"Islamistische" Bewegungen seit dem Arabischen Frühling: Tunesien, Ägypten und Syrien
In: Politische Studien: Magazin für Politik und Gesellschaft, Band 68, Heft 471, S. 15-24
ISSN: 0032-3462
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In: Politische Studien: Magazin für Politik und Gesellschaft, Band 68, Heft 471, S. 15-24
ISSN: 0032-3462
World Affairs Online
In: Internationale Politik: das Magazin für globales Denken, Band 71, Heft 4, S. 22-27
ISSN: 1430-175X
Die islamische Partei Ennahda stellt 69 Abgeordnete im tunesischen Parlament, zu denen Sayida Ounissi und Nafouel Ejammali gehören. Sie erläutern, wie ihre Partei nach Jahrzehnten im Untergrund zu einer politischen Kraft wurde, die den demokratischen Übergang mitgestaltet - jedoch nicht unter Bezugnahme auf den Koran, sondern durch Kompromissfähigkeit. (IP)
World Affairs Online
AMÉRICA LATINA Desastres naturales dejan cientos de muertos en México. Para más información:http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/photo/2013-09/23/content_16987950.htmhttp://www.cnn.com/2013/09/15/world/americas/tropical-weather/index.htmlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-24203404http://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/latinoamerica/47-muertos-en-desastre-por-lluvias-http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/18/20554314-looting-hits-acapulco-as-mexico-storm-death-toll-reaches-80?litecausadas-por-ciclones-ingrid-y-manuel-en-mxico_13069068-4http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1621210-crece-la-desesperacion-en-acapulco-por-un-ciclonhttp://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2013/09/22/mexique-apres-les-tempetes-le-defi-de-la-reconstruction_3482394_3244.htmlhttp://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/09/19/actualidad/1379621833_362444.html Fuertes lluvias y tornado afectan a miles de personas en Brasil. Para más información:http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1622524-un-tornado-deja-dos-muertos-64-heridos-y-cien-casas-destruidas-en-brasilhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/ultimas_noticias/2013/09/130923_ultnot_brazil_lluvias_ng.shtml Al menos 16 muertos deja motín en cárcel de Venezuela. Para más información:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-24135414http://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/latinoamerica/motn-en-crcel-de-en-crcel-de-sabaneta-estado-zulia-venezuela_13067995-4http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1620826-16-muertos-en-un-nuevo-motin-en-una-carcel-de-venezuelahttp://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/latinoamerica/venezuela-en-el-centro-de-la-polemica-por-las-narcomaletas_13079895-4 Vuelo de Air France transportó cocaína valuada en $270 millones de dólares. Para más información:http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1622606-narcovalijas-otro-extrano-caso-que-asombra-a-venezuelahttp://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/09/21/actualidad/1379720594_991194.htmlhttp://www.cnn.com/2013/09/22/world/europe/air-france-cocaine-found/index.html?hpt=wo_t3http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/21/20627626-270-million-worth-of-cocaine-seized-from-air-france-flight?litehttp://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2013-09/23/content_16986361.htm Dilma realiza polémico discurso en sede de la ONU. Para más información:http://oglobo.globo.com/mundo/autoridades-se-dividem-sobre-discurso-de-dilma-na-onu-contra-espionagem-americana-10127164#ixzz2frl2tyP1 http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/09/23/3646392/for-brazilians-president-rousseff.htmlhttp://www.lanacion.com.ar/1622822-dilma-rousseff-dijo-en-la-onu-que-eeuu-quebro-el-derecho-internacional-con-su-programa-de-eshttp://www.cnn.com/2013/09/17/world/americas/brazil-us/index.htmlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/noticias/2013/09/130923_dilma_onu_pu_dg.shtml Turbulencias políticas en la coalición de gobierno del PT en Brasil. Para más información:http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/09/20/actualidad/1379638800_371434.htmlhttp://www.lanacion.com.ar/1621229-turbulencias-politicas-en-la-coalicion-de-gobierno-del-pt Venezuela: el papel higiénico bajo control militar. Para más información:http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/21/world/americas/venezuela-toilet-paper/index.htmlhttp://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/latinoamerica/venezuela-dice-que-ee-uu-prohibi-vuelo-de-maduro-sobre-puerto-rico_13071990-4http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1622118-el-papel-higienico-bajo-control-militarhttp://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/09/21/actualidad/1379731784_337540.html Estados Unidos niega a Maduro el uso de su espacio aéreo. Para más información:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-24173124http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/20/world/americas/venezuela-us-presidential-plane/index.html Cristina Fernández en la ONU: "No se puede vivir en un mundo donde todo dependa de lo que resuelvan una o dos personas". Para más información:http://www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/ultimas_noticias/2013/09/130924_ultnot_cristina_fernandez_mr.shtml Maduro viaja a China para buscar préstamo por 390 millones de dólares. Para más información:http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2013-09/23/content_16985752.htm http://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/latinoamerica/viaje-de-nicols-maduro-a-china_13074455-4 Andrés Oppenheimer analiza: "Venezuela sigue alentando dictador sirio". Para más información:http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/09/18/3635418/andres-oppenheimer-venezuela-keeps.html ESTADOS UNIDOS /CANADÁ Dos tiroteos horrorizan a Estados Unidos. Para más información:http://www.lemonde.fr/ameriques/article/2013/09/23/obama-plaide-pour-une-modification-de-la-legislation-des-armes-a-feu_3482532_3222.htmlhttp://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/estados-unidos/aaron-alexis-el-atacante-en-instalacin-naval-de-washington_13067238-4http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1620538-otro-tiroteo-horroriza-a-eeuu-13-muertos-en-pleno-washingtonhttp://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/estados-unidos/tiroteo-en-chicago_13072703-4http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1621649-otro-tiroteo-en-estados-unidos-varias-personas-baleadas-en-un-parque-de-chicago Obama urge a retomar ley de control de armas de fuego. Para más información:http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/el-mundo/2013/obama-ley-armas-952747.html Obama busca un éxito para salir de su mal momento: quedó debilitado por la crisis siria, el escándalo Snowden y traspiés en el Congreso Para más información:http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1622100-obama-busca-un-exito-para-salir-de-su-mal-momento La Cámara de Representantes aprueba dejar sin fondos el sistema sanitario. Para más información:http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/09/20/actualidad/1379690784_897214.html Impactantes imágenes de las inundaciones en Colorado. Para más información:http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1620424-impactantes-imagenes-de-las-inundaciones-en-colorado Obama 'No creo que acción militar lleve a la paz duradera en Siria'. Para más información:http://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/estados-unidos/obama-dice-que-una-accin-militar-no-llevar-paz-en-siria_13079460-4 Piden a Estados Unidos arrestar al presidente de Sudán. Para más información:http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/el-mundo/2013/piden-a-eu-arrestar-al-presidente-de-sudan-951913.html Sorpresa y alivio en los mercados: la Fed mantiene sus estímulos. Para más información:http://www.bbc.co.uk/portuguese/noticias/2013/09/130923_banco_central_ru.shtmlhttp://www.lanacion.com.ar/1621206-sorpresa-y-alivio-en-los-mercados-la-fed-mantiene-sus-estimulos Fatal accidente entre un tren y un ómnibus en Canadá. Para más información:http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/18/20560490-six-killed-after-train-collides-with-bus-in-canadas-capital?litehttp://www.lanacion.com.ar/1621041-fatal-accidente-entre-un-tren-y-un-colectivo-en-canadahttp://www.cnn.com/2013/09/18/world/americas/canada-bus-train-colllision/index.html?hpt=wo_bn5 El secretario general Ban Ki-Moon abrió la 68° sesión de debate con un mensaje sobre la crisis en Siria. Para más información:http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1622801-en-vivo-comenzo-la-reunion-de-la-asamblea-general-de-la-onu EUROPA Ángela Merkel obtiene victoria histórica en elecciones en Alemania. Para más información:http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-germany-election-20130923,0,1525699.storyhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24203909http://www.economist.com/blogs/charlemagne/2013/09/german-election-diary-6http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/22/world/europe/germany-elections/index.html?hpt=wo_c2http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/23/20656028-germanys-angela-merkel-celebrates-super-result-after-securing-third-term?litehttp://www.lanacion.com.ar/1622594-merkel-con-dificultades-para-formar-una-coalicionhttp://oglobo.globo.com/mundo/apos-selecao-multicultural-de-futebol-alemanha-tem-primeiros-negros-no-parlamento-10104002#ixzz2frq3kPmV http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/09/22/actualidad/1379834875_690573.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/world/europe/germany-elections.html?ref=world&gwh=85DE080B13C14B847AF7298B3279080F Barco de Greenpeace contra intereses rusos. Para más información:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24222392http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24194726http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/20/world/europe/russia-greenpeace/index.html?hpt=ieu_c2 Pussy Riot en huelga de hambre por malas condiciones carcelarias en Rusia. Para más información:http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-pussy-riot-hunger-strike-prison-20130923,0,553029.story Ataque a edificio de policía en Ankara. Para más información:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24184381 Snowden revela que Reino Unido usó un virus para espiar en Bélgica. Para más información:http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/09/20/actualidad/1379676659_653447.html Holanda pone fin al Estado de Bienestar. Para más información:http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1620849-holanda-pone-fin-al-estado-de-bienestarhttp://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/09/21/actualidad/1379759516_595505.html Putin no descarta presentarse a la reelección. Para más información:http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/el-mundo/2013/rusia-putin-reeleccion-952002.html Los suizos rechazan en las urnas la abolición del servicio militar obligatorio. Para más información:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/world/europe/swiss-vote-to-keep-mandatory-army-service.html?ref=world&gwh=E7F8DD8A869141BB79F7E688A1911531http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/09/22/actualidad/1379845725_584652.htmlhttp://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/09/21/actualidad/1379761520_791558.html ASIA- PACÍFICO/ MEDIO ORIENTE Continúa la sangrienta guerra civil en Siria. Para más información:http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2013/09/20/l-offensive-mediatique-de-bachar-al-assad_3481937_3218.htmlhttp://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-syria-weapons-20130924,0,4157401.storyhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-24217703http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/23/world/meast/syria-civil-war/index.html?hpt=wo_c2http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/09/14/actualidad/1379158714_684648.htmlhttp://www.lanacion.com.ar/1622604-el-conflicto-sirio-y-el-acercamiento-entre-iran-y-eeuu-los-ejes-de-la-asamblea-de-la-onu#comentarhttp://elcomercio.pe/actualidad/1635129/noticia-bashar-al-assad-siria-enemigo-imaginario-potencias-occidente?ft=gridhttp://www.cnn.com/2013/09/16/world/meast/syria-whats-next/index.html?hpt=wo_bn8http://www.latimes.com/local/columnone/la-fg-c1-syria-rebuild-20130924-dto,0,6358208.htmlstory Más de 4.000 niños han abandonado Siria sin sus padres según Unicef. Para más información:http://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/medio-oriente/ms-de-4000-nios-han-abandonado-siria-solos-segn-unicef_13072878-4 Ataque suicida en una iglesia cristiana en Pakistán deja 78 muertos. Para más información:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24201243http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-pakistan-church-20130923,0,6344281.storyhttp://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/23/20655580-angry-christians-protest-pakistan-church-bombing-death-toll-rises-to-81?litehttp://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/asia/nio-paquistan-fue-violado-por-el-director-de-un-jardn-y-otros-cuatro-hombres_13072884-4http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1622318-ataque-suicida-en-una-iglesia-cristiana-en-paquistanhttp://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/09/22/actualidad/1379846926_053319.htmlhttp://www.lemonde.fr/asie-pacifique/article/2013/09/22/25-morts-dans-un-attentat-suicide-devant-une-eglise-au-pakistan_3482419_3216.html Pakistán pone en libertad al ex número dos de los talibanes. Para más información:http://www.latimes.com/world/la-fg-afghanistan-pakistan-taliban-20130922,0,3915020.story Cadena perpetua para ex líder chino Bo Xilai. Para más información:http://www.lemonde.fr/asie-pacifique/article/2013/09/22/la-condamnation-de-bo-xilai-a-la-perpetuite-passionne-la-blogosphere-chinoise_3482507_3216.htmlhttp://www.cnn.com/2013/09/23/world/asia/china-bo-xilai/index.html?hpt=wo_c2http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1622319-dura-condena-contra-un-ex-lider-chinohttp://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/asia/cadena-perpetua-para-exlder-chino-bo-xilai_13077445-4http://behindthewall.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/19/20582910-ousted-chinese-politician-bo-xilai-found-guilty-sentenced-to-life-in-prison?litehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24203461 Corea del Norte y constantes pruebas de desarrollo bélico. Para más información:http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-north-korea-cancels-family-reunions-20130921,0,3720420.storyhttp://www.economist.com/news/asia/21586593-north-korea-appears-be-firing-up-its-old-nuclear-reactor-picking-up-steam Los crueles abusos en Corea del Norte preocupan a la ONU. Para más información:http://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/asia/investigacin-de-la-onu-condena-abusos-generalizados-en-corea-del-norte_13066998-4http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/21/world/asia/korea-family-reunions-cancel/index.html?hpt=wo_t2http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/09/21/actualidad/1379749345_852336.htmlhttp://www.lemonde.fr/asie-pacifique/article/2013/09/21/la-coree-du-nord-reporte-les-rencontres-de-familles-separees-par-la-guerre_3482131_3216.html Mas de 60 muertos en atentado en funeral en Irak. Para más información:http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2013/09/21/irak-l-explosion-de-voitures-piegees-fait-au-moins-huit-morts_3482358_3218.htmlhttp://www.cnn.com/2013/09/20/world/meast/iraq-violence/index.html?hpt=imi_c2http://www.economist.com/blogs/analects/2013/09/boxilai-sentencehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24190728http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/world/middleeast/bomber-hits-sunni-funeral-as-attacks-mount-in-iraq.html?ref=world&gwh=7C5D659AC487AAC0D98E436F0B226EB0 Diversos medios cubrieron desastres naturales que afectaron a China, Tailandia y Filipinas. Para más información:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24193201http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/15/world/meast/yemen-child-bride/index.html?hpt=wo_bn8http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/22/world/asia/typhoon-usagi/index.html?hpt=wo_c2http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/22/20638844-twenty-dead-after-powerful-typhoon-lashes-hong-kong?litehttp://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/world/middleeast/netanyahu-is-said-to-view-iran-deal-as-a-possible-http://oglobo.globo.com/mundo/chuvas-causam-mortes-deixam-11-mil-desabrigados-nas-filipinas-10132622#ixzz2frr34vRwhttp://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2013/09/22/apres-les-philippines-et-taiwan-un-super-typhon-menace-hong-kong_3482399_3244.htmlhttp://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2013-09/18/content_16980115.htm Al menos 56 uniformados muertos en ataques de Al Qaeda en Yemen. Para más información:http://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/medio-oriente/56-uniformados-muertos-en-ataques-de-al-qaida-en-yemen_13072837-4 Desafortunados sucesos denotan pesimismo sobre negociaciones de paz en Medio Oriente. Para más información:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24200443http://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-poll-israel-palestinian-peace-negotiations-20130923,0,1612663.storyhttp://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2013-09/23/content_16986672.htm Diplomacia iraní intenta tener rol fundamental en Asamblea de la ONU. Para más información:http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2013/09/22/rohani-veut-la-reconnaissance-du-droit-de-l-iran-a-enrichir-l-uranium_3482409_3218.htmlhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-24210066http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21586598-irans-new-president-launches-unprecedented-charm-offensive-his-biggest-smilehttp://www.cnn.com/2013/09/23/world/asia/un-general-assembly/index.html?hpt=wo_c2 Un fuerte terremoto de 7,7 grados dejó al menos 80 muertos en Pakistán. Para más información:http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1622893-un-fuerte-terremoto-de-77-grados-dejo-al-menos-80-muertos-en-pakistan Elecciones en Sri Lanka. Para más información:http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2013/09/elections-sri-lanka El 'boom' asiático destrona el popular 'made in China'. Para más información:http://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/asia/el-boom-asitico-destrona-el-popular-made-in-china_13073899-4 ÁFRICA Ataque a centro comercial en Kenia. Para más información:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/23/world/africa/nairobi-mall-shooting.html?ref=world&_r=0&gwh=1BE77FB8E179607237AC38DB7471AE95http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/article/2013/09/23/le-kenya-theatre-de-nombreuses-attaques-terroristes_3482543_3212.htmlhttp://www.eluniversal.com.mx/el-mundo/2013/aumenta-a-68-cifra-de-muertos-en-nairobi-952782.htmlhttp://oglobo.globo.com/mundo/presidente-do-quenia-afirma-ter-derrotado-terroristas-em-shopping-10114658#ixzz2frsOPhXmhttp://www.latimes.com/world/worldnow/la-fg-wn-kenya-mall-attack-gunmen-alive-20130924,0,7047934.storyhttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-24179992http://www.economist.com/blogs/baobab/2013/09/attack-kenya-0http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/23/world/africa/kenya-mall-attack/index.html?hpt=wo_c1http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/24/20669256-kenya-mall-attack-survivor-we-were-let-down-by-the-police?litehttp://www.miamiherald.com/2013/09/22/3643048/attackers-remain-in-kenya-mall.htmlhttp://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2013-09/23/content_16985804.htm Cierran el metro de El Cairo tras encontrar dos bombas sin explotar. Para más información:http://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/medio-oriente/cierran-el-metro-de-el-cairo-tras-encontrar-dos-bombas_13071296-4 La violencia persigue a los refugiados sirios hasta Egipto. Para más información:http://internacional.elpais.com/internacional/2013/09/21/actualidad/1379781812_737789.html Egipto prohíbe actividades de los Hermanos Musulmanes. Para más información:http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/23/world/africa/egypt-muslim-brotherhood/index.html?hpt=wo_c2http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/23/20659049-egypt-court-bans-all-muslim-brotherhood-activities?lite OTRAS NOTICIAS En el mundo existen 168 millones de niños que se ven obligados a trabajar. Para más información:http://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/europa/informe-de-la-oit-progresos-contra-el-trabajo-infantil_13077838-4 "Los Angeles Times" presenta portal sobre el crecimiento de la población mundial. Para más información:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/population/ "The Economist" presenta su informe semanal: "Business this week". Para más información:http://www.economist.com/news/world-week/21583302-business-week
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Blog: Responsible Statecraft
Shehbaz Sharif was sworn in as Pakistan's new prime minister Sunday amid a swirl of accusations that his party, in concert with the Pakistani military, rigged the elections.Earlier this month, voters in Pakistan woke up to what initially appeared to be an overwhelming victory to former Prime Minister Imran Khan's party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), and a strong rebuke to the powerful military-backed government in the country's parliamentary elections. Instead, the election was ultimately called for the military's preferred candidate, Sharif, of the conservative Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz (PML-N) party.Early results, broadcast widely by the Pakistani media, had shown a landslide victory for PTI. After the election was called for Sharif's party, nonpartisan observers like the Free and Fair Election Network (FAFEN) found that there were election law violations at over two-thirds of polling sites, which almost certainly helped change the outcomes.This was in addition to unprecedented efforts by the Pakistani military to discourage voter turnout and intimidate candidates running with the populist PTI, including forcing PTI-aligned candidates to run as independents, banning the PTI's iconic cricket bat symbol from the ballot in a country where a significant number of illiterate voters rely on those symbols to identify candidates, and widespread mobile outages.Late in the evening of the election, after an unusual gap in media coverage, constituencies where televised results and hard documentation (known as "Form 45s") had shown PTI-backed candidates with commanding leads were suddenly showing "official" results in which PML-N candidates had surged to improbable leads, in some cases with PTI-backed candidates losing votes. A high-ranking elections official in Rawalpindi, a city housing the military headquarters abutting the capital Islamabad, later confessed to flipping 13 constituencies against PTI-aligned candidates and accused the Election Commission of Pakistan and military leadership of orchestrating electoral theft. In spite of these efforts to ostensibly skew the results in the PMLN's favor, official results still showed the PTI with 93-seat plurality, eclipsing the PMLN's 75 seats. But reducing the potentially-enormous PTI mandate into a bare plurality left the party incapable of overcoming a coalition of the PMLN and the PPP — Pakistan's other dynastic political party — and forming a government. Members of the U.S. Congress from across the political spectrum have come out with statements sounding the alarm on the Pakistani military's election interference, vote rigging, and fraud. A number of lawmakers are specifically calling on the State Department to refuse to recognize the results of Pakistan's election until there is an independent investigation into the vote rigging and fraud. Growing pressure from Congress, advocates, and Pakistani-Americans, many of whom support PTI, has forced the State Department to think carefully about its next moves. House Foreign Affairs Committee members like Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.) and Rep. John James (R-Mich.) were among the lawmakers stressing the importance of making sure the U.S. does not recognize an illegitimate government in Pakistan. "Now is the time for the international community to stand on the side of the people of Pakistan," Rep. Wild said. "We cannot recognize a new government until it is clear that democracy has prevailed." Progressives, establishment Democrats, and even Republicans have spoken out in recent days to express support for the right of the Pakistani people to a democratically elected government. More than two dozen lawmakers, led by Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), sent a letter to the Biden administration on Wednesday demanding it withhold recognition of the new government until there's an investigation. The State Department's response, on the other hand, has been mixed. Not long after military and police forces moved to suppress the election results, Biden's State Department put out a statement calling for an investigation into the election fraud. "Claims of interference or fraud should be fully investigated," spokesperson Matthew Miller said. However, he added, "the United States is prepared to work with the next Pakistani government, regardless of party." Pressure from activists and lawmakers like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) likely compelled the State Department to issue a recent call on Pakistan's government to restore access to X (formerly known as Twitter) during an extensive blackout in the country.It remains a question how committed the State Department is to seeing this through. At a press briefing earlier this month, Miller said the U.S. wants to see the vote rigging investigated by "Pakistan's legal system." It is widely known, however, that Pakistan's legal system is an arm of the regime. Courts in Pakistan have already thrown cases out, and it was the Supreme Court that essentially banned PTI candidates from running in the election when it ruled they could not use their party symbol on ballots. When Intercept reporter Ryan Grim pressed Miller on this fact, pointing to growing congressional calls for an independent investigation, Miller replied: "I don't know what body they're proposing." But the State Department has had no problem assessing elections and suggesting actions against them in the past. They just appear stronger and more categorical. In July 2023, the State Department declared that the Cambodian national elections "were neither free nor fair." When Uganda saw its government undermine the 2021 general election with violence, intimidation, and other suppression tactics, Secretary of State Antony Blinken condemned the actions and announced visa restrictions "on those believed to be responsible for, or complicit in, undermining the democratic process in Uganda." On Sunday, the State Department condemned the "sham parliamentary elections" in Belarus. "Impossible to hold free and fair elections in a climate of fear and with 1400+ political prisoners," Miller said in a tweet. Anyone familiar with recent U.S. foreign policy knows well that Washington is never shy about condemning purportedly undemocratic behavior abroad, even using it as justification for military interventions and sanctions regimes.A chorus for an election audit is growing domestically in Pakistan. Election monitors with varying degrees of independence from officials in Islamabad, ranging from FAFEN to the Pattan Development Organization, have called the results into question and demanded action from the Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP). Pattan officials have gone even further in their assessment of electoral fraud and have demanded an investigation of motives: "Since Pattan had observed and analysed the whole electoral process of the election, we are confident to note that rigging at each step of the election was likely to be part of a grand strategy. Therefore, it appears necessary to investigate the role of its authors, the implementors and who are the possible beneficiaries." Pressure is growing from the halls of the U.S. Congress on the State Department to endorse such an audit before recognizing any PMLN-PPP coalition government formed under fraudulent terms. Senior Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) is among the latest and most significant of those voices, addressing his message to the Pakistani ambassador to the U.S.: "Pakistani authorities must fully investigate the allegations of fraud and electoral interference. Without a credible investigation, a new government will struggle to bring the Pakistani people together." Sen. Van Hollen also invoked the specter of Pakistan's looming IMF negotiations, a challenge that has plagued the country's fragile governments and economy for years and one that has similarly been raised by Imran Khan in his own letter asking the IMF not to extend a loan to an undemocratic Pakistani government.The coming weeks will be a crucial moment in the future of Pakistan's fragile democracy.
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Following Houthi missile attacks aimed at Israel and third-country-flagged vessels in the Red Sea, the Biden administration is reportedly considering targeting northern Yemen while creating a new international maritime alliance to try to ensure secure transit. As a result of the Houthi attacks, international merchant shipping is being rerouted with inflationary consequences for vital global supplies. Washington is weighing whether military strikes would either deter or incite further Houthi action and risk undermining desirable attempts by Saudi Arabia at ending its conflict with the Houthis following Yemen's stalled but unresolved civil war. The Houthis' Red Sea military intervention is attempting to combine ideologically-driven anger at Israel's military campaign in Gaza with leverage for funding the long-unpaid salaries of northern Yemenis under Houthi control. However, oil revenue, in part limited due to Houthi missile attacks on southern Yemeni oil and related facilities, is managed by the internationally recognized Yemen government based in Aden in southern Yemen. For the so-called "Legitimacy Government," or LG, to give the Houthi money to pay northern "civil servants" — who include armed fighters — U.S. pressure and Saudi and Emirati backing are needed. But this is highly unlikely. In southern Yemen, the Southern Transitional Council (STC), founded in 2017 with the backing of the UAE, is preparing to lead the formation of a new state by secession from what it considers a failed, and northern-dominated, Republic of Yemen, or RoY. The STC hopes to exploit what they see as the Houthis shooting themselves in the foot by destabilizing the Red Sea area. After all, the Houthis have, despite a 20-month formal ceasefire, been waging an economically motivated war against the south designed to deprive the LG of revenues and boost the appeal of the Red Sea port of Hodeidah. For the STC to reemphasize southern ports and oil facilities as an alternative to Houthi-controlled Hodeidah, it needs to somehow secure the whole southern Yemeni coast and to incentivize more inbound shipping. The Houthis' relationship to Iran makes it easy for the STC to label it a Tehran proxy. Despite membership in Iran's "Axis of Resistance," and Iran's aid in extending their missile technology's literal reach, the Houthis have their own motivations. The STC is seizing on the Houthi threat to Red Sea security to underline the prospective role of its own "shadow state" in boosting international maritime stability. In this context, this southern state-in-waiting is willing to uphold western security interests and is thus presenting itself as a proactive partner in securing the Red Sea's Bab Al-Mandab strait and the Gulf of Aden against Houthi attacks. The STC argues that the proven Houthi threat to Red Sea security is a cynical exploitation of popular Yemeni anger over Israel's actions against Gaza. A recent STC press conference, headed by the self-styled president of the south, Maj-Gen Aidaroos Zubaidi, called on those seeking to secure the area to beef up the STC's "naval forces."The STC, however, does not actually have its own navy or any regular armed forces. In fact, it is debatable if it has any armed units that can be properly described as under Zubaidi's command. Southern Yemen exists in an almost parallel universe. Zubaidi enjoys recognition, as does the STC he leads, by virtue of his position as vice-president of the Saudi-backed eight-man Presidential Leadership Council, or PLC, heading the version of the RoY that sits in Aden. The PLC includes Zubaidi's STC deputy, the former governor of the huge southern governorate of Hadramawt, Maj-Gen. Faraj Bahsani. Yet another military figure in a leading STC political role, Bahsani previously headed the RoY's 2nd Military Division.But neither Zubaidi nor Bahsani can offer an armed underpinning to the STC's claims to be an all-inclusive movement for southern independence. These men, like other LG members, enjoy their international recognition via the LG, a Yemeni government that is neither a state nor one in waiting. While the LG enjoys the loose loyalty of some RoY military remnants in the south and in some parts of the north, its armed capacity is uncoordinated and riven by unreliable tribal components. And the LG itself lacks popular political support. By contrast, the STC, based on much anecdotal evidence, enjoys some popular support in Aden and in the other southwestern governorates: Abyan, Lahej and Dhale, and in coastal Hadramawt. In the Wadi area of Hadramawt, however, local saadah (descendants of the Prophet Mohammed) and tribal leaders are more circumspect. What the STC lacks, even in its Aden base where leading STC figure Ahmed Lamlas is governor, is direct control of armed forces. The Emirati-trained and -backed "police," the Hizam Al Amni ("Security Belt") operating in Aden, are formally speaking STC-aligned but are not in practice directly controlled by Gen. Aidaroos, the nominal supreme commander of "the Southern Armed Forces." The Amaliqa ("Giants Brigade"), another Emirati-formed force which in 2022 played a decisive role in pushing Houthi fighters out of the energy-rich southern governorate of Shabwa, are only loosely connected to the STC. A rival, Emirati-founded army, the Nokba ("Elite Forces"), was in operation in Shabwa but was displaced by "Shabwa Defense," which is associated more closely with Saudi Arabia. In Aden, the STC is busy creating parallel bodies to those of the governorate. It does not see this as unnecessary duplication but rather as trying to fill the vacuum in services provision in a formal governorate structure that it ostensibly runs. The STC is intent on a similar "shadow state" project in Mahra (the governorate that borders Saudi Arabia to its north and Oman to its east). However, the STC is doing this in far less auspicious circumstances than in Aden. In Mahra, "northern" political and security influence, including that of Al-Islah (Yemen's Muslim Brotherhood) is profound, due in part to demographic realities created by the large numbers of people who have fled Houthi advances and security services that are seen by critics as RoY loyalists. The Mahran version of Amn Al-Watan ("National Security") struggles to communicate with its notional "National Security" partner in neighboring Hadramawt. Oil and other essentials carried by road from southwest to southeast Yemen are not protected for their safe arrival in Mahra by any coordination with supposed parallel security bodies in other southern governorates. To be a plausible partner state of the U.S. and the other western powers who are now moving to protect Israel and Red Sea shipping from the Houthis, the south needs a single unified form of control of the different military and security services that, at best, operate on a governorate basis only. But the south's main external sources of support, the Emiratis and the Saudis (the latter having formed separate "National Shield" forces in Aden and Hadramawt), are not interested in promoting an integrated southern security body. One reason is that these two Gulf states have competing interests in different parts of southern Yemen, and a common unwillingness to push for a sovereign southern stateSouthern Yemen under the STC's would-be leadership is seeking to burnish its western-friendly security and political credentials. However, southern Yemen remains a would-be nation made up of different countries only partly united in opposition to perceptibly northern rulers. For the time being, it looks as if the role of any southern Yemeni state in Arabian Peninsula security will remain rhetorical.
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A recent essay from Israeli writer Gadi Taub in Tablet makes clear that Israel's war in Gaza is not its last. Israel is going "to shed its defensive strategy and go on the offensive." That means taking out Hezbollah and then taking on "a multifaceted struggle against Iran over its drive for regional hegemony and its nuclear weapons program."Taub, whose hawkish views in many ways reflect the vital center of Israel opinion, sees the Biden administration as following a longstanding Democratic policy of appeasing Iran. In sharp contrast to Henry Kissinger, whose 1970s diplomacy he lauds, Taub finds Secretary of State Antony Blinken's policy to be a disaster. "By empowering the Iranians, Blinken's policy will inevitably also further the penetration of the region by Iran's patrons, the Russians and the Chinese, at America's expense. Kissinger's policy was focused on pushing America's great power rivals out. American policy today is inviting them in."The Dream Palace of the IsraelisThe most extraordinary feature of Taub's essay is its unreal portrait of the regional forces arrayed for and against Israel. Iran, Taub writes, "is at war with the old American regional alliance system — which includes Israel, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states. But Secretary Blinken and President Biden are appeasing the new radicals, not containing them."In this imaginary tableau, shared by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel is in an unspoken but deep alliance with the Sunni Arab states, who want to see Hamas crushed and Iran and its proxies relentlessly attacked. What these rulers say in public, so the story goes, is miles apart from what they say in private. In public, of course, Arab leaders are breathing fire about Israel's mad amplification of the Dahiya Doctrine in Gaza. In private, these Arab leaders are reportedly telling U.S. and Israeli insiders (but seemingly no one else) that they heartily approve Israeli's operations. This Israeli view of Arab leaders is delusional. Yes, Arab leaders have big issues with Hamas. But they also think, as do their people, that Israel's extreme violence in Gaza may open the gates of hell, as the 2003 Iraq War once did. They don't think it's possible to pulverize Hamas into oblivion, because new defiant leaders will inevitably emerge. Israel, in their view, is not solving anything, but rather magnifying insecurity in the region. The (feeble) attempt by Blinken to put restraints on Israel's conduct of the war in Gaza is said by Taub to invite Russia and China into the region, but in fact it is Israel's policy that does so. That policy pushes Iran and America's traditional Arab coalition into one another's arms, making them realize that they have congruent interests in opposing Israeli plans. These interests, in turn, are likewise simpatico with those of Russia and China right now. Taub believes that Israel's coming offensives would break the new relations between the Saudis and the Sino-Russian bloc. No, these relations would be strengthened. This Islamic consensus — which joins Arabs, Iranians, and Turks and is supported by Russia and China — would be given further impetus if Israeli ambitions in the West Bank are fully realized. Another Nakba in Gaza and in the West Bank is anathema to America's Arab friends. Yet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks of the Palestinian Authority just as harshly as Hamas or Hezbollah. He has rejected U.S. proposals to bring the PA into Gaza after the war. Netanyahu maintains within his coalition powerful ministers (National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich) who have big plans for the West Bank and Temple Mount. In this regard there appears to be a fourth security front in the West Bank and Jerusalem, distinct from Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. Washington as Enabler and RestrainerTaub hangs his essay on a comparison between Henry Kissinger's Middle East diplomacy in the 1970s and Antony Blinken's policy today. Kissinger, Taub relates, taught a masterclass in diplomacy. Arab leaders, Kissinger saw, "would understand that only the U.S. could deliver Israeli concessions, and that the price–peace with Israel and breaking with the Soviet orbit–would be worth it. It worked."Fast forward to today. If the United States cannot or will not deliver Israeli concessions, surely its leverage with the Arab states is sharply diminished. Israel is totally dependent on U.S. arms for the conduct of its current and projected operations. "The Israelis are playing with house money," as one U.S. official puts it. As of December 1, transfers loaded on to U.S. cargo planes included 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells. More is on the way. The Biden administration has lots of leverage over Israel. They are just unwilling to use it. The Biden administration has rightly warned Israel against a big offensive operation in Lebanon. Hezbollah is in a use-it-or-lose-it situation with respect to its offensive systems, with Hezbollah reportedly having 100,000 to 150,000 missiles and rockets, far superior to Hamas's force. The evacuation after October 7 of some 80,000 Israelis from communities bordering Lebanon is undoubtedly an unacceptable outcome for Israel, but Israel cannot seek to eliminate Hezbollah without incurring grave risks to its own population. It would be far better for Israelis to reoccupy the northern towns under the auspices of the mutual deterrence that prevailed before October 7, rather than to launch a big war against Hezbollah. However, the Israelis clearly think otherwise. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has promised a military campaign to drive Hezbollah beyond the Litani River unless Hezbollah heeds Israel's ultimatum to evacuate the border region. The horrifying risk from such an escalation is that Israel would turn Beirut and southern Lebanon into Gaza. If Taub's views are a reliable guide, the Israelis have totally given up on Biden and the Democrats. The putative "appeasement" of Iran is not "an offhand mistake of the Democratic Party" but "a premeditated strategy designed to strengthen Iran at the expense of America's traditional allies." At a time when Arab Americans and their allies are livid with Biden and Blinken, it is curious to find Taub and the Israelis joining in the execration. The former group hates B&B for giving Israel the greenest of green lights, the other for the bright red lights (stop with the civilian killing, don't invade Lebanon) that Taub discerns. The administration's position is unenviable. On one side is the geopolitical disaster that follows from a blank check to Israel, on the other the domestic perils of having a gigantic fight with Netanyahu and the whole Israeli nation. In this acute battle between the national interest and personal political survival, will President Biden do a John Adams and choose country over party? I do not have an answer to this question. One thing is crystal clear. Supporting Israel means supporting a grand design that calls for a war on all fronts, financed and enabled by the United States. The Israelis seem to have no consciousness of the fact that previous uses of force in Lebanon and Palestine didn't solve their security problem. Instead, they believe that more destruction, on a Dresden-like scale, will do this time around what it has not done in the past. Given Israel's lonely existence in a sea of Muslims, this belief seems irrational to me. Israel cannot get rid of its security problem or its enemies by the massive use of force. Escalation imperils Israelis as much as it imperils their neighbors. But the Israelis hold to their belief in force with theological conviction, and the belief should be taken with the utmost seriousness. Thus far, this irresistible force has not encountered an immovable object.
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United States policy toward Israel's war in Gaza was neatly summarized by Secretary of State Antony Blinken on November 30: "Israel has one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world. It is capable of neutralizing the threat posed by Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent civilians. And it has an obligation to do so." This posture — destroy Hamas but do so in observance of the laws of war — is not that of the administration alone. It has been widely embraced by official Washington. A key defense of what would emerge as the hallmark of the Biden administration's Gaza outlook came from Jo-Ann Mort and Michael Walzer in the New Republic on October 18. "A just war requires the defeat of Hamas," they wrote. "It is a maxim of just war theory that the rules of war cannot make it impossible to fight a just war. There has to be a way to fight."In their view, the best way was "to fight with restraint, to reject indiscriminate bombing and shelling, to respect enemy civilians (many, many Gazans are opposed to Hamas), and take necessary risks to reduce their risks, and finally to maintain a clear goal: defeat for Hamas. Nothing more."Walzer is the author of Just and Unjust Wars, a hugely influential treatise on morality in war that has gone through successive editions since its publication in 1977. Walzer's meditation on the just war was especially impressive for taking on a wide range of historical examples, but it was written under the shadow of the war in Vietnam. Walzer condemned that war not only as an unjustified intervention but also as one that was "carried on in so brutal a manner that even had it initially been defensible, it would have to be condemned, not in this or that aspect but generally." In his treatise, Walzer closely considered both jus ad bellum (the right of going to war) and jus in bello (the law governing its conduct). As Walzer noted, "considerations of jus ad bellum and jus in bello are logically independent, and the judgments we make in terms of one and the other are not necessarily the same." But in the case of Vietnam, he argued, they came together. "The war cannot be won, and it should not be won. It cannot be won, because the only available strategy involves a war against civilians; and it should not be won, because the degree of civilian support that rules out alternative strategies also makes the guerillas the legitimate rulers of the country." Do not these strictures apply to Israel's war in Gaza? Hamas hides behind civilians, or is rather closely intermingled with them, as the Viet Cong once were. It has enjoyed an equal or greater amount of support from the local population. Its acts of assassination and terrorism fall far short, numerically, of those committed by the VC. Walzer was rightly shocked by the civilian toll in Vietnam, which saw a civilian-combatant fatality ratio of approximately two to one. In Gaza, the proportion of civilian-to-combatant deaths is at least five to one and probably much greater. Israeli leaders have made clear that their war is on the whole population. Their criteria for when to bomb, aided by AI, has blown past previous restraints. Another case taken up by Walzer in Just and Unjust Wars was America's atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The decision was justified at the time as the only way to avert the far larger casualties likely to ensue were the United States to have attempted an invasion of Japan. Walzer rejected this argument. "It does not have the form: if we don't do x (bomb cities), they will do y (win the war, establish tyrannical rule, slaughter their opponents)." Instead, the U.S. government in effect argued that "if we don't do x, we will do y." The real problem, Walzer argued, was the policy of unconditional surrender — that is, it had to do with U.S. war aims. Walzer approved the policy of unconditional surrender when applied to Germany — Hitler's regime represented a "supreme emergency" — but not when applied to Japan. "Japan's rulers were engaged in a more ordinary sort of military expansion, and all that was morally required was that they be defeated, not that they be conquered and totally overthrown," he wrote. Walzer's treatment of Vietnam and Hiroshima suggests that there are imperative reasons to stop short of total victory as a war aim, if the result of pursuing it is a moral enormity. If you have to commit wickedness on a titanic scale in order to achieve total victory, you should accept limited war and seek the containment of the enemy, not his obliteration. This is especially so, one might add, if the enemy one aims to annihilate elicits widespread sympathies elsewhere, making probable some kind of over-the-top retribution in the future. There are 2.2 million Gazans. There are 1.8 billion Muslims. Germany and Japan were friendless in 1945. It is obvious that Israel's war in Gaza bears no relationship to the war that Mort and Walzer recommended on October 18. Israel has not fought with restraint, has not rejected indiscriminate bombing and shelling, has not respected enemy civilians. Operation Swords of Iron has been instead the most elaborate and twisted application yet of the Dahiya Doctrine, Israel's longstanding war plan that makes a virtue out of wildly disproportionate retributions. That Israel intended to do this was apparent from the outset — 6,000 bombs were dropped in the war's first six days — but went strangely unnoticed by Mort and Walzer when their piece appeared. The authors stressed the need to get humanitarian aid into Gaza but didn't mention the Israeli blockade on all things requisite to life, a radical policy totally opposed to laws of war and imposed by Israel on the war's first day. In a subsequent interview on October 30, Walzer conceded that there was no justification for Israel's blockades of Gaza's electricity, water, and food supply, but also questioned the idea that a humanitarian pause would be justified before Hamas was defeated. "Acts that shock the moral conscience of mankind" was one of Walzer's most resonant phrases in Just and Unjust Wars. He meant by that "old-fashioned phrase" not the solipsistic prevarications of political leaders, but "the moral convictions of ordinary men and women, acquired in the course of their everyday activities." Clearly, Israel's war in Gaza has entailed a profound shock to these sensibilities. It is this revulsion, not sympathy for Hamas, that explains world-wide public opposition to what Israel is doing. From the beginning of the crisis, the Biden administration's approach to the war ran closely in parallel with the course recommended by Mort and Walzer. Eliminate Hamas. Do so while sparing civilians as much as possible. Then be sweet to the Palestinians and give them an independent state. Israel was happy to take the first part of this formula and to contemptuously reject the rest. Meanwhile, alongside these homilies to humane war, the United States has undertaken a vast effort to resupply Israel's stock of bombs. Confronting the escalating death toll, U.S. policymakers are dazed and confused. They're still on autopilot in support of Israel's war aim, while ineffectually shrieking in horror at the cost to Gaza's civilians. The truth is that there is no way to destroy Hamas without destroying Gaza. Contrary to Secretary Blinken's words (and Walzer's advice), Israel does not know how to destroy Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent civilians. Monumental harm to civilians follows from Israel's war aim of destroying Hamas, which the Biden administration and Walzer continue to endorse. That war aim stands in urgent need of reconsideration.Dear RS readers: It has been an extraordinary year and our editing team has been working overtime to make sure that we are covering the current conflicts with quality, fresh analysis that doesn't cleave to the mainstream orthodoxy or take official Washington and the commentariat at face value. Our staff reporters, experts, and outside writers offer top-notch, independent work, daily. Please consider making a tax-exempt, year-end contribution to Responsible Statecraft so that we can continue this quality coverage — which you will find nowhere else — into 2024. Happy Holidays!
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Colombian President Gustavo Petro sent shockwaves through the diplomatic world recently when he accused Israel of carrying out a "genocide" in Gaza."The head of the state who carries out this genocide is a criminal against humanity," Petro wrote on X. "Their allies cannot talk about democracy."The comments are remarkable for a leader of Colombia, which has historically stuck with the United States on matters of international affairs. "It was just kind of unimaginable for the Colombian government to take a position like that, that would be so divergent from the U.S.," said Alex Main, the director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.Petro, who is the country's first-ever left-wing president, has doubled down on his criticism of Israel in recent weeks. He retweeted a poster depicting a cartoon baby being menaced by Israeli rifles and called Israel's attack on the Al-Shifa hospital a "war crime," promised to petition the United Nations to make Palestine a full member state, and threatened to bring Israel before the International Criminal Court.And Petro is far from alone in Latin America. While most states in the region condemned Hamas's initial attack, their harsh response to the Israeli offensive in Gaza has only been equalled by that of Arab- and Muslim-majority countries. Belize and Bolivia both cut ties with Israel over the war, and Colombia, Chile, and Honduras have all recalled their ambassadors from Tel Aviv. Even states that consider themselves neutral on the conflict — like Brazil and Argentina — have issued withering condemnations of Israel's attacks on civilians in Gaza. "This is not a war," said Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. "This is a genocide."So why are Latin American leaders so pro-Palestine? Experts who spoke with RS said it mostly comes down to three factors: Latin America's increasing independence from the U.S.; the rise of left-wing and indigenous movements; and the presence of large Arab diasporas in much of the region.U.S. pressure 'doesn't count as much as it used to'Brazil's Lula, as he is popularly known, has spent much of his first year back in office carving out an independent path for the country's foreign policy. The leftist leader led a charge for talks to end the war in Ukraine while helping to bolster the influence of BRICS, a geopolitical grouping meant to offset the G7 that he had helped found in the late 2000s. So when a new round of fighting broke out in Israel-Palestine, there was little doubt that Lula would jump in with a pitch to solve it.In practice, this meant leading an effort to pass a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for humanitarian pauses to allow much-needed aid into Gaza. But his initiative hit a wall when the U.S. vetoed the resolution. That, combined with growing pressure from his domestic allies as well as the evacuation of Brazilians stuck in Gaza, led Lula to turn up his rhetoric on Israel's offensive, according to Guilherme Casaroes, a senior researcher at the Brazilian Center of International Relations."He's defending the right of Israel to exist, but not the right of Israel to massacre Palestinians in Gaza," Casaroes argued, adding that Lula views his approach to the conflict as a balancing act aimed at reaching a two-state solution. (The Brazilian leader is not the first to advocate for such a path forward; in fact, Brazil presided over the 1947 U.N. vote in favor of the partition of Mandatory Palestine.)The episode, experts say, highlights the extent to which American influence has waned in Latin America since the height of the unipolar moment after the first Gulf War.The U.S. has privately "expressed disappointment with governments that have done things like recall their ambassadors, or referred to genocide or used strong language and so on," according to Main of CEPR, who has extensive contacts in Latin American governments. "But that pressure doesn't count as much as it used to," he argued. "It's a region that's changed enormously in terms of its dependence on the U.S. and the level of influence that the U.S. can have on foreign policy."The 'pink tide' rolls onThe pro-Palestine stance of many Latin American leaders also stems from the "pink tide" of left-wing and indigenous activists who have taken power in recent years. Left-of-center politicians now hold power in two-thirds of Latin American states, representing more than 90 percent of the region's population and GDP.As Main noted, these groups have long been involved in Palestine solidarity campaigns and other indigenous rights movements, especially since Israel had helped to arm many of the region's most oppressive 20th century governments.For many activists in the region, the disappointment of the Oslo peace process in the 1990s led them to view the situation in Israel-Palestine as little more than a new form of colonialism, according to Casaroes."The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is very often pictured in the back of the minds of Latin American leaders as the conflict between the oppressor, which is Israel, and the oppressed, which are the Palestinians," he said.This helps to explain why the Latin American left has been so united on this issue, as opposed to the war in Ukraine, which has pitted progressive leaders like Chile's Gabriel Boric against traditional leftist stalwarts like Lula and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.While Boric has largely stood alone in his strong support for Ukraine, he has joined his fellow leftists in excoriating Israel for its conduct in Gaza and even withdrew Chile's ambassador from Tel Aviv. "These Hamas attacks are without justification, they deserve global condemnation, but the response by Benjamin Netanyahu's government also deserves our clearest condemnation," Boric argued following a meeting with Biden in Washington earlier this month.Deep ties to the Arab worldThe Arab diaspora in Latin America is also a major force behind pro-Palestine activism. Brazil alone has some 16 million citizens of Arab descent, and Chile has the largest Palestinian population of any country outside of the Middle East.
The phenomenon of Arab migration to the region dates back to the late 1800s, when many Lebanese and Syrian migrants fled to the Americas to escape the death throes of the Ottoman Empire. Palestinians followed in waves after each major war between Israel and Arab states.
This large diaspora has significant political influence across the region, with Arab politicians holding top positions in many governments. Fully 10 percent of Brazil's parliament had Arab origins as of 2016, according to the Washington Post.
Contrast this with the region's relatively small Jewish community, which numbered only 500,000 in 2017. As Main noted, Latin American Jews who support Israel also have no equivalent to powerful U.S. Zionist groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which will reportedly spend $100 million next year to try to push lawmakers advocating for a ceasefire in Gaza out of office.
Of course, there are notable exceptions in the Arab diaspora. El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, is of Palestinian descent but has thrown his full support behind Israel's campaign in Gaza. But, experts say, most Arabs in the region still favor Palestine over Israel.
A new shift, however, could upset the region's political balance in the coming years, according to Casaroes. Latin America has an increasingly large evangelical Christian movement whose leaders see the state of Israel as a crucial part of their theology of the "end times." And survey research suggests that, as a country's evangelical population grows, so does its support for Israel.This has already led to political dust-ups in places like Brazil, where former President Jair Bolsonaro has made pro-Israel activism a key part of his efforts to bolster his evangelical support. Bolsonaro sparked a controversy earlier this month when he met with Israel's ambassador to Brazil, a move that a ruling party official condemned as a "spurious alliance" between the former leader and the foreign diplomat.
Blog: Responsible Statecraft
The alliance system of the United States is frequently called an empire, and for good reason. But it is a peculiar form of empire, in which the metropolitan center seems directed and ruled by the periphery. In the classic idea of empire, rule flowed from the top down. Not in this one. This inversion is nowhere more evident than in the relationship between the United States and Israel. Biden responded to the October 7 attacks by giving Israel total support for its aim of destroying Hamas. The same pattern is apparent in policy toward Ukraine. For 18 months, the Biden administration did not dare to set limits on Ukraine's war aims, though these anticipated, absurdly, total victory over Russia, with Vladimir Putin in the dock at the end. These certitudes, however, have begun to shake. Within the administration, there seems to have been a great awakening over the last few weeks that neither course is sustainable. The gist of recent reporting is as follows: the Ukrainians are losing the war and have to acknowledge that fact, better now than later. The Israelis are behaving barbarically and have got to be reined in, else our reputation in the world is ruined. On the Ukraine front, there were two bombshells. One was an NBC story that painted a dire picture of the military situation and reported that U.S. and European diplomats were telling Ukraine of the need to restrict its aims. It's too late in the day to hope for anything other than a stalemate, said one former administration official: "it's time to do a deal." The other was a long essay in Time that characterized Zelensky as a messianic and fanatical figure, out of touch with Ukraine's worsening prospects. Corruption is even worse than alleged. The West is scraping the bottom of the barrel for key military items. Ukraine's military can't find new recruits. More appropriations from Congress, even the $61 billion requested by the administration, can solve none of these problems.For 18 months, the Biden administration insisted that Ukraine's aims were wholly its own to determine and that the United States would support them regardless. With Ukraine's summer offensive having met with almost total failure, the administration appears to be getting cold feet. This is all very hush-hush, with "quiet" discussions reputedly going on behind the scenes. It's probable, indeed, that Biden's advisers are divided. Though official policy hasn't changed a whit, the impetus to do so is clearly there. The bind over Israel is yet more acute. According to widespread reports, Biden and his advisers believe that Israel is embarked on a mad project in Gaza. They see that the United States — having given Israel a green light, a blank check, and tons of bombs — will be held directly responsible for the awful humanitarian consequences. They don't think Israel has defined a coherent endgame. They fear they are presiding over a moral enormity. They see a precipitous collapse in support from others. Over the past month, Biden has warned the Israelis not to act out of anger and vengeance in retaliation for October 7, advised against a ground invasion of Gaza, and insisted that Israel seek to avoid civilian deaths as much as possible. Use smaller bombs, say Biden's military advisers. Eroding support, his administration told the Israelis, "will have dire strategic consequences for Israel Defense Forces operations against Hamas." Last weekend, Secretary of State Antony Blinken went to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with these ideas and with a request for a "humanitarian pause." Bibi's response: ain't gonna happen. I have an idea. The United States could threaten to suspend military shipments to Israel if it failed to agree to a ceasefire. That might make an impression. Defying Israel, however, is something that no president since George H.W. Bush has been willing to do. The U.S. approach over the last 30 years, as now, has been in the voice of a steadfast friend: "This is really for your own good, but we wouldn't dare demand it of you." Hug the Israelis tight and reassure them endlessly of your undying commitment; that was the way to win an argument with them. There have been some Israeli leaders who responded to this approach, but Benjamin Netanyahu was never one of them. Bill Clinton's comment after first meeting with Netanyahu in 1996 — "Who's the fucking superpower here? — reflects Bibi's considered judgment that he can call forth domestic opposition in the United States that will nullify any threat from a U.S. president. Today, 66% of Americans want a ceasefire, according to one poll, but less than five percent of the House of Representatives does, so maybe Bibi knows whereof he speaks. AIPAC is busy with attack ads against the few brave congresspeople who have criticized Israel and called for a ceasefire. But Biden has to worry about America's larger role in the world and is alive to the likelihood that what is coming in Gaza will wreck America's legitimacy. Who in the non-West could ever bear again a lecture from the United States on its zealous commitment to human rights? What would this do to America's case against Russia? On present trends — no exit to the Sinai for the mass of Gaza's population, the complete collapse of the health and sanitation systems, relentless Israeli military pressure and economic blockade, 1.5 million already displaced — it is difficult to see how the total casualty count among Gazans avoids numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Probably many more will die from disease and epidemics than from bullets and bombs. The experience, as Netanyahu has said, will be remembered "for decades to come." What if it registers in world public opinion as an historic crime? Incredibly, advocates of total war against Hamas invoke Dresden, Hiroshima, and other atrocities to justify their course, neglecting that neither Germany nor Japan had anyone to weep for them after the war, whereas Palestinians have 1.8 billion Muslims to weep over them today. The obvious fact is that Israel cannot pursue to the end its aim of destroying Hamas without causing death on a biblical scale. There is no reason whatsoever for the United States to embrace these aims.Biden's choice is to get tough with the Israelis or to go along with what he fears is going to be a gigantic catastrophe. There are precedents for getting tough, but they are admittedly distant ones. Dwight Eisenhower did it in 1956 over the Anglo-French-Israeli Suez adventure. Bush I did it in 1991 over loan guarantees to Israel. But the most resonant example is 1982, when Ronald Reagan told Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to cease Israeli's bombardment of Beirut. "Menachem," Reagan said, "this is a holocaust." To Reagan's surprise, his threat of an agonizing reappraisal worked. "I didn't know I had that kind of power," he told his aide Mike Deaver. At the time of Reagan's threat, the death toll from two and a half months of war approached 20,000, of which nearly half were civilians.Can Biden summon the will to confront Netanyahu? Will his administration force Ukraine to the bargaining table? In our weird empire, where dependents call the shots, deeply embedded tendencies dictate a negative answer to both questions, though wise policy would dictate positive ones. Perhaps the time is ripe for a new policy in which America consults its own national interests rather than theirs.
Blog: Responsible Statecraft
It's easy to forget now, but the shocking and horrific violence that set off the current hostilities in the Middle East, where Hamas militants slaughtered and kidnapped innocent Israeli civilians, was predicted. Specifically, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under Donald Trump warned in October 2020 that terrorist violence was set to be imminently inflamed.
Trump's DHS didn't claim it was because, in President Joe Biden words, of "sheer evil" from those who exist only "to kill Jews." Rather, it pointed to the Abraham Accords: the U.S.-led effort to normalize relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors, which Trump claimed would shift the course of Middle Eastern history from "decades of division and conflict" and which the Biden administration claimed would make the region "safer and more prosperous."
So how did we end up with the exact opposite?
For decades, the peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, meaning the provision of an independent state for the Palestinian people and the end of Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, was central to the task of engineering peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. This was a problem, since between successive Israeli governments steadily chipping away at the possibility of a two-state solution to the conflict and dwindling U.S. interest in pressuring the Israeli state to follow through on the commitment, that resolution started to look increasingly impossible.
But over time, the priorities of the Arab states shifted away from the Palestinians, too. Their largely authoritarian leadership became more preoccupied with matters like maintaining political control in the wake of the Arab Spring protests — for which support from an advanced military power like Israel might prove useful — and an increasingly assertive Iran, which then-newly appointed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman called a "much more urgent and more important" issue.
This shift dovetailed with the Trump administration's ultra-Israel-friendly stance and its own goal of further isolating Iran in the region. The resulting Abraham Accords were, at least in the neoconservative world, considered a stroke of "genius." Rather than finding a solution to the seemingly intractable question of Palestinian statehood, it simply sidelined it.
The signers dropped this long-standing precondition as they re-established diplomatic relations and deepened security and economic cooperation with Israel, while Trump lavished them with rewards, like an arms deal for the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and U.S. recognition of the annexation of West Sahara for Morocco. It effectively supplanted the Saudi government's Arab Peace Initiative, which since its 2002 introduction had been the foundation of the Arab world's program for resolving the conflict, placing the Palestinians front and center.
The new normalization agreements' foundational and cynical assumption was that the plight of the Palestinians could and would be safely ignored and forgotten about by both the region's governments and the broader international community. Both the Trump administration and, reportedly, bin Salman, pressured Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to assent, while the states that signed continued paying lip service to the Palestinian cause, claiming this normalization push would halt Israel's annexation plans for its illegal West Bank settlements.
In reality, the text of the agreements barely mentioned Palestinians, outside of a few vague assurances to keep working toward a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and that Morocco maintained a "coherent, constant and unchanged position" on the matter. This was, to put it mildly, far short of what both Palestinians and their supporters in the U.S. Congress demanded.
As Arab states began gradually deepening ties with Israel, they increasingly backed away from their historic positions. Bin Salman declared (and subsequently walked back) that Israelis "have the right to have their own land," effectively sanctioning the loss of what the Muslim world viewed as Palestinians' historic land. When violence broke out in April 2021 at the Al-Aqsa mosque, with Israeli forces raiding one of Islam's holiest sites, the UAE response was notably muted. That the normalization process continued despite what would earlier have been viewed as an unacceptable provocation against both Palestinians and Islam itself was celebrated by the accords' supporters, as proof that ongoing repression of Palestinians could indeed be safely ignored.
But the Palestinian issue could not simply be wished away, and the signing of the pacts created a set of contradictions that fueled the tensions that erupted October 7. The vast majority of the populations of Israel's Arab neighbors opposed the accords, as did some leaders, like Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, who charged that the signers had "lost their moral compass," and Jordan's King Abdullah, who declared that "no architecture for regional security and development can stand over the burning ashes of this conflict."
So did Palestinians themselves, across opinion surveys, with both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas calling it a "betrayal," a "treacherous stab," and "grave harm." Hamas also called for "an integrated plan to bring down normalization." Protests against the accords erupted in Morocco, one of the signers.
The signing of the Accords was particularly fraught in Saudi Arabia. The country's powerful clerics continued to oppose Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. But beyond that, the Saudi leadership's internal legitimacy and its standing as the region's leader of the Islamic continued to rest in part on its commitment to the Palestinians. Regional rival Iran quickly stepped in to fill this vacuum left by Saudi support for the deals, sharply criticizing the normalization effort as a "betrayal of Palestinian aspirations for freedom."
Meanwhile, Israeli policy didn't change as promised, and in fact, only hardened. Since 2020, when the accords were signed, illegal settlements have expanded and even ramped up alongside settler violence. The Netanyahu government has now advanced a record number of settler housing units, and transferred administration of the occupied territories from military to civilian hands, widely interpreted as signaling plans for annexation, even as figures like former Abbas adviser Ghaith al-Omari claimed the accords had "already delivered to the Palestinians" by stopping this policy. This past September, the UAE's ambassador to the United States admitted annexation hadn't actually stopped.
The Biden administration could have reversed Trump's efforts, and placed pressure on Israel to halt these plans, as well as end its settlement expansion while making good on its promises and obligations under the peace process. Instead, the president continued Trump's normalization efforts while breaking from presidential precedent and not even attempting to advance the peace process, all while issuing little to no criticism of the Israeli government's violations. He has in fact escalated the issue, pushing for an Israeli-Saudi normalization agreement, with the only concession to Palestinians the mere preservation of the possibility of Israeli-Palestinian peace — an agreement that would also entail further nuclear proliferation in the region and giving Saudi Arabia security assurances. Even so, Biden's secretary of state continues to claim that this could "be used to advance" such a peace.
So while Hamas had reportedly planned this operation for two years, and claimed it was motivated by years of violence at Al-Aqsa, its attack also can't be understood without the bipartisan push for Israeli-Arab normalization at the Palestinians' expense, and the outrage, anger, and despair it has inspired.What is clear — from Hamas's extraordinary violence, the wider regional war it threatens to spark, as well as the major pro-Palestinian protests across Arab countries in response to Israel's bombing campaign — is that almost every assumption that undergirded the Abraham Accords was disastrously wrong, not least the idea that dismissing the Palestinians would make for a more peaceful Middle East.
Blog: Responsible Statecraft
When Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup d'état to oust the civilian government of the Directorate in France, he justified his actions as necessary to save the spirit of the Revolution. The army, in Napoleon's view, had a solemn obligation to defend the nation against threats both at home and abroad.The notion that a military, as guardians of a national spirit, has the right to seize the authority of the state became known as Bonapartism. This seemingly persistent belief in certain militaries in Africa emphasizes the need for comprehensive reform.Military regimes can perceive themselves to be better at governance than civilians. The simplicity of efficiently carrying out orders stands in stark contrast to the seemingly endless bureaucracy impeded by incompetence and corruption. In crises where politics leads to impasses in service delivery, the military's projection as being "above politics" can help it seize and keep power in fragile states.Despite the anti-French rhetoric of coup leaders in Africa, many of them nonetheless invoke this spirit of Bonapartism in acting to "save" the state. As the French Revolution began to eat itself under the Reign of Terror, for Napoleon the only means to preserve the Revolution was for its defenders to remove the civilian leadership by force.This was no singular event. Several times in the 19th and 20th centuries, the French army forced dramatic changes in the state whenever the national spirit had been challenged. Bonapartism furthermore formed a significant part of military formation in France's colonies, particularly in Africa.The problem with Bonapartism is that it has greatly undermined attempts to professionalize security forces. When we speak of professional soldiers outside of a (former) colonial setting, we mean a trained soldier who readily accepts and defends civilian authority. Such a situation is so taken for granted today that we do not always appreciate how necessary this is for a thriving democracy.If a military perceives itself to be better, more competent, or in some way less fallible than the civilian government, then a risk of Bonapartism can persist regardless of how well trained they might be. U.S. training of officers, such as those in Niger, may unintentionally lead to a growing confidence in the military about their competence and increase the risk of a takeover.The officers leading the coups in Niger and Gabon cite persistent civilian misrule, aided in no small part by continued French dominance in domestic political and economic policies in both countries, as the primary justification for their intervention. They present themselves as acting in the best interests of the nations they are nominally intended to protect. Seizing power away from incompetent civilians is merely a continuation of their duty.Scenes of crowds celebrating the removal of decades-long dictatorships do indicate at least a modicum of legitimacy for the military's actions in Gabon. Many coup leaders across Africa have justified their actions on the demonstrable misrule by civilian governments. In almost every scenario, however, the coup leaders merely became the new dictators. These actions further emulate Napoleon's hold on power, although few did so as blatantly as Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic, who declared himself Emperor 4 December 1977.Bonapartism is not solely a francophone problem and can exist in any state with weak democratic institutions. In the cases of Zimbabwe and Egypt, despite the civilian façade, the spirit of Bonapartism still lingers. For both states, the military has long been the true source of the state's authority.Zimbabwe's elections are a mere formality, a political tradition rather than any substantive effort to change the civilian authority. Aside from the Egyptian military's brief foray into relinquishing power to the Muslim Brotherhood in 2012, the civilian leadership serves at the pleasure of the military, not the electorate. When the military felt that Egypt was at risk under the leadership of the Brotherhood, they acted to save the state by retaking authority, a quintessential Bonapartist action.The coup in Sudan that ousted Omar al-Bashir was a remarkably similar instance of a military acting to change the civilian leadership during a crisis. However, the current infighting among senior officers points to an entirely different matter. It's actually a misnomer to refer to states like Sudan as "weak." Rather, the problem lies in the fact that the state is too powerful in relation to other aspects of the society, particularly the economy.Such states are the 'only game in town' in terms of attaining mobility, income, and basic security. Fights over who controls the state become so violent because of a lack of options. As long as other sectors remain underdeveloped, the risks of coups will persist. In such cases, it may well be counter-productive to invest too much in the militaries, and making control of the military all the more tempting.There are steps the African Union and other international bodies can take to militate against Bonapartism. The first concerns the AU's Lomé Declaration of 2000, which established a norm against unconstitutional regime changes by stating that any extra constitutional changes in a government is grounds for immediate suspension. In practice, this commitment has been far from rock solid, with the AU making numerous exceptions over the years.Moreover, tougher penalties could be applied, especially in the form of mandating Security Sector Reform (SSR) as necessary processes to return to the AU.SSR entails a comprehensive overhaul of a state's security sector. The security sector includes not only the military but also the police, judiciary, and any intelligence services. Importantly, SSR requires more than mere training, as the Niger and Burkina Faso cases demonstrate. Therein lies the rub of military governance and strengthening democracies: the only body with the authority to restructure the military is the military itself.Save for the odd counter-example, democratic promises by army officers have rarely been realized. Even in instances where elections have been held, the military nonetheless retains inordinate influence over the civilian leadership, and the threat of future coups persists.SSR is neither cheap nor easy to adequately implement. One of the most important factors is rewriting a constitution with sufficient judicial strength to ensure that an elected legislative body has the ultimate authority over all security forces. Doing so must result in the end of Bonapartism for the military and the conclusion that they are not the sole nor ultimate defenders of the nation.The rush to hold elections after a coup is often seen as an act of good faith by coup-leaders to return a country to democracy. However, to be a democracy does not only mean having elections, as democracy contains a set of values, including civilian oversight and regulation of all coercive forces in a state.Every soldier needs to be educated on the importance of civilian leadership as they are far more likely to know what is in the best interests of the civilian population than a general. Military training by foreign experts without complementary democracy training is, as Niger bears out, counter-productive to the overall mission objectives of combating Islamist insurgencies. US foreign military training reportedly includes instruction on safeguarding democracy and human rights.While US policy is to immediately halt all military aid following a coup, the policy has not always been strictly enforced, more rigorous enforcement may be more effective in the long term. These recent coups raise the difficult question on the efficacy of democracy and human rights training for militaries who are evidently not receptive to the message.Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte attempted a similar overthrow of a civilian government as his more illustrious uncle in 1851. This more foolhardy power grab led Karl Marx to quip that "history repeats itself, the first as tragedy, the second as farce." Unless the right lessons are learned, the Bonapartism lurking in African militaries will continue the tragedy of military rule.
Blog: Responsible Statecraft
On the second anniversary of the final debacle of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, we should consider the lessons of that disaster for U.S. strategy elsewhere. While the case of Afghanistan itself is by nature unique, Washington's mistakes and failures reflected wider and deeper patterns — and pathologies — in U.S. policymaking and political culture. If left unaddressed, these will lead to more disasters in future.Yet most of the mainstream media and the think tank world are treating the memory of the U.S. war in Afghanistan not as a source of reflection but as an embarrassment to be forgotten as quickly and completely as possible. This parallels the approach to the memory of Vietnam in the U.S. mainstream — and the result was the disaster of Iraq. One of the most astonishing things about the U.S. debate — to give it that name — prior to the invasion of Iraq, was the general failure to consider, or even mention, what the experience of Vietnam might have taught. Today, this refusal to learn lessons applies above all to U.S. engagement in Ukraine.The failure to pursue diplomacy with the Taliban prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan can be explained and excused by the fury naturally felt by Americans at the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the Taliban's refusal immediately to hand over the al-Qaida leadership that was clearly responsible. Nonetheless, given the appalling costs that resulted from the U.S. invasion, it is worth asking whether an approach that allowed the Taliban to save face and remain true to their own beliefs might have produced better results for both Americans and Afghans: for example, exploring the possibility that the Taliban could be persuaded to deliver the AQ leadership to another Muslim country. In the case of Iraq, there was no sincere diplomatic effort at all, since the Bush administration had already made the decision to invade.The second lesson of Afghanistan is as old as war itself and was emphasized by military theorist Carl von Clausewitz: that there can never be certainty of long-term victory in any war, if only because war, more than any other human activity, is liable to generate unintended ramifications and consequences. In the case of Afghanistan, the mission to eliminate al Qaida and remove the Taliban from power morphed into a far greater — and probably innately doomed — effort to create a modern democratic Afghan state through foreign intervention, aid and supervision.This in turn became related to the attempt to destroy the old and exceptionally powerful nexus between Islamic faith and Pashtun nationalism that had generated the Taliban, much of the resistance to the Communist regime and Soviet intervention in the 1980s, and numerous revolts against the British Empire before that. Given that most Pashtuns live in Pakistan, the inevitable result was an extension of the conflict to that country, leading to a Pakistani civil war in which tens of thousands died. Pakistan's refusal or inability to expel the Afghan Taliban led to the threat of direct U.S. intervention in Pakistan — which, if it had occurred, would have produced a catastrophe far worse than Afghanistan and Iraq put together.The failure to anticipate consequences is worsened by conformism and careerism; not that these tendencies are any worse in the U.S. establishment than elsewhere. But America's power and capacity to intervene across the world magnify their negative consequences. On the one hand, they mean that even experts and journalists who are in a position to know better, join officials in unthinking obedience to the establishment line of the given moment, which may have only the most tangential relationship to realities in the country concerned.Returning to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, I encountered journalists whom I had known when covering the Mujahedin war against the Soviets and Communists in the 1980s. I was amused — kind of — to find them parroting a new version of the line that Moscow and Kabul had put out in the 1980s: that the Afghan resistance had no real local support and was not really Afghan, and that it was entirely the creation of outside powers (including Pakistan) and money. This was despite the fact that the Taliban were recruiting exactly the same people from exactly the same areas as the Mujahedin, who were fighting for exactly the same reasons.Matters are made worse by the flood of instant shake-and-bake "experts" who are generated every time the United States embarks on a new overseas venture. Selected for their connections in Washington rather than any real knowledge of the areas concerned, they could not correct the mistakes of U.S. policy even if they had the moral courage to do so. Moreover, their ignorance of local history and culture makes them dreadfully receptive to the self-interested fantasies of their local informants. Thus I was also amused in the early 2000s to hear "advisers" on Afghanistan to the U.S. (and European) governments declare that "Afghanistan in the 1960s was a successful middle class democracy." This U.S. syndrome could well be called Oedipal, since it is both incestuous and self-blinded.Once both political parties have committed themselves to a given strategy, the bipartisan Washington establishment finds it extremely difficult to admit mistakes and change course — a tendency to which the U.S. military has also sometimes contributed in a disastrous fashion. This military refusal to admit defeat has its admirable sides — nobody should want U.S. generals to be quitters.That, however, is why America needs political leaders (including ones with personal military experience, like Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Carter) with the knowledge and courage to tell the generals when it is time to call a halt.Instead, in Afghanistan (as documented by the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction and others), generals and administration officials colluded to produce optimistic lies, which were then circulated by a credulous and subservient media. Today, this risks being the case with the Biden administration's refusal to admit that the Ukrainian counteroffensive has failed, and that it is therefore time to start developing a political strategy to end the fighting in Ukraine and the economic and political damage this is beginning to cause to vital U.S. allies in Europe.The last point about the U.S. record in Afghanistan should hardly need to be made, because it has been made over and over again since the 1950s by a whole succession of great American thinkers, including Reinhold Niebuhr, Hans Morgenthau, George Kennan, Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward. This is the tendency in the U.S. political establishment to colossally exaggerate both the malignance of the enemy of the moment, and the danger it poses to the United States. Instead of a Communist-led nationalist movement to reunify Vietnam, the Vietnamese Communists were portrayed as a force that could start toppling a row of "dominoes" that would end with Communist victory in France and Mexico. Instead of a tinpot regional dictator, Saddam Hussein became a nuclear menace to the U.S. homeland. The Taliban, an entirely Afghan force, supposedly had to be fought in Afghanistan so that we would not need to fight them in the United States. And today, U.S. officials in their rhetoric somehow manage to combine the supposed beliefs both that Russia is so weak that Ukraine can completely defeat the Russian army and catastrophically undermine the Russian state, and that Russia is so strong that if not defeated in Ukraine it will pose a mortal threat to NATO and freedom around the world.As Loren Baritz wrote in 1985 concerning the obliteration of the memory of Vietnam in the United States:"Our power, complacency, rigidity and ignorance have kept us from incorporating our Vietnam experience into the way we think about ourselves and the world… But there is no need to think unless there is doubt. Freed of doubt, we are freed of thought."It would be nice to think that on this anniversary, and faced with even greater dangers in Ukraine, the U.S. establishment and media will devote some serious thought to what happened in Afghanistan.
Blog: Responsible Statecraft
The Gulf – where petrostates and psychodrama hold sway – is a critical field for jockeying in the global shift to multipolarity, and the Ukraine war is recasting what each player wants, and thinks it can get.To wit: The Biden Administration wants to extend the Abraham Accords to include Saudi Arabia, so it can point to a key foreign-policy win before next year's presidential election while moving Riyadh back inside the U.S.-Israel tent. Saudi Arabia's Mohammad Bin Salman (Crown Prince MBS) wants instead to distance Riyadh from Washington so he can lead non-aligned talks and take the credit for resolving Ukraine's war with Russia — though, as an aside, he has demanded a nuclear enrichment plant and a fleet of F-35 fighter jets to consider Washington's request in return.Iran, which came in from the cold after the past year's "Women, Life Freedom" protests by signing a China-brokered normalization deal with Saudi Arabia, wants to stymie any Abraham Accords expansion beyond Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates and is working hard on becoming everyone's best friend outside the West — read: Saudi Arabia, China, and Russia.Israel wants to expand the Accords to include Riyadh, seeing it as a rare foreign policy opportunity to both balance Netanyahu's domestic woes triggered by his controversial far-right government and to promote the anti-Iran U.S. alliance in the Gulf.The Gulf's oil and staggering wealth, its divide down the middle between Iran and pro-Western states, and its unwieldy balance of two global energy producers facing each other across the absurdly narrow and strategic Strait of Hormuz all make the region one of the highest-stakes playing fields in the world. And the Ukraine war is shifting the goalposts. The Russians have arrived; China is quietly offering prizes, like nuclear plants, to regional actors; and the Gulf Cooperation Council states are flexing new muscle in the ongoing geo-strategic realignment.Russian Moves Russians are flooding the Gulf. They are buying up everything from lampshades to heavy equipment in Iran's bazaars and avoiding sanctions by shipping them over land and across the Caspian Sea. Saudi Arabia is in talks with Russian weapons manufacturers sanctioned by the U.S. Meanwhile, the hotels in Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and down the Omani coast have seen a 200-percent jump in Russian bookings this year (376,000 guests a month in Abu Dhabi alone, triple last year's average) despite the weakening ruble.Both MBS and Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the UAE's Emir, have entered the field to negotiate a peace accord between Moscow and Kyiv. MBZ, as he is called, visited Russia in June presenting his mediation skills to President Putin, while MBS hosted a round of peace talks in Jeddah in early August, while voluntarily cutting oil output in July to boost prices, upsetting Washington (yet again) as the move will likely shore up Russian oil revenues.U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's attempt during his trip to Riyadh in July to promote the Abraham Accords and convince MBS not to move the goalposts, as well as to join the sanctions regime against Russia fell well short of success.MBS, touting ties to both Ukraine and Russia, instead drew his own line in the turf, gathering 42 countries to his "peace" summit, including the U.S. and China while excluding Iran and Russia. Western critics dismissed it as a soapbox for MBS to parade his new-found role as peace broker (and Moscow blasted it as pointless). But, with China floating a revised 10-point peace formula at the meeting, it established the kingdom's credentials as an emerging power offering new avenues for global conflict mediation, creating more daylight between Riyadh and Washington.Iran ReconstructedWith a new round of protests to mark the anniversary of the women's demonstrations that began last September, the clerical leadership marks a year of surprising rehabilitation in the Gulf as well as wider afield.Saudi Arabia and Iran have reestablished embassies in their respective capitals, offering a green light to warmer (and more substantive) relationships between Tehran and capitals up and down the Gulf's western littoral. For Riyadh, Tehran's warming relations with Moscow and its military support to Russia's war effort have not posed major hurdles, as its own diplomatic proximity to Russia has grown. Both states recognize that their relations with Moscow are pragmatic, if not entirely problem-free, and, as with much in their own ongoing detente, are more focused at the moment on compartmentalizing points of contention to build, rather than damage, goodwill. Despite their respective reputational black marks for human rights, the two oil heavyweights were just warmly welcomed into the BRICS (along with the UAE). This signals the Global South's growing clout and diversity, as well as a clear willingness to challenge established great power rules, prompting White House National's Security Advisor Jake Sullivan seemingly to dismiss the BRICS after the meeting as geopolitically inconsequential.Israel and the U.S. seeking purchaseAlthough U.S. military engagement and financial commitments remain dominant in the Gulf, Washington is no longer leading the action, and is often caught up short these days by Beijing moving the goal posts behind its back. Following its diplomatic coup with the surprise Iran-Saudi normalization deal, China just last week offered to build a nuclear plant on the Saudi border with Qatar and the UAE without including the same conditions demanded by the U.S. to prevent enrichment and possible nuclear weaponization.This comes hard on the heels of Blinken's trip to Riyadh to promote the Abraham Accords, which he described as the "cornerstone" of the Biden administration's Middle East policy on the basis that "Israel's further integration into the region contributes to a more stable, a more secure and more prosperous region." But with tensions still rising between Netanyahu's far-right government and the Palestinians, Riyadh is unconvinced that a public declaration of amity with Israel is politically wise or would contribute to stability in the Gulf, especially as trade, trust and diplomacy between the two countries have grown steadily without the fanfare of normalization. For MBS, the risks of joining the Accords include not only outraging the kingdom's own population and the wider Muslim community if it is seen as downgrading the Palestinian issue. But it could also stymie progress with Tehran, which would view such a move as Riyadh buckling to U.S. pressure and rejoining the anti-Iran camp. As the kingdom spreads its wings, it is clearly prioritizing Gulf neighborliness and détente over U.S. chumminess.Where Washington has made progress, albeit without Israel's support, is in backroom arrangements with Iran to tone down its nuclear enrichment in exchange for access to $6 billion of its frozen reserves held by South Korea.Under the umbrella of a prisoner swap, which Washington hopes to finalize in two or three weeks, bank transfers have been prepared and Iran has quietly slowed its uranium enrichment to 60 percent and is in the process of diluting its stockpile. It's the first breakthrough on the nuclear front since Donald Trump withdrew from the six-party JCPOA in 2018. And, although it means negotiating with a sworn enemy — and only then through intermediaries, notably Oman and Qatar — it shows that Washington can maneuver adeptly even when the Gulf's goal posts are shifting. What's less clear is whether the U.S. can be as flexible in expanding the Abraham Accords, with both China and Israel nipping at its heels, its hopes for a Libya-Israel rapprochement now dashed, and its erstwhile Team USA — aka the GCC states — heading off in different directions.Though the Ukraine war is playing out in the European arena, its repercussions in the Gulf are striking. It has opened new horizons for Russia and China to engage meaningfully in the region's security and energy, while giving new impetus to the region's mid-level powers to pursue not only their own expanding agendas, but to find common cause in a Gulf-centered community that can sidestep the vicissitudes of Great Power competition.
Blog: Saideman's Semi-Spew
Last night, a friend informed me that my favorite retired Canadian military officer, Lt. General (ret) Michel Maisonneuve is going to speak at the Conservative Party of Canada's convention. This gave me a case of deja vu, as the 2016 US campaign had dueling generals at the conventions--Michael (how many foreign payrolls am I on?) Flynn for Trump and the Republicans and John Allen for Hillary Clinton and the Democrats. I have been meaning to write about Michael Robinson's book, Dangerous Instrument, Politicial Polarization and US Civil-Military Relations, for some time,* but the CDSN Summer Institute and a mad dash to finish the Steve/Dave/Phil book got in the way, but this news has pushed Robinson's book to the front of my mind.* One of my sabbatical goals is to catch up and write about the latest civ-mil work (and some older stuff). Robinson's book was at the top of the pile. Now I am working on Jason Dempsey's book about whether the US Army was "Conservative" or partisan in the early 2000s. Robinson does an amazing job of taking a variety of surveys and survey experiments (where some respondents read or listen to one vignette/treatment and others get exposed to different ones to see what primes people) to assess a variety of dynamics surrounding the US military: what shapes people's views, what shapes their media consumption, what shapes media coverage, and ultimately what shapes the standing of the US military in the public. Oh, and how thoroughly screwed the US military is.The basic idea is that there are different ways to politicize a military. The military can politicize itself by directly getting engaged in politics or by doing things that resonate beyond the military. But the book is really a story of affective politicization--that how people see the military depends not just on what the military is doing, but what the other actors in the system are doing that makes it appear as if the military is becoming closer or farther politically. This is all very important because most modern militaries in most democracies seek to be non-partisan institutions--that they were taught the key to both civilian control of the military and relative autonomy was to stay out of politics. Indeed, because most militaries are not seen as partisan, they tend to have higher popularity ratings--that most other institutions are seen as belonging to one side or another and thus at least a chunk of the political spectrum is pissed off. I have delighted in our CDSN surveys showing that only academic folks have higher trust ratings than the military.In the US, there was an arms race between the Democrats and Republicans amassing endorsements from retired generals and admirals, as each sought to be seen as the party of national security. This was bad for the military, as it may be that the public sees retired officers as the voices of the active service since the latter are largely restricting from speaking in a partisan fashion. This culminated in Flynn chanting "Lock Her Up" at the 2016 convention, which is more than a smidge ironic or hypocritical given that Flynn was a far greater danger to releasing classified information than Clinton's email. Anyhow, things got worse once Trump got into office as he kept referring to his generals, kept making partisan statements to and in front of the military (including announcing the Muslim ban at the Pentagon).Robinson, in his book, shows that views towards the military have become increasingly partisan--that views of the military now go up and down depending on who is president--that Republicans, traditionally strong supporters of the military, are less enthusiastic when a Dem is president. The key dynamic driving much of this is confirmation bias (woot?)--that partisans will notice only that which agrees with their preconceptions and discount that which does not agree. As Americans become increasingly partisan--with their identities tied to parties, this gets worse, especially for those who consume only from a very biased portion of the media (you know who). What I like about this book is that it uses a word I hate, polarization, quite well. Polarization generally implies that all parties are spinning away from the center, when studies show that the GOP is becoming radicalized, but the Dems are mostly staying where they were, sliding a smidge to the left. But what is abundantly true is that all sides are increasingly tied to their partisan id. Robinson goes on to show that that consumption of Fox is not good, and so on. And the military is utterly screwed because if they push back at, say, charges of wokeness, they only make things worse. The results also show that despite all the talk of norms of civil-military relations, the public is not really aware of them, nor that concerned about them. So, it is up to the politicians to refrain and for the military to ... hope (and hope is not a plan). So, it is a great book, with terrific social science, important implications for civil-military relations, and, yeah, we are kind of fucked. And now it applies to Canada, damn it. The Conservatives are bringing Mr. Cancelled to their convention, imitating the GOP, so he can rail against the Liberals and the wokeness of the Canadian Armed Forces. The Liberals have dipped into this as they had Andrew Leslie, another retired LTG, in a prominent place when they ran in 2015. The key difference is that they were just trying to use his credibility and stature to buttress their own, they were not using him to attack the military, nor did he speak out that much in any way that was particularly controversial. Maisonneuve, on the other hand, used his Vimy speech and then a regular spot at a national paper, to blast the Liberals, the woke media, the military for daring to make itself more inclusive, and pretty much anyone else he felt spurned by [I am still waiting for some media outlet to note that Maisonneuve was part of the military's abuse of power crisis]. The Conservatives are embracing some of the GOP's efforts to mobilize populist resentment as they now apparently seek to tear down many Canadian institutions. When I say this will endanger Canadian civil-military relations, I don't mean there will be a coup. But it will mean that the public and politicians will view the military as a partisan actor, that appointments and decisions will be viewed through partisan lenses, and then the Canadian military will be fucked, because its efforts to defend itself as an inclusive institution, desperately needed during a personnel crisis, will be seen as partisan. "Hey, we don't discriminate against x" will be seen by CPC partisans as being too woke. Which will make it harder to recruit and retain, deepening the spiral that may make it very hard to send a ship to the Pacific or sustain the commitment to Latvia. In short, the Conservatives are starting a process that is going to be bad for the military, despite their bad faith assertions that they care more about the CAF than the Liberals do. [No, Trudeau does not care much about the CAF, but the CPC does not either].So, here's a song that goes with all of this.
The academic discourse of the early 1970s put interdisciplinarity on the agenda, the subject of which was deviance and crime. For half a century, the categories "deviant", "public penitentiary policy", "social responsibility of the state" and related categories have become the subject of official public political discourse. At the same time a comprehensive study of social control policy in political science has not shaped. Changing the discourse of penality in the late XX century reflects the dominance of the ideology of social defense in relation to deviant behavior and appropriate methods of ensuring social order. In accordance with the realities of the XXI century, the concept of protection (security) of society has been updated as a political priority. Declared "apolitical" classical justice have undergone a transformation of meanings. "Justice" has been replaced by managerial indicators of "economically justified social security", and "justice" itself by "social control" (since the late 1990s – "socio-technological control"). The dissertation substantiates the concept of the panoptic-carceral state, the functions of which are reduced to maximum social control of the population through its widespread use by institutions of imprisonment, the spread of non-institutional forms of restriction of liberty (including those not related to criminal justice) and digital control practices. The dissertation clarifies the consequences of the global impact on the state penitentiary policy: 1) transformation of social control according to the scheme "binary code of legality - disciplinary mechanism - security device" to the level of the fourth modulation (panoptic risk modulator), which is manifested in the creation of a system of panoptic spatial-virtual risk management, which consists in controlled and cost-effective reproduction of deviance as a product with appropriate commercial characteristics and qualities; 2) the transformation of the "criminal law of freedom" into the "criminal law of risks" and the involvement of civilian instruments in social control, as a manifestation of clarifying the political and legal principles of formation and implementation of penitentiary policy of the world; 3) differentiation of penitentiary practices of European and North American countries, penitentiary policy of Muslim countries, countries of South America and the Caribbean; 4) involvement of private actors in the implementation of penitentiary policy and demonopolization of the state's right to determine the principles of social control in open societies; 5) the creation by private national and transnational actors of territories of social control (prison-industrial complexes) that are not controlled by the states and constitute the possibility of forming private solitary quasi-states with the use of forced labor of prisoners. The dissertation formulates probable scenarios for the evolution of social control policy in the global and national dimensions, among which the most probable is the following. Given the persistence of modern global trends, we should expect a decrease in the number of social control centers, including TNCs, leading countries, global cities that will compete for resources, including the creation of prison-industrial complexes, migration centers, and other institutions, which are focused on maintaining marginalization of persons who are identified as dangerous elements of society. The dissertation introduces the concept of quasi-deviant as a special collective object of social control in the XXI century with the key characteristic "dangerous condition of the person" (pericolosità). The author identified the policy of probation as a component of the concept of "penitentiary policy" in the light of the concept of "punitive city" and as an element of the panoptic-carceral state of the XXI century. The author proposed the category of penological pessimism as a fundamental characteristic of social control in the XXI century due to the crisis of paradigms of general prevention and rehabilitation of deviants, as a result of which the category of active penological pessimism was formulated for the first time as a basis for studying the essence, forms and manifestations of social control in the XXI century. The dissertation establishes the supranational nature of modern penitentiary policy and identifies the factors influencing the spread of the phenomenon of supranationalization of penitentiary policy, as well as establishes the relationship between privatization and supranationalization of penitentiary policy. The dissertation formulates the principles, forms and consequences of the formation and implementation of the Ukrainian penitentiary policy (1991 – 2021), which is defined in the form of a system of quantitative and qualitative indicators. ; В работе обоснована концепция паноптично-карцерного государства и проанализированы тенденции инкарцерации современного общества. Доказано, что применение заключения и его неинституциональных приложений ограничивается только в Европе, а надзорно-дисциплинарные механизмы, которые еще недавно анализировались в категориях наказания, больше ассоциируются с мерами безопасности. Пенитенциарные системы национальных государств в XXI в. испытали и продолжают испытывать большого политического влияния, прежде всего, вследствие упадка велфаристского государства и сопутствующих традиционных целей социального контроля. При этом дальнейшей и еще более глубокой политизации пенитенциарных систем национальных государств способствует пунитивная постмодернистская культура социального контроля. В работе анализируется категория квазидевианта как особого коллективного объекта социального контроля в XXI в. с ключевой характеристикой «опасное состояние личности», где указано состояние может формироваться вне классических формальных пунитивних процедур. Анализируется формирование системы постреабилитационных тотальных институций в обновленной системе социального контроля и переход власти от национальных государств к частным актеров. Анализируется изменение сущности государства за счет делегирования такой функции частным акторам, причем «делегирование функции» нередко трансформируется в «захват политической власти». Исследуются особенности украинской пенитенциарной политики и ее модуляции. Установлено, что украинская пенитенциарная политика является непоследовательной, лишенной преемственности и прозрачности (в том числе финансовой). Пенитенциарную политику Украины за период последних тридцати лет можно определить как «а-политику», а иногда даже как «анти-политику», учитывая негативные показатели государственного управления пенитенциарной системой. Доказано, что появление в международных стандартах и национальном законодательстве многих государств неопозитивистских категорий свидетельствует о разрыве между формально декларируемыми целями и политическими отношениями. Система контроля общества XXI века не предназначена для достижения указанных формально-классических целей, поскольку она выполняет другие более важные функции, связанные с еще большим растворением в теле общества постмодернистской дисциплины и цифрового социального контроля. ; У роботі обґрунтовано концепцію паноптично-карцерної держави та проаналізовано тренди інкарцерації сучасного суспільства. Доведено, що на сучасному етапі застосування ув'язнення та його неінституційних додатків обмежується лише в Європі, а наглядово-дисциплінарні механізми, що донедавна аналізувалися у категоріях покарання, більше асоціюються із заходами безпеки. Пенітенціарні системи національних держав у ХХІ ст. зазнали й продовжують зазнавати більшого політичного впливу, перш за все, внаслідок занепаду велфаристської держави та супутніх традиційних цілей соціального контролю. При цьому подальшій та ще глибшій політизації пенітенціарних систем національних держав сприяє пунітивна постмодерністська культура соціального контроля. У роботі аналізується категорію квазідевіанта як особливого колективного об'єкта соціального контролю у ХХІ ст. з ключовою характеристикою «небезпечний стан особи», де зазначений стан може формуватися поза межами класичних формальних пунітивних процедур. Аналізується формування системи постреабілітаційних тотальних інституцій в оновленій системі соціального контролю та перехід влади від національних держав до приватних акторів. Аналізується зміна сутності держави за рахунок делегування такої функції приватним акторам, причому «делегування функції» нерідко трансформується у «захоплення політичної влади». Досліджуються особливості української пенітенціарної політики та її модуляції. Встановлено, що українська пенітенціарна політика є непослідовною, позбавленою спадкоємності та прозорості (у тому числі фінансової). Пенітенціарну політику України за період останніх тридцяти років можна визначити як «а-політику», а інколи навіть як «анти-політику» з огляду на негативні показники державного управління пенітенціарної системою. Доведено, що поява у міжнародних стандартах та національному законодавстві багатьох держав неопозитивістських категорій свідчить про розрив між формально задекларованими цілями та політичними відносинами. Система контролю суспільства ХХІ ст. не призначена для досягнення зазначених формально-класичних цілей, оскільки вона виконує інші більш важливі соціальні функції, пов'язані зі ще більшим розчиненням в тілі суспільства постмодерністської дисципліни та цифрового соціального контролю.
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