President Obama has survived his first hundred days in office. Ordinary
Americans approve his performance and his new puppy. So do most
non-Americans. I'm happy too. My daughter returned from Mexico without the
flu. She is now driving to Pittsburgh with her young man, about to look
for a job in a strange city. She isn't as terrified as I would be. Such
youthful optimism keeps us alive. And Obama is part of it.
How effectively the Obama Administration is saving the U.S. economy
(and with it the world's) is a question worth debating in ten years. His
economic team is pointing a fire hose of money into a dark and burning
building shared by "knowledge workers," migrant farm laborers,
makers of things, pensioners, investment bankers, and school children. A
few will emerge smiling broadly, many others scorched and gasping, some
not at all. Most Americans share my confidence that Obama wants to spread
the scorch-marks evenly and save as many people as he can. We have no such
confidence in the private sector. But governments rescue people very
expensively, deeply indebting our grandchildren in the process.
One fine, expensive little rescue took place on April 12, that of the
captain of the container ship Maersk Alabama. A SEAL team flew from the
U.S. by C-17 and parachuted into the water at night with boats and gear.
Three expert snipers with night vision scopes killed three pirates on a
rocking boat with three shots as soon as the pirate leader pointed a
weapon at the captain.
That Somali fishermen are no match for the superbly trained personnel
of the U.S. special operations command is not news. Nor is the U.S.
government's refusal to pay ransom (though ransom would have been
cheaper). The more important story, the one all but a few grumpy
militarists ignored, is that Obama also sent the FBI, delaying the
military solution in favor of negotiations. The terms U.S. negotiators can
use to coax pirates to surrender are not particularly tempting -
basically, an offer of life imprisonment in the United States. Still,
Obama is aware that, for many people whose opinions matter to U.S.
national interests, bringing pirates (or terrorists) to justice and
killing them are not the same thing.
Obama is a lawyer. Over the past 100 days he has taken modest political
risks to demonstrate his respect for the spirit of the law as well as its
letter, particularly on the issue of torture. President Bush, in contrast,
was a businessman. For him, law was simply part of the operating
environment, to be worked with or evaded based on a businessman's instinct
for the bottom line. Guantanamo was a perfect example of his thinking.
Bush found compliant lawyers willing to sign their names to a convenient
legal fiction by which whatever happened in Guantanamo was covered by no
law or treaty.
Precisely because treaties might limit the exercise of U.S. power, Bush
signed few of them. At international conferences his emissaries worked to
weaken the system of international law their predecessors had worked to
build. Finally, even Henry Kissinger rebelled. No great foreign policy
brilliance is required to understand that treaties are good when they lock
in place an advantage you already have. Nuclear weapons are an equalizer a
500-kg gorilla prefers not to see dangling from the hip of some 150 kg
upstart.
Obama is smart and humane enough not to need Dr. Strangelove to remind
him to start worrying about the Bomb again. The high point of Obama's trip
to Europe was relaunching the United States as a proponent of treaty-based
nuclear disarmament. He used his speech in Prague to reaffirm the bargain
America and the other four nuclear weapons states made in the 1968 Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In that treaty, the non-nuclear states
(184 of them are currently members) made a legally binding pledge that
they would submit their nuclear programs to international inspection and
never develop nuclear weapons. In exchange, the five nuclear weapons
states agreed to end their arms race, to share peaceful nuclear
technology, and to move in good faith toward a world free of nuclear
weapons.
It was a good speech. I know it was a good speech because President
Sarkozy's national security staff took the trouble to write a long memo
sneering at it, and then leaked the result to Figaro. Obama's proposals
were nothing new (correct), just a ploy to rebuild America's image in
Europe (incorrect).
There are few new ideas in nuclear disarmament, just old, good ideas
that occasionally, when conditions are right, gifted politicians can turn
into reality. We are still at least a generation away from seriously
considering the elimination of nuclear weapons. In the absence of better
reasons, they impose some limit on the frivolousness of national leaders.
The French and Chinese fear that without a nuclear arsenal they would not
enjoy the international respect they currently perceive themselves
enjoying. In practice, states do not enrich (or even protect) themselves
by brandishing nuclear holocaust. Preaching global elimination of such
weapons with the sincerity that is one of Obama's political gifts, he will
weaken the constituencies in Iran, Israel, and elsewhere that insist
nuclear weapons are vital to national security and self-respect.
Progress toward nuclear disarmament depends on blending selfish and
unselfish motives to build the broadest possible political coalition.
Reducing the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals through a new START treaty
is a no-brainer - 1200 warheads apiece are enough to deter any conceivable
aggressor. The highly enriched uranium from dismantled weapons can be
"burned" for (relatively) clean energy in civilian nuclear power
plants. Meanwhile, through international agreement we can limit the supply
of fissile material. The next stage is harder, when we ask the Chinese and
French to make reductions in their own arsenals.
Ratifying the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty ought to be easy in
Washington. The United States, thanks to decades of nuclear tests, has the
niftiest little H-bombs anyone could ever want. A tough global ban would
keep rivals far behind. Still, the CTBT is one of the "dozen treaties
hung up in the Senate Committee-room like lambs in a butcher's shop"
(in Henry Adams' rueful complaint from 1904). President Clinton failed in
1999 to find the 67 senate votes required.
On Tuesday a new wrinkle added itself to the U.S. political debate.
Moderate senator Arlen Specter defected to the Democrats after the
Pennsylvania state Republican party turned against him. If comedian Al
Franken of Minnesota joins him (current vote count has him 312 votes
ahead), the Democrats will have a 60-40 filibuster-proof majority. This is
good news for Obama's ordinary legislation, but could be a trigger for
deadly partisan polarization when it comes to treaties. Some Republicans
are angry enough to do their country serious harm to deny Obama even
symbolic political victories. In the interests of a safer planet, let us
hope the new White House puppy will mellow them.
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Book Review: The United States and the Making of
Modern Greece: History and Power, 1950-1974
James Edward Miller (Chapel Hill 2009).
April 2009
In the first essay I wrote for my first real English class in high
school I used a quotation from G.B. Shaw: "Truth telling is not
compatible with the defense of the realm." I was not an aspiring
diplomat or strategic thinker then, and so I instinctively applied the
quotation to the one case where it is actually true: the necessary lies we
tell ourselves. Jim Miller might counter with Coventry Patmore's epitaph
for the historical process: "When all its work is done, the lie shall
rot;/ The truth is great, and shall prevail,/ When none cares whether it
prevail or not."
For any English-speaking reader interested in an honest assessment of
the U.S.-Greek relationship between 1950 and 1974, James E. Miller's new
book, The United States and the Making of Modern Greece is the place to
look. Miller gives as dispassionate and balanced an account as we are
likely to get within the constraints of 211 tightly written pages (backed
by another 70 of footnotes). The price is reasonable, and he tells a
complex story efficiently, with pithy quotations and only mild, forgivable
biases. Greek faith in CIA nefariousness notwithstanding, the odds are
negligible that new documents will overturn any significant part of
Miller's assessment. The largest hole to be filled in his analysis is due
to the difficulty of access to equivalent Greek archival materials.
I got to know Miller at the Foreign Service Institute, where he had the
duty of introducing U.S. diplomats and staff to the culture and politics
of Greece, Turkey, and Cyprus. One of his other hats was as the editor for
the Greece-Turkey-Cyprus volumes of Foreign Relations of the United States
(FRUS), the State Department's official documentary history. In that
capacity, Miller could read essentially all the relevant State Department
files as well as other classified documents the CIA still refuses to
release. In 2001, I served briefly as a sniper in his ultimately
successful war with the CIA to release his FRUS volume as an intact
historical work.
Miller documents the surprise and unhappiness the 1967 military coup
provoked in Washington and the Embassy. A standard Greek response to such
accounts is that the State Department did not make policy, that
"real" U.S. policy was made by the CIA, or DIA, or darker
agencies still. But all this has been denied strenuously and plausibly as
well. Miller cites the long, rather plaintive op-ed then-Station Chief
Jack Maury wrote for the Washington Post as soon as he was free to do so.
Miller rightly laments the U.S. government's failure immediately to
rebut the rumor of U.S. involvement in or endorsement of the 1967 coup. He
doubts the U.S. could have restored Greek democracy through threats or
even concerted economic pressure. He emphasizes the toughness and
fanaticism of the Colonels, and makes the case that coup leader
Papadopoulos was the most unyielding Greek interlocutor the USG ever
encountered.
Alas, the State Department was honest. It warned Nixon and Kissinger
that the Junta would fall eventually, and that damage to U.S. interests
from Greek perceptions of U.S. support for it would be serious. But the
analysts' bottom line was that the relationship would survive. This is
what Kissinger seized on with the decision to "normalize"
relations with the Junta. Indeed a high price was paid (but not by
Kissinger -- rumors of war-crimes charges brighten my day, but this is a
pipedream). Five USG employees were murdered, many others had their cars
torched, and the ordinary business of day-to-day diplomacy between two
allies turned into endless, excruciating melodrama. But the sky did not
fall. Someone should have lied to Kissinger that the sky would fall.
Miller has no illusions that his book will correct the myths current in
Greece about the role of the "foreign finger." It is good to be
reminded that "the image of U.S. ambassadors as proconsuls, an idea
deeply ingrained in the Greek collective memory, recurrently revived by
the Greek press, and thus probably not erasable, is in marked contrast
with the realities of the early 1950s." (p25) Ambassador Peurifoy,
still a byword for imperial manipulation, was actually rather clueless.
Andreas Papandreou is an outsized figure who causes the bars of any
documentary cage to creak ominously. What Miller calls the "Andreas
version" of Greek-U.S.-relations was exploited when necessary by the
elder Karamanlis and all his successors as they rebuilt the maimed
legitimacy of the Greek state by proving their independence from
Washington. Distortion of the U.S. role in Greece continues to serve a
variety of political and social agendas, some narrow and selfish, others
(arguably) integral to Greece's spasmodic state-building process.
Predictably, much enjoyable material is buried in Miller's end notes.
The gunfire around the Polytechnion on November 17, 1973 had been audible
as far as the U.S. Embassy. One of my distinguished predecessors as
political counselor was unlucky enough to inform a visiting congressional
delegation that "a small disturbance was taking place over curriculum
issues" (p269, note 52). This remark helped undercut the credibility
both of embassy reporting and of Ambassador Tasca (1970-74) as a promoter
of democratic reforms.
Tasca, naively clutching at every crumb of hope dictator Papadopoulos
or prime minister Markezinis offered him, comes off as a less
unsympathetic figure than I expected. Tasca made himself persona non grata
with Kissinger by fervently urging 6th Fleet intervention to save Cyprus.
Miller is properly tough in condemning Kissinger for diplomatic
incompetence as well as ideological blindness.
Every historian of modern Greece owes a debt to Jim Miller, and this
new book adds to it. His FRUS volumes are available on-line at http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/frus/index.htm
. These documents are a fascinating counterpart to the book, as are the
oral histories of U.S. diplomats transcribed at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/diplomacy/
. The level of political analysis is high, and in many cases a passion for
truth shines through the bureaucratic mask, even from Cold Warriors who,
tragically, feared communism more than they loved freedom.
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I have no polling data to prove it, but anecdotal evidence suggests
most Greeks over the age of thirty occasionally catch themselves
wondering, "Where is Revolutionary Organization 17 November when we
need them?" I certainly have.
It is not that we want lifeless bodies sprawled bloody on the
sidewalks. Greek society's tolerance for murder is commendably low --
lower than mine as a Hollywood-hardened American. Each time 17N killed
someone, there was a wave of sympathy for the victim and revulsion for the
killers. But people with zero faith in state institutions and only limited
faith in divine retribution are comforted when rich bastards, contemptuous
of the Greek courts, at least must live in permanent fear of violent
death.
17N survived for 27 years partly thanks to its reputation as "the
people's avengers" (laïkoi timoroi). This role was not, however,
what Dimitris Koufodinas, their spokesman and de facto leader, had in
mind. 17N's goal was revolution, to overturn a corrupt establishment and
replace it with ancestral virtue and self-managed socialism. His tiny
group wanted, through "armed propaganda," to channel the masses'
instinct for freedom and justice (or, in a pinch, nationalism and
xenophobia) toward the formation of an invincible revolutionary movement.
But real life doesn't work that way. Each spectacular 17N attack undercut
the public's sense of urgency regarding the abuses around them. Though
Koufodinas gamely argued otherwise, 17N was a safety valve for the system,
not an agent of its overthrow.
The niche for domestic terrorism in the Greek political ecosystem was
tiny by the mid-1990s. The foreign enemy - America's military presence --
shrank to one inconspicuous base on Crete. Post-Soviet communism has
little power to motivate self-sacrifice. A rising tide of prosperity began
lifting even anarchists' sailboats , and the PASOK government had masses
of EU money with which to co-opt dangerous idealists.
17N's tough-minded village kids gradually acquired middle class habits.
By the end, they were going through the motions of urban warfare primarily
to make their bank robberies feel less disrespectable. It was a
half-hearted bomb that brought them down, exploding in Savvas Xiros's face
in June 2002.
The niche once filled by 17N has been widening again. The failure of
necessary but unpopular reforms undercuts the legitimacy of the Karamanlis
government. Unpunished scandals erase lingering faith in the state. As
"new Greeks" in luxury SUVs dodge the ragged immigrants at every
stoplight, young idealists draw unwelcome conclusions about social
justice. The economy is sinking. And suddenly the December 6 shooting
death of Alexi Grigoropoulos made "revolutionary
counter-violence" seem - briefly -- a morally valid concept.
The groups active in Greece are no grounds for hysteria.
"Revolutionary Struggle" (EA) took up the ideological mantle of
self-managed socialism from 17N after 2003. Though it scored a public
relations coup with its RPG in the U.S. ambassador's bathroom in 2007, EA
has neither rhetorical gifts nor sharp political instincts. The failed
fertilizer bomb against Citibank - now an ailing, politically irrelevant
mastodon -- was a confession of intellectual bankruptcy as well as poor
urban warfare skills.
EA's record of attacks suggests its members can reach internal
consensus for murder only when public anger is particularly intense. The
Citibank bomb could easily have killed an innocent passerby. Some future
bomb will. Then EA will split, most likely to disappear back into the
shadows.
More deadly than EA is the so-called "Sect of
Revolutionaries," precisely because it rejects political logic. The
Greek "anti-authority" movement embraces "overthrow" (anatropi)
for its own sake: the system is hopelessly corrupt, so let indulge our
private taste for smashing and burning and hope something better rises
from the ashes. "Sect" is the nihilist fringe of that movement,
distinguishing itself with its claim to a taste for bloodshed.
"Sect's" machine gun attacks against police and a television
station sparked anger even among the far left. If "Sect"
improves its aim and kills people, the public will reluctantly give Greek
police the video cameras, warrantless surveillance, prolonged
investigative detention, and DNA data bases available in nations that,
wisely or not, trust their authorities more than Greeks do.
Evaluating terrorists by the results of their attacks is not a job for
amateurs. Imprisoned 17N member Vasilis Tzortzatos opined to a journalist
from Eleftherotypia (16 February 2009) that EA was created or at least
manipulated by the authorities to enable government repression. One of his
"proofs" was that it would take a highly trained professional to
spray so many rounds from an automatic weapon at short range without
killing anyone. EA's January 5 wounding of a policeman near the Culture
Ministry, Tzortzatos argued, was a deliberate, successful attempt to bleed
the fury out of the December demonstrations.
Tzortzatos was right about the effect of the EA shooting. He is wrong,
however, in thinking EA a pawn of the establishment. Greek and U.S.
services are deadly serious in pursuit. Athens.indymedia.org and other
militant websites are equally vehement in attacking Tzortzatos's insult to
revolutionary comrades. Still, "false flag" terror groups are
not unknown. In 1985, the Greek Intelligence Service's provocateur Danos
Krystallis got close enough to 17N to rattle the group. "Sect's"
proclamations are more provocative and no better written than Krystallis's.
Though no sane politician would authorize such attacks, there is some
chance that "Sect" is not a real group but a free-lance attempt
to discredit the anti-authority movement.
A new group to watch is "Conspiracy of Fire Cells --
Athens-Thessaloniki," (SPF) unveiled via an eye-catching barrage of 16
gas-canister bombs dedicated to Koufodinas. The damage was minimal, but
both the scale of the effort and the literary pretensions of their
proclamation imply some potential for future escalation. (see my SPF
update of October 2009)
Hosing down the wreckage, it is easy to forget that terrorists are
small groups organized around the same needs all social primates have to
feed themselves, outshine their peers, attract the opposite sex, and feel
virtuous doing so. Greece is a politicized society that rewards verbosity.
"Conspiracy's" proclamation writer seems to have learned from
Nietzsche or Sartre that clever, content-free paradox spiced with
rhetorical violence is highly seductive and requires less effort than
serious political thinking.
Fortunately, Greek radicalism lacks a transcendental ideology (e.g.,
Hamas's Islamic nationalism) to trump today's social consensus against
taking life. The groups now active skulk around that consensus by staying
socially isolated. Their dogma is a distillation of turgid tracts,
late-night bull sessions, and too much nicotine. Their experience is too
narrow to grasp the human impact of their incendiarism. One powerful
remedy is the public tears of their victims.
The public health metaphor that follows is not meant to provoke a
gazaki on my doorstep. When clouds of flies are buzzing around, something
is probably rotting nearby. Extremist groups are flies that lay their eggs
in the open wounds of a society. Like most successful parasites, the
resulting maggots are seldom fatal to their hosts, and one should not get
hysterical about them. They even promote healing by eating dead flesh.
Healthy societies, however, have few open wounds and modern societies have
less unappetizing ways of treating those wounds. Rather than swat the
flies one at a time, or spray clouds of DDT into the air, let us clean up
our vacant lots and bandage our sores.
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There is good news for the Middle East: Barack Hussein Obama is using
all three of his names again. The new president's first television
interview was a warm message to the Islamic world via the Al 'Arabiyya
satellite television network. Obama ordered the closure of the detention
camp at Guantanamo. Word went out that the "war on terrorism" is
no longer what official Washington thinks it is fighting. And
distinguished former Senator George Mitchell was sent to prop up the
fragile calm with another round of listening to Middle Eastern leaders.
Is the name "Barack," which means "blessing," be
enough to erase from Arab memories Obama's silence regarding the latest
crop of dead children in Gaza? Of course not. But perhaps the Mitchell
mission can be a first step in the direction of transforming Israeli and
Palestinian understanding of the strategic environment is which they
operate.
Israel/Palestine is a small, hard-edged country with too little water,
arable land, or mineral resources to sustain the life and dignity of the
millions of people with little choice but to live there. Middle Eastern
society has always been organized on the basis of tribal competition. In
less crowded times, one tribe could prosper by plundering its neighbors.
Modern prosperity also requires a steady flow of resources from the rest
of the world.
To that end, the marketing of Zionism, first to a diverse Jewish
diaspora and more recently to selfish secular governments, has been a
remarkable success. For fundamentalists, Israel was a country of holy men
carrying out God's purpose by repopulating Judea and Samaria with His
chosen people. For secular Jews, Israel offered an intensity of cultural
and scientific expression that validated a sense of superiority. For
idealists, the kibbutz movement was welcome evidence of the viability of
socialist self-management. All these groups donated money, knowledge and
political backing to help Israel flourish.
Europe's guilt for past anti-Semitism left a moral obligation to be
generous to Israel. For the Chinese and other less sentimental
governments, Israel's military industries dangled a smorgasbord of
U.S.-origin high-tech wizardry, elegantly customized and with fewer
political/humanitarian strings attached. American gentiles were assured
the Israel Defense Forces were their loyal comrade in arms, that Israel
was not the fiercely independent country it is, but instead an unsinkable
U.S. aircraft carrier. The United States still happily pays more than $3
billion per year to console Israel for the shacks that were bulldozed in
the Sinai desert when President Carter brokered peace with Egypt three
decades ago.
Within the favorable international environment they shaped, Israelis
have reaped the reward of hard work and sense of national purpose: an
enviable lifestyle defended by a world-class, nuclear-armed military. As
evolutionary adaptation, this has been brilliant.
The truncated Palestinian state is far more dependent on the kindness
of strangers than Israel. Donor fatigue since 1948 is a dire problem, more
so in today's global economic downturn. The Palestinians have proved less
gifted at projecting different facets of their composite identity to
different audiences. Shimon Peres could charm the U.S. and USSR
simultaneously. Arafat managed to antagonize both. Christian Palestinians
are excluded from the club of "Judeo-Christian civilization"
while the militant piety of Palestinian Islamists makes neighboring Arab
governments nervous rather than sympathetic. Thousands of articulate
Palestinian engineers, doctors, and professors have remained politically
almost irrelevant in exile. At home, rockets and suicide bombers have been
worse than useless as politics by other means.
The evolutionary adaptation the Palestinians have made with proven
effectiveness for attracting money and support is the steady supply of
young children. International support, however, is not a child's reward
for being born but instead for dying.
In December, Israeli politicians accepted the risk of strengthening the
Palestinian cause through a slaughter of innocents. The invasion of Gaza
was a desperate, perhaps futile attempt to redraw the domestic political
map before the February 10 Israeli national elections.
Israel's ugly electoral arithmetic make the extortion talents of Greek
farmers seem Scandinavian in comparison. No politician can build a working
majority in the Knesset without selling his or her soul to bigots from the
single-issue parties. Even to discuss a viable Palestinian state is to
destroy that coalition. Ehud Olmert talks sensibly about meaningful
concessions only now that he has been exiled permanently from electoral
politics.
Per the opinion polls, Bibi Netanyahu of Likud looks likely to take
back the prime ministry. His main platform plank is a promise to kill the
thousands of Hamas members his political rivals had left alive. Kadima's
Tzipi Livni, his chief rival, promises to kill more as well, but her true
passion is bombing Iran.
These are not genocidal psychopaths, simply ambitious politicians bent
on manipulating a flawed and cynical political system. They have seen
ample evidence that most voters are tribal creatures with a tribal version
of justice. Wanton slaughter is evil in Israel and everywhere else. Still,
our tribal God smiles serenely on the targeted killing of a few hundred
terrorists from the neighboring trib, provided our tribe's self-interest
is not harmed thereby.
Enter Senator Mitchell. Ten years ago he convinced extremists on both
sides of the Northern Ireland issue that he was a man of common sense and
absolute integrity. He knows the Middle East already, and is thus an
excellent choice to persuade the government of Israel that 1300 dead
Palestinians cannot be written off as targeted killings. Killing more will
harm Israel's self-interest and thus be an offense to God.
Mitchell's first message to the next Israeli coalition should be a
selfish and thus believable one: the death of innocent Palestinian
children harms U.S. national interests and the political standing of
President Obama and his European colleagues. Should they persist, Israeli
politicians risk equivalent harm in retaliation.
Mitchell can then make clear the following:
Efforts to delegitimize Hamas in the eyes of Gazans have failed. It
is preferable to talk to Hamas now, reaping some credit for
magnanimity.
Hamas will keep the peace provided that peace is crafted to serve the
interests of its leaders. Their interests are no more theological and
unknowable than those of the ultra-Orthodox rabbis Israeli politicians
cut deals with every day.
Israeli efforts to starve Gaza are a political gift to Hamas. Once
the Gaza port and airport are rebuilt and operational under strict EU
control, the porous land border can be closed as tight as Israel and
Egypt decide.
Preparing for the ultimate success of the peace process, the U.S.
will place all future assistance to Israel in an escrow account to fund
compensation for Israeli settlers removed from the West Bank.
Obama is a rare politician with the rhetorical power to give meaning to
tragedy. He should use the blood of these children in Gaza to sanctify a
political process aimed at making the desert bloom for Palestinians as
well as Israelis. International generosity will be required, perhaps
forever. Europe and the United States must be indivisible partners for
either promises or threats to have any meaning to the warring tribes.
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Dear Madame Secretary-designate,
In February 2003 I ended my resignation letter to Colin Powell, with
the following words: I have confidence that our democratic process is
ultimately self-correcting, and hope that in a small way I can contribute
from outside to shaping policies that better serve the security and
prosperity of the American people and the world we share.
The election of Barack Obama has been a vindication for me and many
other foreign service officers. Merely by existing as the embodiment of
that universal dream we like to call "American," he has opened
the door for the United States to represent itself effectively to the
world again.
You have the skills to take full advantage of that opening. Powell was
a superb diplomat, but diplomacy cannot restore America's global standing.
Our policy choices matter more than the intelligence and gravitas with
which we explain them. Fortunately, the American people have demanded a
change in course. To fulfill their dream of security and prosperity, that
change must respect a growing interdependence of U.S. and global
interests.
The willingness and ability of foreigners to cooperate with us
effectively has always been a key component in our calculation of national
security costs and benefits. It is the invidious task of the State
Department to argue, within a brutally competitive Washington policy
process, that our allies have interests as well. Powell found that every
time he turned his back on Washington to talk to foreigners, Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld would knife him.
President Obama will protect you better than President Bush protected
Powell. The American people will understand and forgive your diplomatic
duty of talking to strangers. Still, to be an effective Secretary of State
means giving up any ambition to be president after Obama. You cannot
negotiate workable compromises with foreign governments without being
accused of weakness or treason by potential rivals. If your assistant
secretaries perceive that your goal is to protect your political future,
they will loyally feed you comfortable soundbites about the world. You
will know you are doing your job well only when they offer you the
tortured diplomatic caveats that faithfully reflect Americans' conflicting
interests and stubborn human nature.
American democracy has been and will be again an inspiration to many.
Do not forget, however, that our system has thrived because our government
has been wealthy enough to buy acquiescence from the losers in each power
struggle. Most of the world is not so fortunate. Global economic downturn
will further weaken the standing of governments in the eyes of societies
already close to famine. Wherever the rule of law collapses, environmental
degradation snowballs. Then people migrate or die.
Your first mission, therefore, is to strengthen Third World
governments, even undemocratic ones, and prevent a chain reaction of state
failures and civil wars. Already in Africa we see armies based on tribal
or religious identity coalescing around whatever resource is capable of
sustaining an army. In abjectly poor regions like Gaza or Somalia, foreign
humanitarian assistance is that resource. So even humanitarian
intervention is not automatically humane.
Our European Union/NATO partners are keenly aware that deploying the
military to topple tyrants, impose ceasefires, distribute food, and
supervise elections is not the same as building viable states. Western
intervention in Bosnia saved lives but did not turn Bosnian Serbs into
Bosnians. Once they leave Europe for harsher landscapes, our soldiers are
hard-pressed even to protect themselves. They must persuade their foreign
hosts to want them there.
Curb your enthusiasm for the "surge" in Iraq. U.S. forces
"won" that battle the same way they defeated the Taliban in
2001, by forming alliances with local chieftains against a common enemy.
In Afghanistan that tactic has led, predictably, to a new and harder
mission, propping up the central government against the warlords.
President Karzai's reliance on an occupying army delegitimizes him in the
eyes of many of his subjects. Our NATO allies will soon withdraw unless
you define for them a political mission they can accomplish with finite
resources in a finite period of time.
Frankly, foreign armies have never been a cost-effective prop for any
government. The sensible alternative is arm's-length imperial diplomacy.
Subsidized with a fraction of the $3 billion we pay Israel every year to
console it for peace with Egypt, Karzai can rent enough support from his
warlords to keep Afghanistan afloat.
I apologize for sounding cynical. I know you dream of unleashing a U.S.
national security apparatus capable of glorious quests like defanging Iran
or saving the people of Darfur. But reread the new Senate report on Iraq
reconstruction: "Five years after embarking on its largest foreign
reconstruction project since the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War
II, the U.S. government has in place neither the policies and technical
capacity nor the organizational structure that would be needed to
undertake such a program."
America lacks those policies and capabilities because Washington hasn't
wanted them. The State Department and USAID teem with smart,
well-intentioned people, many of them Clinton Democrats. But they have
evolved, in the absence of effective leadership, into servants of the army
of predators and parasites preying on our national security obsessions.
Information about the real world reaches policymakers through a Darwinian
selection process that exaggerates security threats (e.g., a nuclear
attack from Iraq/Iran) and moral obligations (rebuild the Iraq we
shattered), in order to pry loose tax dollars for political, bureaucratic,
or personal benefit. The results have been abysmal, but the United States
was rich and remote enough to afford such incompetence. Until now.
I have faith that you will insist on a new culture of diplomatic
pragmatism and will reject the paranoid self-congratulation that dominates
Washington discourse about the outside world. There are no easy victories
to look forward to, only four or eight years of toil and stewardship. Your
reward will not be a Nobel Peace Prize - there are no low-hanging olive
branches to pluck these days - but the satisfaction of having used
America's still-enormous power to nudge our species toward a more
sustainable accommodation with its planet. Good luck.
Top of page
Imprisoned “17 November” militant Dimitris
Koufodinas wrote a column for Ta Nea (11 December 2008) to applaud
the demonstrators following the death of Alexis Grigoropoulos.
This was a wasted opportunity to
teach the new generation of radical "anti-authority"
protesters some of the lessons Koufodinas learned from 17N’s 27-year
failed effort to turn violence into effective Greek domestic politics.
1.
Your choice of target becomes your political message, so
respect people’s sense of justice. In
1981, we scolded anarchists and our comrades from Revolutionary Popular
Struggle (ELA) for torching supermarkets and two big department stores.
Ordinary people do not understand a decision by outsiders to
deprive employees of their
livelihood or kill them (so when you killed four civilians in 1991,
firebombing the Kapa Marousi store on Panepistimiou St., we covered for
you, blaming police grenades). Our goal is to mobilize the masses to
defend themselves and ultimately to overthrow the system. Destroying
shops, Christmas trees and recycling bins doesn’t inspire people to join
you. It frightens them into the arms of the authorities.
2.
The media’s agenda is not your agenda. When we executed
CIA station chief Richard Welch, we sent our proclamation to the
newspapers and left copies in Exarcheia. Everyone ignored us, because we
were unwelcome competition. Rather than admit revolutionary leftists are
capable of murder, the media came up with idiotic conspiracies involving
Cypriots, the Middle East, or the CIA murdering its own man. KKE daily Rizospastis insisted for decades we were an American provokatsia.
3.
We worked hard on our proclamations, but almost no one read
them but the police and the U.S. Embassy. They were too long, a laundry
list of grievances rather than a political program. Keep your pitch short,
focused, and consistent.
4.
Be skeptical about the eyewitnesses to Alexi’s death. One
reason we stayed out of jail so long is that people don’t remember what
they see and hear, but rather what seems socially useful to have seen and
heard. When the police wanted us to be Middle Easterners, witnesses
described Middle Easterners. Later, police suspected a leftist named
Nondas Skyftoulis, so witnesses picked out Nondas. This cuts both ways.
Some of us are in jail for the wrong crimes, because witnesses rewrote
their memories to help the prosecutor. Believe the forensic evidence
instead. Libération and Eleftherotypia
accepted us once the police ballistics laboratory figured out that Welch
was killed with the same gun we used to murder policeman Mallios a year
later.
5.
“Cold-blooded executions” aren’t so easy. Firing
multiple shots from inside two meters, we seldom hit our targets close to
the heart. Many of them took hours
to die. Korkoneas shot from 15-20 meters. Alexi’s falling dead was a
lucky accident for you. Don’t waste it.
6.
The overthrow we killed 22 people to achieve never happened.
We would have accomplished more, it turns out, if we had been willing to
die for it instead. Are you sure enough of the change you want that you
are ready to follow Alexi to achieve it?
Top of page
On December 6, a Greek policeman violated clear standing orders and
used his service weapon improperly. He was unlucky enough to kill a minor
child.
The destruction that followed had nothing to do with bad luck. Dozens
of Greek journalists ran to dip their hands in young Alexi's blood.
Without waiting for the autopsy or ballistic reports, without waiting for
the prosecutors' conclusions, far less a trial by judge and jury, Greek
news broadcasts and banner headlines declared that the "police
executed a pupil in cold blood." The talking heads declared that
Alexi's and three similar deaths over 28 years were proof of the
uncontrolled, murderous nature of the Greek police. Society's proper
response, as Ilias Makris, the gifted cartoonist for centrist daily
Kathimerini, made clear in his editorial cartoon of December 9, was to
impale three policemen ("Sorry, the pen ricocheted").
It was hard not to think of Kristallnacht as I walked down Filellinon
street watching the merchants sweep up the broken glass of their shop
windows. This ghastly 1938 Nazi rampage, let us not forget, was triggered
by the murder of a German diplomat in Paris by a single Jewish hothead.
The doctrine of collective guilt, one every civilized nation has
abandoned, is alive and well in the highest levels of Greek journalism.
The police are murderers. Therefore we should douse them with burning
gasoline. To lure them into range, we should not hesitate to smash shop
windows or set a building on fire.
Greek journalists will no doubt be offended by this comparison. After
all, it is not Jews or Gypsies but the despised police against whom they
launched their pogrom. So for a less inflammatory analogy, let them go
back and read the proclamation "Revolutionary Organization 17
November" issued to denounce the "cold-blooded murder" of
15-year-old Michalis Kaltezas by policeman Melistas. The language of the
mainstream Greek media in 2008 is eerily similar to that of 17N in 1985.
The difference is that Greek journalists do not have to kill a policeman
with a car bomb to earn their right to incite others to do the same.
Kristallnacht was a rampage simply waiting for a trigger. But so was
ours in Athens. When authority figures -- teachers, journalists, and
politicians -- make clear to young people that their youthful impulse to
smash and victimize is politically virtuous and will not be punished, a
small but sufficient number of them will exploit their freedom.
To anyone with experience of the world outside Greece, it would be
asinine to accuse the Greek police of being murderous or totalitarian.
Tourists watch with amazement as Greek drivers ignore with complete
impunity the orders of traffic police. It is understood in most countries
that the rule of law saves far more lives than it destroys. But Greek high
school students mourn dozens of young Alexis every year, victims of their
society's decision to close its eyes to murderous drivers, to corrupt
workplace safety inspectors, to factory owners dumping carcinogenic waste
in streams.
Inadequate police morale, training, and equipment are symptoms, not the
cause, of the breakdown of the rule of law. Every month the Greek
parliament passes another draconian, poorly-written law to appease the
public's anger about some abuse. The Greek public may applaud those laws'
being written, but does not want those laws enforced. Therefore, neither
do the politicians. Unenforceable laws and low pay guarantee police
corruption. Corruption guarantees loss of respect. Lack of respect for the
forces of order is a very convenient rationalization for the flagrant
illegality at all levels of Greek society.
Yes, the Greek police have their share of bullies, who can be brutal
indeed when an offending immigrant falls into their hands. But the bullies
are also cowards, and the safely torturable class is small and shrinking
in Greece. Police who break the rules risk the same sluggish, half-hearted
justice meted out to every other Greek offender.
Respect for the rule of law requires that Alexi's unnecessary death be
punished more swiftly and firmly than that. The judges and jury, armed
with all the evidence, must weigh the right to self-defense of every human
being -- including police officers -- against the duty of the state and
its servants to protect human life even at risk to their own lives. But
only if the punishment fits the actual crime, not the media's lurid
misrepresentation of it, will society be the healthier for this process.
Any Kristallnacht is a blot on a nation's self-respect. Having
entertained the whole planet with the inability of Greek police to defend
Athens against a few hundred window-smashers and molotov-throwers, a
responsible few within the Greek media are changing their tune to match
the public's darkening mood.
Perhaps the past week's events will be part of a wider maturation
process. Journalists are pampered members of Greek society. Let them
justify their pseudo-revolutionary narcissism by playing a more legitimate
version of the role 17N once tried and failed to usurp, as a relentless
guardian of the rule of law whenever the state, as now, is faltering in
its duty to protect its citizens.
Top of page
Through the miracle of email I know I have at least one regular reader
outside my immediate family. I therefore dedicate this column to Dr. David
Green, who suggested that I discuss "Global Trends 2025," a
120-page opus just released by the U.S. National Intelligence Council (the
text is free at http://www.dni.gov/nic/NIC_2025_project.html). As the
title suggests, the report sets out to describe the global trends that
will shape the world in 2025.
The NIC was created to coordinate and where possible popularize the
work of the 16 official members of the "U.S. Intelligence
Community." Hollywood notwithstanding, this does not mean that 13
other agencies -- the really secret ones, unlike CIA, DIA, and NSA - are
tunneling under the Acropolis to upload mind-control software into key
Greek politicians and their spiritual advisers. Instead, the majority of
intelligence community employees belong to overt outfits like the Treasury
Department and Coast Guard, with jobs depressingly like my current one.
They surf the internet, read newspapers, have coffee with each other,
sneak off to the gym, and then write articles that will one day, if they
are lucky, be honored by an email from Dr. Green.
In his email to me, Dr. Green summarized the NIC study well enough that
I don't need to. "It paints an emergent global canvas uncannily like
the decline of the British empire, e.g. decreasing American leverage in
world politics, a paradigm economic shift from West to East, increased
local nationalist disputes and a decline in the power of the dollar. It
envisages a multipolar world by 2025 with increasing conflicts over water,
oil, food etc."
Of course, what Dr. Green was too polite to say was that this is not a
description of the world will look like in 2025; it is a description of
the world a few months ago, precisely when the NIC undertook its latest
crash program of dining out with eminent international pundits . Pundits
figured out centuries ago that the safest way to maintain a reputation for
punditry is to predict the present rather than the future. And since, as
Voltaire's Dr. Pangloss (or maybe it was Leibniz) pointed out, we live in
the best of all possible worlds, it would be impious to foresee a
different world in any case.
Anti-Americanism will fade of its own accord, the NIC opines,
collateral damage from America's shrinking power. Yes, but in that case so
what? America needs global popularity only if it wants to be a global
player. Terrorism will also subside, the NIC tentatively suggests, unless
it doesn't. Unfortunately, when it comes to terrorism the NIC has a short,
America-centered memory. It sees terrorism is a Middle Eastern phenomenon,
the product of religious fanaticism and lack of democracy. If the NIC
understood that terrorism is a tactic routinely used by the weaker side in
power struggles, it would take a less languid stance toward the
intensifying competition for resources within states already on the verge
of failure.
If the weakness of the NIC is its parochialism, its strength is the
leisure, money, and prestige to cozy up to actual scientists in possession
of actual data. I was hoping, therefore, to learn what the U.S. government
really thinks will happen to global sea levels, at least a consensus
guesstimate. But Vice President Cheney's icy claw apparently still loiters
perilously close to Washington's collective windpipe. On global climate
change, therefore, the NIC offered an uncontroversial Hollywood scenario,
a freak hurricane putting Wall Street under water. This will happen some
day, but worse things will have happened first.
What good are pundits if they have only weasel words for the impact of
migration patterns that are already undermining European and American
commitments to democratic values? How many millions of people will be put
on the march by climate change is a question with deadly-serious
implications for the future of democracy. Nor does the NIC seriously
address the question of who will run out of irrigation water when. If an
enlightened democracy like Greece cannot impose groundwater conservation
on a few thousand cotton and citrus farmers, we can extrapolate the
certainty of civil war and humanitarian catastrophe due to groundwater
depletion in parts of Africa and Asia.
When a pundit washes his hands of catastrophe by saying the world will
be multipolar, it is time to change the channel on your crystal ball. Even
in the darkest days of the Cold War, "bipolarity" was a
psychiatric disorder, not a description of the international scene. Viewed
in enough detail to be meaningful, the world has never been anything but
multipolar. At the height of U.S. "unipolarity" in 2002, a dozen
tribal chieftains, militant mullahs, Pakistani intel officers, or narco-traffickers
still possessed the same capability as the U.S. government to project
power (e.g., fifteen armed men or $20,000) into a given Afghan village.
Adding Chinese or Indians to the mix, an important but also obvious NIC
prediction for 2025, only reinforces the common-sense message that what
proved impossible for a rich and self-confident superpower may also be
difficult for a Iraq-scalded and indebted one. So we must build
international institutions sturdy enough to cope with the huge, complex
emergencies that will be taking place simultaneously in many parts of the
globe.
The only point of making dire predictions is to change our behavior
enough to make our predictions turn out wrong. The NIC staff timidly
invites the next U.S. president to take measures to change the future, but
is not brave enough to suggest how. Perhaps this fuzzy, harmless report
will help President-elect Obama forgive the NIC's 2002 National
Intelligence Estimate on Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction."
But unless the experts goes out on a limb by suggesting pragmatic
solutions to a few of the perfectly predictable demographic/environmental,
economic/political crises looming before our noses, we will end up stuck
in a present no less ugly for the remarkable ability of U.S.-sponsored
pundits to "predict" it accurately.
Top of page
When the first exit polls leaked out on Greek television, shortly after
midnight Athens time November 5, we learned that Barack Obama was running
neck and neck with John McCain in the deep red state of Indiana. At that
point a sensible political analyst would go to bed. The shift in sentiment
away from the Republican party had not evaporated on election day.
Therefore, Obama's overall victory was assured. McCain's concession speech
(written, I suspect, at least a week in advance), would be gracious.
Obama's victory speech would be inspiring. But there would be no hard
information to digest that night.
If there are any sensible political analysts out there, I have yet to
meet one. After sneaking out of a panel discussion, I glued myself to the
TV screen in a ballroom packed with hundreds of Democrats and friends. By
2 am it was mathematically impossible for Obama to lose. Logic, however,
was no defense against our fear that victory would be snatched away in the
final seconds. So when CNN admitted the obvious the instant it decently
could - the instant polls closed in California (our 6 am) -- I cheered and
waved my arms and hugged and got misty-eyed like everyone else.
Unquestionably, this was one of the best moments in my life. Our little
group, Democrats Abroad, had been working for months to encourage absentee
voting from Greece. Election day (my birthday) was a blur of spread
sheets, name tags, and last-minute calls from the media and desperate
would-be party-goers. Now, suddenly, our work (someone's, anyway) had been
rewarded. And so we stayed awake till 0730 to cheer Obama's victory speech
and hug each other some more, while the hotel janitors swept up the debris
around us. And once back home, emails from all over were waiting to
congratulate me on my country's great step forward.
Readers of my past columns have probably guessed that irrational
exuberance makes me queasy. It is very dangerous to pin our hopes on any
flawed, vulnerable human being. This time, however, I see no alternative
to faith in Obama.
The logic of personal and family self-interest only takes us so far. In
this case impeccable calculations of short-term profit have just mired the
whole of humankind in an economic and environmental morass of unknown
depth. One of the remaining planks keeping six billion heads above water
is our collective faith in a piece of paper called the U.S. dollar.
Without that faith, much of humankind's accumulated wealth (and
consequently its good manners) will sink like a stone.
At such times of crisis we clutch at a leader to restore our faith. The
good news is that people will follow Barack Obama. He projects an almost
godlike aura in his loftier moments. This is a rare and powerful gift.
The better news is that Obama has a decent chance of being able to lead
us where we want to go. He is very smart and very disciplined. His ideals
seem real, because his life story is a reaffirmation of the real American
dream, not the discredited dream of two gas-guzzlers and a house in the
suburbs but the eternal, universal human dream of creating oneself out of
nothing through talent and hard work. He is one good answer to the fatal
delusion that we can all be fat and happy by clipping the coupons of
someone else's toil and talent.
There are many important caveats. First, the exit polls warn us that
the enormous enthusiasm Obama generates applies to only half the U.S.
population. Our democratic camp is an odd alliance of African-Americans,
Hispanics, Asians, and other "minorities," together with
under-thirties and a small group of the richest or best educated whites.
Ordinary middle-class white males - feeling themselves now a threatened
minority -- strongly preferred John McCain for reasons of tribal
solidarity.
Second, the United States is broke. The young had every reason to vote
for Obama. George W. Bush presided over a massive transfer of wealth from
future generations. Rhetoric of God and guns obscured the fact that the
economic interests of working Americans were not those of the wealthy tax
avoiders who dictated Republican policy. Many decent, naive Americans will
continue to fight for the right of the military-industrial complex to
bankrupt their grandchildren still further. The Obama administration will
have little spare cash with which to bribe them to reconsider.
What happens next? The transition teams will install themselves in
government agencies. Their first task is to make sure the Bush
Administration does nothing to compromise the freedom of action of the
next president between now and January 20. Their second task is to
identify those key political appointments which must be reserved for
someone with the knowledge and talent to do the job properly. Democrats
are not immune from Bush's mistake of confusing loyalty with competence.
Though I cheered every time another Senate seat fell to the Democrats,
it is probably just as well they fell short of the magic number of sixty
seats. Unless a measure has strong bipartisan support, therefore, any
Senator can block legislation simply by announcing that he or she is
prepared to read aloud from the telephone directory until hell freezes
over (by humane convention, no actual telephone directories are harmed).
The filibuster is sometimes a means of petty extortion -- blocking an
ambassadorial appointment to avenge some policy decision. It is also a
vital safety net against the bizarre enthusiasms that regularly sweep
through Washington. President Obama's team will be forced to limit their
legislating to what is urgent and politically persuasive, and to nominate
judges and other senior officials able to project balance and probity.
Healthy democracies throw large, expensive bones to the hungry opposition.
Obama must do the same, and we will learn to forgive him.
It is beautiful to wake up on a morning when Americans and Greeks are
celebrating together. The next four years of faith and patience and hard
work will determine whether our shared exuberance was rational or not.
Top of page
The Bottom Line of a
Community Organizer
(Saving the Athens News)
3 October 2008
At the Republican National Convention last month, former New York City
mayor Rudy Giuliani was rewarded with cheers and guffaws for sneering at
Democratic candidate Barack Obama as a "community organizer."
For millions of otherwise decent Republicans, there is something childish
if not sinister about the idea of working for little or no material reward
to help fellow citizens band together to protect their interests.
Individual self-reliance is the current Republican theology. God wants
each one of us to be rich. Therefore, he gave each of us our two hands
with which to grab our fair share before someone else does. Paying taxes
is punishment for sinners. The meek can have the blessing Jesus promised
them -- once they reach paradise.
By Giuliani's pitiless New York measure -- rate of return on capital --
the Athens News should long ago have submitted its résumé to St. Peter.
In recent years the paper has not posted an operating profit. Unlike its
Greek-language peers, the Athens News does not pad its advertising revenue
by blackmailing shady businessmen or squeezing the government for
subsidies. If it is too squeamish to prostitute itself as the vanity press
of some rich benefactor, it must die.
But just as Giuliani's Manhattan is not the only city on the planet,
neither is dog-eat-dog the only possible mode of human behavior. In the
mid-1960s my parents in Silicon Valley made a valiant attempt to be part
of an "intentional community," a group bound by friendship and
philosophy that pooled resources to carve out a more humane and
environmentally responsible lifestyle. Alas, they gave up after a year or
two. Without a skilled organizer nipping at their heels, a tractable herd
of idealistic, consensus-driven professionals has a hard time making a
firm, irrevocable decision even on what to eat for dinner.
Oddly enough, the English-speakers of Athens comes closer than any
other in my experience to that childhood ideal of an intentional
community. Though we are scattered among four million Greeks, most of us
chose to live here. Just as Greeks band together and flourish quite well
outside Greece, we foreigners in Athens find ourselves united by a set of
common challenges. And over time we have built dozens of institutions -
churches, schools, charities, business lobbies, environmental groups,
animal welfare organizations, the 640-member e-mail list of Democrats
Abroad - to create the social structures our biology and upbringing make
vital to human happiness.
The Athens News has scraped by for over half a century because it fills
a vital need. It is our source for reliable information on how some poorly
written Greek law is implemented by a bewildered, bewildering Greek
bureaucracy. It is our window into Greek customs and Greek politics. It is
our public forum for addressing outrages most locals tamely accept. More
importantly, it is our community organizer, the one resource the
English-speaking community has for reaching out to other members of the
community. Otherwise we are invisible and unreachable microfauna in the
14th most populous metropolitan area in Europe.
The Athens News is a small-town newspaper, the place to print
shop-closing schedules, gardening tips, our parents' obituaries, our
children's track-meet accomplishments, the advertisements for local
caterers and English-speaking therapists. On the other hand, it is also a
national and international newspaper, driven by a desire to provide
world-class reporting and commentary on Greek and regional issues. Like
any serious newspaper, it is a living demonstration of the principle of
thinking globally and acting locally.
The Republican cult of individual responsibility and the bottom line
has its admirable side. Competitive energy drives most of the world's
great accomplishments. A newspaper should feel hungry, should struggle
every week to entice new readers, to entrance old readers, to prove its
relevance to the community. I have had the privilege of getting to know
members of the Athens News staff. Their frenzied work reflects quite well
how challenging the economics of their profession have become.
But perhaps we should take another look at the economics of the Athens
News. Going for a week to Club Med, we seeing nothing odd in paying for
the work of the "gentils organisateurs" who organize our leisure
for us. Why do we balk at paying the people who organize our community?
Why do we take for granted the unpaid or underpaid idealists who build our
schools and churches and clubs? Why do our businesspeople here forget what
small business owners know in the UK or USA, that customers will judge
them from their support to the local youth teams, from their advertising
in the local newspaper?
In the worst moments of Czarist repression, Lenin's Bolsheviks fought
tenaciously for the survival of their party newspaper as the key symbol of
their cause. We are wealthier, better educated, far more humane than most
revolutionaries, with leisure and taste to enjoy a well-written,
well-produced, non-fanatical weekly newspaper. I fear, however, that we
have forgotten our responsibility as members of an intentional community
to fight for our collective interests. And therein lies the darker motive
behind Giuliani's sneer at Obama - if people do not band together, they
are easy prey.
Those of us wondering whether the global economy will collapse next
month should be comforted by scientific research. Beyond a reasonable
minimum income for food and warmth, happiness does not increase much with
increased wealth. Instead, our happiness is directly connected to our web
of human relationships, to our rootedness in a community. Greece offers us
that community, have we the wit to be active members in it. Our standing
in that community, the admiration and gratitude of our peers, is a better
drug than heroin, and far cheaper.
The Athens News must and will survive, because where else will our
contributions to our community be recorded? Therefore, buy a subscription.
When the time comes, your grandchildren should have the chance to read
your obituary in the Athens News, the fairest, friendliest, and (with your
help) most permanent record of a community you helped to build.
(Note: Following an amazing public outcry, the
Lambrakis group reversed itself and kept the Athens News going until a
buyer was found later in October. The transition has been relatively
seamless, with editorial integrity intact.)
top of page
I belong to a tiny minority on the planet - those rare humans who have
set foot in Tskhinvali, the little capital of South Ossetia. I wish we
were a more inspiring bunch.
I tagged along on a visit by the U.S. State Department's international
aid coordinator for the former Soviet Union. I forget which Ossetian
official we talked to, but the conversation did not sparkle. Our message,
delivered so diplomatically as to be almost unintelligible, was:
"abandon your claim to independence and the international community
will give you aid." His message, blunter, was: "give us our
independence and we will soon be rich enough not to need your aid."
As if to emphasize his point, someone had just burgled the one
international assistance office in Tskhinvali and stolen its computers.
Tskhinvali was a charmless Soviet town like a half-dozen impoverished
Armenian provincial capitals I had visited. What made Tskhinvali different
was a huge field on the southern edge of town. Parked there in untidy rows
were hundreds of ex-Soviet tanker trucks full of gasoline and heating oil
from refineries in the Russian Federation. For the atmospherics, consult
the 1979 Mel Gibson classic Mad Max.
South Ossetia controls the only tunnel through the Caucasus mountains
separating Georgia from the Russian Federation. The Ossetian mafia chased
out the Georgian customs officials in 1992. They then pocketed $300
dollars from every truck that crossed from Russia. But because South
Ossetia was an integral part of Georgia, it would have been crime against
the national sovereignty to establish a new Georgian customs post on the
road south of Tskhinvali. Therefore, thrifty Georgians could drive a few
minutes north to fill up on untaxed fuel. The local mafia and its Russian
accomplices waxed fat on customs revenue the Georgian state wanted for
itself.
The war happened because President Saakashvili thought he could starve
the Ossetians into rejoining Georgia by clamping down on smuggling.
Because it was their key source of cash, the Ossetians fought back,
killing Georgian police. The now powerless Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) was unable to calm either side. Nor was
Washington, which mistook Saakashvili's ability to speak English for proof
of enlightened statecraft. The State Department delegation in July offered
sensible advice instead of brutal threats.
Mountaineers are trigger-happy in the best of times. Russian military
and intelligence officials inflamed their Ossetian business partners with
assurances that enriching themselves at Georgia's expense coincided
perfectly with Prime Minister Putin's determination to reassert Russian
influence by humiliating Saakashvili.
Underemployed Ossetian paramilitaries yearned to avenge old insults by
carrying off the cows and television sets of their Georgian neighbors.
Meanwhile, cocky Georgian soldiers had mistaken the excellence of their
U.S.-supplied uniforms and training for actual military competence and
U.S. official backing. Saakashvili failed to pass on the bad news that
Georgia would be on its own once it blundered into war with Russia.
Fortunately, far fewer civilians were murdered than either side
claimed. Also fortunately, the anemic Russian army has no enthusiasm for
overt imperialism. Untempted by Georgia's beautiful scenery and excellent
wines, Russian politicians and generals prefer an independent punching bag
to a rebellious new province. The price of Georgia's defeat, therefore, is
not an occupying army but simply the public humiliation of a Russian
military tripwire stretched across Georgia's supply line from Poti, the
main Black Sea port, to Tbilisi the capital..
The United States and NATO, for all their anger at Russian arrogance
and theft, cannot afford to trip that wire by rebuilding Georgia's
shattered army. Europe and Turkey are direly dependent on oil and gas the
Russians would instantly cut off in a crisis. Though an excellent symbol
of political will for U.S. politicians in an election year, Georgia's
territorial integrity, always tenuous, is too peripheral to western
interests to risk a global meltdown.
Launching a new cold war in retaliation for the token Russian
detachment in Poti is militarily unnecessary. The Russian military lost
enough hardware in Georgia to reveal how far it lags behind NATO in the
quality of its forces. Russia's new rich do not want to trade their Greek
island villas for a first-world air force. Unless NATO challenges Russia
publicly - NATO membership for Ukraine, too blatant an anti-missile
program -- Moscow prefers to assure respect through its oil wealth, not an
expensive arms buildup.
Disrespecting Russia with diplomatic isolation would fail. The West
could "win" the last Cold War because a corrupt Soviet system
killed off any lingering faith in the communism that allegedly sanctified
Russian imperialism. Communism's replacement, the Putin model of selfish
nationalism, is too deeply rooted in human nature for us to count on
outlasting it. Globalization is another key difference from 1989. Russia
can always find new customers for what it has to sell, while using
selective economic blackmail to break NATO unity.
Doing nothing, however, would be a sad waste of a good political
opportunity. The West's inability to help Georgia against Russian bullying
is one more fine excuse to change our fossil-fuel-intensive lifestyles.
Once we have reduced our economic dependence on selfish strangers, we can
take another look at the idea of sheltering Georgia under NATO's nuclear
umbrella. Until then, we should be polite but not effusive to visitors
from Moscow.
I took for granted in 2000 that independence would doom the Ossetians
to impoverished servitude to Russia. I was forgetting the magic of
offshore banking. Lichtenstein was once as poor and charmless as South
Ossetia. As the EU tightens up, billions of black rubles leaking out of
Russia are about to be offered a new haven on the ski slopes above
Tskhinvali. The Russian state will be the poorer, but Georgian winemakers
and customs clerks will one day smile with happy malice at the sight.
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One of the great things about the United States is how easy it is to
hide from the political process, especially during this merciful lull
between the primaries and the party conventions. I'm back in Silicon
Valley to see family. Election events are like truffles. If you know where
to look you can root around and find them. Most of us, however, have
better things to do, like see a film with my daughter.
Before we bought the tickets I had to make her a solemn promise not to
squirm or make little moaning noises. Good diplomats never writhe in
public, but I writhe uncontrollably when people say and do asinine things.
For example, I had to turn off the television whenever Ronald Reagan
spoke. His saccharine, bloodthirsty sentimentality and mangling of facts
were more than simply an obstacle to convincing foreigners of the
rightness of America's cause. They were a source of agony. But it would
have been highly unprofessional to allow foreigners to suspect that my
commander in chief was a nincompoop bent on squandering America's public
wealth to gratify his "conservative" friends.
Barack Obama is not a nincompoop. On the contrary, he is brilliant and
well-spoken. In Berlin, he strode onto the world stage as if he owned it.
Next to Sarkozy in Paris he looked tall, fit, and supremely comfortable in
his own skin. I strongly support him for President and suspect his press
conferences in 2009 will be superb. But unless and until he becomes
president, I prefer to watch him with the sound off.
The electoral process is not about policy choices. It is about
character. Proof of the strong leadership the voters demand, not just in
America but everywhere, is willingness to tell lies about the world that
make our self-interest seem moral. Americans worshipped Ronald Reagan
because his pious folktales turned tax fraud and rape of the environment
into a moral philosophy. Radovan Karadzic was loved for his ability to
reassure Bosnian Serbs that God smiled on them when they murdered Bosnian
Muslims, raped their women, and stole their television sets. Greeks vote
for the prime minister who helps them forget their villas are built on
forests and beaches they stole from the Greek nation.
The latest polls confirm what any analyst could have predicted:
Sarkozy's enthusiasm for Obama means less than nothing to U.S. voters. To
win the presidency, Obama must prove the strength of his character by
telling stirring lies to the American people. To his credit, his heart is
not in it. He would rather rehash harmless platitudes eloquently, hoping
to win reelection by trouncing Senator McCain in the battle of the
teleprompters. But the media will not let him get by with saying
uninteresting things brilliantly well. Obama must make grandiose promises,
and they will be painful to hear.
Five years ago, Obama endeared himself to a vocal minority of Americans
by correctly assessing that Iraq would be a stupid war. But the remaining
80 percent of us do not mind fighting stupid wars. We only mind losing
them. Therefore, to buy himself the right to extract the U.S. military
from Iraq, Obama now feels compelled to mislead the American people by
offering them the hope of "victory" in Afghanistan. He bolstered
the illusion by making the substantive part of his European tour a more
eloquent echo of Bush's plea for NATO reinforcements against the Taliban.
I supported the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 because I was
confident the United States was smart enough to learn from Russia's
mistakes. We would punish the Taliban for their hospitality to al Qaeda by
arming and directing the competing warlords. The Pashtuns would be pushed
back to their traditional areas, and Afghanistan's precarious tribal
balance would be restored. We would then get out quickly, before our
presence discredited the new government in Kabul or destabilized our
prickly allies in Pakistan.
The U.S. "victory" was too easy. Bush leapt to the conclusion
that U.S. virtue and persistence could transform Afghanistan into a normal
country, perhaps even a democracy. He did not understand that the presence
of foreign troops in Afghanistan would be a catalyst for Pashtun
nationalism, whose most powerful political expression was and remains the
Taliban. The U.S. military presence also became a magnet for Islamists
from around the globe.
Obama has calculated that to extricate American troops from Iraq, a
little more suffering by the long-suffering Afghans is an affordable
sacrifice to U.S. political reality. Once he becomes president and has
time to look at a good map, I am confident he will internalize the
unfortunate geography of the region. The militant Pashtunistan America is
creating lies intractably athwart the border with Pakistan. Winning
Afghanistan is prohibitively expensive, because it ultimately implies
losing a nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Obama is an intelligent man with no personal stake in the fiasco. The
problem of funding the budget deficit Bush is about to leave him will be
so horrendous - worse than the darkest days of the Reagan administration -
that Obama will ultimately have no choice but to bail out of other
countries' civil wars if he wants to save the U.S. financial system from
collapse.
On civil liberties, the Middle East, the economy, and everything else I
have reasonably confidence in Obama -- once the campaign is over. McCain
would be no competition if brains and good intentions were what the voters
prized. But until November 4, easily embarrassed people like me are too
small an audience to matter. To avoid mortifying my daughter with
inappropriate public writhing, I'll keep the volume of the news shows at
an inaudible minimum and get my pie-in-the-sky promises from Hollywood
instead.
Top of page
Reading a Greek revolutionary archive my heart suddenly leapt at a name
I recognized. Here was my chance to "Swift-Boat" the Republican
presidential candidate the way a nasty group of political operatives had
tarnished Democratic candidate John Kerry's luster as a Vietnam war hero
in 2004. I had documentary proof that John McCain had given aid and
comfort to Greek communist revolutionaries in 1968. Indeed, McCain was
only three degrees of separation distant from the founders of Greek terror
organization "17 November."
Admittedly it's a bit of a stretch. The first of McCain's many
mainstream-media bons mots came when he was 30, as a bomber pilot in the
U.S. Navy in 1967. Having witnessed a devastating deck accident on the
U.S.S. Forrestal, he quipped to a journalist "Now that I've see what
the bombs and the napalm did to the people on our ship, I'm not so sure
that I want to drop any more of the stuff on North Vietnam." But
McCain's squeamishness was purely rhetorical. A few days later he was
dropping "the stuff" again. His conversation with a journalist
became catchy enough to make the front page of the New York Times only
after McCain placed himself beyond the range of Navy media-relations
discipline by getting shot down over Hanoi.
New York-based surrealist poet, art critic, and amateur Trotskyist
revolutionary Nikos Calas siezed on McCain's quotation in January 1968 to
illustrate the tough mind-set of the American airmen in Vietnam. They
might make wry comments to imply humane sentiments, but such sentiments
would not deter them from incinerating as many innocent civilians as it
took. Calas took poetic license: readers of his article in Antistasi, the
anti-Junta revolutionary journal produced by his friend "Pablo"
(international Trotskyist Michalis Raptis), were misinformed that McCain
had died, shot down by the heroic Viet Cong.
"Pablo," in turn, was not the leader of 17N, though a
deranged Greek ex-member of parliament wrote three books insisting he was.
His old mentor Trotsky had been a highly efficient practitioner of state
terrorism but disapproved of retail political violence. Therefore,
"Pablo" focused his energies on half-baked schemes like
recruiting Andreas Papandreou as figurehead of the revolution. The McCain
article was simply one tiny element in a dream of enlisting Vietnam War
protesters and the Greek anti-Junta movement as footsoldiers in their
struggle against capitalism and U.S. imperialism.
"Pablo" may have been a dreamer, but he knew everyone in
Paris, including Alexandros Giotopoulos, who refused to suspend his
movement's "hyperconspiratorial" and "rather childish"
(Raptis-Calas letter of 28 October 1968) anti-imperialist activities after
the Junta collapsed in 1974. Giotopoulos and a handful of comrades would
morph into 17N, the most elusive terrorist group in Europe. They used to
read Raptis' articles carefully. No doubt they forgave Calas McCain's
premature death notice. The version of McCain they see today on their
television sets in Korydallos prison is a godsend to anyone still fighting
for the overthrow of the American Empire. No outside force, but only the
U.S. president himself, can hope to destroy that empire. And McCain seems
to be eager to take on the task.
I did something today I warned last month's readers not to waste time
with. I looked at McCain's official campaign web site. The word
"diplomacy" does not appear in his "National Security"
platform. Instead, the McCain administration promises to expand the size
and budget of the U.S. military, built a shield against ballistic
missiles, and reinvigorate the "Global war on terrorism." There
is not a word to explain how this new U.S. arsenal will be more persuasive
against "Islamic extremism" than the current one. There is not a
word about how McCain plans to pay for it.
McCain does not really believe that diplomacy is unnecessary, of
course. Nor does McCain really believe in his proposed cure for high
energy prices, which is to open up more of the U.S. continental shelf to
oil drilling. Nor, having watched the debacle of the Soviet Empire, does
he really plan to expand the U.S. military to the point of bankrupcy and
ignominious economic collapse. But McCain wants to be president very
badly. Human beings are much more violent, irrational, even brutish than
we care to admit. And idiots vote.
We are watching a U.S. presidential campaign in which both candidates
must prove to conservatives that they are cruel enough to be president
without frightening liberals into thinking nuclear holocaust is on the
horizon. McCain's strongest tool is his gift for using self-deprecating
humor to imply toughness to one and moral sensitivity to the other. For
example, McCain has tiptoed away from his early stance that his own
experience of torture by the Vietnamese makes him unwilling to authorize
it against others. Instead he makes waterboarding jokes, counting on both
sadists and humanists to read that humor as support for their position.
McCain's combination of good intellect, strong but erratic moral
impulses, and poor impulse control made him a Gatling gun of quotable
phrases. Therefore, lazy journalists grew fond of him, too fond to ask the
hard questions that might set off his hair-trigger temper. What churl
would push past his neatly-worded hesitation about the use of napalm to
ask whether in fact he ever hesitated?
17N routinely mocked the "humanitarian sentiments" of
America's leadership. But so do ordinary Greeks. Most of the world will
find nothing to laugh about in McCain's brand of wit. If McCain is not
brave and tough enough to take a serious, unambiguous stand on his
fundamental principles of statecraft, then he is not brave and tough
enough to be president of the United States in the difficult years ahead
of us.
Top of page
The bell ending the last round has rung. The boxing match is over, and
the referee is in the process of lifting Obama's arm to signal victory. In
theory anything could still happen. It probably won't, however, and thus
the foreign policy of President Hillary Clinton will remain a
might-have-been. I will shed no tears for it.
There was never any point in dissecting the foreign policy
pronouncements on the U.S. presidential candidates' web sites. As she
proved in the primaries, Senator Clinton was tough enough to break
campaign promises when U.S. national interests or her own require it.
Anyway, all the leading candidates made the same basic promises. First,
they would not be President Bush. They profess diplomacy and
multilateralism and the restoration of America's image in the world. Then
they reassure conservatives they are prepared to bomb anyone God tells
them deserves it. They pledge obedience to the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee. They mumble something gracious to the old guy who
wanders in claiming to be the Greek lobby.
Somewhat more revealing was Clinton's choice for her foreign policy
team. Some were capable technocrats, who admired Hillary's brains and
discipline. Others were shameless opportunists, who saw her foreordained
victory as their meal ticket. Former Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, Clinton's chief foreign policy expert, discredited herself in
the past by being naively judgmental. Saddam and Milosevic were bad, so
America should topple them. Israel was good, so America should support its
government uncritically. Ultimately, Albright's mishandling of the WMD
sanctions regime in Iraq (such as publicly shrugging off thousands of dead
Iraqi children) set the stage for Bush's Iraq war.
Albright notwithstanding, I enjoyed being a diplomat under Bill
Clinton. The Republican-controlled Congress was afraid Clinton might reap
some domestic political benefit if he used American power and wealth to
make the planet a better place. Therefore, Congress gave the State
Department barely enough money to pay our salaries, and almost nothing for
policy programs. So we improvised. One week we thought peace might be
breaking out in Nagorno Karabakh. Deputy Secretary Strobe Talbott begged a
plane from the Pentagon to fly our negotiating team to Baku and Yerevan.
It broke down. We hitched a ride on an aerial refueling tanker. In Baku
and Yerevan, our negotiating tools were uncollectable promises and hollow
threats, backed by whatever charm, humility, subtlety, logic, and
multilateralism we could muster. No peace broke out. Neither, however, did
war. That was the pattern of the Clinton administration, good diplomacy to
manage crises but no mobilization of resources or bold leaps of
imagination to resolve those crises.
Politics is the process of deciding how to spend the public's surplus
income. The U.S. government cannot help a little old lady across the
street, far less democratize ungrateful foreigners, unless Congress writes
it a check. U.S. voters want a president they can trust to spend three
trillion dollars a year of their money only on things they approve of.
They judge this by the church the candidate attends and by assessing how
poised she seemed wearing stupid hats, bowling gutter balls, or knocking
back shots of mysterious local liquors in front of television cameras.
Unlike most Kenyans and many Greeks, Americans have a childlike faith
that the goal of their president is not to enrich his or her clan but
rather to ensure the security and prosperity of the people as a whole.
Hillary Clinton spent the past seven years as a U.S. senator. This
coincided with the most remarkable U.S. spending spree since World War II.
After September 11, the American people forgot any reservations they might
once have had about borrowing money. The Chinese and other allies funded a
huge expansion of the federal budget. Homeland Security dollars were doled
out to every Congressional district in the country, partly to reassure the
public, partly to earn the gratitude of big campaign contributors.
It would have taken considerable bravery to stand up in the Senate to
warn that America needs to spend its scarce resources on projects with
direct impact on U.S. security, like draining the swamps that breed
terrorism or rebuilding highway bridges before they collapse. Hillary
didn't. Like her colleagues she used rhetoric and symbolism to link the
government's largesse to issues the public cared about. Contracts were
awarded in the name of African AIDS orphans and overheated polar bears.
But her main accomplishment was to aim the Bush administration's fire-hose
of public money toward her adopted state of New York whenever she decently
could.
Hillary is smart, hard-working, disciplined, and endowed with good
interpersonal skills. If, as President Calvin Coolidge once insisted,
"the business of America is business," she would be a fine
president. But ordinary Americans have righly lost confidence in the
ability of Washington's selfish, insular culture to generate solutions to
the real (as opposed to rhetorical) problems the planet now confronts.
Billions of dollars have disappeared in Iraq, some of it lost by civil
servants, some of it stolen by contractors. Future U.S. presidents will
have far less money to spend and equally massive problems to solve. To
project America's waning power effectively, Bush's successor must inspire
a fresh generation of unselfish young people to acquire the substantive
expertise, local knowledge, and ethic of cooperation needed to work
effectively with foreigners. Then he must persuade Congress to give them
the time, resources, and political backing to do tangible work on the
necessary scale.
The campaign gave Senator Clinton ample opportunity to prove she could
step outside the Washington Beltway, both intellectually and ethically.
Her failure to do so condemned her to be the also-ran. She was pushed
aside by a man with less experience than she, and fewer accomplishments.
Obama was able to project, truthfully we hope, an inspirational commitment
to breaking a deadly cycle of business as usual.
Top of page
"This is the Pasha of Bardovtsi," said my friend;
"there are no pashas now, but that is what he would be if there
were any, and he is not anything else, so that is what we call
him."*
I just picked up Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon again
for the umpteenth time. It is a beautiful, heartbreaking book, full of the
rueful, intensely practical folk wisdom of a dozen distinctive ethnic and
regional cultures still thriving in Yugoslav Macedonia in 1937. She
described them all lovingly - bronzed Gypsies and refined Turks,
Albanians, Bulgars, Serbs, the women's white headdresses of Debar.
West called the people she found there "Macedonians." This
was not because she endorsed a distinctive Macedonian ethnicity - she
preferred Belgrade's version that they were Serbs who had been
Bulgarianized over the centuries. Simply, there was nothing else a decent,
humane person could call them.
To call the Slavs of Macedonia "Bulgarians" in 1937 was to
hand them over as spoils of war to Hitler and his allies. The coming
battle against fascist imperialism excused the fanaticism of Serb
administrators trying to forge a single Yugoslav national identity. But
West was also certain that stubborn loyalty to traditional local
identities would be the force that ultimately redeemed Europe from
totalitarianism.
When I talked to the Greek Foreign Ministry in the waning days of the
Cold War, their experts offered a Balkan War response to my observation
that Greece had even then a number of people who looked, spoke, or prayed
differently from other Greeks. Whatever language aging villagers might
speak at home, their "national consciousness" was purely Greek.
Therefore they were not "minorities." Taking any notice of their
existence was a hostile act.
This was a hard argument to answer, especially in a language that had
not yet settled on a word (now "ethnotita") to permit a humane
and necessary distinction to be drawn between "national" and
"ethnic." A mild-mannered diplomat does not wander around the
countryside of a NATO ally challenging Vlachs and Roma and
Slavomacedonians to disclose their "national consciousness,"
even without a not-quite-invisible gentleman from the Greek Intelligence
Service taking notes in the background.
But what about the Muslims of Thrace, I asked? Was their "national
consciousness" not Turkish? Here the MFA lawyers spoke up sternly:
the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 made clear that this particular population
had no right to a national consciousness, only a citizenship (Greek) and a
religious faith (Muslim). I was skeptical that such rights could really
have been cancelled by signatures on a treaty. But I moved on. And so has
Greece.
With migrants now one tenth of the population, the Greek official
position on minorities has become nonsensical. The "national
consciousness" of Bangladeshi farm laborers and Chinese shop owners
owes no allegiance to Balkan power politics. To be able to incorporate
such people as loyal, useful citizens of the Greek state, Greece will
ultimately embrace the liberal cult of individual rights and equality
before the law. This includes the freedom of each individual to define his
or her own individual and collective identities.
In March the European Court of Human Rights shut down the Greek state's
two-decade crusade to ban the "Turkish Association of Xanthi."
This was a case that should never have reached Strasbourg, because
Greece's obligations to its own citizens were self-evident. Greek judges,
however, were not brave enough to alienate fellow Greeks by upholding the
law. They left it for foreigners to protect the right of Greek citizens to
call themselves Turks (or, ultimately, communists, cyclists, or fans of
AEK) and to band together lawfully with other likeminded citizens for
pleasure and mutual benefit.
Few of the Xanthi Turks are genetic descendants of the Turkic tribes
that swept out of Central Asia a millennium ago. But the political and
practical considerations behind their current Turkishness date back
decades or centuries. In the same way, the Slavs of Macedonia did not
appoint themselves heirs of Alexander the Great out of perversity or
ignorance or lust for Greek territory. Theirs is an identity constructed
during a rigorous and bloody process of nation-building since before 1900.
Their grandparents and parents called themselves Macedonians. There is no
other name for them. No politician who ordered them to call themselves
something else could possibly survive.
Some Greek bigots are brutally indifferent whether the neighbors
survive or not, because the name "Macedonia" is their ticket to
political power in Athens. The European Court of Human Rights, alas, has
no jurisdiction to rescue PM Karamanlis from his own political party,
which demands from him the impossible, "a single composite name
[e.g., 'Upper Macedonia"] for all uses."
Unless they are conquered and exterminated, the neighbors will continue
to call themselves in their own language by the name their "national
consciousness" dictates. But language offers a more humane solution.
Let them be Makedontsi, their language Makedonski. Printed in Cyrillic,
which few Greeks read, their passports will say "Republika Makedonija."
In exchange, the rest of the world will know them as "New
Macedonia" or "Macedonia (Skopje)," in English, Chinese,
and every other language and alphabet. A dual name based on language
differences is not an insult - how many Hellenes feel insulted at being
called Greeks? Thus, such a name can be implemented without loss of
dignity both in international organizations and in the former FYROM's
bilateral relationships with the 120-odd countries that now do business
with it under a name Greeks detest.
But what about FYROM's theft of Greek history? One of Rebecca West's
lovely vignettes was an Easter festival in the Macedonian hills. The young
men began singing 'John Brown's Body.' "'It is an old song of our
comitadji,' explained the priest." Balkan freedom-fighters stole a
glorious American anti-slavery anthem. I do not feel poorer. American
freedom-fighters stole Athenian democracy. Greeks do not feel poorer. The
proof of great men and great ideas is that they become, like Alexander the
Great and Pericles, the common heritage of all mankind and thus immune to
theft.
*West, Rebecca, Black Lamb and Grey
Falcon (New York: Viking 1943), p 683.
Top of page
In July 1990 I escorted five members of the Greek parliament on a
NATO tour to Naples, Brussels, and Berlin. These were fascinating times --
the Berlin Wall had just opened. My five MPs, however, once they had
sampled NATO's tax-free shopping (disappointing) and the red light
district (a bit better), found the FIFA World Cup vastly more interesting
than listening to NATO briefings. Even I could barely keep awake.
The intellectual problem of melding the military services of (soon) 28
member states into an instrument of "politics by other means" is
mind-numbingly complex. But complex is not the same as interesting. We
have almost no curiosity about our 60-year interlude of peace and
prosperity. We assume some little group of gnomes is keeping the NATO
machine going so the rest of us can watch football.
The mathematics of European stability were simpler when a rational (if
over-hyped) fear of the Red Army held us together. Once that fear
subsided, Yugoslavia and the Warsaw Pact instantly disintegrated. NATO's
alliance mechanics began to depend on that special inertia democratic
governments have in common with ostriches and three-year-old boys, the
instinct to keep running in a large circle. As long as the United States
did not stray too far in any direction, NATO seemed to orbit smoothly
around Washington as before. But President Bush was bored with the
immobility imposed by the lack of a unifying threat. He went looking for
trouble.
The April 2-4 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest was the latest in a long
series of U.S. attempts to force NATO rightwards and eastwards. The
pay-off to Europe was the same as before: not U.S. protection - because
there is no military threat to Europe - but continued partnership in
European integration. However, the price demanded was higher than usual, a
fresh confrontation with Russia over NATO expansion and more Alliance
troops for Afghanistan
The U.S. official who crafted this bargain was Assistant Secretary of
State for European and Eurasian Affairs Dan Fried, filling in for newly
retired Under Secretary Nick Burns. When I knew him, Dan was a shrill and
self-important bureaucrat. Even under Clinton he had little patience for
colleagues who tried to negotiate with America's foes rather than preach
at its friends. President Bush and Secretary Rice no doubt find his
imperviousness enchantingly virile.
Fried's brief to the Europeans had four main points: more and deadlier
European combat troops for Afghanistan; a limited ballistic missile
defense program in Central Europe; confronting President Putin head-on by
opening NATO membership talks with Ukraine and Georgia; and shoehorning
Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia into the NATO club. All of these are
contentious issues.
Ten NATOs could not rescue President Bush's fantasy of turning Middle
Easterners into docile, democratic, pro-Israel pumpers of petroleum. An
expanded NATO mission in Afghanistan is easier to justify morally. But it
is not a mission that will make NATO interesting, because ultimately it
will fail and failures we forget.
Cowardice and low birth rates play a tiny role in Europe's reluctance
to engage in Afghanistan. The shortage of helicopters and peacekeepers
with the necessary political skills is more acute. But the stalemate in
Afghanistan is not a problem of troop levels as much as it is a refusal to
understand Afghan politics. The myth of redemptive military sacrifice on
the Afghan frontier remains politically potent in America. But any foreign
military presence legitimizes the Taliban, a tribal-religious brigandage
fueled by opium dollars and an infinite supply of young men, as a national
liberation movement. A humbler but more effective solution would be to
subsidize the government in Kabul to buy back its lost legitimacy from
Pashtun farmers along with the poppy crop.
Ukraine would be a useful NATO member if Ukrainians shared the
certainty of Poles and Romanians that their country needs protection from
Russia enough to justify the nuisance of playing by NATO's rules. But
Ukrainian society is divided sharply. NATO would be wielded as a blunt
instrument in Ukrainian domestic political battles or becomes the pretext
for well-financed Russian political intervention. The French and Germans
were right to ask Ukrainians to live next door to Russia for another few
years. Their loyalties will become clearer.
Georgia currently has nothing to offer European security but
professions of future servility from a government elected in a democratic
process that fluctuates perilously between fragile and fictitious. The
prospect of NATO membership is a powerful force for democratic reform, but
it is safer to wait until Russia is distracted elsewhere.
Ballistic missile defense is harmless except to U.S. taxpayers, but
lack of clarity as to U.S. motives made the issue more contentious at
Bucharest. Was this charity to starving defense contractors, or
reassurance to Israel regarding a future preemptive strike on Iran, or an
attempt to lock Poland and the Czech Republic into a symbolic strategic
role? Perhaps it was a cynical attempt to land a job with Lockheed-Martin
when the Bush administration expires.
The Macedonian name stalemate has been branded "the world's
stupidest major issue" by a "top U.S. official." This was
Greece's contribution to making NATO interesting. The State Department,
though furious, was unable to impose its will on an issue threatening a
NATO ally's political survival. Fortunately, the Former Yugoslav Republic
of Macedonia has plenty of NATO-related reforms to implement while it
waits for the United States to come up with a compromise. Unfortunately,
no viable compromise exists. Therefore, Republika Makedonija will enter
NATO and the EU only after civil war sends a few hundred thousand Slav
Macedonian or Albanian refugees into Greece.
There was a silver lining to Greece's veto, that in the confusion
Albania slipped through with no scrutiny of its imperfect record. Croatian
and Albanian military officers can now improve their English and table
manners at NATO headquarters, a small but important step toward
"Europe whole and free."
Perhaps NATO is interesting already. It will get more interesting soon.
Climate change and population pressure will drive a chain reaction of
state failures and mass migration. NATO has the resources, skills, and
doctrine to respond effectively but also humanely to refugee flows across
the Mediterranean. We should begin focusing on this task immediately, not
only because it is urgent but also because it can ultimately relegitimize
U.S.-European cooperation in NATO. Rehashing Balkan history or even
killing young Taliban never could.
top of page
President Nixon's amoral National Security Advisor Henry
Kissinger stole many excellent insights, including the following:
"University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so
small." Political scientist Wallace Sayre had put it more
scientifically: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely
proportional to the value of the stakes at issue."
With all its sound and fury, the "Macedonian name crisis"
obeys Sayre's Law. One easy proof: genuine secrets seldom leak, in Greece
or anywhere else. Newspapers hardly ever print the names of Greece's
secret agents abroad or its plans for defending Thrace against armored
attack. However, the full text of Ambassador Nimetz's proposals for
renaming the "Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia," a document
allegedly safeguarded by Foreign Minister Bakoyianni as a single copy she
personally hand-carried to party leaders, appeared on the front page of To
Vima within hours of its delivery.
Prime Minister Karamanlis and Foreign Minister Bakoyianni are
intelligent, patriotic politicians surrounded by loyal advisors. None of
them would deliberately undercut their country's negotiating position on a
vital national issue. So clearly, at least to these experienced Greek
politicians, the problem of what to call Greece's northern neighbor does
not fall in that category.
Around 1900, Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia shared "Macedonia"
as a relatively neutral term for the multiethnic Ottoman territories they
planned to carve up between them. But the borders of 1912/13, an accident
of where their armies stalled out, left all three states feeling cheated.
History and geography were unhelpful. Not all the people redeemed from the
Ottoman yoke were grateful to their liberators. Greek was not the language
most villagers spoke among themselves.
Had the United Nations existed when the Ottoman Empire lost its Balkan
possessions, a "decolonization" process based on modern criteria
would have resulted in an independent state called Macedonia, with
Thessaloniki its capital and a hastily standardized "Macedonian"
as one of its three or four official languages. (Bulgarians say
"Macedonian" is merely a rustic dialect of Bulgarian. Serbs soon
abandoned efforts to call it "South Serbian." In Greece, the
"local idiom" has no name.)
Geography partly corrected itself through an exchange of populations
with Bulgaria in 1919, another with Turkey in 1923, and mass refugee flows
during the 1946-49 Greek civil war. Temporary cease-fire lines gradually
became sacred, eternal national borders. Strong social and political
pressure, sweetened by the joys of city life, turned many of Greece's
Slavs into fanatical Greek patriots.
Nation-building is a cruel process protected by a bodyguard of lies,
but it works. Three generations of homogenization, the disintegration of
Yugoslavia, and the marginalization of Russia as Bulgaria's big brother,
have made the Greek state safely and irreversibly Greek.
Because the stakes for Greece are negligible, Greek university
professors now openly teach Greek students about the Slav-speaking
villages around Florina and the tens of thousands of Greeks who still
speak "local" on intimate occasions. A few hundred activists
freely proclaim themselves Greece's Macedonian minority and campaign as
the "Rainbow" party. But even protected by Brussels and funded
by donations from an active diaspora, they have no hope of ever polling
more than a few thousand votes.
Greeks lived peacefully next door to Tito's "Socialist Republic of
Macedonia." The SRM's independent successor poses even less a threat
to Greek lands and dignity. Pretending otherwise is simply a theatrical
work mounted by politicians and journalists to entertain the public and
perhaps embarrass Karamanlis, Bakoyianni, or both. In a low-stakes game
such as this, politicians obey Oscar Wilde's dictum: "a secret kept
is a secret wasted."
Across the border the stakes are much higher. Undermined by economic
woes and a restive Albanian minority, the government in Skopje is telling
the truth when it argues that a composite name would forfeit its
legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. The Macedonian state is fragile
enough that it can borrow from Herodotus the ringing defiance launched by
the impoverished islanders of Andros: "The power of Athens can never
be stronger than our inability." Simply by going limp and allowing
chaos to prevail on Greece's northern border, "FYROM" can do
unacceptable damage to Greek interests.
Local demagogues urge preemptive creation of a new Darfur on Greece's
doorstep, but ordinary Greeks know better. Their security and prosperity
are increased by locking the peoples of "Upper Macedonia" firmly
into the rules of NATO and the European Union. Karamanlis is perfectly
aware that, by vetoing NATO's invitation for Macedonia to join, Greece is
slashing its wrists to bleed on its neighbors' shoes. But what choice does
he have?
A dictator could trade Greek acceptance of "Republic of
Macedonia" for something valuable, such a strict Macedonian
compliance with the terms for NATO entry. This is something neither
Brussels nor Washington can be trusted to impose. Even a less languid
implementation of Andreas Papandreou's 1995 "interim agreement"
with Skopje (which promised more and cleaner river water and upgraded
transport infrastructure) would be a net gain for Greeks.
Karamanlis, however, is a democratic leader with an unstratospheric
approval rating and a parliamentary majority of one seat. Accepting
Skopje's bottom-line position - to add an adjective to Macedonian name
tags at international meetings as a courtesy to any Greeks in the room -
would not automatically lose him a confidence vote. MPs like being in
power and will brutally punish the traitor who brings them down. But
Karamanlis would lose enough seats in the next elections to force him into
an ugly, expensive coalition with LAOS. Because selfish interest and
national interest somewhat coincide, Karamanlis will veto Macedonia's NATO
entry without hesitation.
This is Nimetz's last hurrah. Once a new U.S. president is elected, a
new diplomatic endurance contest will begin. Because the stakes of that
contest are so asymmetrical, Greece will ultimately accept defeat. The
Hellenic Republic, known to the rest of the world as Greece, and the
Republika Makedonija, known to the rest of the world as Macedonia, will
soberly establish full diplomatic relations in the wake of some tragedy.
By then, alas, no one anywhere will care whether they do or not.
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Ioannis D. Stefanidis, Stirring the Greek Nation: Political
Culture, Irredentism and Anti-Americanism in Post-War Greece, 1945-1967
(Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press, 300 pages, €87)
In early February 2008, I attended a lecture in Greek at the Athens
Technical Chamber on the "Eleftherna Mechanism," a piece of
ancient technology recently discovered in Crete. For an hour, the lecturer
wielded PowerPoint slides and CAT scans to keep us on the edge of our
seats. Ultimately, the object of his research proved to be a rusty padlock
on a chain - a padlock from AD 364 to be sure, and quite handsome in its
way. After hearty applause, a well-dressed man stood up to hail this
important scientific contribution "not just to Greece but to all
mankind." The next asked timidly whether this was indeed a Greek
padlock and not a Roman one.
Early in Stirring the Greek Nation, Professor Ioannis Stefanidis
quotes Maurice Barré writing in 1906 about his visit to Greece, "I
have never seen anyone other than four-year old children … admire
themselves with such naiveté and, I must add, sincerity, as this nation
does" (p 12). But Barré, a French nationalist himself, ought to have
known better. National narcissism is universal. Greeks differ from French
or Americans only in their craving for regular public reassurance that
they deserve the Periclean pinnacle to which they cling.
Stefanidis identifies darker implications to this craving. Attempts to
play an imperial game beyond its resources led Greece to military defeat
in 1897 and to catastrophe in 1922. Unchastened, many Greeks felt little
gratitude when the Paris peace conference of 1947 handed over the
Dodecanese islands. Greeks' moral and cultural superiority over their
neighbors, combined with their sufferings in World War II, entitled Greece
to much more: all of Cyprus, plus territory in Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslav
Macedonia, European Turkey, and perhaps even Libya.
The United States, however, failed to recognize Greece's entitlement.
With the Cold War looming on the horizon, the U.S. government wanted to
avoid the mistakes of the Versailles Treaty. There would be no further
rectification of Greek borders. That was a disappointment. But the U.S.
government added insult to injury, treating Greece and Turkey, publicly as
well as privately, as equally valued allies or (once the two quarreled
over Cyprus in 1955) as equally blameworthy children. For proud Greek
nationalists, this even-handedness was betrayal.
Stirring the Greek Nation reminds us that Greek anti-Americanism
became intense and distinctive as early as the mid-1950s. Stefanidis's
insight lies in seeing its roots in Greek domestic political competition.
Voters rewarded Greek politicians for the ferocity of their Cyprus
rhetoric. In 1964, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou promised enosis
to the cheering crowds, the union of Cyprus with Greece. He claimed enosis
would make Cyprus "the springboard of Hellenism," destined
"to continue the march of Alexander the Great to the East by peaceful
means" (p150).
Unlike President Bush in 2003, the Greek government was in no position
to spread mayhem among actual Middle-Easterners with such megalomania.
Instead politicians blamed the United States for standing between Greeks
and their Megali Idea ("Great Idea"). In 1959, General
Grivas's rightist followers gathered up all the hula hoops they could find
and destroyed them in the streets to protest the lack of U.S. support for enosis.
The Cyprus issue was a godsend to the Greek left as well. Leftist
politicians could not afford to alienate moderate voters by reminding them
of America's real crime - intervening in 1947 to help their conservative
rivals thwart a Stalinist paradise in Greece. But fighting for
"decolonization" of Cyprus, a cause blessed by Moscow, helped
the left overcome the stigma of having allegedly conspired with the
"eternal Slav enemies of Greece" during the civil war. From 1954
on, leftist students routinely smashed the windows of the U.S. libraries
in Athens and Thessaloniki as punishment for U.S. reluctance to oust the
British from Cyprus.
Anti-Americanism was and remains an affordable price for U.S.
administrations to pay for staving off a catastrophic Greek-Turkish war.
But already in 1950, the Office of Research of the U.S. Information Agency
was concerned enough about America's tarnished image to sponsor the first
scientific public opinion polling in Greece. Stefanidis has mined USIA's
once-confidential data to support his analysis of when and why Greek
public opinion turned so sharply and unpleasantly against the ally that
had rescued it.
This survey data is by no means entirely negative. Greeks were more
neutralist than other Europeans in 1957, but they favored U.S. films,
music, higher education, and even politicians over local versions. Their
key concern, in the 1960s as now, was the struggling economy. Only a
handful of ordinary Greeks, sometimes only one percent, saw Cyprus as
their chief concern. In March 1964 the United States was the "best
friend" of Greece, beating the USSR 28% to 15%. Six months later, the
Soviet Union was winning 22% to 16%. By the middle of 1965 the United
States was the best friend again by a crushing margin, 49% to 8%. In each
case, headlines from Cyprus played a decisive role in shaping volatile
public perceptions.
Stefanidis warns us that these polls should be treated carefully. They
were flawed by low literacy levels and high levels of "don't
knows" and "no opinions." With retribution still a serious
risk for Greek leftists until the socialist election victory in 1981, at
least a third of the population did not care to express its true opinions
to strangers with a clipboard. Thus, the bare summary results of the 45
data tables printed by Stefanidis in chapter 10 would be more convincing
if backed by more analysis. Still, he is almost certainly right in the
conclusions he draws for the pre-Junta period.
Greeks are more self-confident in 2008. Politicians can more plausibly
blame the EU for any inability to deliver on ill-chosen promises. When
they pander to voters with grandiose language about Greece's civilizing
role in the Balkans, this is a much less dangerous fantasy than its
predecessors. And because the flip side of a heightened sense of national
destiny is a heightened sense of national responsibility, such patriotism
is a sentiment we cannot afford to mock.
With this new book, Stefanidis has made an important contribution to
the study of anti-Americanism in Greece. His fine ear for quotations
sweetens the pill of the high price tag (€87). Reissued in Greek in a
more affordable format, slightly reorganized to reduce repetitive
material, Stirring the Greek Nation will be a revolutionary
contribution to young Greeks' understanding of America's role as a tool,
often an unwitting one, in their manipulation by their own politicians.
U.S. diplomats should also study Stirring the Greek Nation
carefully. Greece and the world have changed, but the opinion polls have
not. Greeks remain the most anti-U.S. population in Europe. Some of their
reasons are rational. For example, Stefanidis illustrates how the presence
of the U.S. military bases in Greece became massively more controversial
with ordinary Greeks in 1954 because of American insistence on immunity
from Greek criminal jurisdiction for U.S. service members. Each bar brawl
outside a U.S. base became an opportunity for the opposition to attack the
Greek government for its servility to Washington. Fifty years later,
blanket legal immunity for U.S. forces remains an expensive mirage, one
the Pentagon continues to pursue with counterproductive ferocity. Armed
with a better grasp of history, American diplomats can argue more
persuasively back in Washington for policies that undercut the ability of
ordinary Greeks to cherish a corroded and obsolete anti-Americanism with
the same naïve admiration they bestowed on the "Eleftherna
Mechanism."
Top of Page
The Greek criminal justice system is about spectacle and catharsis, as
in ancient tragedy. The goal is not truth, but rather immediate,
convincing reassurance that divine justice will prevail. Lurid, sweeping
statements by politicians and prosecutors, exaggerated charges
("murder with intent" for simple cases of vehicular
manslaughter), leaked testimony, illegal photos of defendants being
frog-marched to jail. And then a pause to look around.
If the issue stops selling newspapers, the person is quietly released.
If public curiosity persists, then legal delays will arise until some new
enormity captures the headlines. This is a democratic version of justice,
one that suits a people condemned by the mismatch between their legal
system and their social habits to break at least six laws just to go
shopping for breakfast.
Will the Zachopoulos scandal be different? The public seems happy to
watch its favorite media personalities, in the name of science, bravely
thrusting their heads deep into the entrails of the former Secretary
General of the Ministry of Culture. Alas, the passing weeks confirm that
this is not truth they are tugging at but simply lunch. When the corpse is
picked clean, they will move on. The underlying problem of the Culture
Ministry -- letting politicians or their relatives dole out other people's
money to an arbitrary list of cultural figures is inherently corrupt and
corrupting - will be forgotten.
Faced with this grisly sight, Prime Minister Karamanlis preferred to
get out of town. And fortunately he had an appointment in Ankara it would
have been seriously rude to postpone any further.
Greek commentators (and even some Greek diplomats who ought to know
better) insisted that Karamanlis deny the Turkish people the radiance of
his presence until the Turkish government made some concession to justify
it. Under such logic, Turkish PM Erdogan's 2004 visit to Athens might
perhaps be reciprocated by one of Karamanlis's children.
Karamanlis knew better. We do not go to the dentist because he will
reward us for our magnanimity in calling on him. We go because of the
agonizing, disfiguring consequences of letting our teeth and gums go
untended for too long. In the same way, the health of Greece's
relationship with its most important neighbor ought to be maintained with
an official visit at least every two years.
Karamanlis had a good visit to Turkey, without painful surprises. The
reception was cordial, the crowds respectable. There were no
breakthroughs, but he and Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan talked seriously
and usefully. They agreed to reinvigorate diplomatic discussions regarding
a package deal of Aegean issues. One day, if neither side loses its nerve,
the International Court of Justice will draw a series of lines in the
water. Then Greek and Turkish pilots can conduct their mock dogfights over
the Aegean for pleasure rather than business.
So why had no Greek prime minister visited Ankara since 1959? Quite
simply, the Greek media environment is so poisonous that it is safer to
let Greek-Turkish issues fester like an impacted wisdom tooth. Any Greek
politician who goes to Turkey is vulnerable to being ambushed by a Greek
television crew. Before Karamanlis made his visit, mass-circulation Sunday
paper Proto Thema made a game attempt to bully him out of it.
Pursuant to an agreement brokered by then-President Clinton in 1996,
Greece and Turkey promise to keep their respective politicians,
journalists, and fishermen a safe distance from the disputed rock islets
of Imia until a settlement is negotiated. It was an easy bargain because
the rocks are not worth visiting. But…
The Aegean is a beautiful clear blue because so few fish survive
uneaten to poop in it. A handful of survivors noticed that Imia, or Kardak
as it is referred to by fish from the Turkish side of the maritime
boundary, after 1996 became an excellent place to raise their fingerlings.
No dynamite, no acetylene lamps, no bottom-trawlers. Predictably, the
waters there were soon as crowded and carefree as Psirri at 2 am.
Appeals to patriotism get you a glassy stare. Throw in €500 worth of
unwary fish and a dozen Admiral Canarises will rise at midnight from the
tomb. Proto Thema discovered to its horror, scant days before the
Karamanlis visit to Ankara, that the Turkish coast guard was chasing Greek
fishermen away from Imia.
Technically, Proto Thema is right to be annoyed. Chasing Greek
fisherman away from Imia is the job of the Greek coast guard. But the
Greek coast guard is desperately busy elsewhere, repelling (or more often
rescuing) illegal immigrants. A key item on Karamanlis's Ankara agenda was
reminding Turkey to do its share in controlling the dangerous escalation
of migrant flows toward Europe.
So congratulations to PM Karamanlis for ignoring the media. He did the
right thing for his country. He will be punished for it, losing a few
thousand voters to LAOS in the next elections. But the next time a Greek
prime minister goes to Ankara will be easier, with fewer silly
expectations. If politicians everywhere were braver about routine visits
to the dentist, the world would be safer for all of us … except for
Imia's fish. If peace breaks out they will be fair game once again.
January 4, 2008
Lebanon wasn't the holiday destination (for the full
7-page travelogue, click here) we were contemplating when we bought
our plane tickets through Beirut. The Syrian Embassy, however, didn't feel
safe giving a blue-eyed American ex-diplomat a visa to wander around loose
along the Euphrates. I might be a spy trying to winkle out their
secrets.
Lebanese authorities take a much more relaxed attitude. Lebanon is a
democracy. A clear majority of its people would be grateful if some agent
of a foreign power would figure out what is currently going on in their
country and then explain it to them.
The Lebanese presidency is vacant, parliament does not meet, and
politicians of proven lethality are making ominous declarations that the
government is illegitimate. Most tourists think they are being sensible by
staying away. We thus had Lebanon's superb archaeological sites almost to
ourselves. We also had ten days to watch politics in the pure, primitive
form still practiced in Lebanon -- the redistribution of society's
resources by a small group of individuals empowered by God-given certainty
of their right to do so.
Small, mountainous Lebanon became dangerously overpopulated centuries
ago. To discourage predators, every village plasters itself with posters
showing membership in a political/religious movement led by a local
strongman who wields their ballots or bullets as the situation requires.
By Lebanon's power-sharing rules, the president must be a Maronite
Christian. Lebanese Army chief Michel Suleiman is broadly acceptable. But
to elect a serving official as president requires amending the
constitution by a two-thirds majority of parliament. For this one moment,
the votes of even minor warlords are worth cabinet seats for themselves,
jobs for their relatives, and white-elephant public works projects for
their home village. As good players they conceal most of their cards. They
also cultivate the sense that they have powerful patrons outside Lebanon.
High-stakes poker breeds paranoia. Every couple of days, a new
delegation of well-meaning foreigners exhorts the Lebanese to put politics
behind them and unite for the good of their country. Because this is the
same language cynical Lebanese politicians use, it is taken as proof
foreigners are pulling the strings. Lebanese assert their rivals are in
the pocket of the Syrians, the Americans, the French, the Iranians, the
Israelis or all of the above simultaneously. And every few weeks someone
gets assassinated.
Foreign tourists are on no one's hit list. Ordinary Lebanese are also
perfectly safe, apart from the economic slump the stalemate has caused.
The fine restaurants, where rich Lebanese and their diaspora relatives
drown their sorrows, are overbooked. But politicians cower behind
truck-bomb barriers, armored personnel carriers, and enormous coils of
razor-wire.
These security precautions have turned the swanky new Beirut downtown
into a deserted movie set. We went there to catch the tail end of
Christmas Eve midnight mass at St. George's Maronite cathedral. This was
not American suburban parents imposing a sermon on their restless
offspring as the price of Santa Claus. Nor was it the ring-tones and
social chatter of a Greek service.
In Lebanon, religious devotion is part of deterrence. It signals
potential foes or allies a willingness to escalate at a moment's notice to
self-sacrificial collective violence. The church was full of short, pious,
bullet-headed men with leather coats and leathery wives. Some wore orange
scarves showing loyalty to Michel Aoun, a politician with a limitless
yearning to be president. His and the other militias are now political
parties, but I understood immediately why other Lebanese think camouflage
uniforms still hang in the back of Maronite closets.
The music, however, was angelic. Uplifted, we took a wrong turn out of
the church and bounced like a pinball from military checkpoint to military
checkpoint. Finally, we found an alley bypassing an empty tent city, a
relic of earlier massive protests, and found a main road and an ancient
taxi. But lost and alone at 1:30 a.m. we felt no fear. The implied threat
of violence is not directed at foreigners.
Later in the Bekaa Valley, we drove past kilometers of portrait posters
spaced every 25 meters to remind visitors of Hezbollah's limitless supply
of martyrs. Hezbollah has supplanted Amal as the leading Shiite movement.
It owns Baalbek, site of the most impressive temple of classical
antiquity. We found the mayor in the ruins graciously welcoming tourists.
Hezbollah tee-shirts are on sale in a variety of colors.
Hezbollah has earned the grudging respect of most Lebanese as a rare
faction that actually looks after the material welfare of its
constituents. Were Hezbollah's religious zeal and Iranian funding
understood objectively, as a close counterpart to Maronite piety and
traditional dependence on France, then western governments would have a
reasonable hope of buying its good behavior in the traditional Lebanese
way. The abject failure of Israel's cluster bombs in 2006 is a lesson in
the need to make the attempt.
Reading Lebanon's dire history inspires a desire to exterminate the
human race and start over. Visiting the place sends a more optimistic
message. Lebanon distills the virtues and vices of humanity, including
paranoid sectarianism and generous joie de vivre, into a very palatable
beverage. Arak is like ouzo, only much stronger. Regina and I had a
wonderful visit. Ignore the machine guns and you will too.
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