by Charlie Edwards | Apr 4, 2008 | Off topic
British readers of Global Dashboard may think the headline is a description of Britain’s relationship with the US. But you would be wrong. Kevin Rudd, the new Australian Prime Minister has apparently brought shame to the billabongs and indignity to the ‘bush capital’ with his mock salute to the US President. This may be the greatest storm-in-a-tea-cup moment since John Lewis (a department store in the UK) stopped selling their own brand starch but to an Australian electorate that was promised they would no longer be subservient to the world’s only remaining supower it is a slap in the face or as the aussies like to say a snag short of a barbie…
by Richard Gowan | Mar 29, 2008 | Global system, Influence and networks, Middle East and North Africa, North America
The current edition of the Columbia Journalism Review should be required reading for foreign policy wonks as well as aspiring hacks. It has a great piece on how marines in Iraq turned to a blogger in New Jersey to track the patterns of insurgent attacks – as well as a thoughtful dismissal of indie documentaries on the war. Best of all is the cover story, which explains how the U.S. print media have followed the administration’s line on Iran, including this account of how the Iranian offer of a “grand bargain”in May 2003 has been kept out of the news.
Whatever its inspiration, Iran’s offer put nearly everything on the table, from support for Hezbollah to Iran’s nuclear energy program. It has since been dubbed the “Grand Bargain.” The exact provenance of the offer wasn’t initially clear. It came sans letterhead via a fax from the Swiss ambassador to Iran—Washington’s designated middleman for communications. But the offer does appear to have been serious.
The offer wasn’t an easy story for journalists to nail down. The Iranians who had crafted a peace offering to the “Great Satan” had every incentive to stay mum, as did an administration in Washington that had little interest in negotiating. But the Financial Times published a short piece by diplomatic correspondent Guy Dinmore in July 2003 sketching out the overture and the U.S.’s lack of interest. “We are not reaching out at this point,” a State Department official told Dinmore.
And there the story sat. The first follow-up didn’t come for nearly a year, until Dinmore himself wrote another, more detailed piece in which he clarified that the fax was actually the culmination of a series of feelers. The added details still did not set off a rush for follow-up. The next story on Iran’s interest in a deal didn’t appear until the fall of 2004, roughly eighteen months after Dinmore’s first report, in The Washington Post. That story, the first to refer to a “Grand Bargain,” included more intriguing revelations:
• Through Swiss Ambassador Tim Guldimann, Tehran indicated a desire to discuss its nuclear program.
• The offer held the outlines of a “Grand Bargain,” but Washington balked. “We’re not interested in a grand bargain,” then U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton said.
• Over eighteen months, the countries periodically discussed their mutual interests in Afghanistan and Iraq. But a Bush administration policymaker said “instructions were clear” to the U.S. negotiators: “Don’t bring up the nukes.”
All of which were mentioned roughly sixty paragraphs into the Post piece. The story itself, written in the run-up to the 2004 presidential elections, was a lengthy (and stinging) assessment of the administration’s nonproliferation strategy. There’s very little to criticize in the Post’s effort. The story’s reporters—Dafna Linzer and Barton Gellman—simply happened across some fine nuggets as part of a larger investigation.
What is surprising was (again) the lack of follow-up. Few other reporters seemed interested in the evidence of Iran’s apparent peace overtures and the U.S.’s recalcitrance. The first headline about any of this in a U.S. paper wouldn’t come for another year and a half, nearly three years after the Financial Times first revealed those overtures. (That story was published in February 2006 by a freelancer, Greg Beals, in Long Island’s Newsday.)
Reporters seemed interested in the story and later—when a source began providing documentary proof—some tried to write it. But “editors slashed it down to something like the last paragraph of a larger story,” says Trita Parsi, the Iran expert and former congressional staffer who provided the documents. “It was something that went against people’s assumptions.”
Through the rest of 2006, there appears to have been one piece devoted to the offer, in The Washington Post—it ran on page A16. Even though the offer had never really made news, it was considered old news.
New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof decided to write about the proposals in early 2007. Kristof says he, too, was “concerned about the possibility of a military encounter. So I started doing some reporting.” Kristof eventually added more detail showing that the Iranians had not simply sent the offer through the Swiss, but had also approached the State Department, and had sent an offer to the White House itself. Writing about the various versions of the offer, Kristof concluded “neo-cons killed [an] incipient peace process.”
No story about the “Grand Bargain” ever appeared in the news pages of the Times.
by Alex Evans | Mar 14, 2008 | North America
When I saw the headline of James Carville’s FT article today – “Time to halt America’s political hara-kiri” – my heart sank. Surely, I thought, not another sanctimonious counterblast from Team Clinton moralising about Samantha Power having the temerity to call their queen a ‘monster’.
Silly me. Duh – this is the Ragin’ Cajun we’re talking about, after all: the man who met Paula Jones’ claims of sexual harassement by Bill Clinton with the succint epithet, “Drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there’s no telling what you’ll find”.
So it should not surprise us that he’s appalled that Samantha Power had to resign. Rather like Dustin Hoffman’s character in Wag the Dog (“This is nothing! During the filming of ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ three of the horsemen died two weeks before the ending of principle photography. This is nothing, this is nothing…”), Carville’s seen far worse than this before:
I think back to the 1992 Bill Clinton campaign, in which I played a role. The morning after the New Hampshire primary, Paul Begala, my colleague, began belittling the victory of Senator Paul Tsongas by arguing that Mr Clinton’s comeback was a much bigger story. In doing so, Mr Begala called Mr Tsongas a “son of a bitch”. Mr Clinton asked him to write an apology note but also requested that it not affect his aggressiveness. The story lasted one day.
Later in the campaign, my then girlfriend and now wife Mary Matalin called my client “a philandering, pot-smoking draft dodger”. Naturally, someone made a perfunctory call for her to resign which got nowhere, and we all got a good laugh and moved on.
Near the end of that campaign, George H.W.Bush, the president, boldly asserted of Mr Clinton and Al Gore that “my dog Millie knows more about foreign affairs than these two bozos”. Thank God nobody asked Mr Bush to resign. Life as we knew it went along quite nicely because it was all part of that entertaining, rough and tumble endeavour we know as politics.
It has always been that way. In the late 1950s, Earl Long, the then governor of my home state of Louisiana and in my view its most courageous politician since the second world war, referred to one of his political enemies as “nothing but a little pissant”. Or consider the election of 1828, in which surrogates for John Quincy Adams called Andrew Jackson’s wife a bigamist and his mother a prostitute. And that was before television.
So for heaven’s sake, he concludes: “Ms Power, come back to work. New York Times, get out of these candidates’ way and let them run for president. Everybody take a deep breath. And if somebody somewhere refers to their rival as a little pissant, do not sweat it. Nobody seems to even know what that is.”
by Richard Gowan | Feb 28, 2008 | Conflict and security, North America
This is now nearly a day late, but I can’t resist juxtaposing two stories from Tuesday’s New York Times – stories which oddly enough, the NYT ran entirely separately. Put them together though, and you may find the magic equation for who will win in November. Story #1 concerned John McCain’s cheerful admission to journalists that “he needed to convince the American people that the troop escalation in Iraq was working and that American casualties there would continue to decline. If he did not, he said, “I lose” the election.”
Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, made clear that he believed his prospects in November would rest in large measure on the way the situation in Iraq played out.
“If I may, I’d like to retract ‘I’ll lose,’ ” he said. “But I don’t think there’s any doubt that how they judge Iraq will have a direct relation to their judgment of me.”
Mr. McCain said he believed opinion was shifting to his point of view, referring to a recent USA Today poll that, he said, showed that “now the majority of Americans believe the surge is succeeding.”
Fair enough. Now here’s story #2: the Pentagon has projected that U.S. troop levels in Iraq will still be at 140,000 in July – that’s 8,000 more than the pre-surge figure. And, judging by comments from the Joint Chiefs’ Head of Operations, the numbers may stay nice and high:
General Ham stressed that his projected number of 140,000 was subject to change depending on security conditions, but it was the first time the Pentagon had publicly estimated the total.
Asked if the total would be below 132,000 by the time President Bush leaves office next January, General Ham said, “It would be premature to say that.”
In other words, the military strategy in Iraq is likely to favor Mr McCain all the way through to November. No surprise, then, that he and Barack Obama have spent the last day trading insults on Iraq. But please don’t take my welcome for the European parliament’s new report on securing Iraq to be an indirect McCain endorsement – the Dashboard remains studiously neutral.
by Richard Gowan | Feb 23, 2008 | Conflict and security, Europe and Central Asia
While everyone still seems to be aghast that Kosovo’s declaration of independence somehow hasn’t resulted in unrestrained Sweetness and Light flooding across the Western Balkans, the general media line that “we are teetering on the edge of a precipice” isn’t entirely sustainable. Yes, sustained violence by the Kosovo Serbs has made life exceedingly difficult for the international presence. And yes, the assault on the U.S. embassy in Belgrade is a reminder that this isn’t just about a few weeks of posturing and rhetoric – people are very angry.
And as I noted a few days ago, the Kosovo Serbs may have identified clever tactics to exploit NATO’s weaknesses. But for all that, I’d still be pretty satisfied with how things have gone if I were a Kosovo Albanian. Five reasons why:
- The thuggish faction among the Kosovo Albanians has been kept in check: it’s clear that a lot of the Serb provocations over the last week have been aimed at getting the Kosovo Albanians to reply in kind. Before independence, UN officials almost all assumed that “some idiot will burn down a Serb’s house in week one”. That would give Belgrade a huge publicity boost. But that hasn’t happened – yet.
- The thuggish faction in Serbia is winning all the attention: Belgrade’s best hope for managing the crisis was to keep looking like the injured party. The huge peaceful rally that preceded the assault on the U.S. embassy was a good example of how to get that message across: a nation mourns, etc. But then a few cretins go after the embassy, and the headline is: a nation riots. No wonder that moderate President Boris Tadic and his allies have been lamenting “one of Belgrade’s saddest days”.
- Russian rhetoric is already starting to look bankrupt: there’s been much excitement because Russia’s ambassador to NATO has talked of using “brute force” if the EU and NATO break with the UN. Well, perhaps we are on the road to World War III, but another interpretation is that Moscow is actually pretty short on leverage and has thus had to play this card extremely early. Remember, Boris Yeltsin warned in 1999 that a NATO intervention in Kosovo would result in “a European war for sure and maybe a world war.” New crisis, same old play-book – even if the smell of vodka is less these days.
- The Europeans aren’t making utter fools of themselves: things looked bad at the start of the week when Spain signaled that it couldn’t support independence, but Spanish NATO troops have still been involved in handling disturbances. The big question was whether Germany would waver – it hasn’t. I’m not as confident as Daniel Korski that the EU has crossed a rubicon, but it hasn’t turned tail either.
- Lots of money is coming Kosovo’s way: welcoming Kosovo’s independence, George Bush pledged $335 million in aid – that’s about three times the level of U.S. aid last year. And there’ll be more to come from the EU. Of course, much of it will disappear one way or another, but would you say no?
It may all go horribly wrong tomorrow, or in a week, or a month or whatever. But don’t be fooled by all the shots of burning border-posts – by the (admittedly low) standards of post-Yugoslav state formation, this isn’t a bad start.
