Posted on 03/04/2005 2:25:44 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Condi Rice is heralding a shift in long-term US policy to transform the Middle East
Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday February 10, 2005
The Guardian
We are told that Condoleezza Rice received her unusual first name because her parents liked the Italian musical term condolcezza , meaning "with sweetness". What might condoleezza mean? A gifted Italian translator emails me that "it doesn't immediately suggest sweetness to an Italian ear". Yet there's no doubt that the new US secretary of state has conducted an impressive charm offensive during her lightning tour of Europe. She has presented a more elegant face, spoken a more nuanced language and played a sweeter mood music than those whom most Europeans have come to associate with the Bush administration over the past four years. The grand strategy she unfolds, both in public and in private, also has breathtakingly ambitious substance. At the very least, it deserves to be studied carefully.
What's more, she's been lucky. Her conciliatory speech in Paris earlier this week coincided with the handshake of peace between Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas. That was a gift only in small measure of Washington's own making. The president whom Dr Rice serves so faithfully, George Bush, has long been inspired by the example of Ronald Reagan. Like Reagan, he wants his first term, in which he was demonised as a warmonger by many Europeans, to be followed by a second term in which he writes himself into the history books as both peacemaker and freedom spreader. (Into some history books, depending whose you read.) But Reagan could do this because the US's main geopolitical challenger produced a leader called Mikhail Gorbachev. Until recently, it was hard to see where Bush's Gorbachev moment would come from. Now there is a chance that Bush's Gorbachev will be called Mahmoud Abbas.
I know, I know - this is different in a whole clutch of ways. And the optimist's new beginning is the pessimist's false dawn. But let's start with the good news: there's a development in American policy and a moment of opportunity in the Middle East. The two are linked. The heart of Dr Rice's argument goes something like this: the greatest strategic challenge of our time lies in the wider Middle East. It's from there that the terrorists who struck the twin towers on September 11 2001 emerged, and there that Islamist extremism is still being spawned. Poverty may contribute to the problem, and should be tackled, not least in the Palestinian territories, but Osama bin Laden was hardly poor. The root causes are political. "Freedom from want" matters; more important by far is the want of freedom. To adapt Tony Blair's famous one-liner about crime: you have be tough on terror but also tough on the causes of terror.
In shock after 9/11, the Bush administration began with a military and police response. They were going to kick butt - even if they sometimes kicked the wrong butt. Now they recognise that addressing the underlying causes of terrorism requires more and longer-term deployment of economic, political and cultural means. "Even more important than military and indeed economic power," Dr Rice said in Paris on Tuesday, "is the power of ideas." This approach also requires working more closely with allies; hence the hand of friendship extended to Berlin and Paris.
So the emphasis has shifted from a short-term war on terror to a longer-term war on tyranny. The post-9/11 analogy was with the second world war; the second-term analogy is with the cold war. That bust of Winston Churchill remains in the Oval Office, but now it's less the Churchill of 1940 than the Churchill of the 1946 Fulton speech, a defining moment of the cold war. Dr Rice, whose earlier life as an academic was focused on the cold war, often makes comparisons with the formative years of the late 1940s. In other words, we are talking about a long-term strategy to foster peaceful change in the undemocratic societies of the wider Middle East over the next two decades, comparable to the evolution encouraged in Soviet-ruled Europe by a mixture of containment and detente. An evolution that threw up a Gorbachev.
This approach represents a significant development not just in American policy but also in Dr Rice's own thinking. Four years ago she entered the White House as national security adviser on an intellectual ticket of "realism", emphasising military power and the hard-nosed pursuit of national interests. In her case this shift seems plausible, not just because of what she says but because of who she is - an African-American woman whose slave ancestors were treated, as she often recalls, even by the founding fathers of American democracy, as mere property, a fraction of a man. Proclaiming this vastly ambitious programme of fostering democracy around the world, from Belarus and Burma to Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe, she mentions that "in my own experience, a black woman named Rosa Parks was just tired one day of being told to sit in the back of a bus so she refused to move. And she touched off a revolution of freedom across the American south."
Not a line George Bush could credibly deliver. Here, at the latest, the good news ends and the problems begin. "President Bush," she said in Paris, "will continue our conversation when he arrives in Europe on February 21." But can he convince Europeans that this really is conversation, not dictation? Even if he starts talking like Immanuel Kant, many Europeans will not believe him - just as it took them a long time to accept (and some never did) that Ronald Reagan had changed tack.
Gorbachev was the undisputed leader of a post-totalitarian state. Mahmoud Abbas is the contested leader of a non-existent state. Representatives of two militant Palestinian groups, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, said yesterday that they are not bound by his ceasefire. Reagan was Gorbachev's chief interlocutor; the deals were made directly between the two of them. For all the US influence in the region, Abbas's chief interlocutor is Sharon, and the deal has to be done between them. Europeans and Americans are pulling in the same direction here, but if the Israeli-Palestinian negotiation stalls, transatlantic differences could again become acute.
Dr Rice has been reassuring Europeans that Iran is not another Iraq. While the US president will never take the threat of force off the table, the military option is low on his list. Yet the administration wants Iran to stop working towards a nuclear weapons capacity, stop supporting terrorists, reform itself, and respect human rights. This adds up to regime change. In dealing with the already nuclear-armed Soviet Union, you could combine military containment and detente-style political engagement for peaceful change. But no one has yet managed to explain how you do both prevention and detente at the same time. Meanwhile, there's a big transatlantic row brewing over the EU proposing to lift its embargo on arms exports to China.
So if I were a gambling man, I would not bet on this transatlantic honeymoon lasting long. While I have been writing this column, my Italian translator has emailed me: "If anything, the name could suggest condoglianze, that is condolences (on the occasion of a death) ..." The death of the west, perhaps?
With that prospect concentrating our minds, we Europeans should seize this fragile moment of opportunity to put on the table our own proposals for how best to achieve our common goals. We need to do this soon, concretely, and con brio.
Special report
Israel and the Middle East
World news guide
Israel
Middle East
Timeline
A chronology of events in the Middle East
Key speech
25.06.2002: Full text of George Bush's speech on Palestinian statehood
The issue explained
04.06.2003: Crisis in the Middle East
Interactive guide
How the Israelis and Palestinians came to war
Weblog
The best journalism on the conflict, from around the web
Government sites
Israeli Knesset (parliament)
Israeli ministry of foreign affairs
Israeli government site
Office of the Israeli prime minister
Palestinian Ministry of Information
Media
Ha'aretz (Israel)
Israel Insider (Israel)
Jerusalem Post (Israel)
Maariv (Israel)
Arabic Media Internet Network (Palestinian)
Palestine Chronicle (Palestinian)
Electronic Intifada (Palestinian)
Bitter Lemons (Israeli-Palestinian)
And why, after decades of complacent gerentocracy, did the USSR feel the need to anoint Gorbachev at that time?
Earlier piece :
Mideast Democracy: Thank Bin Laden
I wonder if he tweaked up his piece in the LA Times just for the Ultra Lefties on the Times Reading List, this doesn't seem so bad.
Nice twist of the logic that the author used in the LA Times piece linked above.
I know, I know - this is different in a whole clutch of ways.
Yeah, you might say that. But it is alike in Garton-Ash's treatment. In both cases an EU ideologue is desperately trying to deflect credit from where it is due to some other more politically-correct source, there Gorbachev, here Abbas. In both cases it is desperate historical revisionism while the ink is still wet on the original page.
And in both cases we have a Garton-Ash bleating "Europe is responsible! Europe is virtuous! Europe gets it right while those stupid American presidents just thrash around!" when, in fact, Europe fought the wrong cause with every ounce of its collective strength.
But not all of Europe, just the parts he admires. The British and the Italians and the Poles and the Danes and the others who bled there deserve Garton-Ash's notice more than the Zapateros and the Chiracs. And they'll never get it.
fyi
I have never read him before...didn't like his piece in the LA Times...see link above.
He is basically a fence-sitter. Hope it hurts!
Unlike the earlier article, the author does not appear drunk when he wrote this one. Here's the executive summary of this one:
Condelezza Rice is cool and charming but her name reflects the ignorance of her parents about Italian (but they're American, so what do you expect). Ronald Reagan was lucky in the cold war because Gorbachev ended it. W may be getting lucky in the WOT because Abbas has been elected. Abbas is W's Gorbachev. In his second term, W has realized that war doesn't work against terrorism; hence the charm offensive. But he will probably revert to type and piss of his betters in Europe soon. So let's seize the moment and have a joint EU/American policy to promote freedom in the Middle East over the next twenty years.
With that prospect concentrating our minds, we Europeans should seize this fragile moment of opportunity to put on the table our own proposals for how best to achieve our common goals. We need to do this soon, concretely, and con brio.
How wrong he was...
This article further proves that Washington was right in his farewell address.
This is klusterowane write klusterowane write is one plus one is two two plus two is three this person do want write this Thank you
All I got was this:
**********************************
Get the Most Popular Sites for "klusterowane"
No entry found for klusterowane.Did you mean klystron?Suggestions: For better results, try our search tips. |
What ?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.