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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I was planning to write this month's column on the role of human
sacrifice in politics, with special reference to PASOK. This was not to
urge reelected PASOK president Papandreou to don his priestly robes, wrap
the fat from his defeated rivals' kidneys around their thighbones, and let
the savory smoke waft to Mt. Olympus. But voters like to interpret their
politicians' willingness to send people to their deaths as proof of strong
leadership. Winston Churchill and U.S. Grant were mediocre military
strategists, but people still worship them for their ability to
anesthetize themselves with a bottle or two of brandy and then order a
costly new assault. (Leadership tip to Transport Minister Hatzidakis: the
longer you wait, the more disgusting the bits that will fall off as you
drag the rotting corpse of Olympic Airlines to the landfill. Ouzo may
help.)
My Athens News readers have been rescued by events in the Middle East.
I turned on CNN and was lucky enough to catch a snippet of actual news:
the U.S. "Intelligence Community" concluded that the government
of Iran has adopted a rational, cost-benefit approach to nuclear weapons
and thus suspended its A-bomb development program back in 2003.
Normally, the fact that foreigners are not crazy is kept so highly
classified that not even President Bush knows it. But this time National
Security Adviser Steve Hadley went before the TV cameras to announce it to
the world. Air strikes on Iran, at least by the United States, are now off
the table. Once we accept Iran as rational, there are effective diplomatic
tools for dealing with its nuclear and other aspirations.
The Bush-Cheney White House had long deluded itself it could channel
the fears of conservative Sunni regimes into a grand alliance against
Shiite Iran. Such regimes only survive, however, by keeping the regional
balance of power at least triangular. By the time Washington discovered it
could not reinvent the Middle East, the overextended American presence in
Iraq and Afghanistan had become a hostage for U.S. good behavior rather
than a tool for imposing America's will.
On December 3, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia let himself be
photographed holding hands with President Ahmadinejad at the Gulf
Cooperation Council. Iran and the GCC have been at odds for decades over
maritime boundaries and islands in the Arabian/Persian Gulf (other
capitals besides Athens and Skopje have name issues, if this is any
comfort). For the first time, Ahmadinejad was invited to the GCC and his
proposals for expanded regional cooperation were even welcomed.
Meanwhile, the Syrians and almost everyone else (the U.S. shrank from
inviting Hamas and Iran) showed up at Annapolis to make more fervent
noises than usual about solving the Israel-Palestine conflict. Then the
Lebanese thought hard and decided to elect a broadly tolerated Maronite
general as president rather than launch the next round of civil war. The
Turks bombed Iraqi Kurdistan gently, but they did not invade. Soon the
snows will lie too deep.
Per my discarded initial theme, does this spasm of peacefulness reflect
a problem of weak leadership in the Middle East? Not necessarily.
When Churchill said "The Americans will always do the right
thing... after they've exhausted all the alternatives," he was being
uncharitable. The witticism applies everywhere. The Middle East is
experiencing this moment of diplomacy because almost everyone recognizes
the region teeters on the brink of meltdown. Customary arrogance, greed,
and bigotry have become luxuries few can still afford.
Peace is not at hand. Cynics judge the sincerity of Israeli government
peace proposals by whether the Jewish settler movement reacts hysterically
to them. From that standpoint, Annapolis was a non-event. The conference
declaration reaffirmed a lopsidedly pro-Israel roadmap. PM Olmert assured
Israelis the 2008 deadline for agreement was merely a pious hope. He
intervened with President Bush to kill an innocuous UN Security Council
resolution drafted by the State Department in support of the Annapolis
goals.
Nevertheless, Annapolis was a right thing. Merely by agreeing to attend
a concession-free meeting, Gulf Arabs bought themselves political room to
explore a new modus vivendi with Iran. Syrian participation decreased the
risk the U.S. would insist on a civil war in the name of protecting the
Lebanese from Syria. Israel will embarrass itself now if it sabotages the
international assistance British ex-PM Tony Blair is orchestrating for the
Occupied Territories.
Hamas looks to alien Iran only because everyone else has connived at
Israel's illegal and counterproductive strangulation of the Gaza Strip.
The Annapolis conference undercut Iran by making the peace process and its
promises of Gaza's survival seem more credible. Unless Blair persuades
Europe to outbid Iran for Hamas's cooperation, however, Gaza will never be
peaceful enough to invoke Israel's obligations under the roadmap.
Strict rationality in the Middle East remains impossible because of
domestic politics. Therefore, the suggested reward for Iran's improved
nuclear behavior is harsher UN sanctions rather than gentler ones. For the
same reason, Blair's Palestinian diplomacy must remain invisible. Still, a
diplomatic window is open briefly pending the 2008 U.S. election, a chance
to keep an overcrowded, ill-governed Middle East from going up in flames
for a few more years.
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We should study the classics for our own protection. I grew up in
Silicon Valley, a land of perpetual sunshine where nothing bad ever
happens to anybody. I moved to Greece, another mythic land of free medical
care. So when they bashed out the brains of Hektor's infant son Astyanax
on the walls of Troy and gave his mother Andromache as concubine to
Achilles' son Neoptolemos, I had no idea what was going on.
Any chimpanzee, however, would have recognized the situation
immediately. Dominant males don't have many years to breed before a rival
snuffs them. Breast-feeding suppresses fertility. Infanticide is thus a
rational follow-up to regime change: it gives your genes a few months'
head start.
This logic of chimpanzees diverges only subtly from the logic of
swift-footed Achilles, the hero of the Iliad. Homer makes clear that
passing your genes on to the next generation is linked to social standing.
Some of Achilles' status was inherited. Some was charm and good looks. The
rest was precarious, based on his remarkable ability to fling a bronze
spearhead through someone's liver.
We have spent the 2800-odd years since Homer inventing ways to conceal
the primitive ferocity underlying our behavior. We have succeeded pretty
well. Who now but the victim would ever guess that a smart bomb might be
just as unwelcome as a spear through the liver? Who talks of sacking
cities now that nubile foreign women are sold cheaply on the internet and
delivered to our door?
This modern certainty that we soar on a higher moral plane than our
chimpanzee cousins makes it easy for us to pry open their skulls. When we
do, we discover a limited but recognizable moral code based on reciprocity
and loyalty to the tribe. "An eye for an eye," however, does not
in practice protect adolescents from being kidnapped by the band across
the river. Humans supplement it with a moral intuition that some rules of
behavior transcend tribal boundaries.
Thus we applaud the efforts of the United Nations to impose a universal
code called international law. But when Matt Nimetz, the UN special
negotiator in charge of finding a shorter name for "The Former
Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia," applied that principle to Greek
history, his head was handed back to him. He meekly retracted his
suggestion that Alexander the Great was not a worthy national symbol to
fight Skopje over.
Alexander used Achilles as his role model. By UN standards, this did
not give the king of Macedon the right to lead an army of mercenaries
thousands of kilometers into another continent to kill, impregnate, or
levy tribute on millions of startled strangers. The arguments President
Bush used to justify invading Iraq look almost respectable in comparison.
But Alexander was a Greek, not a barbarian. Therefore he was entitled to
as many captured concubines as he could carry.
I discovered this double standard in the late 1980s watching the eyes
of certain Greek human rights activists glaze over when I talked about
minorities in Greece. Theirs were firmly set on the plight of ethnic
Greeks in other countries. I chided their tribalism, forgetting that
President Reagan's devotion to "freedom" sometimes meant helping
right-wing death squads protect the property rights of friendly Central
American oligarchs. Then I watched Tom Lantos, the distinguished Hungarian
Jewish fighter for human rights in the U.S. Congress, make clear that the
universal rights he insisted on for Jews and Hungarians in Romania (for
which I was State Department desk officer in 1992-94) did not apply to
Palestinians in Palestine.
In the 5th century BC, Thucydides noticed that the weak insist on moral
universals while the strong try to ignore them. This remains accurate. In
the United States, moral leadership of the human rights movement shifted
after 2001 to Muslim groups. They feel vulnerable: "Islamo-fascist,"
a term invented by aspiring mass-murderers, is flung about freely on the
talk shows. Jewish communities, once the standard-bearers for humanist
morality in the United States, have retreated, concluding that universal
human rights are now a liability rather than an asset for their relatives
in Israel.
But human rights protect no one unless they are universal and enforced
by the common determination of strong and weak alike. This fact should be
embraced as prudent selfishness. Neither your columnist nor noble Achilles
nor anyone in our respective tribes was born with any internal prohibition
against rape and infanticide. The strong eventually become the weak, and
no tribal, opportunistic moral code will save their children when it
happens. Unlike chimpanzees, we have all the tools we need to make our
genocides total.
As chimps could have predicted, the murder of Astyanax was followed
soon after by the birth of a half-brother, Achilles' grandson Molossos. He
in turn, through a long chain of begats, produced the famous King Pyrrhus
of Epirus. Had it not been for infanticide, therefore, the pages of
history would be empty of Pyrrhic victories. I would trade them all in a
heartbeat for a world in which Astyanax survives.
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Last week, President Ahmadinejad of Iran came to New York City to speak
at the UN General Assembly. Like many foreign leaders, he asked to lay a
wreath at the World Trade Center site to honor the victims of September
11. Politicians vied with one another for the most scathing public
denunciation of his request. Permission was denied. Columbia University
bravely invited him to speak to its students. Dr. Bollinger, the President
of Columbia, protected himself by prefacing Ahmadinejad's speech with a
tirade against his and Iran's shortcomings.
Most commentators criticized Bollinger not for rudeness to an invited
guest but rather for having allowed Ahmadinejad to be invited in the first
place. The scoundrels pushing to reduce Iran to smoking rubble before
their gullible friends leave the White House are few. Even fewer, however,
are the pundits brave enough to challenge their myth that Iran is Germany
and Ahmadinejad is Hitler. When Columbia undermined the case for
preemptive war by allowing Iran's elected president to suffer patiently
for the TV cameras, the university was guilty of appeasing a dictator.
Bollinger's attempt to ingratiate himself by preemptively ridiculing an
unpopular guest was doomed to backfire. Hospitality is one of a precious
handful of traits that elevate human beings above hyenas. Not only for
Greeks and Middle Easterners is it a betrayal of a sacred bond to insult
someone you have invited into your home. The letters to the editor that
followed Bollinger's performance made clear that Ahmadinejad's
ill-treatment sparked sympathy for the visitor. It also confirmed
Iranians' misplaced sense of moral superiority.
Ahmadinejad began his speech at Columbia University with an exhortation
for the hidden Imam Mahdi to return. The speech was otherwise mild and
quite sane, a call for scholarly dialogue. The U.S. media ignored his
repudiation of nuclear weapons, preferring to ridicule his belief that
Iran has no homosexuals. Still, Ahmadinejad made clear he saw no moral or
intellectual basis for war between the two countries. He claimed at a
subsequent dinner that the Mahdi will bring peace and justice, not war.
But how can he be sure?
Until the Imam Mahdi shows up with his superior knowledge of God's
will, Ahmadinejad will obey his human moral instincts. Those instincts
tell him the welfare of his own people outweighs his sympathy for the
Palestinians or reverence for Jerusalem as an Islamic holy place. Starting
a nuclear war on behalf of the Palestinians, who after all are Arabs and
heretics, would be immoral and insane.
"Man's insanity is heaven's sense," Herman Melville pointed
out helpfully in Moby Dick. The love of God for his people is not
constrained by human moral notions of hospitality, compassion, or
ownership. A Palestinian TV cameraman told me one of his experiences in
Jerusalem. After a group of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students beat him up,
they stole his mobile phone and spent the night calling friends in Italy.
Their directive came straight from Deuteronomy 6:10:
"The Lord your God will bring you into the land which he
swore to your forefathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that he would give
you, a land of great and fine cities which you did not build, houses
full of good things which you did not provide, rock-hewn cisterns which
you did not hew, and vineyards and olive-groves which you did not plant.
When you eat your fill there, be careful not to forget the Lord who
brought you out of Egypt."
Collective religious observance is one of the underpinnings of
successful societies. But that does not imply that divine ordinances must
be followed literally. The sensibilities of our hidden redeemers do not
evolve in lockstep with those of the societies they are foreordained to
redeem. The Greek gods of Olympus, living close to humans over the
centuries, ultimately lost their taste for human sacrifice. Popes and
patriarchs, reflecting the social consensus of 21st century Europe, are
now deeply uncomfortable with capital punishment. But heavenly justice is
eternal and unchanging. Once God returns in glory, no UN convention will
absolve us of our duty to exterminate the Amalekites.
A 9th century Zen Buddhist koan goes, "If you meet the Buddha
on the road, kill him." Koans are not meant to be taken
literally. We are hospitable to wandering prophets, because our sense of
civilization demands it. And yet…
As long as the Mahdi and the Messiah are still waiting in some secure,
undisclosed location alongside Vice President Cheney and the last emperor
of Constantinople, religious exhortations to theft and murder can usually
be drowned out by the voice of our conscience. Or by the voice of
enlightened self-interest, which diplomats find easier to translate from
one language to another.
A gentle prophet from Nazareth once gave us fair warning: "Do
not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to
bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34-42). Perhaps the truest
proof of divine mercy is that he and his colleagues from rival faiths are
allowing us to wait this long.
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Everyone knows that "free and fair elections" are the
cornerstone of democracy. Few recognize how empty an abstraction
"democracy" can be when detached from the rules by which it is
played. In 2000 the world got an expensive lesson in political science.
Thanks to a rule written for the playing field of two centuries before,
America elected a disastrous president when a plurality of Americans had
voted for a better one.
Greeks head to the polls on September 16 with an electoral system whose
rules are as arbitrary as the rules of football. The views of some Greeks
go unrepresented in Parliament, because their votes are wasted on minor
parties that fall below a three-percent threshold. Small-party politicians
who overcome that threshold are condemned to irrelevance by rules that
transfer most of their votes to the largest party. As a result, the leader
of center-left PASOK or center-right New Democracy enjoys near-despotic
control of Parliament. All he must do every four years is beg, borrow, or
steal 41% of the valid votes cast while maintaining an edge of more than
one percentage point over his rival.
One of the drearier side effects of this "reinforced
proportional" election system, however, is that anyone hoping to
transform big ideas into reality by becoming a politician must leave those
ideas behind when entering the stadium. New Democracy, like Manchester
United or the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States,
achieves critical mass to win elections by being a content-free coalition
of people looking for a winner.
World-class football players exploit the rules to keep winning when
talent isn't enough. Politicians have their own art of diving in the
penalty box. Prime Minister Karamanlis announced snap elections during the
August holidays because he had faith in the mildness of his referee. His
two-percent lead in the polls seemed firm. In a three-week sprint the
governing party can expect to run the legs off its disunited and
underfunded rivals.
But human nature does not always rally around the winner. Some teams -
Arsenal or the Communist Party of Greece - retain the cradle-to-grave
loyalty of tens of thousands of fans regardless of standing in the league
tables. Neither ND nor PASOK inspires such devotion. This year the LAOS
party of George Karatzaferis lures former ND voters who believe Greeks are
the chosen people of God, hence envied and conspired against by the rest
of the world. Karamanlis falls short as a xenophobic zealot. He hopes,
therefore, that a former PASOK MP named Papathemelis with a similar
platform will draw enough votes from Karatzaferis to hold both below the
three-percent threshold.
In practice, the battle between PASOK and New Democracy will be decided
by a small number of swing voters. Some of those votes have already been
bought with a job in the reborn agricultural police for an otherwise
untalented child. Other voters will reward competent governance or punish
the lack of it. Once the forest fires began, New Democracy reminded the
country how depressingly average its performance has been.
Swing voters are patriotic citizens who simply want what is best for
their country. They do not trust their own ability to judge policies and
platforms or even performance. They are sure, however, that they are good
judges of character. They will vote for the party whose leader has the
character best suited to dealing with the challenges their country faces.
When Greece burned in August, Karamanlis did not waste his breath
claiming the government was more competent than it appeared. Instead, he
borrowed his script from President Bush's Global War on Terrorism,
assuring Greeks that sinister forces were behind the fires. The government
spokesman said nothing to calm the hysterical rumors of high-tech
incendiary devices and foreign arsonists.
This strategy was designed to clarify the voters' choice. If Greece is
indeed locked in a titanic struggle with the forces of incendiarism, there
is no question that Karamanlis is a more Churchillian leader than
Papandreou. On the other hand, if most of the fires are natural, the
product of hotter, drier summers and high winds, then Churchill's "We
will fight them on the beaches" is not a statement of proud defiance
but rather a confession of utter helplessness.
The election therefore should come down to a scientific judgment of the
state of the planet. If environmental changes underlie Greece's current
woes, then building an social, economic, and political consensus to adapt
to them would be more constructive than a mass roundup of potential
arsonists. In this scenario Papandreou would be the better choice.
The political rules in Greece and most countries promotes gladiatorial
combat between two outsized personalities at the expense of discussion of
real-world problems. If this spectacle still inspired and entertained, who
could quarrel with it? Manchester United is immensely profitable. But some
of my Greek friends are threatening to cast a blank ballot on September
16.
Greece was the world's original laboratory of democracy. If, as I
darkly suspect, no clear political message emerges from these elections,
it will be a good time for fans and sponsors to demand that the rule-book
be updated to make the sport exciting again.
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In the spring of 1980, at a taverna table near Porto Cheli, a
tipsy group of now-eminent American archaeologists taught me not to pour
wine backhanded. It's a harmless superstition. By respecting it I keep a
tiny sentimental connection to what I once aspired to be.
Human beings are social animals preoccupied with how to survive and
reproduce in an environment shaped by the humans around them.
"Rational," therefore, almost never means "logical." A
handful of people find a niche - e.g., as actuaries - for rigorous
deduction from carefully sifted data. The rest of us learn a different
skill, to recognize beliefs and attitudes that will give us access to the
social networks that keep us alive and happy.
Faith-based wine-pouring costs me only a spot of rust on my analytical
armor. The social benefit I derive from it is correspondingly modest.
Reciting innocuous truths, for example that the earth is an oblate
spheroid, earns you even less, a blank stare. The breakthrough comes from
insisting the earth is flat. As if by magic, fellow members of the Flat
Earth Society will offer stock tips or flirt with you shamelessly.
The social support a group offers its members is proportional to the
apparent oddness of the views its members profess. The tiny KKE (M-L)
offers Greek teens who never heard of Chairman Mao a summer camp
experience gnarlier than any mainstream political group can manage.
Jehovah's Witnesses, a suspect minority in Greece, cheerfully help out
unknown coreligionists while their mainstream neighbors are routinely at
one another's throats.
But we are moral animals. Whatever the rewards of professing what we do
not believe, it makes us uncomfortable. To stay virtuous and happy we
practice believing, like the White Queen in Alice's Wonderland, "six
impossible things before breakfast."
As suicide bombers remind us, there is a dark side to belief in things
that are not true. If Greeks took a scientific view of their own history,
then Revolutionary Organization 17 November would never have launched
itself by killing a U.S. diplomat. They would have killed fewer Greeks as
well.
Americans flatter themselves that, thanks to an Enlightenment which
allegedly occurred some three hundred years ago on a distant continent,
they are more logical and less conspiratorial than Greeks. Millions of
them, however, insist some cabal within the U.S. or Israeli government
staged the September 11 attacks. The evidence they email back and forth to
each other is scientifically worthless and politically childish. But the
implications are horrendous. Against a hideously evil conspiracy such as
they describe, the honorable American response would be to load our
constitutionally protected handguns and march on Washington.
Fortunately, most people know better than to extend the logic of their
beliefs to their actual behavior. A handful do, however, and their impact
is massively disproportionate to the deaths they inflict. On September 11,
nineteen fanatics transformed an inept and unpopular U.S. administration
into swaggering warlords. The results were disastrous for all concerned.
Thus it behooves diplomats to take conspiracy buffs seriously. But I
failed miserably to convince highly intelligent Greeks by rational
arguments and official documents that the United States had not encouraged
the 1967 coup or orchestrated the partition of Cyprus. By believing the
United States covertly plotted the ruin of a friend and NATO ally, Greeks
purchased membership in an intellectual community of mutual admiration and
complimentary beverages.
President Clinton visited Athens in 1999 and apologized for the U.S.
role in the junta. Philipps Talbot, whom the 1967 coup had taken by
surprise when he was U.S. ambassador, wrote the New York Times to protest
this distortion of history. But Clinton was a gifted politician who
understood how pointless it is to challenge socially useful beliefs with
mere facts. He relied instead on his ability to project across cultures a
personality most people would instinctively read as honorable.
Transparently good character, whether or not backed by impeccable
policy, is the best defense for a vulnerable superpower. This means more
than replacing President Bush with someone more statesmanlike in 2009. The
CIA and similar covert organizations should be abolished. This sounds
cruel, perhaps. Ninety eight percent of the work done by intelligence
agencies is innocent or at least irrelevant to the lives of decent people.
But the value of the CIA to conspiracy enthusiasts now far outweighs its
value to the American taxpayer.
A current example is the Turkey-Iraq border, where Turks accuse the
U.S. of arming and training Kurdish militants against Turkish interests.
This belief is mostly false. Someone, however, is encouraging Kurdish
militants to harass Iran. U.S. weapons have found their way to nasty
little groups. And awareness of idiotic U.S. covert operations elsewhere
now haunts every Turkish politician.
Healthy individuals limit the cost of their social delusions by
compartmentalizing them carefully - an hour every Sunday or an
inconspicuous adjustment of the pouring hand. States, however, do not have
this luxury. Everything they do or fail to do will be interpreted by the
lonely, greedy, or clueless in the darkest way possible. In a world where
any believer can kill himself and dozens of innocents, full transparency
of decision-making and rigorous consistency between rhetoric and reality
thus constitute basic public safety measures. Governments can and must be
judged by how well they implement them.
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"It is not a coincidence" was the stubborn response of one
Russian colleague to my demonstrations that America was not the cause of
all the world's ills. I thought of him when the worst heat wave in Greek
history followed so closely on the heels of Al Gore's passionate
presentation on global warming at the Megaro Mousikis. Gore has powerful
friends. How far would they go to prove his point?
Paranoia aside, twenty-six years of laissez faire U.S. economic
policies, including those of the Clinton/Gore White House, fueled global
prosperity and with it an insatiable appetite for cars and air
conditioners. American consumers unleashed China as the world's deadliest
exporter of climate change. By killing the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse
gases in 2001, President Bush took political responsibility for the
world's weather. But scapegoats can be found anywhere.
Greeks shiver (briefly) in winter, pump out flooded basements in
spring, scorch in summer, and choke on exhaust fumes year-round. This
seems a fair price for the sweet deal they negotiated with their
ecosystem. The transformation of worthless olive groves, goat pastures,
and pine forests into expensive building lots was an easy source of
wealth. Because most of these transactions were illegal, politicians,
civil servants, lawyers, and other middlemen extorted a hefty share of the
profits. In exchange, developers were allowed to build houses without
streets, sidewalks, drainage, or green spaces, using cheap, inappropriate
materials and energy-inefficient designs. But all but the most marginal
citizens of Greece could thereby afford multiple homes despite declared
incomes barely enough to cover their electricity bills. Rising property
values paid for the new cars required to commute between them.
Greece's wonderful lifestyle is a natural adaptation to the mild
climate, cheap gasoline, and unrationed water resources of the late 20th
century. Thanks to a low birth rate, ten million Greeks could continue on
this course indefinitely, if they were alone on the planet and gave up
cotton farming. But 6.5 billion other human beings have meanwhile been
behaving with eerily similarity. Globalized human selfishness has
overwhelmed the planet's mechanisms for climate regulation.
We cannot predict Greece's weather ten years or ten days from now. We
can say with certainty, however, that behavior that was perfectly rational
twenty years ago will be absurd or impossibly expensive in another twenty.
People will not pay a week's income to commute to their beach house if
that house is half-submerged.
At the end of his presentation, Al Gore reminded us that the stakes are
higher than the loss of a few luxuries. In much of the world, political
institutions barely cope with today's mismatch between population and
resources. Ecological stress, he warned, will cause many of those
institutions to collapse. His heat wave was an excellent illustration.
I was on the island of Naxos with my mother and aunt in a borrowed
beach house. The two bedrooms were laid out to be cooled by any sea
breeze, but there was none. We bought what we were assured was the last
electric fan on the island. My decision on resource allocation was easy,
but I spent three sweaty, sleepless nights as a result. Filial devotion
protected my mother. It did not protect the Naxiote who jammed his car
into the last parking place as I was backing into it. Had he not
retreated, I would have physically attacked him, so sensitive to injustice
had I become.
It was hotter in Athens than on Naxos. There was no fair way to
allocate scarce electricity, clean air, and firefighters. Because the
shortages were minor, the government could manage them with rotating
blackouts and by letting Parnitha burn to ashes.
Next time could be worse. Chinese factories and Greek freighters ensure
that appliance shops will not run out of air conditioners. No politician
can ask someone to sweat while the neighbors' unit belches hot air into
his window. Each heat wave, another hundred thousand Greeks make
themselves psychologically dependent on electric cooling.
Globally, therefore, more power plants will burn more fossil fuel to
keep more air conditioners blasting more hot air back into the sweltering
streets. As it gets warmer, more groundwater will be pumped, from
increasingly greater depths, to fill more swimming pools and water more
crops. At a certain point the sources will dry up. The trees will burn.
Their shade will disappear. And Greece will resemble today's North Africa.
Before global warming, Greeks lived comfortably in North Africa. But
after it, what will North Africa resemble? Probably not Greece. Naxos
fishing boats are crewed by Egyptian fishermen. If the Nile fails, will 80
million others wish to join them? Will Greece fence them in, like the
Palestinians are fenced into Gaza?
Europe's and America's reserves of ingenuity, endurance, and humanity
have not been seriously tested since 1945. The planet's resources are
still vast. There is still time to build local, national, and global
institutions capable of dividing too few resources among too many people
without injustice so manifest that it tears democracy apart.
Showing solidarity with the planet by voluntarily adopting sustainable
lifestyles may seem like a purely symbolic gesture. Symbolism, however,
has political power. If the likely alternative is unimaginable tragedy, we
should offer no less.
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A grand, half-forgotten bargain was sealed in Helsinki in 1975. The
Soviet Union, the United States, and their partners and satellites
renounced armed conflict and acknowledged the existing borders of Europe.
Nationalists unreconciled to those borders were appeased by guarantees for
the rights of their "national minorities" stranded on the wrong
side of them.
The Helsinki Final Act was crafted to weaken the glue holding the
Soviet system together. Even so, the U.S. legal team at Helsinki had
serious reservations about enshrining "national minorities" in
international law. The American nation is every U.S. citizen. The founding
fathers insisted that civic and human rights belonged equally to each
individual by virtue of membership in the human race. Each person is a
minority of one. Minority rights are acceptable as the extension of the
exercise of individual rights, but preferential treatment handed out by
the state to some groups but not to others on the basis of language,
religion, or "blood" is incompatible with the fundamental
principle of equality before the law.
Greek history dictates a more collective view of rights. A Greek is a
Greek, worthy of the Greek state's protection whatever passport he or she
might hold. The state may choose to write laws or sign treaties that also
protect non-Greeks, but the Nation has no interest in them.
Philosophically, the Greek government endorses the concept of national
minorities. The Northern Epirotes in Albania are entitled to Greece's
protection. But philosophical consistency is very expensive in the
Balkans. Two adjoining states display an unwholesome enthusiasm for
defending the rights of their kinfolk in Greece. With the 1974 invasion of
Cyprus still vivid in memory, Greece prefers to deny the existence of
national minorities on its territory.
As the U.S. Embassy human rights officer, I was once dragged to the
Foreign Ministry behind Ambassador Sotirhos to be scolded for the State
Department's annual human rights report. By criticizing official
mistreatment of Muslims in Western Thrace and Slav speakers in Macedonia,
we had implied that Turkish and Macedonian minorities existed in Greece.
Staring at the floor I mumbled that neither the Greek state nor the U.S.
State Department had any right to decide who existed and who didn't.
As individual citizens we follow conscience and self-interest in
asserting whichever of our multiple political and social identities is
most appropriate in a given context. Waiting in line for a driver's
license in Houston, I was a tall Texan again after 46 years. Under other
circumstances I identify myself as an American citizen, a Californian, a
would-be archaeologist, a dissident diplomat, a lapsed Catholic, or a
resident of Plaka. In peaceful times, these segmented loyalties are an
advantage. The price I pay for them is that, should I need rescuing, no
group will feel any obligation to invade the Plaka on my behalf.
Greek courts disapprove. They have refused since the 1980s to allow
Greek citizens whose mother tongue is Turkish to identify themselves Turks
in official contexts.
Legally and morally this is an untenable position. The 1923 Treaty of
Lausanne specified minimum human rights for Greece's Muslim community, not
maximum rights. Greece is a party to international agreements recognizing
a right to self-identification. The European Court of Human Rights will
eventually overturn a 2005 Greek Supreme Court decision and insist that
the Turkish Union of Xanthi and similar organizations be allowed to exist.
Persuading the Muslims of Western Thrace that they were not a Turkish
minority might have been possible once. When the Greek army overran
Western Thrace in 1912/3, "Turk" was a term of abuse among the
local Ottomans. The region escaped Ataturk's "creative
destruction" of traditional Muslim communities. During the Cold War,
however, with Bulgaria an enemy and Turkey a NATO ally, the Greek state
decided it would be safer for Pomaks, the conservative, Bulgarian-speaking
Muslims of the Rodopi Mountains, to learn Turkish. The Turkish consulate
in Komotini did its part to ensure that economic, social, and educational
benefits flowed from Turkish self-identification.
When relations with Turkey soured over Cyprus, the Greek state hardened
its approach. By blocking economic opportunities for Muslims, local
officials hoped to encourage Muslims to emigrate to Turkey while their
places were taken by immigrants from the former Soviet Union. As payback
for the vanished Greek population of Istanbul, this treatment was mild. As
policy, however, it was foolish. It attacked the most vital
self-identification of the minority communities, as loyal Greek citizens.
In 1990, shocked by an anti-Muslim pogrom in Komotini, Prime Minister
Mitsotakis met with the other party leaders to decree the end of
discrimination. Very slowly they succeeded. The Greek political system is
still rigged to dilute Muslim votes, but in most respects the Muslims of
Western Thrace have no excuse to look across a border for help.
In times of internal political crisis - such as now -- Turkish
governments need little excuse to obsess over the plight of Turks abroad.
Turkey's EU candidacy, once a powerful brake on that temptation, is
moribund. Greece cannot win with its legal arguments. Prudence therefore
dictates that Greece preserve the loyalty of its minorities in the ancient
and honorable way of its Roman imperial predecessor, by making sure the
blessings of Greek citizenship flow fully and freely to all citizens who
identify themselves as such.
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When Clausewitz said war was politics by other means, he should have
specified domestic politics. It took me twenty years of perplexity to
grasp this basic point of the diplomatic profession. When politicians are
pursuing their country's interests rather than their own, they seldom see
a barrage of cruise missiles as an effective option.
Looking east and south from Brussels, the EU faces a pair of
interlocking issues where domestic politics look increasingly deadly:
Israel's fear of Iran's nuclear program, and Turkey's fear of Kurdish
independence.
The current Iranian government considers nuclear weapons to be
un-Islamic. If the True Faith were threatened, today's peaceful nuclear
energy program would quickly militarize to reflect an updated religious
dogma. Even then, a nuclear-armed Iran would pose no more a threat to the
United States, Europe, or Israel than nuclear-armed Pakistan does today.
Both are distant, corrupt, defensive states with ethnic and economic
problems that consume their energies. President Ahmedinejad's statement
that Israel will be erased from the map is not a threat. It is a pious
politician's prediction that Allah's justice will prevail.
War fever reflects the inherent weakness of Israeli governing
coalitions. Israeli politicians and bureaucrats invented the lie that
Iranians are genocidal maniacs bent on nuclear apocalypse in order to put
pressure on their domestic rivals. They then forgot it was a lie.
The Israeli public is genuinely hysterical. Humiliated by his
mishandling of the war in Lebanon, PM Olmert has no ability to reassure
them. Sensing Olmert's weakness, ambitious generals are pushing him hard
for an air strike on Iran.
With the 2008 presidential election campaign already under way, U.S.
politicians do not care to antagonize Jewish voters and their evangelical
friends by telling Israelis they are in the grip of a mass psychosis. The
easy solution would be for America to attack Iran's nuclear installations
on Israel's behalf. Fortunately, American officials have learned something
from their Iraq War frenzy.
State Department officials know a limited bombing of Iranian nuclear
facilities would only reinforce Iran's nuclear ambitions. A broader attack
would invite global economic meltdown. Foreign forces in Iraq and
Afghanistan are hideously vulnerable to Shiite backlash. The threat of
unconventional retaliation cannot be contained without firm support from
both Turkey and the Kurds. This support is unattainable, because Turkey is
embroiled in a major domestic political crisis of its own.
The Turkish military feels honor bound to restrict the power of the
Islamist AK Party of Prime Minister Erdogan, despite his clear majority in
parliament. As defender of Ataturk's legacy, secular president Ahmet Sezer
was a symbolic counterweight to Erdogan, but he is stepping down.
Turks dread the consequences of a clash between the military and the
government. Opposition to an independent Kurdistan is one issue on which
religious and secular Turks agree. An easy bargain allowing the military
to accept foreign minister Abdullah Gül as new president is parliamentary
approval for a Turkish Army incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan. The real
purpose of attacking the PKK is to remind Iraqi Kurds not to press their
claims to Kirkuk and independence.
The United States will soon have its hands full prying Turks and Kurds
apart. It cannot afford to choose between them. The U.S. military,
woefully undermanned in its "surge" against the Iraqi
insurgency, is dependent on Kurdish units as the only Iraqi Army component
it can trust. And the Kurds enjoy powerful political support in
Washington, mostly out of gratitude for past services, partly because they
purchased an alliance with friends of Israel by permitting a tiny Kurdish
insurgency against Iran.
Looking at the mess in the region, Washington has quietly concluded
that attacking Iran is too dangerous. Proof of this decision is the
ongoing campaign to install a symbolic ballistic missile shield in Europe.
If war with Iran loomed in the coming months, it would be insane to
infuriate Russia now to protect Europe from an Iranian nuclear missile
threat still years in the future.
A cynical ex-diplomat can make an educated guess how the State
Department prevailed over Vice President Cheney and his fellow hawks on
Iran. Missile defense is a pet project of Cheney's. Accepting the system
proves Europe's fear of Iran's nuclear program. Waiting for this
capability to be in place is a flimsy but possible pretext for Olmert to
delay Israel's strike.
Diplomatic pressure on Iran will continue. Perhaps the EU will be
successful in winning agreement to adequate international controls on
Iran's nuclear fuel cycle. Until it does, a "surgical" Israeli
air attack remains a serious risk. If that happens before Turkey and the
Kurds arrive at a formula for coexistence, Turkey and the United States
risk finding themselves on opposite sides of an evolving regional
nightmare.
Israeli politicians cannot afford to worry much about collateral damage
to U.S. and EU interests in the Middle East. Deterring them would take
firm, united diplomacy. Unfortunately, the Middle East is not the only
region with domestic politics. Because politicians around the world have
discovered that Israel's anti-Muslim hysteria is popular with mainstream
voters, Greeks and their fellow EU members should not take good diplomacy
for granted.
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Thousands of young Greek university graduates wait ten years on a
roster for appointment as a schoolteacher. The pay is miserable, and they
start their career in a remote village. If they looked more carefully at
the Greek history they aspire to teach, they might well opt for a
different profession.
The Iraq on our television screens resembles late Ottoman Macedonia a
century ago. When Greek, Bulgarian, or Vlach freedom fighters arrived in
the village in 1907, the schoolteacher was the first person they murdered.
Today, Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish militias, with equally untidy beards but
deadlier weapons, eliminate Iraqi teachers for the same reason.
Murdering schoolteachers is a token of respect for how dangerous they
are. Winning the battle for Macedonia required persuading illiterate
peasants that they were not humble taxpayers of the Ottoman Empire but
rather patriotic sons of the Greek/Bulgarian Nation. The Nation, however,
was a recent import from Europe, one prudent peasants viewed with alarm.
To mobilize village children to kill and die for politicians in Athens or
Sofia required giving them a nationalist education.
This is the context in which to understand the impulse of the Church of
Greece, the nationalist bullies of Chrysi Avgi, and a few Thessaloniki
politicians to burn the new sixth-grade Greek history textbooks. Mystical
nationalism was a successful ideology for Northern Greece in the early
20th century. Perhaps it will be again. At the moment, however, people do
not benefit when politicians and priests assure them that history proves
God smiles on their hatred of the neighbors.
This does not mean Greek schoolteachers should force their pupils to
memorize, for example, the 1821 massacre of Muslim and Jewish women and
children at Tripolitsa. The object of teaching history is not to give our
children nightmares or to harden them as future football hooligans. But
what history lessons will best form young Greeks into good citizens of the
society they will inherit?
Americans are not taught their debt to the USSR for victory in World
War II. No one tells Greeks they owe their independence to the
intercession of the Great Powers. There is tacit agreement that ordinary
citizens serve their country better when they believe its security and
prosperity depend entirely on their own efforts. Beyond that, what
constitutes good citizenship is a political debate. Destiny is no more
manifest in Greek history than it is in anyone else's. Who knows which of
hundreds of contradictory lessons from history will prove valid in twenty
years?
Historical revisionism is thus an unending political process. American
secondary school graduates now benefit from reasonably factual accounts of
slavery, the destruction of the Native Americans, and the atomic bombs on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Had they been armed with equally sober accounts of
the Vietnam War, they might not be dying in Iraq today. Turks and Kurds
would understand one another better if they admitted their joint
complicity in the destruction of the Armenians. One Japanese government
admitted the ugly truth about "comfort women" and the Rape of
Nanking as part of building a more open Japanese society. Those textbooks
were then rewritten by nationalists preaching Japanese ethnic superiority.
Now Japan's relationship with China is in crisis.
The new Greek textbook seems a sensible attempt to match the teaching
of history to current Greek reality. Among its goals is to downplay the
inevitability of national/racial/religious conflict in the Balkans, to
reduce the sense of Greek victimization by hostile outsiders, and to
weaken the myth that Greek national independence is a gift of the Church.
In today's secular EU context, these are good lessons.
In Thessaloniki I twice visited the Center for Democracy and
Reconciliation in Southeast Europe. This idealistic group has an
impressive list of donors that includes Greek foundations and Thessaloniki
businessmen as well as EU governments and the United States. Its major
initiative is the Joint History Project. A panel of scholars, chaired by a
Greek, prepared a set of four history workbooks for simultaneous use in
all the Balkan countries. Unlike the sixth-grade textbook, this is a
genuine effort at non-nationalist history.
Greek and other education ministries are wavering on whether to approve
the CDRSEE workbooks for use in schools. Meanwhile, wild accusations are
flying that this is an American plot to "denationalize" Greeks
(along with Turks, Serbs, Bulgarians, Albanians, and Romanians) to make
them easier prey for U.S. imperialism. The Thessaloniki business community
knows better. If national resentments can be transcended, they calculate,
Thessaloniki will become what it was in Ottoman times, the port and
business center of a huge Balkan hinterland. Then they will all be rich.
Few village schools in Macedonia had any history books to burn back in
1907. I'm not sure the lack mattered. I remember nothing of my sixth grade
textbook, but I remember my teacher vividly. Whether students learn useful
history or murderous myth depends more on their teachers than on even the
bravest drafting committee. I prefer to live in a world that feels no duty
to murder teachers at regular intervals. Teachers should embrace these new
textbooks in that selfish spirit.
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My usual bicycle route takes me through the Zappeio gardens. Five or
six stray dogs live there, fine, placid, well fed creatures with collars
and shots. Ordinarily they are too busy enjoying their naps to challenge a
grotesquely spandexed intruder. But some days the pack charges me, barking
ferociously. Then I know an animal-lover is nearby.
I explain to the dogs that they are being bad dogs, but they do not
believe me. Nor can I blame them. Thousands of years of natural selection
reassure them that they are being excellent dogs. They are protecting the
people who feed and pat them from whatever evil I might be contemplating.
I cannot blame their patrons either. They have unimpeachably humane
motives for feeding stray dogs. Chasing me out of the Zappeio is not one
of them.
Diplomacy is full of similarly blameless unintended consequences. When
Martti Ahtisaari, the former president of Finland, pedaled into Kosovo, he
did so by invitation, in response to an almost universal consensus that
the people of Kosovo need a clear legal foundation on which to build their
future.
It was not Ahtisaari's intention to make the extreme nationalist,
anti-EU Radical Party the largest faction in the Serbian parliament. It
was not his intention to spark massive protest marches against the U.S.
Embassy in Belgrade. Ahtisaari therefore waited until after the Serbian
elections before actually unveiling his plan. His draft agreement
carefully avoided inflammatory words like "independence." On
sensitive issues of human rights and ethnic dignity, representatives of
the international community would cast the deciding vote for the
foreseeable future. This not-quite-independence under continued
international supervision would provide the Serb community of Kosovo a
level of protection most minorities around the world would envy. It didn't
help.
Politicians and stray dogs have a lot in common. Neither will sleep
peacefully in the sun when there is an opportunity to prove their
usefulness to the people who feed them. The Serbian state is a mess.
Parliament is deadlocked, unable to agree on a prime minister and
government. Many Serb taxpayers privately believe their country would be
better off without the Kosovar Albanians and their clan-based extortion
rackets. But Ahtisaari's plan gave rival politicians a welcome duty to
outbark one another in their quest to be adopted into a good home.
Letting sleeping dogs lie is not a better option, alas. At some point
they wake up ravenous for food and attention. So diplomats spend years
crafting fair, balanced, even brilliant peace plans. The official goal is
a permanent end to conflict based on a settlement all sides agree is fair.
The unofficial goal is to keep the dogs from getting carried away and
biting someone. For then the dogs will be put down, to the horror of
humanitarians everywhere.
I helped write a peace agreement once, for Nagorno-Karabakh, the
Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan. It was a fine document, I thought, one
that faithfully reflected a deal the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan
had quietly reached while none of their citizens were watching. The
governments of the United States, Russia, and France pushed the deal as
hard as we dared. With high-level superpower support the plan took a full
18 months to die. Similarly excellent plans, like the Annan plan for
Cyprus, have died similarly lingering deaths. Meanwhile great snarling
packs of dogs have barked but not bitten.
Many conflicts are intrinsically insoluble. In no political system yet
invented can politicians hope to survive giving away any sovereign right
belonging to the nation they lead. But overall the world is a reasonably
peaceful place. Dozens of little-known conflicts are being managed, often
very cheaply, by little teams of diplomats and retired politicians with
doomed peace proposals in their knapsacks.
For the past decade, Greece's intractable conflict with its northern
neighbor over ownership of the name "Macedonia" has been managed
by one retired U.S. diplomat named Matt Nimetz. Every year Nimetz spends a
couple of weeks coming up with a new formulation one or both sides will
immediately reject. Meanwhile cross-border business flourishes as it
ought.
In Kosovo the cost of intractability is higher - 16,000 NATO soldiers
and a large UN and EU presence. So long as an even-handed, open-ended
settlement process exists, one backed by the moral authority of the United
Nations, the dogs can master their temptation to bite. There is one
frustrating condition. The diplomats must accept that conflict management
is the best they can hope for, not a peace deal.
Serb negotiators have submitted amendments to Ahtisaari's plan to make
clear that Kosovo remains an integral part of Serbia. These changes are
unacceptable to Kosovars. The plan will be vetoed by the Russian
Federation when it comes up before the Security Council. There will be
more flare-ups in Kosovo, more Serbs made homeless, a few more deaths to
remind all sides why peace is better than war. Ahtisaari's successors will
carry on his blameless work. Dogs will continue to eye my calves
speculatively.
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This past Tuesday at Korydallos prison, a compact, quiet man named
Thomas Serifis left his solitary corner of the defendants' pen to explain
himself to the judges. One elderly couple sat in the hall to watch him,
his parents, I suspect, though I was too embarrassed to ask them. The
other defendants ignored him.
This is the appeals trial of "Revolutionary Organization
17N," with five judges rather than three. The seventeen defendants
are the same (minus two acquitted in 2003), the exhibits and witnesses are
the same, and most of the arguments are the same. There is, however, some
logic to retrying a case once no one cares. In 2003, with the Olympics
looming, the Greek state was desperate to prove to the world that it had
solved its problem of domestic terrorism. By sentencing those involved to
life imprisonment, Greece satisfied its British and American allies and
most of the Greek public. But key questions were swept under the rug.
When 17N unraveled in July 2002, few of its members withstood all-night
interrogation. Threatened with extradition to Guantanamo, coaxed with
pledges of leniency under the 2001 anti-terrorism law, and led to believe
their colleagues had already testified against them, they waived their
right to a lawyer and their right to remain silent. They signed detailed,
sometimes inaccurate statements naming their friends and co-conspirators.
And then they compared notes in the prison courtyard and realized how
little evidence the authorities really had. They had convicted one another
with their own confessions. Their lawyers fought to prevent their
confessions from being used in court, to no avail. Now doomed to prison,
the 17N defendants struggled in court to redeem their tarnished character,
some in the eyes of their revolutionary peers, others in their own.
Thomas Serifis was proud that he worked two full-time jobs, days as a
bus driver, nights as waiter at a taverna in Pendeli. He lived alone, sent
money to his parents, and never asked or needed anything from anyone else.
Unwilling to burden others with his troubles, he called only three
witnesses. He spoke calmly, except to deny fiercely that he had ever taken
money from 17N.
Serifis was arrested with his two childhood friends, Iraklis Kostaris
and Kostas Karatsolis. They had grown up together in Thesprotia, in a poor
village where the men all worked in Germany. After secondary school and
military service they moved together to Athens. All of them cared about
social justice, but Kostaris was the most radical. In 1988 he recruited
his two friends, then age 22, to join him in an organization that would do
more than simply block traffic with protest marches.
Serifis and Karatsolis confessed the night following their arrest. They
then discovered that Kostaris had refused to admit anything. Karatsolis
denounced his confession as false, the product of exhaustion and threats.
At the trial, he and Kostaris presented witnesses and documents to
undermine the confessions. But Serifis was too locked into his code of
personal responsibility to deny his actions. He refused to implicate
anyone but himself, but he freely admitted his own participation. That
stance indirectly destroyed the alibis of his friends and with it their
friendship.
Serifis helped bomb an empty house, his initiation to "armed
propaganda." He helped plunder the Greek Army arsenal at Sykourio and
steal two relic bazookas from the War Museum. Then he realized that the
group was 17N. He was skeptical such attacks could rouse the masses, and
did not appreciate taking part in operations he had no part in planning.
And so he left in 1990. Many 17N stories are similar: anti-authoritarian
personalities recruited on the basis of personal trust and then drifting
away.
Thomas Serifis and his colleagues pose a moral problem. Before the
first arrests, law enforcement authorities were certain Alexandros
Giotopoulos was the founder and mastermind of a tightly organized,
hierarchical group of conspirators. That certainty shaped the confessions
of two peripheral figures, on the basis of which Giotopoulos was sentenced
to 2109 years in prison as the moral instigator of all the crimes ever
committed by 17N. But Giotopoulos's alleged minions were unaware of his
supreme status as First Murderer. Their confessions, retracted or not,
make clear that 17N was four to six members casting about for targets all
could agree on. Sympathetic friends occasionally lent a hand.
17N is finished, but there is still good reason to try to understand
the group and its origins accurately. No one has been charged with the
1975 murder of CIA station chief Richard Welch, the first 17N victim, or
of U.S. Navy Captain George Tsantes, killed in 1983. The statute of
limitations has expired in Greece but not in the United States.
It is hard to keep a terrorist group together. Getting intelligent
people to agree that murder and theft will advance their political cause
is no easy task in a democratic society that recoils from violence. The
rare individuals willing to risk life and freedom for an abstraction seek
respect for their rigid principles from their leaders as well. This second
trial is the opportunity to study 17N as real human beings and not as the
product of our theories. Such study is the only realistic basis for
defeating any such group.
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The January 12 rocket-propelled-grenade in the
executive washroom was not the first such attack on the U.S. Embassy. Late
one night in 1996, the Greek terror group 17 November fired a stolen
anti-tank rocket from the lower slopes of Lykavitos. Fearful of
overshooting the Embassy and hitting civilians on the far side, Savvas
Xiros aimed too low: the rocket clipped the top of a wall and fell
harmlessly into the parking lot. A bit higher and he would have made a
terrible mess of my future office.
There was no proclamation at the time. Fifteen months
after the attack, 17N explained in a postscript to the Peratikos murder
proclamation: "We of
course launched the rocket against the American Embassy on 15 February,
1996. The reasons for this action were so evident and understandable that
we didn't send a proclamation. The spontaneous guffaws, squawks and
general derision, even from members of parliament, prompted by the public
thanks of Prime Minister Simitis to the Americans were amply
eloquent."
When it attacked the U.S. Embassy, 17N was venting
against a safely impersonal target the anger and humiliation felt by many
Greeks. The month before, Turks had challenged Greece's ownership of the
worthless Aegean islets of Imia. Rather than go to war, new prime minister
Kostas Simitis had expressed gratitude for President Clinton's
intercession. By the inexorable code of nationalism – and in this 17N's
moral instincts coincided perfectly with those of New Democracy leader
Miltiadis Evert – the stain on Greece's national dignity should instead
have been washed clean with the blood of Greek and Turkish young men.
Probably the members of Revolutionary Struggle saw
their motives for last Friday's rocket attack as equally self-evident.
They sent a long manifesto to Pontiki
after the failed May 30, 2006 bomb attempt on ex-Public Order Minister
Voulgarakis. Their program is resistance to an (increasingly implausible)
U.S.-imposed "New World Order" and ultimately the overthrow of
capitalism. By cooperating with the "global war on terror" and
violating the rights of Pakistani migrants, Voulgarakis was enlisting
Greece in a "clash of civilizations" America allegedly intends
to provoke. According to Revolutionary Struggle, mass anti-imperialist
movements, including urban warfare, will make Greece and Europe less a
target of Middle Eastern rage. Such symbolic attacks, carried out with
impunity, will inspire others to resist.
Revolutionary Struggle is bound to be disappointed.
Terrorist acts -- even ideologically coherent ones -- are always
misunderstood because society imposes on us the duty to misunderstand
them. It took decades for Greeks to accept 17N at face value, rather than
as some baroque conspiracy of the CIA or Andreas Papandreou. Rather than
think carefully about the terrorists we have and why we have them, we
prefer to populate the shadows with imaginary terrorists who better serve
our selfish purposes.
Black-market RPGs are easy enough to buy, and an
illiterate twelve-year-old Taliban can shoot one. Journalists exaggerated
the difficulty of striking the U.S. Embassy primarily in order to accuse
Minister of Public Order Vyron Polydoras of incompetence and, through him,
the government. Greek police are hungry for the long-withheld permission
to use as a powerful tool against ordinary crime the sophisticated video
cameras they purchased at enormous expense for Olympic security. They
happily exaggerate the danger posed by Revolutionary Struggle and the fury
of the U.S. government. Security companies seize any excuse to raise their
prices. And U.S. bureaucrats will go to Congress to argue that this
challenge to American omnipotence warrants more money and personnel for
their little empires.
We can dismiss the conspiracy theories. Far from
orchestrating the September 11 attacks, the White House was caught
flatfooted by them. That did not prevent it, a few days later, from making
Islamic terrorism the domestic political basis for a hugely ambitious,
impossible agenda in the Middle East. Fortunately the U.S. government has
no outlet for such opportunism in Athens at the moment. Ambassador Ries
reacted calmly and sensibly to the affront to his washroom. The Greek
police and FBI will work in close cooperation because they cannot catch
the culprits without it. And life goes on.
History suggests a rocket will whistle through a U.S.
embassy window every few years. Sometimes its launchers will leave behind
a proclamation. Few will read it. Healthy societies do not allow small
groups of violent ideologues to set the terms of political debate. They
sweep up the glass and let democratic institutions do their work.
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The November 2006 U.S. congressional elections took place under the
shadow of a pending report by the Iraq Study Group. Returning from their
second or third tour of duty in Iraq, National Guard troops and Army
reservists had begun whispering to the folks back home a dire military
acronym: Iraq is FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition). The
conservative heartland respects such military wisdom. President Bush
admitted he could use fresh advice on how Iraq could be made recognizable.
Ten Washington wise men stepped up, led by Bush the Elder's Secretary of
State James Baker and ex-Congressman Lee Hamilton.
The aspect of the report that remains most vivid in my mind a month
later is how few words the ISG put on each of its 160 pages. Leaving out
the regional overview and the credentials of the authors, the substance of
the report -- 79 recommendations for readjusting U.S. policy -- could have
been squeezed onto ten photocopied pages. But a real exit strategy from
Iraq's civil war would not have needed such padding to reach book length.
A dozen significant ethnic, tribal, religious or political coalitions
inside Iraq, plus the governments of Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the
United States, have some bottom line - territory, resources, and
legitimacy in the eyes of their people -- for which they will kill and
die. Each group nurtures aspirations it must ultimately negotiate away.
Each can mobilize a sliding scale of internal and external resources
depending on which of its claims it is defending against whom. Including
those messy, indispensable details would have made the Baker report
weighty indeed.
With modest additional bloodshed, a Lebanese-style, loosely federal
Iraq is probably attainable. Fortunately or unfortunately, the U.S.
government is too moral to substitute itself for the democratically
elected Iraqi government in reinventing Iraq. The ISG, however, is not the
U.S. government. Using the local balance of power and its conversations
with Iranian, Turkish, and Saudi officials as the guide, the ISG could
have sketched out internal borders that would correspond closely to those
the current civil war will ultimately produce. This sketch should be the
starting point for a regional conversation. For the right price the
governments of Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia might align their influence
with that of the United States to persuade Iraqi politicians and warlords
that civil war is unnecessary. Any faction that limited itself to a
predetermined share of Iraq's territory and resources and an orderly
exchange of stranded populations would be free to govern its share as it
chose. Concentrated international firepower and funding would render all
bloodier aspirations unattainable.
In making foreign policy, the United States and the European Union
resemble Iraq. By the time warring interest groups have negotiated a
compromise among themselves, the bravest and best ideas have been weeded
out of the meme pool. Still, the ISG drafters deserve credit for admitting
what is obvious to anyone outside Washington, that Iraq is a disaster and
that to fix it the United States must negotiate with its enemies as well
as its allies. The drafters could not agree, however, on a U.S. bottom
line for such negotiations. The price America must pay for a regional deal
would include recognizing the role of Iran and sweetening the Sunni share
of Iraq at the expense of the Kurds, America's client. No U.S. policymaker
wants to put his signature on this brand of realism. Bloody chaos is
politically safer.
The ISG proposed a number of sensible bureaucratic reforms to improve
the interface between Iraqi authorities and the U.S. military and
diplomatic presence. These will help the situation marginally. On the
question that dominates debate in the U.S., whether to withdraw U.S.
military forces faster or temporarily increase them, the ISG had no choice
but to waffle. Unless you know what version of Iraq your military force
will be used to impose, a million American soldiers armed to the teeth
will be far too few.
The ISG nobly attempted to use the Iraq catastrophe to shame President
Bush into a more honorable approach to the Palestinian problem. Justice
for Palestine will make the whole world safer, not just the United States.
A Washington shift away from blind support for Israel will reduce the
carnage when Iraq-hardened jihadis look for new employment. But the Iraqi
people are currently too busy to notice such improvements.
Ten of the most respected figures in Washington, backed by dozens of
acknowledged regional experts, have failed to identify an acceptable exit
from the Iraq quagmire. Still, the ISG process has nudged the Washington
consensus back in the right direction, toward recognition that the United
States cannot be a competent player in the Middle East without respecting
the rules of geography and power politics. If this document triggers one
useful conversation on Iraq between the U.S. and Iranian governments, it
will have been worth the trees so callously sacrificed for it.
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In 1970 it was still possible to park legally in Athens. The blue
Volkswagen Beetle with Swedish plates, purchased from a used-car lot four
days before, had its nose innocently pointed down the grassy slope behind
the U.S. Embassy. Late the evening of September 2, 1970, if all went well,
a timing mechanism would disengage the hand brake. The car would roll
forward. A few seconds later a small but powerful bomb would detonate.
Greeks and the world would take heart from the courage and ingenuity of
the anti-Junta resistance. And Giorgos Tsikouris and Maria Elena Angeloni
would be safely in Italy, back from an innocent three-week Greek vacation.
Something went wrong. Tsikouris was a Cypriot math student at the
University of Milan, not an electrician. At 3:45 pm he was crouching over
the bomb trying to fix the timing mechanism. His old associates suspect he
short-circuited the clock by using the too-powerful battery of the car.
The blast threw his mangled body 10 meters from the car. Angeloni died in
the twisted metal. The windows of the embassy all shattered.
The Junta, however, did not shatter. Its official communiqué gloated
that "the wakeful eye of Divine Judgment annuls the dark plans of the
enemies of the Greek people." The spokesman pointed out that no Greek
-- only a Cypriot and an Italian -- could be found to carry out so
dastardly a deed. Authorities pledged "strictest measures against the
stealthy importation of explosives by tourists."
For diplomats and politicians, tragedy is opportunity. The street of
the explosion, securely fenced off, became reserved parking places for
senior embassy staff. Andreas Papandreou claimed the martyrs to boost the
revolutionary credentials of PAK, his rather academic resistance
organization. But Tsikouris had been the Milan chief of the Patriotic
Antidictatorship Front (PAM), a rival resistance group headed by Mikis
Theodorakis. PAM's student militants had not informed the sensitive
composer and Nobel Peace Prize applicant that they had moved beyond
playing his stirring anthems with the volume cranked up. Still, he would
not yield them to Andreas. He and actress Melina Mercouri tried to fly to
Milan to give a fiery speech at Angeloni's funeral. They were blocked by
the Italian Communist Party, which supported the Greek resistance but
could not afford to associate itself with a bombing.
If Tsikouris and Angeloni had survived, it would have been a disaster.
Blowing up an embassy designed by Walter Gropius is bad manners as well as
a violation of international law. PAM claimed feebly that the U.S. embassy
was "the brain of the military dictatorship" and thus a
legitimate target, but its occupants knew otherwise. Greek authorities,
with help from their shaken U.S. counterparts, would have solved the
puzzle of Angeloni's forged Swedish passport and followed her trail to the
Greek student's club in Milan. Italian authorities would perforce have
agreed this abuse of hospitality needed to be punished harshly.
Wise officials do not delude the public or themselves that they can
divide up the world tidily between good and evil, "with us or against
us," terrorists and freedom-fighters. By dying, Tsikouris and
Angeloni eliminated any political or moral obligation to make the attempt.
Theodorakis, Mercouri, and Papandreou were not kidnapped off the streets
of Milan and sent to Athens or Guantanamo for providing "material
support to terrorists." Instead they toured the United States raising
money for their resistance groups and preaching the downfall of the Junta
to enthusiastic American audiences. When Andreas Papandreou was elected
prime minister in 1981, American diplomats winced at the revolutionary
past of some of his associates, but they did business with them. No one
knows or cares that the Greek Embassy in Nicosia sends a representative
every year to the memorial service of the first man who bombed the U.S.
embassy in Athens.
In August 1972, to honor the memory of Angeloni and Tsikouris, another
young leftist placed a small bomb in the women's lavatory of the U.S.
embassy. It exploded, damaging the washbasin irreparably. Alexandros
Giotopoulos spent the next thirty years in hiding under a false name.
Arrested in 2002 as the 17N terrorist group mastermind, he claimed his
fingerprints and the other evidence against him were planted by the CIA as
retribution for America's wounded plumbing. Based on how Tsikouris and the
PAM leadership were treated, it would be hard to quibble with the judges
who rejected Giotopoulos's argument. Revenge is sweet, but a sensible
state has other priorities.
The wisest advice for young diplomats I ever heard was a poem by
Christopher Logue, put to music by Donovan and then made famous by Joan
Baez:
Be not too hard for life is short
And nothing is given to man
Be not too hard if he's sold or bought
For he must manage as best he can
Be not too hard when he blindly dies
Fighting for things he does not own
Be not too hard when he tells lies
Or if his heart is sometimes like a stone
Be not too hard for soon he'll die
Often no wiser than he began
Be not too hard, for life is short
And nothing is given to man.
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I returned from my eight-week book tour rather more cheerful about U.S.
policies than I was when I started. A remarkable number of Americans,
including many lifelong Republicans, have concluded that official
Washington needs to be taught a lesson on November 7. Most pundits believe
the Democrats will claw back a narrow majority in the House of
Representatives, though probably not in the Senate.
The contradictory explanations the pundits offer up reveal what strange
bedfellows the U.S. political parties have become: the administration will
be punished for ballooning deficits but also the impermanence of its tax
cuts, for theocratic assaults on civil liberties but also its
insufficiently concealed contempt for evangelical Christian voters.
Business owners, who generously funded political campaigns and profited
from the resulting gusher of government spending, are now sincerely
horrified to discover that some of their congressmen became corrupt and
cynical in the process.
Republicans supported their President's war in Iraq based on a natural
assumption that America would be victorious. A remarkable shift in
attitudes occurred during October. The U.S. military had gambled that it
could restore security in Baghdad before the elections by shifting 12,000
troops from other regions. The plan failed completely. U.S. and Iraqi
casualties soared during Ramadan. Daunted, senior military officers and
key Republican senators began to say the unsayable: the occupation of Iraq
isn't working now and seems unlikely to work any better in the future.
My last stop on the book tour was Lexington, Kentucky. Flipping cable
channels I caught America's most egregious public bully, Fox TV
commentator Bill O'Reilly, ridiculing a pundit from his own camp for
missing the U-turn in Washington's conventional wisdom. "Staying the
course" no longer signals strength and resolution. Now in Washington
it is proof of cluelessness. The Iraqis, O'Reilly made clear, are unworthy
of our magnanimity. Everyone is waiting for ex-Secretary of State James
Baker to unveil a new strategy to cut our losses.
But foreigners should remain skeptical about any great lurch leftward
by Fox TV and its viewers. My seatmate on one flight was the wife of a
Republican congressman from Southern California. Unlike hard-pressed Greek
political spouses, she had no qualms about playing hooky from her
husband's election campaign. His victory, like that of fellow conservative
incumbents, was a foregone conclusion. As vice president for
"strategic initiatives" for a Beltway contractor, she could use
her talents to market communications technology to the Iraqi police.
The politicians most at risk of losing their seats are Republican
moderates in liberal-leaning states. Their Democratic challengers, many of
them military veterans, were chosen for their ability to appeal to
religion, family values, and strong defense. Winners and losers alike will
fit comfortably within the center-right ideological spectrum of Greece's
New Democracy party.
Each of the 30-odd contested congressional races hangs on a few
thousand votes. Millions of dollars in attack ads are scorching the
airwaves in a desperate push to frighten voters into showing up at the
polls. In this environment, Democratic candidates will not make brave
promises on foreign policy or challenge the costly myth that the American
homeland is beset by murderous Muslim foes.
Thus the foreign policy implications of a Democratic victory would not
be enormous. The House of Representatives wields the power of the purse,
with the consequent ability to veto any sustained foreign policy
adventurism. But there is little enthusiasm for adventurism in Washington
in any case. Too little money, too few troops, and waning confidence in
America's ability to impose solutions on ungrateful foreigners all argue
for managing crises rather than solving them.
Looking at Greece and its region, a Democratic Congress would be
unlikely to challenge the Administration's basic approach, which is
balanced and unambitious. It might, however, decide that the minimal
diplomatic resources now allocated are insufficient. Currently, a bright
young Deputy Assistant Secretary of State named Matt Bryza is watching
Cyprus, the Aegean, Turkey's EU candidacy, Nagorno-Karabakh, and at least
three other intractable issues in whatever spare time he has left over
from his regular duties as the chief policy officer for Southern Europe
and the Caucasus.
A hostile Congress can demand attention by taking hostages. After
President Clinton lost his House majority in 1994, the State Department
was forced to appoint senior diplomatic representatives to manage the pet
issues of key committee chairmen and ethnic lobbies. Opposed to such
political symbolism, President Bush abolished most of those positions
early on in his first term. The U.S. paid a price in decreased influence
and increased risk of new regional explosions. Congress may well push for
more hands-on engagement in the near future.
Historically, the U.S. has done quite well with divided governments.
Even if it ekes out a majority again, the governing party has not enjoyed
its recent adventures in Iraq and has no wish to repeat them elsewhere.
The economic and environmental challenges looming ahead will soon dim the
current unhealthy obsession with Iran, North Korea and terrorism. All in
all, the message from the U.S. heartland is a reasonably good one.
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A famously corrupt Louisiana politician once quipped that to lose an
election he would need to be "caught in bed with a dead girl or a
live boy." As if to remind us of this folk wisdom, a Florida
Republican congressman has just resigned. His mistake was to have
propositioned a male 16-year-old congressional page. Three other notable
Republicans are going or gone, one even to jail. This was punishment for
arrogance, for failing to take the simple precautions that would have made
the bribes they received legal. A Democratic colleague was smart enough to
stay unindicted despite the $90,000 found stuffed inside his freezer.
My U.S. book tour coincides with election season. For a former
political analyst, watching the results of individual U.S. congressional
races is about as exciting as watching paint dry. Over the decades,
Republicans and Democrats have jointly wielded scissors and census data to
create a contortionist's paradise of "gerrymandered" safe
districts for all.
Still, Congressional Democrats see an opportunity to regain control of
the House of Representatives after 12 years watching their rivals enjoy
the perquisites of office. They sensibly want to keep the electoral focus
on Iraq. The corrupt mishandling of this thoroughly unpopular war has been
documented by a flood of damning new books and articles. President Bush's
approval rating dropped low enough that many Republicans were politely
asking him to stay out of their districts.
Political scientists have charted, dismayingly, that Bush's approval
rating now closely tracks the rise and fall of gasoline prices. The price
at the pump has fallen sharply in the past few weeks. People expect the
oil companies not to arrest that fall until November 3. As the cost of
filling a Humvee's 121-liter fuel tank drops below €60, President Bush
ceases to be an electoral liability.
Congress is taking no chances. In a marathon session lasting well past
2 am, the House approved the Defense Department authorization bill with
its millions of dollars in defense contracts for every Congressional
district in the country, an 1100-km border fence to keep out Mexican
terrorists posing as cheap labor, and a new law to strengthen the
President's power to wage his "war on terror" without
interference from the courts.
Political jujitsu can turn catastrophe to electoral benefit. President
Bush's subservient legislature and ultimately his place in history depend
on keeping ordinary Americans obsessed with the threat of terrorism rather
than with Iraq or their economic prospects. The gist of a National
Intelligence Estimate from April 2006 was leaked to the press. It
confirmed what everyone already knew, that invading Iraq had inspired a
dangerous new generation of Islamic terrorists. But Democrats derived no
benefit from that assessment. On the contrary, the headlines recounting
this disastrous strategic blunder were exploited to confirm the
superstition of ordinary Americans that they and their children are in
immediate personal danger from terrorism, despite the absence of evidence.
Frightened voters think they want toughness in their leaders, not brains,
integrity, or even competence.
Passing anti-terrorism legislation served this same political goal.
Three Republican senators successfully resisted the President's demand to
"reinterpret" the Geneva Conventions. But even this defeat was a
White House victory. The controversy kept the headlines focused on
terrorists, rather than on the slide of Afghanistan as well as Iraq into
civil war. And the dozens of politicians who voted to preserve the U.S.
constitution gave their opponent an easy attack ad: theirs was a vote for
coddling the terrorists who want to murder us and our families.
Lawyers and diplomats in the State Department, the experts the U.S.
government pays to make such assessments, have secretly argued for the
past two years that secret detentions and human rights abuses are not only
illegal but also harm U.S. national security. They know first-hand that
America's battle against terrorism is a battle to convince skeptical
Muslims to cooperate with an alien superpower against their own neighbors
and cousins. Diplomats are used to the idea of sacrificing things
Americans merely want for things they truly need. Realism dictates that
the United States must prove every day that it is firmly on the side of
law, justice, and human dignity. The new anti-terrorism legislation,
selfish electoral politics masquerading as terrorism
prevention/preemption, should have been recognized as an affordable
sacrifice. So too, of course, should be the loss of a few Congressional
seats.
In terms of jobs, health care, education, and the environment this has
not been a good year for the U.S. Congress. Voters tell pollsters they are
disgusted and eager for a change. But the change they say they want is in
Washington, not in their home district. Incumbents, though not as adept as
Greek counterparts at bequeathing their seat to one of their children, can
count on the voters to keep reelecting them essentially forever.
Lifetime tenure is an indecent but seductive proposition. Over time,
even principled politicians succumb to it, losing sight of democracy's
fundamental purpose of mobilizing collective resources to serve the common
interest. Each lapse of the legislature creates an ample number of
innocent victims. Voters cannot really afford to wait until their
politicians have become so stupid and arrogant that they let the body be
discovered in their bed.
Top of Page
Soon, thousands of European soldiers will be rumbling sternly through
southern Lebanon, the blue of their UN berets and EU flags bringing out
the steely blue of their eyes. Their mission is just that, to look
steely-eyed for the television cameras.
The only mission an army can perform on foreign soil with genuine
enthusiasm is to defend a friendly population against an outside
aggressor. NATO strikes against Bosnian Serb heavy weaponry in 1995
shifted the military balance around Sarajevo to allow the Dayton Accords.
In 2000, a few tough British troops restored respect for tribal borders in
Sierra Leone by making mincemeat of the drunken brigands that attacked
them. But protecting the Lebanese people is not the purpose of UN Security
Council Resolution 1701. UNIFIL's real mandate is to protect Israeli PM
Olmert's political future from Hezbollah rockets. This is not the mission
on which an ambitious soldier would care to stake a career.
The international community's reluctance to commit peacekeeping forces
is seldom a problem of cowardice or racism. Military officers know it is
next to impossible for outsiders to distinguish the good guys - those
determined to live peaceably with their neighbors -- from the bad guys who
are not. When they step between two unreconciled local nationalisms,
foreign peacekeepers inspire as much violence as they deter. Where
peacekeepers are welcomed, as in Kosovo, it is because their presence
ratifies the victory of one side over another. Military intervention saves
lives-- in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Iraqi Kurdistan, and (soon we hope)
Sudan - by partitioning a failed state.
State failure is no longer the problem in Lebanon. Hezbollah has clawed
out a sustainable balance of power for the Shiite majority by defending
their interests with implacable ferocity. That practical success, not
death-worshiping religious fanaticism, gives Hezbollah its current
legitimacy. Hezbollah's interests are now intimately entangled with those
of the rest of Lebanon. So long as a fair share of the spoils of
government goes to its friends, Hezbollah is happy to live and let live.
But does this magnanimity extend to tolerating Israel? Hezbollah's
success is subsidized by Iran and Syria, two states not noted for
altruism. By carrying on the struggle against Israel for lost Muslim lands
and dignity, Hezbollah cheaply soothes a festering political sore for
shaky Middle Eastern governments. This service is a profitable sideline
that obscures the fact that Hezbollah's own political issue with Israel is
limited and local: the release of captured Hezbollah militants and the
return of Lebanese territory (Shebaa Farms, which Israel insists is part
of Syria and thus Israel's by right of conquest).
In rejecting Hezbollah's demands Israel offers Hezbollah no incentive
to dispel the myth that it is an Iranian puppet with no agenda but
Israel's destruction. This myth, left undispelled, is extremely dangerous
to world peace, because it helps mislead U.S. politicians that it might
not be evil as well as foolish to attack Iran on Israel's behalf.
The current ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah does not depend on
the Security Council or international peacekeepers. Because international
law and UNSC resolutions would bar Israel's ongoing colonization of the
Occupied Territories, Israel perceives a national interest in discrediting
the UN system -- generally through gullible conservative proxies in the
United States. Israeli troops bombard UNIFIL positions whenever their
military convenience requires it.
The current peace in Lebanon has a more solid basis, the shared
assessment of the Hezbollah leadership and the government of Israel that
the harm to their respective populations, armed forces, and international
relationships outweighs the benefit from killing more of the hated enemy.
UN peacekeepers have no ability to impose peace in place of war.
Rather, once warring leaders have decided on peace, the presence of UN
blue helmets legitimizes for the domestic audience the decision not to
prosecute their war as thoroughly as justice and national honor should
demand. The Lebanese Army, backed by an expanded UN presence, allows
Olmert to claim the invasion of southern Lebanon made Israel safer.
Hezbollah defends its concessions by pointing out that neither the
Lebanese army nor foreign troops pose a threat to its local dominance. The
presence of European peacekeepers, however, is an excuse for both sides to
retaliate less brutally and counterproductively against the inevitable
next provocation from across the border.
Increasing the strength of UNIFIL to its authorized maximum of 15,000
troops is proving difficult. States with low birth rates find it
inexpedient to send their children into harm's way. Countries like
Pakistan with a sturdier mercenary tradition are unacceptable to Israel.
However, the 15,000 figure is an exercise in political symbolism rather
than a military requirement. UNIFIL's mission does not depend on thousands
of heavily-armed troops empowered by aggressive rules of engagement. If
UNIFIL attempts to disarm Hezbollah it will spark a Lebanese civil war and
then scuttle home in disgrace. If the peacekeepers fail to prevent rocket
attacks on Israel the Israelis will give them the choice of leaving or
being trampled.
Success depends on the ability of troop-contributing countries to
convince Israel and Hezbollah that upholding the ceasefire serves their
vital interests. In practice this means offering generous benefits to
those who cooperate while threatening implacable retaliation against those
who do not. We are about to learn whether Europe is genuinely prepared to
wield its economic leverage, the only EU weapon Israel actually fears, to
impose respect for its soldiers and international law on the Lebanese
border.
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Remedial Imperialism from the Pig Farm
4 AUGUST 2006
The former Sisian State Hog-Rearing
Complex is not as isolated as it used to be. Thanks to satellite TV we
have Euronews as well as several phone-sex channels. But the electrons are
tired and confused by the time they reach our little U.S.-UK-Armenian
joint archaeological team. So are we, after a day teetering on steep
hillsides in search of the ancient history of this imperial buffer zone.
Each new atrocity in Lebanon reaches rural Armenia only as dim rumor.
With so little information, sober calculation of degrees of guilt and
innocence seems impossible, and neither we nor our Armenian hosts even
make the effort. Rather, we respond to the Lebanon crisis as most people
have responded to similar crises throughout human history, indeed in the
same visceral way President Bush has responded. We persuade ourselves that
this is a conflict between good guys and bad guys, and make our selection
of which is which based on tribal affinity or instinctive preference.
Crimes committed by the good guys undermine our moral certitude, and
therefore we forget them the instant they occur. The crimes of the bad
guys, however, confirm our moral intuition that no punishment is too harsh
for such depth of evil.
Armenians do not share President Bush's conviction that Israel
represents the good guys in Lebanon. Planeloads of Armenian refugees from
Beirut have reached Yerevan through Syria. They were descendants of
survivors of the Ottoman massacres of 1915, who had found refuge in the
Beirut suburbs for their distinctive language, religion, and culture. They
dodged Lebanon's murderous domestic politics for decades, but they cannot
dodge Israeli bombs. Armenians keep their outrage diplomatically to
themselves. This is possibly a mistake.
Washington is run by people who take for granted their role as
functionaries of a benevolent and useful empire. Few of them have read
history written by the beneficiaries of imperial benevolence. They prefer
to believe what they are told in English by smiling foreign clients. This
is certainly a mistake.
Armenia's leaders have seldom had the luxury of arbitrary moral
judgments of good versus evil. The survival of the Armenian people has
depended on willingness to resist hungry neighbors with near-suicidal
ferocity while speaking only sweet words to whichever heavily armed empire
might deign to regulate some local conflict in Armenians' favor. During
the 13th century, Armenian princes made the year-long pilgrimage to
Karakorum and bought an audience with the reigning descendant of Genghis
Khan. They flourished when most of their neighbors were being annihilated.
By studying imperial languages and prejudices better than their neighbors
did, Armenians played on the vanity of successive Persian, Roman,
Byzantine, Seljuk, Mongol, Turcoman, Ottoman, and Russian potentates to
eke out privileged status and, since 1991, full independence. But
"benevolent empire" is not a phrase any Armenian would care to
use. They have paid, often heavily, for that protection.
Given a free choice of protectors, most Armenians would prefer America,
not because the United States is virtuous and competent but because the
United States is far away and cheap. Deeply mired in Iraq, the United
States does not devote money or political energy to fulfilling imperial
obligations more reliably than the Russians. Armenians long ago learned
not to irritate lax superpowers by complaining. They simply flatter a
rival empire -- currently Iran -- until the imperial attention span
improves.
The Lebanese, whose security and prosperity likewise depend on
counterbalancing d
