD programme stays in place, soaking up resources that might contribute far more effectively to American security if used in other ways.
Another example of fantasy at work is the American campaign against the international criminal court, which could even undo the Nato peacekeeping forces in the Balkans. There are legitimate concerns over how the ICC may operate, but the American demand for immunity rests on the fantastical notion that the court would reward American risks and sacrifices in peacekeeping by victimising American personnel, a concept as far from the purposes of the new institution as can be imagined.
American governments are of course not alone in being attached to unrealistic doctrines or pursuing contradictory policies, and the resistance of rulers to unwelcome news about what is actually happening on the ground is an old story. The problem is only particularly American because of American primacy. This, you might say, is always going on in government, as is the countervailing process of slowly grasping that policy does not fit reality. It is on this possibility that the present Palestinian leadership rests its remaining hopes. As when mediaeval rebels used the device of blaming the monarch's advisers but not the monarch himself, they have embraced the positive elements in the Bush speech and girded themselves for the continuing fight to turn round the American establishment.
Vietnam was less critical for America than it seemed to be at the time. There is reason to believe, by contrast, that Palestine could indeed be crucial in determining whether we are entering an era of vicious irregular war or whether we can contrive a round of settlements. The achievement of a viable Palestinian state could produce a domino effect, to use Vietnam phrases, by changing the hearts and minds of men and women in many societies.
The denial of such a state could bring a domino effect in the other direction. The Bush administration, of course, thinks of the yet different domino effect of giving in to terrorism, something that underlines the connections between the Vietnam time and the present day. The Vietnam generation has been in charge for a decade. Now that things have become truly serious on Bush's watch, it would be a good idea to recall how hard it was, once upon a time in Washington, to sort out the real facts from the rhetoric, how unready those in power were to listen to voices that turned out to be telling the truth about how the war was going, and how they made the mistake of casting the conflict in apocalyptic terms that made changing policy all but impossible.
We've missed the point of Bush's Middle East policy
Obsessed with war on terrorism, the president is prepared to go it alone
Hugo Young
Thursday June 27, 2002
The Guardian
It's usually a mistake to assume that a world leader is off his head. Even Boris Yeltsin, though drunk in charge of Russia, had a sense of strategy. Another chump, Ronald Reagan, seemed barely to know in detail what he was doing at any given time, and once, talking to Gorbachev in Reykjavik, came close to handing over America's nuclear store. But Reagan wasn't mad. He clung to a big idea about how to make the world a better place. George Bush is no exception to this rule. His first solemn shot at bringing peace to the Middle East is so one-sided, so absurdly unreal, that it's tempting to dismiss it as the casual folly of a president who can't be serious. But presidents need the benefit of the doubt about their seriousness. We owe them, and ourselves, nothing less.
Certainly Bush proves he's nowhere near being a multilateralist. The long-promised speech was the result of little consultation. The explicit demand that Arafat must go was added to it only hours before delivery. According to the New York Times this grew out of an intelligence report - can it really have been new? - that Arafat had financed yet another suicide bomber. That was enough to rouse Bush's gut instinct to side with his Pentagon people against Colin Powell, and thus impose the undeliverable demand that, before anything else happens, the Palestinians must withdraw their mandate from the only leader to whom they've ever given one.
Some allies have tried to make the best of it. Mubarak of Egypt denied the speech meant anything about ousting Arafat. The Jordanian foreign minister said it marked the beginning of the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The steer from the British Foreign Office was that Bush's approach would never work, but Tony Blair was on hand, as ever, to smooth the waters and explain the inner meaning of what his friend was really trying to say, which was, of course, only helpful and constructive.
If you were an optimist, like Blair, you might also say the speech, however blatant its bias, constituted at last a serious US intervention. Europeans and others have been urging for months that unless Washington re-committed to a process there would be no advance from the suicides and the settlements. Surely Monday's initiative is proof that Bush has got the message? How have Europeans got the nerve to complain? This is, after all, only a beginning. The text that could have been written by Ariel Sharon will be followed, if the Palestinians respond, by equivalent pressure on Israel.
There may be something in this. The European attitude to US intervention almost anywhere has often been paradoxical, not to say contradictory. But another rationale for Bush's sanity is more convincing. This is that he cares more about the war against terror than bringing a just peace to Israel/Palestine. That's why he was prepared to be impossibly one-sided. Palestinian terrorism stimulates his gut instinct more thrillingly than the elusive obscurities of a Middle East peace. It links to the global campaign to which he has dedicated both this presidency and many that might follow. The anti-terror priority is set to be the sine qua non of every aspect of security and foreign policy for the indefinite future.
Read through Bush's recent speeches and this becomes ever clearer. He and his intimates, especially Defence Secretary Rumsfeld, return to it again and again. Nearly 10 months on from 9/11, that's something most Europeans still do not understand. For Americans, in the political class and a long way beyond, the war against terrorism is directed at an enemy that looms as large as the Soviet Union once did, and has made itself felt much closer to home. Everything, including Israel/Palestine, is subordinate to that. Telling Yasser Arafat he must go, and laying his terroristic guilt ineradicably on the line, far exceeds in relevance the pettifogging democratic details about how his departure will happen and who might replace him.
Europeans, by contrast, still live in the old world where change occurs, nominally at any rate, through more familiar modalities. Political process rather than licensed Israeli militarism continues, in this quarter, to be the way forward in the Middle East; and here Mr Blair, for all his bridge-building reassurance, has to be a European not an American. Europeans have not absorbed The Shield of Achilles, the key text by Philip Bobbitt, a security intellectual and former Clinton intelligence chief, which describes at prescient length the new dealing-room of international relations and the brutal terms of trade that America will dictate there as a matter of survival.
In this room, the keynote is not legality but pre-emption. The right to take pre-emptive action, before the stateless enemy strikes first, is a declared Bush doctrine swiftly making its way into axiomatic custom and practice if not law. In the case of Iraq, the prime object of such pre-emptive doctrine-building, the legalities would doubtless be observed. Saddam Hussein will one day be told to comply with the UN resolutions requiring him to let in inspectors to prove he has no arsenals of mass destruction. But failing that, intervention is being prepared. Europeans find this hard to believe. The case against it seems on regional, diplomatic and many practical counts so obvious. But the other day the Democratic leadership in Congress wheeled into line, offering support for whatever the president chooses to do in his avowed and formal policy of removing the Saddam regime.
That illustrates the gulf between us. There's hardly an American front-line politician who has come out against attacking Saddam, and hardly a European who favours it. This grows from differences of history, of culture and even - to American incomprehension - of geography. Those closest to the seat of terror evidently do not understand the threat it poses to them. They are ignorantly sanguine. They do not want to know. Can't they see, says an exasperated Bush, that terror is the global enemy, and Palestinian terror, as the most conspicuous daily version of it, the terror that must be eradicated before anyone talks about Middle East peace?
Europeans, for their part, think Bush exaggerates. And even if he doesn't, they think his answers, whether in Israel or Iraq, are counter-productive. That may be so. But there's one thing he is not. He is not crazy but, by his own lights, quite rational. He and his people have their eye on a purpose. The danger they run is that they think they can achieve it, if necessary, alone. They're the most grudging of multilateralists, the stance that most distinguishes them from Clinton. But they take a harsher, more apocalyptic view than Europeans, including the British, of the possibilities ahead, and no one can say for sure they are mistaken. That view does not allow for equal treatment as between Israel and unreformed Palestine. In reality it does not give prime place to a Middle East peace process at all. Instead it says that the prime enemy is terror - and it doesn't much care whether anyone else agrees.
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The Emperor's Clothes
Uri Avnery
1.7.02
As it so happened, I heard President Bush's speech in Copenhagen. It reminded me immediately of the most famous story created in that town: "The Emperor's Clothes".
Everybody praised this fine speech. Prime Minister A. lauded the style, President B. commended the fabric, Sheik C. admired the collar. And I saw only a naked emperor.
Everynody knew, of course, that it was a stupid speech, perhaps the most silly ever uttered by an American president. But who will confront the leader of the world's sole superpower? Who will bring upon himself the wrath of a man that possesses such frightening power, while voicing such inanities?
A 12-year old would have been ashamed of presenting such a composition to his teacher. The assumptions are baseless, the general picture resembles a caricature, the conclusions are ridiculous and the parts contradict each other.
It says that the Palestinians must chose their leader in a free, democratic election, but that they are forbidden to elect a leader not approved by Sharon and Bush.
They must establish a democratic, liberal, pluralistic and multi-party system, including separation of powers, independent courts and transparent finances. For that purpose they are commanded to accept the assistance of America?s allies in the Middle East: democratic Saudi Arabia, pluralistic Egypt and liberal Jordan. Financial transparency like in Riyadh, separation of powers like in Cairo, independent courts like in Amman.
The establishment of this ideal system is a precondition to any peace negotiations. In Europe, such a system was achieved after a struggle of hundreds of years. In the Arab world, it does not exist anywhere. Arafat is the only Arab chief of state who was chosen in free elections, under close international supervision, personally overseen by ex-President Jimmy Carter.
In Bush's crooked mirror, terrorism antedates the occupation. Indeed, he did not mention the occupation at all in this context. There is nothing but terrorism. In his limited world-view, terrorism is the sum of everything: In the beginning God created the War on Terrorism, and the whole world revolves around it. Terrorism, like Satan, exists since the creation, it is not the result of anything, it has its own independent existence. And, much as a devout Christian is commanded to fight Satan every moment in his life on earth, so must every human being fight terrorism and will be judged accordingly by the divine judge, Bush.
And what i s terrorism? Terrorism is what the enemies of the USA are doing. Friends of the USA cannot, of course, do such a thing. In Turkey, for example, it is the Kurds who are the terrorists, while the Turkish army is a humanitarian outfit. Good friend Putin does not commit acts of terrorism, his deeds in Grozni are nearly as charitable as those of Sharon in Jenin.
But Artafat is a terrorist. He is also corrupt, also a dictator. This needs no proof. Sharon says so, and Sharon is beyond reproach. Arafat has to be eliminated, removed from office, expulsed, murdered. (Bush, of course, does not speak of murder, but not so long ago the decree forbidding American agencies to kill foreign leaders was rescinded. Actually, in this instance their involvement is not needed, the slightest hint will suffice for Sharon to execute the deed at once.)
What will happen after Arafat's removal-expulsion-murder? According to Bush, it's quite simple: reform-minded Palestinians will come forward, take some Palestinian professor from Harvard or Oxford as president and create the Palestinian Switzerland.
Bush, of course, does not imagine that something very different is going to happen. The man after Arafat will have to show that he is no Mossad or CIA stooge, therefore he will have to be more extreme than Arafat. In order to avoid being executed as a traitor within 24 hours, he will have to create an alliance with Hamas,. In the coming elections, the candidate of the "National and Islamic Forces" will surely win.
That's the best-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, there will not be an alternative leadership at all. Palestinian society will break up into hundreds of shreds, each of which will commit suicide bombings in the occupied territories, Israel, throughout the Middle East and the world. Chaos will reign supreme. This is what Sharon really desires, because it will enable him to carry out ethnic cleansing and annex the Palestinian territories, fulfilling his dream of at least 50 years.
The good Bush certainly does not want this, but since he has become the squire of Sharon, a kind of American Sancho Panza to the Israeli Don Quixote, it's what the Don says that counts.
After the speech, I met with a senior European diplomat. "Well, it may not be the most brilliant discourse we ever heard," he said with a slight, ironic smile, ?But it?s what we have got. It would not be wise to confront Bush head on, that would only cause him to become obstinate."
If so, what can be done? The ironic smile did not leave his lips. "European diplomacy has hundreds of years of experience. The clever thing to do is to pick from the speech one positive sentence and blow it up, ignoring the negative parts."
Europe will concentrate on the elections. These must be free, under close international supervision. For the elections to be free, candidates must be free to move. For parties to be formed and conduct their campaigns, there must be freedom of speech and association. All this is impossible under occupation. Therefore, first of all, the occupation has to be removed from the Palestinians territories.
Under the Oslo agreements, the Palestinian inhabitants of Jerusalem enjoy the right of active and passive vote, and they, too, must be allowed to move and campaign freely.
Until the elections, the existing elected instituted, including the chairman of the authority, must continue to function. Europe will continue to deal with him. Arafat, of course, like any other citizen, has the right to present his candidacy -- and, if chosen in a free election, the world (led by Europe) will recognize him. Nobody doubts that he will indeed be elected by a massive majority.
So, after all, a golden thread can be found in the emperor's clothes.
Visit by British minister to Arafat deepens rift with US
By Andrew Grice Political Editor
03 July 2002
The rift between Britain and the United States over the Middle East deepened last night when a British Foreign Office minister held talks with Yasser Arafat at his West Bank headquarters.
The surprise visit by Mike O'Brien came only days after President George Bush demanded that Mr Arafat step down as President of the Palestinian Authority, and Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, shelved plans to visit the region and suggested Washington was no longer talking to Mr Arafat.
Mr O'Brien, who took over as junior minister with responsibility for the Middle East last month, also met Shimon Peres, the Israeli Foreign Minister, on what Downing Street said was a "familiarisation visit". He did not meet Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister.
The meeting with Mr Arafat threatened to reopen the row between London and Washington over Mr Bush's call for his removal as part of a Middle East peace settlement. Relations have also been strained by America's opposition to the International Criminal Court established on Monday.
Downing Street tried to play down the significance of Mr O'Brien's visit and said Tony Blair supported the US President's speech on the Middle East last week calling for a Palestinian state alongside a secure Israel.
But the clear differences of approach were highlighted by the decision to meet Mr Arafat. The Prime Minister's official spokesman said: "We have said we will continue to talk to those people who are elected representatives of the Palestinian people. But that does not mean we do not want to see reform of the Palestinian Authority."
The spokesman said Mr Blair, while happy to continue dealing with Mr Arafat as an elected leader, believed the Palestinian president had let his people down. "We don't believe the Palestinian Authority and Yasser Arafat have done all they could to bear down on terrorism and to condemn terrorism," he said, adding that this was likely to be relayed by Mr O'Brien during the talks.
The spokesman added: "We have to be able to negotiate with somebody who represents the views of the Palestinian people and who can deliver. It's no secret that, as the Prime Minister has said on several occasions, we believe Yasser Arafat is somebody who has let down the Palestinian people." There were no plans for Mr Blair to speak to Mr Arafat directly, Number 10 said.
Asked why the Foreign Office minister was not meeting Mr Sharon, the Number 10 spokesman replied: "Because he is seeing who he is seeing. Shimon Peres is the Foreign Minister, a senior figure in the administration."
Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrats' foreign affairs spokesman, said it was an "entirely sensible decision" for Mr O'Brien to go to the Middle East. He added: "For all his many faults and failures, Yasser Arafat is still the leader of the Palestinian people. No reasonable prospect for peace in the Middle East exists without his engagement."