Iran...
(Please see my Tripod blog -- http://benfrankln.tripod.com/bensutherland/ - to get a copy of this post with links in tact:)
The Bush Administration has not only kept military options on the table around Iran, but Charles Krauthammer is explicitly asking Europeans to get out of the way should the Administration decide on a military route...
Say No to Tehran's Gambit...Charles Krauthammer...
The Economist encourages world leaders to "be tough now to avoid a nuclear conflict"...
Last ditch diplomacy to stop a nuclear Iran...
And offers what it thinks are the lessons of soft power in European dealings with Iran...
Playing soft or hard cop...
Krauthammer is just wrong -- as the May 12th, 2005 editorial by the Economist illustrates...
Iran and North Korea: Return of the axis of evil...
There are many, many problems in the analysis of the first three of these articles that the last Economist, in part, understands better...
The reason why threats of military action are so wrong, as the Economist editors illustrate in their May 12th article, is because those threats -- along with the invasion of Iraq which no doubt intentionally gives credence to them -- have clearly accelerated Iranian nuclear ambitions (and accelerated North Korea's nuclear ambitions, before the South Koreans stepped in with their more successful diplomatic efforts) for any objective observer...
Meaning...North Korea and Iran didn't pursue their nuclear programs -- as ambitiously, anyway -- until the United States started threatening them and Syria with similar action as what occurred in Iraq if they didn't concede to American demands...
And what is bothersome about the swagger on this issue by hawks like Krauthammer is the almost zero ackowledgement of any serious responsibility in this way...
It's as if Charles' conceit that hawkish efforts are always better can always dismiss bad consequences from those efforts as the fault of someone else, while folks like Charles simultaneous preach responsibility to the world and to Americans and never seem to take any...it's very much like watching Roy Cohn go after Deep Throat actor Harry Reems with the threat of a five year prison sentence for his role in the movie all the while simultaneously hiding his secret of homosexuality and all of the hypocrisy that goes with it...
Take responsibility, says, Charles to his fellow Americans, but don't expect me to...
And that really is the rub...
As long as Americans continue to rationalize their more hawkish and forceful and brutish efforts to solve all of their problems, international and domestic, rather than more thoughtful, proactive, and less threatening approaches when immediate danger is not eminent -- though it does seem that the more hawkish amongst us can always rationalize eminent danger whenever it tickles their fancy -- then we never have to be responsible for when those efforts fail...if I don't acknowledge responsibility, the theory goes, there's no responsibility for me to take...
And it's bullshit...
The Economists' article on the lessons of soft power ignores the earlier lessons it draws from the threat of military force on North Korea's and Iran's nuclear ambitions, seems to argue for something akin to "let's not go too far with the hard power threats," and then rationalizes the Administration's threats of military power -- which the Economist acknowledges is likely responsible for so much of the mess that we find ourselves in at this point -- by offering up a compromise with no real principled direction that our diplomatic, economic, political, legal, or military efforts should take...
Thus allowing the Administration to keep the most serious threats on the table to leverage for tougher action, whether such action is constructive or counter-productive or not...
German Foreign Minister Joschka Fisher makes a very sensible case for this very kind of thinking in today's Washington Post...
The Case for Bargaining with Iran...Joschka Fischer...
What we need is more of the discussion that Joschka Fischer offers up in this article and that the Economist offered up in the 2005 article about whether these efforts might actually be creating the current crisis in many ways, rather than curing it...
Noone wants a nuclear Iran to bully it's neighbors, especially Israel...
But neither should we want a nuclear America to bully it's neighbors when imminent danger is not present, no matter how much hardline conservatives in America may persistently rationalize all of their worst fears...
Bullying a bully does not work if your goal is to persuade a bully to stop being a bully, and not just the short term opportunity to scare one, very temporarily, into submission...
The Economist's article on the lessons of soft power are too simplistic to be useful...anyone interested in studying soft power should reads Joe Nye's book of the same title...
Joe is not just talking about diplomacy, though diplomacy is an important part of dealing with the current situation in Iran...he is talking about American culture, education, entertainment, and liberalizing values...the American economy and free trade values, generally...all of such values and opportunities that allow for exchange and learning between cultures and for mutual appreciation between cultures...he is arguing, rightly, that they are attractive to the peoples of many developing countries even as they are similarly easily scared by hardliners in their own country afraid of the decadence and un-Godliness that they fear that such values and elements of freer Western cultures demonstrate...just as hard-liners in our own country treat the outside world with fear and dread...
And what angers me most about the whole deal is that it is all such people who are so hostile to more freedom and more liberalizing values -- in America, in Iran, among Al-Queda, and all over the world -- that keep fucking it up for everyone else...
Everyone wants a bully on their side to protect them against other bullies...
And I, for one, have no interest in rallying any bullies to my side...
Joe's work is has far more depth to it than the Economist article gives him credit for...and even Joe could dig deeper, I think, and my work is an effort to do so...
The least possible necessary aggression means that we consider objective efforts to deal with such situations with a presumption for less aggressive efforts, first, and aggression is only justified when danger is clearly eminent and not rationalized by our perpetual fears of its eminence...
Anyone who has ever worked with gang members and school bullies knows that they are perpetually rationalizing fears as being more eminent than they really are...and our international policy efforts, right now, are very similar...and need much grounding in less heat and more light to understand them as such...
The principles of least possible necessary aggression lead me to believe that the fundamental problem with the way that the situation with Iran is being carried out is that the most serious threats have been made up front in a way that has seriously distorted the conversation...there is no room for disagreement in this conversation on the part of the Iranians, a pretty important element of democratic discussions that the Administration professes to want to better emulate for Iran -- isn't the reason that the Administration believes, implicitly, that America should be trusted, more, in this entanglement is because it is more democratic and respects basic freedoms more than the Ahmadinejad and the Iranian government? -- and there is very little serious room for such discussions to occur without the threat of miltary, economic, or political action that is ultimately undermining such efforts, right now, I believe...
If you are having any conversation with someone for any purpose -- diplomatic, business negotiations, political discussions, personal discourse and/or disagreements -- and you put a gun on the table while you are discussing, you must assume that there will be a change in the tone of the conversation...and when you do so and the conversation turns sour, at what point do you take responsibility for how the presence of the gun affected the tone and effectiveness of the conversation?...
This is the question that the Administration needs to answer for itself, right now...and that honest conservatives, liberals, independent, political, and non-political folks need to be asking the President, right now...it is a question that the Economist and Joschka Fischer have put to the Administration, but neither the Administration nor its apologists, like Charles Krauthammer, have bothered to answer, too sure are they of their own correct worldview with no need for questioning or challenge or correction as they face these terribly complicated issues...it's a conceit that undermines the goals that America and the world shares of a world with less nuclear proliferation, especially among governments that are often hostile to democratic freedoms and responsibilities...
What is so terribly frustrating about this conceit is that it so ignores so many of the very important lessons of the cold war...there is not much of an argument at all, I don't believe, that the Soviet Union let go of its very forceful hold on Russian and Eastern European peoples because of nuclear weapons pointed at it from the United States...the capacity to defend oneself in case of attack is an important capacity to develop, to be sure...
But the most serious histories I have seen and read on the matter point to the impressive diplomacy between Ronald Reagan and Mikhael Gorbachev, as the two negotiated arms and discussed more generally the various merits and problems of communism and capitalism and democracy...it was Gorbachev's announcement of plans for perestroika and glasnost which began to open the Soviet Union up to more democratizing and decentralizing and self-determining forces, not threats of nuclear war from the West...it was internal changes in the Soviet Union, with the breaking down of the Berlin Wall and the breaking away of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, and the democratic election of Boris Yeltsin which helped to democratize and open up the old Soviet Republics, not threats of war from the United States...
And the Soviets, then, represented a far more credible threat to American strategic self-interest and self-defense than Iran does today...
But American hawks just can't seem to let go of their fears of world that is outside of American control...
And, ironically, it is American control that much of the world -- including Americans, like myself -- has much reason to fear, as much as Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons...
International security has clearly been undermined by so much of the breast-beating, hypercharged, far-too-forceful international policy by Americans and the Bush Administration...which is having all kinds of consequences for Americans on the world stage...
Not the least of which is that the American dream and promise of democracy and freedom is parodied by an international policy that seems to respect neither, much of the time, except on terms that a overzealous Administration believes that it can leverage to its advantage...
It's not the ideas that matter, so the thinking goes...it's the power...
And that really is the problem...
