2005 Articles
2006 Articles
AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL watching the Vouli's television channel could be
forgiven for inferring from the rhetoric that Greece was fighting for its
life against a ring of implacable foes. On November 1, President Papoulias
beat an ignominious retreat rather than run the gauntlet of 200 Cham
protestors to meet with Albanian President Moisiu in Sarande (Agia Saranda).
The "non-existent" Cham issue was too grave a threat to the
national dignity.
The Chams were Muslim Albanian landowners who stayed when their land
became part of Greece in 1913. Embittered by the creeping confiscation of
their land, many Chams embraced the Axis occupiers in 1940. Greek
collaborators could redeem themselves by becoming fierce anti-communists.
The Chams were not given that option. In 1944 when the Nazis withdrew,
rape and murder became instruments of national purification as well as
personal vengeance. The surviving Chams fled to Albania, where they formed
a political group to demand compensation for their lost houses and fields.
Until they are satisfied, no Albanian politician will derive much
political benefit from good Greek-Albanian relations.
Greeks were dismayed to discover in 1912 that the Macedonian provinces
they had just seized from the Ottoman Empire were full of Slav villagers.
Some of these "locals" were pushed across the border in 1948 as
communist bandits. The rest learned Greek and set about becoming
anonymous, as befitted their official non-existence. Their relatives
across the border in Bitola and Skopje did not have the option of
anonymity. Late-comers to Balkan nation-building, they took their name -
the only name they know - from the territory on which they have been
living for the past few centuries. Now they are Macedonians, and they live
in the Republic of Macedonia. Every month or two, the dispute over the
name of the country makes some act of neighbourly cooperation between
Greece and "FYROM" more trouble than it is worth.
Nation-building is an ugly process everywhere. Each Thanksgiving
holiday, as Americans commemorate the early colonists' first successful
harvest, the liberals among them glance sheepishly over their shoulders at
the Native Americans who made the fatal mistake of helping the colonists
or the fatal mistake of not helping them. Enough time has passed that
American nationalism no longer resents its early victims.
"Closure", a cautious revision of the historical record with
modest material or moral compensation, has become good US politics.
Closure with its northern neighbours would be prudent politics for Greece
as well.
Why? The ethical reason - that collective punishment was illegal and
immoral in the 1940s and remains so today - is not convincing to ordinary
citizens. But there is a national interest argument as well. The US
government has wearied of its involvement in Kosovo. The US hopes some
magical process will make Kosovo independent without triggering chaos in
Serbia. As critics of the Iraq invasion point out, "hope is not a
plan". When the superpower stirs the smoking embers of Kosovo and
disappears, Greece's economic interests will suffer if the incompatible
national aspirations of Serbs, Albanians, and Macedonians blaze up again.
Greek ability to be a calming influence on its neighbours doesn't come
free of charge. Then-foreign minister Papandreou paid a domestic political
price for reaching out to the anti-Milosevic opposition in Serbia in 2000.
Doing so redeemed Greece as a valid Balkan partner, and not just in
American eyes. By announcing an ambitious 500 million-euro Balkan
reconstruction assistance package, Greece bought itself enormous access.
Greece has further leverage over its neighbours through Greek private
investments, its lax visa/migration policy, and its advocacy inside the
European Union.
What Greece lacks is a domestic political consensus that permits it to
use its Balkan leverage efficiently. Instead, diplomatic capital is
squandered to appease Greek nationalism - with cancelled visits and EU
veto threats. Listening to the politicians, it is clear that Greek fiascos
in the Balkans are good domestic politics. Failure gives carte blanche to
criticise the prime minister and sanctifies an attitude of general
churlishness. Greek victories, on the other hand, would impose an
obligation of magnanimity.
Chams and Macedonians are not a collective figment of Balkan perversity
or irredentism. They are identifiable human beings with the yearning for a
personal inheritance that identity implies. Greeks have never forgotten
and will never forget a square centimetre of Greek land or a single
paragraph of Greek history. Neither will their neighbours, who have
considerably less of either to spare. Greeks should remind themselves that
they are the winning side and have been for a century. They can afford to
be magnanimous, when their weaker, less stable neighbours cannot.
Greek, US, and EU interests coincide in wanting Greece to be a
benevolent EU elder brother to the fledgling Balkan democracies. Greece is
not a brother, however, but instead the local superpower. As such, Greece
does not enjoy the benefit of its good intentions without proving them in
advance. Granting Macedonia its name and granting the Chams a less
dishonourable place in Greek history are two small, affordable steps
toward making Greece more persuasive as the metropolis of a peaceful,
prosperous Balkan peninsula.
top of page
Back in the innocent days of 2001, a U.S. Foreign Service officer could
prove he or she was "in the loop" with the new Bush
Administration by making a knowing reference to "Scooter."
Whenever a fresh slab of U.S. foreign policy was heaved into place, Lewis
"Scooter" Libby was there as the alter ego of Vice President
Cheney.
Watching a foreigner with multiple university degrees fall for a
monolingual Greek fisherman we see the seductive power of taciturnity.
Cheney has a rare gift of silence, the ability to sit and let a roomful of
tough, ostensibly worldly men project the hidden wisdom of the cosmos into
his steely, unreadable eyes. The American humorist James Thurber captured
him brilliantly in a 1939 parable, "The Owl Who Was God,"
readable on-line for the price of a Google search. Scooter was the magna
cum laude Yale graduate who turned Cheney's silence into policy.
In June 2003 tempers had begun to fray in the White House. Iraqi
weapons of mass destruction had not been found. The collective
hallucination of the U.S. national security establishment was now too
grotesque to conceal. The White House had a strategy for limiting the
damage: Ari Fleischer, the White House press spokesman, would simply stare
contemptuously until the journalist changed the subject. But not every
U.S. government agency was equally disciplined.
The bureaucratic mission of intelligence services is to allow
presidents and prime ministers to put forward with a clean conscience
whatever view of the world serves their political requirements of the
moment. CIA Director Tenet understood his duty. Asked by the White House
to document that invading Iraq would be moral and rational, Tenet
complied. He gambled, unwisely, that it would turn out to be true.
The CIA, however, is not only a public relations firm. As the
intelligence service of a global superpower, it has thousands of highly
trained case officers and analysts in regular contact with the real world
outside the Washington Beltway. At any given time, someone in the CIA has
just finished a report giving a reasonably correct answer to some
important question. Most of those reports are not read, because they serve
no useful domestic political purpose, but their authors are proud of them.
President Bush was too timid to "play the blame game" over
Iraq. Still, the CIA was unhappy. Before the war they had been mocked by
Cheney's office as wimps and poodles for failing to come up with the hard
evidence of Saddam's weapons programs everyone knew existed. Now even
President Bush was making a joke of their increasingly forlorn efforts to
comb Iraq for WMD. CIA officials assuaged their misery by leaking to the
press enough good Iraq analysis to prove that their policy rivals had been
swindled worse than the intelligence professionals. Intellectual integrity
remembered six months too late is not an endearing virtue, not to a White
House whose survival depends on concealing weakness from the circling
media jackals.
At the beginning of 2002, Cheney asked the CIA to confirm a helpful
intelligence report that Iraq had secretly negotiated to buy 500 tons of
uranium ore from Niger. Valerie Plame Wilson, an undercover CIA officer
specializing in nuclear nonproliferation, suggested that her husband's
background and business made him a perfect emissary to check out the
story. Her superiors agreed. Joe Wilson, a former U.S. ambassador to
Gabon, drank tea with old friends in Niger and satisfied himself the story
was implausible. But the CIA was not brave enough to debunk the Niger
uranium deal as a forgery. The tale resurfaced in the President's 2003
State of the Union message to Congress, an obvious, embarrassing blunder.
Once the non-existence of Iraqi WMD was safely established, Wilson's
African mission became useful to the Democrats as evidence that Cheney's
office had knowingly misled the public about the Niger uranium. An angry
Libby leapt to the conclusion that Wilson's disclosures to the press were
a bureaucratic sneak attack by the CIA on the Vice President. Libby's
first priority was to reassure Cheney's admirers that the Vice President
was still God, despite the unfortunate WMD shortfall. The CIA, as everyone
knows, is a liberal cesspool. Wilson's relationship with CIA officer Plame
made it the patriotic duty of every good conservative to ignore his biased
information.
Libby blundered. Revealing the identity of a covert CIA officer would
have been a difficult crime to prosecute. He will almost certainly go to
jail briefly for lying to the FBI. The "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal"
(the term belongs to Colin Powell's chief of staff Larry Wilkerson) has
lost a key player.
Liberal rejoicing across America is tempered by the fact that the
investigation did not bring down Cheney or Rove, or reveal who falsified
the evidence that led the U.S. Congress and people to war. The true
message of "Plame-gate," one unlikely to penetrate widely, is
that willingness to fight dirty as a competitive Washington bureaucrat is
no proof of tough, effective realism out where the real world bears down
on American interests at fifty miles an hour.
James
Thurber "The Owl Who Was God"
Once upon a
starless midnight there was an owl who sat on the branch of an oak tree.
Two ground moles tried to slip quietly by, unnoticed. "You!"
said the owl. "Who?" they quavered, in fear and astonishment,
for they could not believe it was possible for anyone to see them in that
thick darkness. "You two!" said the owl. The moles hurried away
and told the other creatures of the field and forest that the owl was the
greatest and wisest of all animals because he could see in the dark and
because he could answer any question. "I'll see about that,
"said a secretary bird, and he called on the owl one night when it
was again very dark. "How many claws am I holding up?" said the
secretary bird. "Two," said the owl, and that was right.
"Can you give me another expression for 'that is to say' or
'namely'?" asked the secretary bird. "To wit," said the
owl. "Why does the lover call on his love?" "To woo,"
said the owl. The secretary bird hastened back to the other creatures and
reported that the owl indeed was the greatest and wisest animal in the
world because he could see in the dark and because he could answer any
question. "Can he see in the daytime, too?" asked a red fox?
"Yes," answered a dormouse and a French poodle. "Can he see
in the daytime, too?" All the other creatures laughed loudly at this
silly question, and they set upon the red fox and his friends and drove
them out of the region. They sent a messenger to the owl and asked him to
be their leader. When the owl appeared among the animals it was high noon
and the sun was shining brightly. He walked very slowly, which gave him an
appearance of great dignity, and he peered about him with large, staring
eyes, which gave him an air of tremendous importance. "He's
God!" screamed a Plymouth rock hen. And the others took up the cry
"He's God!" So they followed him wherever he went and when he
bumped into things they began to bump into things, too. Finally he came to
a concrete highway and he started up the middle of it and all the other
creatures followed him. Presently a hawk, who was acting as outrider,
observed a truck coming toward them at fifty miles an hour, and he
reported to the secretary bird and the secretary bird reported to the owl.
"There's danger ahead," said the secretary bird. "To
wit?" said the owl. The secretary bird told him. "Aren't you
afraid?" he asked. "Who?" said the owl calmly, for he could
not see the truck. "He's God!" cried all the creatures again,
and they were still crying "He's God" when the truck hit them
and ran them down. Some of the animals were merely injured, but most of
them, including the owl, were killed. Moral: You can fool too many of the
people too much of the time.
From: James
Thurber, Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated (New York,
1940), pp. 35-36.
Top
of Page
07/OCT/2005
IN SEPTEMBER the United Nations celebrated the 60th anniversary
of its founding with a summit of world leaders. As delegations
representing 191 UN member states laboured over the draft summit document,
UN Headquarters briefly seemed pregnant with the reforms necessary to make
the UN a credible instrument to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Collapse, a gripping new book by the US geographer-physiologist
Jared Diamond, describes those challenges better than any statesman would
dare. Dissecting the corpses of failed societies, from the Anasazi in
North America to the Polynesians of Easter Island, Diamond describes the
brutal implications of ordinary human behavior. Without strong governing
institutions enforcing rules of environmental stewardship, each family and
tribe will ultimately destroy the carrying capacity of its territory.
Democracy in itself is no panacea. What elected Greek politician would
dare stop the farmers of Thessaly and Corinthia from pumping dry the
ancient aquifers on which their life depends?
The call for UN reform assumes its true urgency in the quest for good
governance to preserve a fragile lacework of interconnected ecosystems.
Terrorism is a minor irritant compared to the UN's inability to keep pace
with a chain reaction of environmental disaster and global climate change.
Saving the UN is a first step towards saving the planet.
Sixty years after it was created, the Security Council, the UN's
executive body, no longer reflects the world's balance of power and
population. This is a key reason - though there are others - that the UN
lacks legitimacy to impose universal respect for the most basic rules of
environmental stewardship and long-term survival.
Few world leaders recognize their self-interest in making the UN more
effective. The General Assembly is a safe platform for political
posturing. The UN system offers employment for political friends and exile
for political foes. Voting power in the General Assembly can be traded for
development assistance. In exchange, national leaders grant the
international community license to intervene under the UN blue flag only
when a state has lapsed into genocide too egregious to call by any gentler
name.
Strengthening the UN charter requires a two-thirds majority in the
General Assembly. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan thought he could
purchase that majority for the 2005 summit. Poor states would benefit
financially through implementation of the Millennium Challenge Goals
negotiated in 2000, particularly if rich countries fulfilled the goal of
devoting 0.7 percent of gross national product to international
development assistance. Regional powers such as India, Nigeria, and Brazil
would join the UN as permanent members of the Security Council, albeit
without the right of veto.
When new US Permanent Representative to the UN John Bolton took up his
post in August, scant weeks before the Summit, the US position turned cold
and practical. A 25-member Security Council with nine or eleven permanent
members, up from five, would be more dysfunctional than the current
15-member Council. The US would not buy Third World votes to save the UN
from its flaws. Anyway, that commitment to increased aid would be
unacceptable to the Congressional nationalists who sign America's checks.
The US tabled 700 amendments designed to destroy the attainable deal Annan
was crafting.
Bolton told his staff to make full use of his reputation as a
neoconservative mad dog in the negotiations that ensued. He infuriated
America's allies by holding hostage the Millennium Challenge development
goals the world had painfully negotiated five years before. Bolton
relented, but not until he had debunked Annan's assurances that UN reform
meant new resources for the Third World. In exchange for striking out
language that offended a handful of US militarists, he allowed harmless
references to reducing Third World poverty. By then, however, the
Secretary General's majority in the General Assembly had evaporated. The
forty pious pages of the summit document recapitulated a decade's worth of
conventional wisdom on international development, but UN reform was kicked
down the road.
Bolton's negotiating tactics were brilliant, but his strategy was
insane. Perceived US bad faith helped persuade key African states to
reject any Security Council expansion that locks future permanent members
into a lesser status. An unreformed UN will drift helplessly until massive
catastrophe forces all sides to reconsider their resistance to a more
legitimate, effective system.
There is plenty of blame to share. All five permanent Security Council
members rabidly defend a 1945 status quo the world now perceives as
illegitimate. Warlords play off great power rivalries to plunder the
world's collective patrimony unchecked. Only the US can offer a way out of
the current deadlock, through announcing that the time has come for the
Permanent Five to dilute their right of veto. America's veto is an
expensive luxury, especially when misused to defend indefensible Israeli
policies. Any policy that cannot command the support of two other regional
powers will cost more than it gains. Only by weakening the veto can the
Security Council circumvent selfish opposition to the UN's true mission:
being a source of legitimacy for policies of voluntary restraint and
survival, the policies that national political systems are too weak and
timid to follow on their own.
top of page
16/SEP/2005
THE PRESIDENT of the republic, the leader of the
opposition and former ministers of public order came to Nea
Erythrea on September 7 to say farewell to an advisor to the
ministry of foreign affairs. A British diplomat flew from
London. A US diplomat sat in the back of the full church.
Ambassadors would have envied such a sendoff, but
Marialena Conalis was not a professional diplomat. She was
one of the rare individuals who make diplomacy possible. I
had the honor of working with her for two years, when she
was an expert in the foreign minister's office and I was the
US embassy political counselor.
Greeks and Americans misunderstand each other, not
because they are different but because they are similar.
Greek politicians and bureaucrats, like their American
counterparts, are locked in internal competition for
influence and promotion. They are honest, when circumstances
permit them to be. But nationalism has stern rules. No one
dares sound naive and trusting of foreigners when colleagues
are watching.
Effective diplomacy needs the courage to believe your
foreign partners when they are telling the truth. That was
the secret to George Papandreou's successful tenure as
foreign minister. Marialena made a key contribution to the
respect Greece earned then. Her expertise and intellect were
impressive, but they were less important than the
transparent idealism of her character. As a Greek-American
with her heart in two countries, she insisted that Greece
and the United States had an obligation of mutual trust. She
was honest with the career diplomats. Her integrity and
commitment to a better world convinced them that it was safe
to be honest with her.
Marialena helped persuade the United States and Greece to
be genuine partners in fighting terrorism. Opportunists in
both countries sabotaged cooperation with accusations
designed to score points at home.
Armed with the truth her friends shared with her,
Marialena persuaded a tough-minded group of officials on
both sides that they had not been betrayed. No diplomat
could have played that role.
As a token of the bipartisan respect she had earned, the
foreign ministry allowed Marialena to serve Greece as long
as she was physically able. Her last assignment was at the
Greek embassy in Washington, strengthening Greece's web of
ties with the US foreign policy establishment. Friendship
and respect between two countries she loved will be
Marialena's monument, usually invisible but splendid indeed.
02/SEP/2005
A fluke of ferry schedules,
not any pre-planned perversity, dropped me on Kalymnos in August. Drawn
lemming-like to the Kalymnos Coast Guard commander's office, I asked for
permission to visit the rocks of Imia to take a picture for my book. I was
tactful enough not to mention the goats.
The commander, an impeccable military bureaucrat, sent me politely to
hell: he invited me to apply in Athens to the Press Office of the Ministry
to the Prime Minister. The compromise that helped Greeks and Turks back
away from war in 1996 made Imia and its surrounding waters a prohibited
zone. The restriction infringed upon the sovereign liberties of two proud
peoples. My calling attention to it was churlish at best.
A kafeneio owner affirmed stoutly that a Greek shepherd still bestrode
Imia with his goats. I was curious. If the municipality of Kalymnos rented
out grazing rights, it was irrefutable evidence for the Greek claim to
ownership. As pious legend, the defense of Imia by stalwart Greek goats
was still a salve to national pride. A well-intentioned American would not
be too literal-minded in his search for goat droppings.
Ambiguity is a necessary part of diplomacy. Border islands are
inherently ambiguous even when the borders are not in dispute. If you walk
far enough on an island the "Nudism strictly forbidden" signs
cease to apply. So do the strict controls that separate Greece, a member
of the Schengen visa fortress, from hordes of Turkish customers a short
boat ride away. But each decade sets different limits to the central
ambiguity of the Dodecanese island chain: defensive bastion between Turkey
and Europe, as Imia symbolizes, or open European gateway.
The island of Symi was a revelation, and not only for the magnificent
neoclassical architecture that adorns the dramatic harbor town. The port
was full of Turkish charter boats. The taverna in Horio was full of Turks
as well, English-speaking and self-assured. Turkish collectors dropped
hundreds of euros at the antique shop. Italians meanwhile filled the tour
boats that flooded in from Rhodes and Kos. With such tourism, the
residents of Symi would soon be rich enough to restore and reoccupy the
stately mansions that had been collapsing around them for the past 90
years.
Globalization is a dirty word in Greece, but through the ages Greeks
have built themselves lavish houses from its proceeds. The corporate
letterhead on display at the Vouvalis mansion in Kalymnos was a reminder
that the multinational corporation is not a recent invention. Around 1900,
Kalymnos was one office of a global sponge-fishing empire based in London,
with tentacles in Paris, Tunis, Havana, Tarpon Springs, Nassau, and
elsewhere. Similarly impressive mansions sprang up everywhere in the
Dodecanese in the 1880s, when the Ottoman Empire restored local autonomy,
low taxes, and free rein to profit from the burgeoning peaceful commerce
in the Mediterranean. The booming island ports all faced east toward the
Ottoman mainland.
The civic architecture in the Dodecanese, from Classical times to the
present day, confirms a consistent pattern throughout history. Prosperity
for the islanders depends on prosperity and stability in Asia Minor next
door and, crucially, on peace and freedom of the seas surrounding.
From the 7th to the 18th century, war and piracy dominated the Eastern
Mediterranean. The Dodecanese islanders huddled behind castle walls on
jagged mountaintops, with only miserable hovels outside the walls for
Franks or Turks to pillage. The late Ottoman renaissance that adorned Symi
was brief. When Italy snatched the Dodecanese in 1912, the islands became
a hostile frontier. Leros was its naval fortress, with the west-facing
port at Lakki built to convince the islanders that they could flourish as
a backwater of Mussolini's New Roman Empire. Grand buildings
notwithstanding, the islanders did not flourish.
Union with Greece in 1947 did not make the islanders prosperous again.
Locals decried the indifference or avarice of the Athenian Empire in the
5th century BC. They decry it again. Centralized government was not
entirely to blame. The Mediterranean was now a minefield of prickly
nationalisms, the sponges were gone, and ship-building had financial and
technical requirements islanders could no longer meet. Still, Athens saw
the Dodecanese not as its gateway to anywhere, but rather as a dumping
ground for political prisoners and hopeless psychiatric cases from Athens.
Nothing notable was built, since Italy's crumbling imperial relics were
already overlarge for a population in decline.
The globalization of leisure saved the Dodecanese, if salvation is the
word. Rhodes and Kos ruthlessly mined their resource of sun and sand for
tourist dollars. The EU funded millions of cubic meters of ugly concrete.
But this boom is not sustainable. The plundered coastline of Kos has
nothing to differentiate it from a thousand other rows of beach umbrellas
on a thousand other beaches.
Symi is different and more hopeful. The original builders gambled that
their late Ottoman globalization would last. The unique, melancholy
splendor of that miscalculation has seduced a stream of wealthy foreigners
and Greeks into restoring traditional houses with loving care. Symi
profits from a modest, sustainable building boom. To guarantee that Symi's
vibrancy can continue, we should remember the history imbedded in the
architecture. The Dodecanese thrive to the extent the islands are a
smiling, open gateway between a globalizing Europe and an increasingly
prosperous and cosmopolitan Turkish mainland. History will judge the
result by the quality of the architecture that remains standing
afterwards.
Top of Page
05/AUG/2005
Ordinary Americans have concluded that America stands to gain nothing
from its occupation of Iraq. Sense of duty, not the mirage of an oil-rich
client state in the Middle East, explains continued American support for
its troop presence. A July 21 poll by the Pew Research Centre reported
that 52 percent of Americans believe US troops should remain in Iraq
"until the situation has stabilized". However, 64 percent
believe President Bush does not have a "clear plan" to succeed
in that stabilization, and for the first time a solid plurality of
Americans - 47 percent - recognize that the Iraq war has been
counterproductive to the war on terrorism. The Council on Foreign
Relations, a generally servile conduit of Washington's conventional
wisdom, has issued a report calling for sweeping bureaucratic changes
before America tries any more "nation-building" adventures.
As America eyes the exits, no one should underestimate President Bush's
personal moral commitment to his pledge of a peaceful Iraq under a
democratically elected government. So, like any moralist faced with an
insoluble moral dilemma, Bush will take refuge in fantasy. General Casey,
the US commander in Iraq, will announce at an opportune moment before the
November 2006 US elections that "Iraqization" has reached a
point where he can begin the troop withdrawals he previewed with Secretary
Rumsfeld in Baghdad on July 27. The conservative media conglomerates on
which ordinary Americans depend for news will judge Iraq's civil war no
longer newsworthy, since US troops are officially not involved. When the
carnage becomes too gruesome to ignore, the president will explain that it
was the Iraqi politicians, not America's brave soldiers, who had failed.
The American people will believe, because Bush himself will believe.
This claim of Iraqi failure will not be implausible. The Iraqi
politicians who took three months to form a government after the January
elections are doing little better on writing a broadly acceptable draft
constitution by August 15. Beautiful, progressive Iraqi constitutions are
a dime a dozen. In its haste for war, however, the Bush Administration
forgot that post-war Iraqi politics would be as short-sighted and zero-sum
as politics elsewhere. Unlike in Greece or the US, Iraqi politicians have
no nationalist card to play. They cannot plausibly ask their citizens to
put loyalty to a discredited Iraqi national ideology above loyalty to the
family, clan, tribal, and religious structures that now offer the most
credible guarantees of life and livelihood. Telling their heavily armed
constituents to sacrifice precious new ethnic and religious freedoms to
buy loyalty to a hypothetical Iraqi state from blood-drenched rivals would
be a suicidal display of political courage.
Control of Kirkuk and a distinct Peshmerga army are minimum Kurdish
demands for remaining in an Iraqi federal state. A Sunni leader who
accepts those demands will be rejected by his fellow tribesmen for
betraying their interests. The Shiite leader who compromises the Islamic
purity of the Iraqi Republic will lose his followers to a rival militia.
With US pressure, the draft constitution may paper over these and other
differences artfully enough to be ratifiable. It will not be enforceable.
Should the US allow Iraq's Shiites to fill the institutional vacuum
that results? We can ignore the bugaboo of Iranian influence here - Iraqi
Shiites value their local leaders above Persian-speaking outsiders. The
exportability of any Iraqi theocracy would be minimal. Washington should
judge purely on whether a majority-rule Shiite state would fulfil Bush's
pledge to the Iraqi people.
The recent emergence of Shiite militia death squads in response to
Sunni terrorism suggests that internal political competition has already radicalized
the Shiite community. To maintain their internal authority, even moderate
Shiite leaders must back the imposition of "one nation under
Allah" on Sunni tormentors and secular Kurds. Too much history rules
out a counterbalancing Kurd-Sunni alliance. The natural result would be
fragmentation among competing warlords, a new Afghanistan. The Kurds would
assert their de facto independence, and the oil fields of Kirkuk would
become the central front in a civil war.
Perhaps there is another option, to cut Kurdistan loose. In exchange
for independence and security guarantees, the Kurds could abandon their
debatable claim to Kirkuk. With federalism no longer a divisive issue,
Sunnis and Shiites might find common ground for a stabilizing new Iraqi
nationalism in their shared desire to end the US occupation and to confine
the Kurds to their historical mountain territory.
The problem with such a scenario is Turkey. A completely rational
Turkey would decide the same way Greece grudgingly decided about the
Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and its own Slav Macedonians:
nationalism must yield to national interest. A small, weak Kurdish state
squeezed between the Turkish border and vengeful Sunni Arabs would be in
no position to foment rebellion among Turkey's Kurds. Kurdistan's economic
lifelines could be severed from one day to the next, and only impeccable behavior
would keep it safe from annual Turkish invasion.
Turkey's negotiating position is that rationality is impossible where
the Kurds are concerned. This may well be true. Despite Washington's
sympathy for the Kurds, the US will not risk the NATO alliance by testing
Turkey. Only the Kurds themselves can enter this particular oriental
bazaar. The absolute minimum price, a hefty one, for fulfilling the
ancient dream of a Kurdish state would be losing Kirkuk to the Turkmen and
handing over the PKK leadership to Ankara. In today's shattered Iraq, any
way forward demands more betrayals of solemn pledges than President Bush's
alone.
Top of Page
01/JUL/2005
GREECE and Turkey have evolved since 1999 a nearly perfect political
relationship. They have booming trade and tourism ties, frequent
diplomatic contacts, steady exchanges of academics and think-tankers, and
a shared vision of integrating the Balkans into an expanded EU. Serious
conflict is unthinkable. Still, whenever a Greek politician needs to tweak
the defense budget or burnish his nationalist credentials, all he has to
do is wait a few moments and a squadron of Turkish F-16s will roar past
with a made-to-order crisis in its drop tanks.
For decades now the Turkish airforce has routinely conducted exercises
to remind the world that Turkey rejects Greece's unconventional claim to
10 nautical miles of airspace. Six miles is all Greece is entitled to, and
the Turks will prove it. The Greek airforce just as routinely treats each
Turkish intruder to a hair-raising mock dogfight. Greek defense analysts
manipulate the interception statistics to argue that Turkey is
"ratcheting up the pressure". Greece must buy each new
generation of expensive military hardware or be overrun.
In 2000 a US State Department law-of-the-sea expert quietly pointed out
to Greek and Turkish colleagues that neither country had genuinely vital
national interests at stake in the Aegean. Based on the private positions
of experts on both sides, a compromise deal was possible that would put
both countries on firm legal ground and end the skirmishing over
theoretical rights with no practical value in peace or war. This
observation, though not the accompanying offer of US mediation, was
timely. The EU membership ambitions of Cyprus and Turkey gave all sides an
incentive to cooperate. Senior Greek and Turkish foreign ministry
officials began in 2002 a series of "exploratory talks" that
continue to the present day.
A package deal on Aegean issues seemed within reach as Greece entered
its March 2004 national election campaign. Both sides kept their
negotiations secret, including from the US. Internal US scenarios called
for shrinking Greek airspace and expanding its territorial waters so they
coincided at a reasonable width, as international law prefers. Greece
would renounce its right under the Law of the Sea Treaty to expand its
Aegean territorial sea to a full 12 miles. The Turkish and US navies would
thus retain an international high-seas corridor through the Aegean. Greece
and Turkey would submit their maritime border, including ownership of the
disputed islet of Imia/Kardak, to the International Court of Justice to
delineate. There the stronger Greek legal position would prevail, but
Greece would agree in turn to a generous formula for allotting Turkey its
share of the Aegean continental shelf. Greece and Turkey might quietly
agree that common defense commitments superseded Greece's treaty
obligation to keep certain islands demilitarized.
Talk of a deal has subsided. Turkish analysts believe the Karamanlis
government looked around and concluded that the domestic political risks
of a compromise (or unwillingness to lose the Turkish threat as a national
mobilizing issue) outweighed the foreign policy benefits. If that is the
case, then in the wake of the failed June EU summit it is time for a fresh
calculation of the costs and benefits.
Turkey is still digesting the message from the European Union that
Turkish EU membership is awkward domestic politics. The setback is not
fatal. Over a decade of EU entry negotiations the political pendulum can
swing back. Samuel Huntington's bloody alternative of the "clash of civilizations"
will seem in ten years to thoughtful Turks, Greeks and other Europeans
even more unappetizing a prospect than it does now.
Prime Minister Erdogan has implied to Islamist voters that their road
to the free wearing of headscarves had passed through Brussels. Now he
must find new arguments why Turkey should maintain the momentum of reform.
What Erdogan has always insisted is still true, that democratic reforms
are to Turkey's benefit whether it joins the EU or not. But Turkish pride
has been hurt, and with it the Turkish public's faith in its leadership.
Erdogan has no desire to pander to aggrieved Turkish nationalism, but
there are other Turkish politicians who will.
Nationalism, still the world's dominant mode of political mobilisation,
judges politicians not by their competence but by their perceived passion
to defend to the death every centimetre of sacred soil. That is why the
pathetic little outcropping of Imia/Kardak still looms dangerously on the
Aegean horizon. Turks do not lust for Greek islands. They are genuinely
grateful for Greece's support for their EU entry. But Turkish politicians
are no braver than their Greek or US counterparts when they face the
primitive political judgments that matter most. Thus even tiny issues like
the Orthodox theological seminary on Halki remain unsolved.
A local mayor's raising the Turkish flag on Imia would be a nationalist
attack on Erdogan, not a Turkish attack on Greece, but ordinary Greeks
would not understand the distinction. Erdogan would react sensibly, but he
and Turkish attitudes to the EU would pay a price for his doing so.
President Bush has less standing to help either side save face than
Clinton had during the Imia crisis of 1996.
As Turkey and the EU lurch through the coming years of uncertainty over
their respective futures, all sides would benefit if Greece and Turkey
reduced the nationalist threat to Erdogan by agreeing, as they could have
years ago, to park their Aegean differences safely with the ICJ in The
Hague.
Top of Page
03/JUN/2005
One of the professional secrets of great-power diplomacy is how much it
resembles dentistry. A visit once every six months would be ideal, but
once a year is all most of us find time for. Private consultations in the
back room are a warning of upcoming pain and expense, not the signal of a
privileged relationship. A good visit is one neither party has any reason
to consider memorable.
When Prime Minister Karamanlis met with President Bush on May 20, there
was no throbbing molar to hasten his visit to Washington. The prime
minister of a NATO ally, currently a UN Security Council member as well,
was happy to make a brief detour on his way to an honorary degree from his
alma mater, if the President had a moment free. The President indeed had a
moment. All parties flossed and brushed well beforehand. The resulting
smiles were impeccable. Whether the smiles were sincere is a question for
philosophers rather than dentists or diplomats.
There are still a handful of ideologues in or near the White House who
rank America's friends by the muscularity of their support in Iraq and
Afghanistan. By that measure, Greece would be due a presidential meeting
about the time the icecaps melt - sooner than we hope, but not very soon.
The Greek government found it hard to deliver the symbolic assistance it
promised. Its Afghanistan-bound field hospital, for example, did not exist
at the time it was offered to NATO, though it does now.
Fortunately, polls of American public opinion confirm the common-sense
message from recent world history: routine diplomatic prophylaxis is again
good U.S. domestic politics as well as prudent foreign policy. When
America's foreign friends signal that a White House snub would hurt them
at home, the State Department asks the President to cut short his mountain
bike circuit by half an hour. Often he will.
Greek journalists assume that Prime Minister Karamanlis must have
traded away something valuable to be rewarded by President Bush with the
assurance that Greece is a "strategic partner." This is an
ungenerous misreading of a fine phrase. India is a strategic partner.
Karzai's Afghanistan is now a strategic partner. The term expresses
warmth, friendship, and overlapping interests without implying close
agreement or any specific legal obligation. It is thus an excellent
diplomatic tool. Presidents use it with distinguished visitors (provided
no U.S. domestic political constituency objects) when praise that
resonates better with Congress, like "firm ally in the Global War on
Terror" or "bastion of democracy," would fall flat with the
foreign audience. Karamanlis could return home with "strategic
partnership" to add to the limited evidence that U.S. policy towards
Greece has changed since the defeat of PASOK. For the Greek-American
community, "strategic partnership" was an especially welcome
gesture after its shock at waking up with the renamed Republic of
Macedonia 48 scant hours after Bush's reelection.
Being a strategic partner does not imply that Greece will show more
than symbolic NATO solidarity in Iraq or Afghanistan -- Souda Bay is
strategic support enough. It does not mean that Karamanlis will drop
Greece's objections to calling FYROM by its inevitable name, or accept a
package deal with Turkey on Aegean issues, or use Greece's limited
diplomatic capital with Serbia to promote an independent Kosovo, or even
press Cypriot President Papadopoulos to divulge the hidden flaws in the
Annan Plan. Nor, of course, will the U.S. sacrifice its own views, which
are mostly pragmatic and unremarkable where Southern Europe is concerned.
Karamanlis had little political room to buy additional U.S. good will.
His visit, invisible in the U.S. like most such visits, was front-page
news in Athens. He could not return home without having raised the
Macedonian name issue. He simply reminded President Bush that Greece has
become in other respects a responsible and potentially useful mid-level
player in the Balkans and Mediterranean. Hemmed in by EU budget deficit
ceilings, Karamanlis could not seduce Bush with grand promises either for
Greece's €500 million Balkan Reconstruction Fund or for America's
elegant but fabulously expensive weapons systems.
Diplomacy is the art of overcoming massive differences of culture,
language, outlook, and interests to build relationships that function
across national borders. Fortunately, traveling politicians yearn to shine
as diplomats and statesmen for their home audience, and their hosts are
honor-bound to reciprocate. Bush and PM Simitis were scarcely soul-mates,
but their relationship proved adequate to preserve basic U.S.-EU ties as
the U.S. plunged into Iraq in 2003. Bush and Karamanlis have enough common
background not to need a rare diplomatic partnership like that of Powell
and Papandreou to keep their relations cordial.
Karamanlis is fully entitled to the sense of virtue that comes with any
voluntary visit to the dentist. The low-key and painless new style of U.S.
diplomacy in Greece is in keeping with the limited content of the
relationship. American tourists are back, thanks to the 2004 Olympics, but
U.S. businesses still look elsewhere. If Karamanlis decides to pursue an
Aegean deal with Turkey, Washington will provide any assistance requested.
If the Karamanlis government wins the lottery or otherwise achieves the
Balkan influence to match its excellent intentions, a solid diplomatic
partnership is in place to make the most of Greece's welcome contribution.
Top of Page
06/MAY/2005
(first AN column)
ON APRIL 19 the Greek parliament ratified the constitution of the
European Union, making Greece the sixth country to do so out of 25. Prime
Minister Karamanlis saw no reason to entrust Europe's future as global
superpower to his fickle voters. Voters in France, however, will deliver
their potentially lethal opinion in a referendum on May 29.
Few Europeans have read the constitution's 448 articles - the table of
contents alone fills 10 pages - much less decoded what this bloated
document implies for their security and prosperity. Opportunists from left
and right have told the French their "No" vote is a chance to
show their disdain for the French government's economic policies and for
the European Commission's opening to cross-border services. Endowing the
EU with superpower institutions - a stronger presidency, a foreign
minister, an EU diplomatic service - to match its size and wealth has not
captured the French imagination. This is predictable. Foreign policy is
the poor stepchild of domestic politics, unless a crisis compels
otherwise.
In 2003, when the constitution's drafters were at work, Iraq offered an
organizing crisis to justify a united Europe. Europeans concluded 40 years
ago from their inability to defeat the rise of nationalism in their
colonies that imperialism had become too ugly and expensive to be a
realistic option. Now the US seemed to think its high-technology
"revolution in military affairs" made it cheap and easy again to
civilize unwilling foreigners by force of arms. If the American
neoconservatives had it right, the door was open to a fresh, frightening
wave of imperialism. The threat was theoretical, not reflecting real US
government intentions, but Europe had a precautionary duty to constitute
itself as a counterbalancing superpower.
Come 2005, however, European fear and anger over Iraq have subsided.
The neoconservatives were indeed deluded, it turned out. As Chirac and
others had predicted, Iraqi insurgents made America's mostly well-meaning
occupation so expensive and unpleasant that no sane person would want to
repeat the experiment elsewhere. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's lean and
lethal military proved ill-configured to hold the ground it seized so
effortlessly. The credibility of US intelligence took a serious blow, and
with it the willingness of foreign leaders to follow America's lead. The
US government reverted to traditional diplomacy, begging allies for ground
troops for Iraq and Afghanistan. Reassured that no new age of imperialism
was at hand, Europeans reverted to domestic politics as usual.
A diplomat at the US embassy in Paris confirmed my suspicion that he
and his colleagues are also under strict orders not to discuss the French
constitutional referendum. The European constitution, the US government
insists, is an internal matter for Europe to decide. This is true, and
yet... President Bush must have some outcome he secretly prefers.
When I was a diplomat, it was clear that different pieces of the US
government wanted mutually incompatible things from Europe. At one end of
the policy spectrum, Congressional populists learned from the
neoconservatives that "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" could be
ignored. For them, Europe's reluctance to embrace a robust role in
policing the planet is a matter not of weak federal institutions or moral
scruples but rather of cynicism and cowardice. No piece of paper, no
matter how thick, would cure cowardice, so the fate of the European
constitution should be beneath America's notice.
At the other end, America's few actual EU experts tend to hope the EU
will play the international role its size suggests. They sighed when
European security needs were ignored in favor of domestic politics. The
1.6 billion euros Greece spent to buy Leopard tanks in 2003 was money
poured down a rathole in terms of Europe's ability to carry out plausible
military missions. But once the diplomatic and military resources of 25 EU
members are coordinated, Europe could enforce the peace in Sierra Leone or
Rwanda - since the US usually will not - without the national hesitations
that cost tens of thousands of lives in the past.
Somewhere in the middle is the pragmatic mainstream, US officials who
want Europe more organized and capable than currently, but not to where it
puts limits on US freedom of action. This group doubts EU member
governments will put aside national self-interest to follow the
constitution roadmap to full superpower status. Dismissing public
hostility toward the US, they count on Tony Blair, "New Europe"
and US supremacy in Nato to protect US interests indefinitely.
America cannot shape the outcome of the French referendum in any case.
Clinton slowed the growth of the United States of Europe by embracing it
openly and, probably, sincerely. Because of his populist political base,
Bush does not have that policy option. Were he to denounce the EU
constitution, he would offer a welcome gift to European federalists, but
he would destroy vital relationships with European partners in the
process. Secretary of State Rice's well-dressed flirtation with global
good citizenship is as far as America will go in subverting European
unity.
It would be ironic if the European constitution met its end in Iraq's
Sunni Triangle, a casualty of America's failed omnipotence. Nationalism is
no less alive and potent in Europe and America than in Iraq. As global
competition for resources mounts, so will pressure to ignore the civilized
rules of that competition. If Europe does not develop the foreign policy
and security institutions to enforce the rules, Europeans will soon come
to regret their current indifference to their fledgling constitution.
Top of Page
