China's Private Party
The Communist Party has made strenuous efforts to keep signs of its enduring power out of sight to the Chinese public and the rest of the world. Richard McGregor on the secrets of the world's largest political machine and its role in Beijing's growing clout.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704250104575238590027868792.htmlOn the desks of the heads of China's 50-odd biggest state companies, amid the clutter of computers, family photos and other fixtures of the modern CEO's office life, sits a red phone. The executives and their staff who jump to attention when it rings know it as "the red machine," perhaps because to call it a mere phone does not do it justice. "When the 'red machine' rings," a senior executive of a state bank told me, "you had better make sure you answer it."
The red machine is like no ordinary phone. Each one has just a four-digit number. It connects only to similar phones with four-digit numbers within the same encrypted system. They are much coveted nonetheless. For the chairmen and women of the top state companies, who have every modern communications device at their fingertips, the red machine is a sign they have arrived, not just at the top of the company, but in the senior ranks of the Party and the government. The phones are the ultimate status symbol, as they are only given out—under the orders of the Party and government—to people in jobs with the rank of vice minister and above.
The phones are encrypted not just to secure party and government communications from foreign intelligence agencies. They also provide protection against snooping by anyone in China outside the party's governing system. Possession of the red machine means you have qualified for membership of the tight-knit club that runs the country, a small group of about 300 people, mainly men, with responsibility for about one-fifth of humanity.
The modern world is replete with examples of elite networks that wield behind-the-scenes power beyond their mere numerical strength. The United Kingdom had the "old-boy network," originally coined to describe connections between former students of upper-class, non-government schools; Japan has the Todai elite, graduates of the law school of Tokyo University, an entry point into the long-time ruling Liberal Democratic Party, the Finance Ministry and business. The U.S. has the Ivy League, the Beltway, K Street and the military-industrial complex, and a host of other labels to signify the opaque influence of well-connected insiders.
None can hold a candle to the Chinese Communist Party, which takes ruling-class networking to an entirely new level. The red machine gives the party apparatus a hotline into multiple arms of the state, including the government-owned companies that China promotes around the world these days as independent commercial entities. As a political machine alone, the Party is a phenomenon of awesome and unique dimensions. By mid-2009, its membership stood at 76 million, equal to about one in 12 adult Chinese.
China's post-Maoist governing model, launched by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, has endured many attempts to explain it. Is it a benevolent, Singapore-style autocracy? A capitalist development state, as many described Japan? Neo-Confucianism mixed with market economics? A slow-motion version of post-Soviet Russia, in which the elite grabbed productive public assets for private gain? Robber-baron socialism? Or is it something different altogether, an entirely new model, a "Beijing Consensus," according to the fashionable phrase, built around practical, problem-solving policies and technological innovation?
Few describe the model as communist anymore, often not even the ruling Chinese Communist Party itself.
How communism came to be air-brushed out of the rise of the world's greatest communist state is no mystery on one level. The multiple, head-spinning contradictions about modern China can throw anyone off the scent. What was once a revolutionary party is now firmly the establishment. The communists rode to power on popular revulsion against corruption but have become riddled by the same cancer themselves. Top leaders adhere to Marxism in their public statements, even as they depend on a ruthless private sector to create jobs. The Party preaches equality, while presiding over incomes as unequal as anywhere in Asia.
The gap between the fiction of the Party's rhetoric ("China is a socialist country") and the reality of everyday life grows larger every year. But the Party must defend the fiction nonetheless, because it represents the political status quo.
The Party's defense of power is also, by extension, a defense of the existing system. In the words of Dai Bingguo, China's most senior foreign policy official, China's "number one core interest is to maintain its fundamental system and state security." State sovereignty, territorial integrity and economic development, the priorities of any state, all are subordinate to the need to keep the Party in power.
The Party has made strenuous efforts to keep the sinews of its enduring power off the front stage of public life in China and out of sight of the rest of the world. A decade into the 21st century, the Beijing headquarters of the big Party departments, whose power far outstrips that of mere ministries, still have no signs outside indicating the business inside and no listed phone numbers. For many in the West, it has been convenient to keep the Party backstage too, and pretend that China has an evolving governmental system with strengths and weaknesses, quirks and foibles, like any other. China's flourishing commercial life and embrace of globalization is enough for many to dismiss the idea that communism still has traction, as if a Starbucks on every corner is a marker of political progress.
Peek under the hood of the Chinese model, however, and China looks much more communist than it does on the open road. Vladimir Lenin, who designed the prototype used to run communist countries around the world, would recognize the model immediately. The Chinese Communist Party's enduring grip on power is based on a simple formula straight out of the Leninist playbook. For all the reforms of the past three decades, the Party has made sure it keeps a lock-hold on the state and three pillars of its survival strategy: control of personnel, propaganda and the People's Liberation Army.
Since installing itself as the sole legitimate governing authority of a unified China in 1949, the Party and its leaders have placed its members in key positions in every arm, and at each level, of the state. All the Chinese media come under the control of the propaganda department, even if its denizens have had to gallop to keep up in the Internet age. And if anyone decides to challenge the system, the Party has kept ample power in reserve, making sure it maintains a tight grip on the military and the security services, the ultimate guarantors of its rule. The police forces at every level of government, from large cities to small villages, have within them a "domestic security department," the role of which is to protect the Party's rule and weed out dissenting political voices before they can gain a broad audience.
China long ago dispensed with old-style communist central planning for a sleeker hybrid market economy, the Party's greatest innovation. But measure China against a definitional checklist written by Robert Service, the veteran historian of Soviet Russia, and Beijing retains a surprising number of the qualities that characterized communist regimes of the 20th century.
Like communism in its heyday elsewhere, the Party in China has eradicated or emasculated political rivals; eliminated the autonomy of the courts and press; restricted religion and civil society; denigrated rival versions of nationhood; centralized political power; established extensive networks of security police; and dispatched dissidents to labor camps.
The Party in China has teetered on the verge of self-destruction numerous times, in the wake of Mao Zedong's brutal campaigns over three decades from the 1950s, and then again in 1989, after the army's suppression of demonstrations in Beijing and elsewhere. The Party itself suffered an existential crisis after the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states in 1992, an event that resonates to this day in the corridors of power in Beijing. After each catastrophe, the Party has picked itself off the ground, reconstituted its armor and reinforced its flanks. Somehow, it has outlasted, outsmarted, outperformed or simply outlawed its critics.
Few events symbolized the advance of China and the retreat of the West during the financial crisis more than the touchdown in Beijing of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in February 2009. Previous U.S. administrations, under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, had arrived in office with an aggressive, competitive posture towards China. Before she landed, Ms. Clinton publicly downplayed the importance of human rights. At a press conference before leaving, she beamingly implored the Chinese government to keep buying U.S. debt, like a traveling saleswoman hawking a bill of goods.
Deng Xiaoping's crafty stratagem, laid down two decades earlier, about how China should advance stealthily into the world—"hide your brightness; bide your time"—had been honored in the breach long before Ms. Clinton's arrival. China's high-profile tours through Africa, South America and Australia in search of resources, the billion-dollar listings of its state companies (including PetroChina and the Industrial & Commercial Bank of China) on overseas stock markets, its rising profile in the United Nations and its sheer economic firepower had made China the new focus of global business and finance since the turn of the century. China's star was shining more brightly than ever before, even as its diplomats protested they were battling to be heard on behalf of a relatively poor, developing economy.
The implosion of the Western financial system, along with an evaporation of confidence in the U.S., Europe and Japan, overnight pushed China's global standing several notches higher. In the space of a few months in early 2009, the Chinese state committed $50 billion in extra funding for the International Monetary Fund and $38 billion with Hong Kong for an Asian monetary fund; extended a $25 billion loan to cash-strapped Russian oil companies; set aside $30 billion for Australian resource companies; offered tens of billions more to various countries or companies in South America, central and Southeast Asia, to lock up commodities and lay down its marker for future purchases. In September, China readied lines of credit of up to $60 to $70 billion for resource and infrastructure deals in Nigeria, Ghana and Kenya.
Beijing's ambition and clout were being lit up in ways that would have been unthinkable a few years previously. The Chinese central bank called for an alternative to the U.S. dollar as a global reserve currency in early 2009, and reiterated its policy as the year went on. France obediently recommitted to Chinese sovereignty over Tibet to placate Beijing's anger over the issue, after Beijing had canceled an E.U. summit in protest at Paris's welcome for the Dalai Lama. On its navy's 60th anniversary, China invited the world to view its new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines off the port of Qingdao.
The giant Chinese market had become more important than ever. Just ahead of the Shanghai auto show in April 2009, monthly passenger car sales in China were the highest of any market in the world, surpassing the U.S. A month later, Wang Qishan and a team of Chinese ministers met Catherine Ashton, then the E.U. trade commissioner, and about 15 of Europe's most senior business executives in Brussels to hear their complaints about Chinese market access. Sure, Mr. Wang conceded after listening to their problems over a working lunch, there are "irregularities" in the market. "I know you have complaints," he replied. "But the charm of the Chinese market is irresistible." In other words, according to astonished executives in the meeting, whatever your complaints, the market is so big, you are going to come anyway. Even worse, many of the executives realized that Mr. Wang was right.
The rise of China is a genuine mega-trend, a phenomenon with the ability to remake the world economy, sector by sector. That it is presided over by a communist party makes it even more jarring for a Western world which, only a few years previously, was feasting on notions of the end of history and the triumph of liberal democracy.
In just a single generation, the party elite has been transformed from a mirthless band of Mao-suited, ideological thugs to a wealthy, business-friendly ruling class. Today's Party is all about joining the highways of globalization, which in turn translates into greater economic efficiencies, higher rates of return and greater political security.
In the absence of democratic elections and open debate, it is impossible to judge popular support for the Party. But it is indisputable that support for the Party has grown with reform since Mao's death. The Chinese Communist Party and its leaders have never wanted to be the West when they grow up. For the foreseeable future, it looks like their wishes will all come true.
Richard McGregor is deputy news editor and former Beijing bureau chief for the Financial Times. This essay is adapted from "The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers."
The Pretender
By Anthony Julius
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/books/review/Julius-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3Over the past 10 years, Paul Berman has been exploring a theme: the repudiation by liberal intellectuals of their values and ideals. The theme has been elaborated in several books — “Terror and Liberalism,” “Power and the Idealists” and now “The Flight of the Intellectuals.” Berman himself is a man who identifies “with the liberal left.”
It is a good theme, and it has attracted the attention of other writers too — the British journalist Nick Cohen, for example, examined it in his estimable 2007 book “What’s Left? How the Left Lost Its Way.” Indeed, so fertile is this idea, so appealing is it as an object of inquiry, we may even speak of a distinct category of recent books devoted to elaborations of it. Richard Wolin’s “Seduction of Unreason,” on the intellectual romance with fascism, is a distinguished instance, written from the left. Paul Hollander’s “End of Commitment,” on intellectuals, revolutionaries and political morality, is another, this time from the right. The many books written in the last 20 years about the German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s complicity with Nazism represent further instances of the genre.
The masterwork, however, is still Julien Benda’s “Treason of the Intellectuals.” This book, written in 1927 by one of the leading French intellectuals of the early 20th century, may be regarded as the inaugural work of the line. Berman’s own books can usefully be read as restatements (in their own register, of course) of Benda’s polemic against his fellow intellectuals.
For Benda, the intellectual betrays his vocation when he compromises his commitment to universalist values. The temptation to make such compromises, he argues, lies principally in the appeal of national sentiment, to which intellectuals are quick to subordinate themselves. And the role they assume as nationalists is to conceptualize political hatreds. Benda, a supporter of Dreyfus, deplored the eagerness of some French writers to play this degraded, ignominious role.
For Berman, the contemporary intellectual’s temptation is somewhat differently constituted. It consists of the following elements: the false identification of liberal values with an oppressive West, and of political Islamism with an oppressed third world; an unreflective, unqualified opposition to every exercise of American power; a certain blindness regarding, or even tenderness toward, contemporary expressions of anti-Semitism.
It is against these betrayals of vocation — colored in certain cases by self-hatred and defeatism — that Berman sets himself. And though there is a slight implication of civilizational decline in his work, as if to lament that intellectuals today are not what they once were, his arguments are always well made. He is an elegant, ironic writer and addresses his readers with an engaging, if at times slightly leisurely, assurance.
Berman has two targets. First, he takes on the Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, whom he contrasts with the admirable and courageous secularist Ayaan Hirsi Ali. (Ramadan, a professor at Oxford, was recently permitted to enter the United States after being barred for six years under the Patriot Act.) And second, Berman challenges the commentators Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash for their qualified endorsements of Ramadan and their disparagements of Hirsi Ali, noting the “tone of contempt that so frequently creeps across discussions” about her, the “sneering masculine put-downs of the best-known feminist intellectual ever to come out of Africa.”
In short, Berman finds the widespread admiration of Ramadan to be misplaced. Berman regards Ramadan as a sinister figure with a sinister agenda, and at the same time deplores the intimidation and violence directed at that “subset of the European intelligentsia — its Muslim free-thinking and liberal wing especially” — who “survive only because of bodyguards.” This, Berman concludes, has been unheard of in Western Europe since the fall of the Axis. “Fear — mortal fear, the fear of getting murdered by fanatics in the grip of a bizarre ideology — has become, for a significant number of intellectuals and artists, a simple fact of modern life.”
Berman identifies duplicity as part of the problem with Ramadan, that is, his tendency both to say different things to different audiences and to speak with such equivocality as to be understood in different ways by those audiences. There is “a dark smudge of ambiguity” that “runs across everything he writes on the topic of terror and violence.” In consequence, Ramadan cannot be trusted to know his own mind, and therefore cannot be trusted when he claims to speak it. Further, his language of accommodation, his project of defining a minority Islam at peace within liberal democracy, emerges as somewhat phony, the more hard-line stance that he advocates from time to time more accurately reflecting his true views. This duplicity is now well documented. The French journalist Caroline Fourest has written a whole book on the subject, with a title that discloses its essential argument, “Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan.” Berman contributes to this exposure of Ramadan and offers his own perspective on some instances that Fourest herself writes about.
Another part of the problem with Ramadan lies in his political and family pedigree, which he has not repudiated, but which he misrepresents. It is in his analysis of this pedigree that Berman’s book really takes off. Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a “terrible fact” that Ramadan’s “personal milieu — his grandfather and his father, his family contacts, his intellectual tradition — is precisely the milieu that bears the principal responsibility for generating the modern theory of religious suicide-terror.” Like his grandfather, Berman writes, Ramadan desires a return to a distant age, one characterized by religious purity, in which all dissent will necessarily be absent. It is an imagined past, of course, and an impossible political program. And it supposes the ideal intellectual posture to be “supine.” Furthermore, “in a modern political world shaped by the rise of the Islamists,” Berman writes, “even some of the most attractive of thinkers tend, if they have come under an Islamist influence, to have a soft spot for suicide terrorism. And a soft spot for anti-Semitism.”
On the question of anti-Semitism, Berman writes about Ramadan’s “brief and angry essay” of 2003 in which he attacked a group of intellectuals he designated as Jewish, criticizing them for forsaking their vocation as intellectuals in favor of support for Israel, and of Zionism. Berman demonstrates that the criticism is bogus, three times over. First, Ramadan went looking for Jews and made mistakes — not all the named intellectuals were in fact Jewish. Second, he muddled support for Israel with the recognition of a growing contemporary anti-Semitism, a “new Judeophobia.” And third, since he is not himself a Benda-style intellectual, but rather the spokesman for a specific community, it is not open to him to adopt Benda’s universalist perspective. Actually, it is far worse than that. Ramadan’s own “commitment to ethical thinking,” Berman concludes, “turns out to be worthless.” “What is surprising,” remarked one of the intellectuals Ramadan attacked, “is not that Mr. Ramadan is anti-Semitic, but that he dares to proclaim it openly.” (Ramadan would no doubt say in response that he has spoken out against anti-Semitism before both Western and Muslim audiences.)
Berman, by contrast, has a fair claim to being regarded as the Benda of our time. In “The Flight of the Intellectuals” he continues his work of redeeming the good name of intellectuals by exposing the corrupt among them.
Anthony Julius is the author, most recently, of “Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England.”
Don't Let Iran Blackmail The World
As the international community stands by, Tehran comes closer to unveiling its nukes.
By Christopher Hitchens
http://www.slate.com/id/2254073/pagenum/all/#p2Two events last week make the Obama administration's gradualist approach to Iran seem rather too leisurely. They also put us on notice of two possible future developments, one of them extremely menacing, the other somewhat encouraging.
On May 15, we were subjected to a tirade by Ayatollah Mohammad Bagher Kharrazi, leader of Iran's Hezbollah party and proprietor of the newspaper of the same name, which carried his incendiary article. The need of the hour, intoned the ayatollah, was for a "Greater Iran" that would assume hegemonic control over much of the Middle East and Central Asia (stretching from Afghanistan to Palestine, according to the broad-brush ambitions disclosed by his polemic). This new imperialism would, he urged, possess two very attractive attributes. It would abolish the Jewish state, and it would assist in the arrival of the long-awaited Mahdi, or hidden imam, whose promised reign of perfection has been on hold since his abrupt disappearance in the ninth century.
The second development took place in the material world and in the here and now. Iran's Kurdish population managed to bring off a well-organized general strike in all the major cities of their long-oppressed region. Schools and shops and bazaars were closed, and the claim that the strike was pretty solid seems to be well-supported by the evidence. The occasion for the strike was the brutal execution of five anti-regime activists, four of them Kurdish. This is the only tactic that the Islamic Republic of Iran seems to have left at its disposal, as the anniversary of last year's military coup by the Revolutionary Guards approaches.
Just as those guards are actually the embodiment of a vicious counterrevolution and an unstable dictatorial status quo, so is Ayatollah Kharrazi's call for a Shiite imperialism profoundly reactionary. (Nothing, however, will stop our media from referring to him, and to people like him, as "radical.") His call for the abolition of Israel is of what one might call a routine nature—as is his ardent wish for the advent of the Mahdi—but what's of more immediate interest is his railing against the "cancerous tumors" of Sunni Islam, especially as represented by Iran's Arab neighbors in the Gulf.
Nor is this a new noise, or something to be explained away by mere crowd-pleasing demagogy. It isn't very long since the quasiofficial Tehran newspaper Kayhan declared that the nearby island state of Bahrain was in reality a province of Iran, a position more or less openly held by several members of the hard-line wing of the Khamenei-Ahmadinejad regime. It is true that a large proportion of Bahrain's population is ethnically Persian or Shiite, or both. But it is also true that a large proportion of Iran's Kurdish population is Sunni and by definition not Persian.
These warlike statements from the ultra-right in Tehran, then, invite a possible carnival of sectarian warfare, instigated by Iran both at home and beyond its borders. One might dismiss it as raving, were it not for the fact that any future Iranian government—and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has announced that he expects his successors will be "10 times more revolutionary"—will have possession and control of nuclear weapons and of the means to deliver them.
Almost all comments about this appalling outcome, which we seem to have sleep-walked our way into half-accepting, are focused on the "existential" threat to Israel. Not to discount this, or the anti-Jewish paranoia and Holocaust denial that goes along with it, but there are three insurances possessed by Israel that are not possessed by, say, Bahrain or Lebanon or the United Arab Emirates (the latter also the object of territorial claims by Iran, arising from three disputed islands that it already occupies). The most obvious is Israel's own nuclear arsenal. The second most obvious, but very seldom emphasized, is the existence of the Palestinians. It will not be possible for the Iranian mullahs to devise a weapon of mass destruction that kills only Jews but that spares, for example, the Al-Aqsa mosque. It might be possible for them to devise a fatwa that licenses the mass slaughter of Sunni Arab Muslims—the Palestinian majority—and leaves it to Allah to welcome his own to paradise, but this seems far-fetched even in Kharrazi's terms. (Conclusion: The sooner there is a Palestinian state with a share of Jerusalem as its capital, the safer Israel will be.)
To come to the third assurance, then, the United States is committed to fight in defense of Israel. But are we sure that this would be equally true of Bahrain and the UAE? Suppose that the Iranian armed forces storm the smaller statelets of the Gulf and then say, Want to guess how many nukes we have? It would be as if Saddam Hussein had not made the calamitous mistake of invading Kuwait before his reactors and missiles were ready.
It seems to me obvious that the Iranian mullahs do not desire to immolate their profitable system of corruption and exploitation in a last-ditch fight with states that can actually obliterate them. There may be some Mahdi-fanciers who dream of this apocalypse, and they should not be completely discounted. But what could be clearer in the medium run than that Tehran wants the bomb in order to exert nuclear blackmail against other Muslims?
When the day comes that Tehran can announce its nuclear capability, every shred of international law will have been discarded. The mullahs have publicly sworn—to the United Nations and the European Union and the International Atomic Energy Agency—that they are not cheating. As they unmask their batteries, they will be jeering at the very idea of an "international community." How strange it is that those who usually fetishize the United Nations and its inspectors do not feel this shame more keenly. In the meantime, the very force in Iran that holds the keys to the secret nuclear sites is also the force that rapes its prisoners, humiliates its womenfolk, represses its "voters," empties its universities, and murders its national minorities. The urgent task of statecraft is to evolve a policy that can synchronize the disarmament demand with the idea that all Iranians, Kurdish and Azeri as well as Persian and Armenian and Jewish, can have a say in their own "internal affairs." No sign of any such statecraft exists. Welcome, then, to a world in which we will have to be fawningly polite to men like Ayatollah Kharrazi.
Venezuela's Hugo Chavez Allegedly Helped Colombian, Spanish Militants Forge Ties
By Juan Forero
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/19/AR2010051905472.htmlFor two years, Colombian officials have accused Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez of providing arms and sanctuary to Marxist rebels intent on toppling Colombian President Álvaro Uribe, Washington's closest ally in a turbulent region.
Now, based on documents and witness testimony, Chávez is facing fresh accusations that his government has gone well beyond assisting the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC. Documents seized from two subversive groups, along with information provided by former Colombian guerrillas, suggest that Venezuela facilitated training sessions here between the FARC and ETA, a separatist group in Spain that uses assassinations and bombings in its effort to win independence for the northern Basque region.
The evidence led Judge Eloy Velasco of the National Court in Madrid to level charges of terrorism and conspiracy to commit murder in March against a Chávez government official, Arturo Cubillas, and a dozen members of the FARC and ETA. Spanish authorities want Venezuela to extradite those accused, but so far the Chávez government has not responded to Velasco's international warrant.
The latest revelations, largely based on information collected by Spanish investigators in Colombia, Venezuela and France, prompted Arturo Valenzuela, the State Department's assistant secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs, to declare in a congressional hearing in March that the Obama administration is "extremely concerned" by the allegations.
With Chávez hamstrung by harsh economic conditions, some in the U.S. Congress worry that the Venezuelan president could increasingly radicalize and forge closer links with subversive organizations or nations such as Iran, Sudan and Belarus.
"As he gets more bogged down domestically by the natural consequences of capricious rule, we are likely to see more troubling relationships," Carl Meacham, senior aide to Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said by phone from Washington.
Chávez strikes back
The new spotlight on Venezuela's alleged links to subversives has been so uncomfortable to Chávez that he has warned that Spain's multibillion-dollar investments here could suffer. Critics in Venezuela have also been intimidated for speaking out about the FARC or ETA.
When Oswaldo Álvarez Paz, an opposition figure here, publicly expressed support for Velasco's investigation in a television interview, he was arrested and charged with spreading false information.
"This government does not endorse nor support any terrorist group," Chávez said in March soon after Velasco's indictment. "We have nothing to explain to anyone."
Chávez critics have long asserted that his government could be aiding groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. But this is the first time judicial authorities outside Colombia have leveled accusations that link Venezuela's government with terrorist groups.
"There is nothing like this in the world, showing support for organizations that are declared terrorist groups," said Gustavo de Arístegui, a Spanish commentator and author of the book "Against the West," which details the anti-Western stand of Chávez and his allies, including Cuba's Fidel Castro and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Colombian authorities who have sifted through documents seized from three rebel commanders in 2008 and 2009 said they discovered that ETA operatives met with FARC guerrillas in rural camps from 2003 to 2008. Those camps were located outside Machiques, this cattle-raising town in Venezuela's northwestern Zulia state, as well as farther south in sparsely populated Apure state, according to Colombian government documents.
Colombian security service officials say ETA members taught bombmaking techniques to the explosives experts of at least five FARC units. Velasco, in his complaint, said that among those who facilitated the meetings in Venezuela was Cubillas, a Basque exile who had arrived in the country in 1989 and was absorbed by a small Basque community in Caracas. Cubillas, until recently an official in the state's National Land Institute, could not be reached for comment.
Ex-guerrillas speak
Two former FARC guerrillas who disarmed and now live freely in Colombia said in interviews that they saw ETA operatives in FARC camps outside Machiques in 2008.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity because they fear retribution for having cooperated with Colombian authorities, the former rebels described how Venezuelan military officers accompanied ETA operatives to the camps. The training, the rebels said, included how to build rockets and car bombs.
"They would talk about how they use them in Spain -- how they hid them under the cushions in cars," the older rebel, who is 23, said of the ETA explosives.
Colombian authorities said the FARC has in recent years begun activating car bombs with cellphones, a tactic long perfected by ETA. Authorities say they are also increasingly seeing remote-controlled land mines.
"The ramifications of this happening in territory we do not control is that the FARC increased its capacity to get new technology and modernize," said a high-ranking security services official in Colombia.
ETA benefited by taking advantage of Venezuela's isolated jungle camps to test weapons that could not be fired in Spain, said Florencio Domínguez, an expert on ETA in Bilbao, Spain. "They develop new tactics, new mechanisms, share experiences -- that's what ETA's terrorism entails, and it threatens the security of Spanish citizens," Domínguez said.
Velasco's criminal complaint also alleges that the FARC asked ETA to assassinate prominent Colombians in Spain. No one was killed, but the targets included President Uribe and Antanas Mockus, a former Bogota mayor now running for president in Colombia.
Colombian and Spanish authorities say that among those ETA closely tracked in Spain was former Colombian president Andrés Pastrana, who lived in Madrid for more than three years after he left office in 2002.
"President Chávez needs to give us an explanation of what happened," said Pastrana, who now lives in Bogota. "I left Colombia because of security, and now I learn that I was a target of ETA."
Obama Is Weakening America
The president's new nuclear weapons policy is just the latest (should we call it “Jimmy-Cartesian”?) indication that he is determined to hasten the country’s decline, writes Tunku Varadarajan.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-04-06/obama-embarrassed-by-america/full/Consider me unimpressed. Barack Obama’s ballyhooed “Nuclear Posture Review” has turned out, in truth, to be more “posture” than “review.”
As has been pointed out by a prominent parser of all things nuclear, the new policy actually changes very little: We weren’t going to nuke Brazil before the review and we’re still asserting the right to nuke North Korea if we need to. And even my nuclear-layman’s eye detects the thrust of platitude in the president’s assertion that, henceforward, the U.S. would “only consider the use of nuclear weapons in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.” Does the president mean to tell us that his predecessors were free to consider the use of nukes in humdrum circumstances to defend trivial interests?
I jest here, of course, but I despair, too. I despair of this latest episode of gestural theater designed to make the U.S. look exquisitely reasonable (should we call it “Jimmy-Cartesian”?), but which in truth results in the U.S. looking flaccid, or worse, complacent. After all, who gains from a presidential posture that has, in effect, stigmatized our most potent deterrent?
In terms of foreign policy—or, better put, foreign clout—the U.S. is going through a startling period of auto-emasculation. Barack Obama has discarded his predecessor’s big stick—the wielding of which should have confirmed the flaws not of big sticks but of his predecessor—and replaced it with a mission of almost messianic outreach to our foes and most adamant competitors (while, at the same time, snubbing allies like Britain, Israel and India; Robert Kagan has a doughty essay on this in The Washington Post.)
Observing Obama’s foreign policy, one comes away with the impression that he is profoundly embarrassed by American exceptionalism: We are a country like any other, and let no one tell us otherwise. He also views America’s international decline as irreversible: His instinctive response is to accommodate the U.S. to the forces that have led to this decline, since to resist them would not merely be futile, but an affront to the multi-polar sensibilities of all those who, in foreign chanceries and international institutions, watch America closely for any trace of unilateralist recidivism. (Of course, it is OK to be unilateralist in the formal renunciation of strategic options, as happens with any nuclear self-denial; otherwise, multinational solidarity is always to be preferred, even when it leads to the backing of anti-American forces, as has happened in Honduras.)
In the Obama narrative, America has been a reckless source of trouble for the world because of its arrogant interventionism. Obama’s solution, in the words of Charles Hill, a professor at Yale, is the following: “Close out the wars, disengage, and distance ourselves in order to carry out the real objective: the achievement of a European-style welfare state. Just as Reagan downsized government by starving it through budget cuts, Obama will downsize the military-industrial complex by directing so much money into health care, environ-o-care, etc., that we, like the Europeans, will have no funds available to maintain world power. This will gain the confidence of those regimes adversarial to us as they recognize we will no longer be a threat to them and that we will acquiesce in their maintenance of power over their people.” All will be well with the world.
Obama’s foreign policy has two pillars: conciliation as a tool for peace (defined as lending a close ear to every recalcitrant nation, while abjuring any American right to be censorious); and an avowed preference for pragmatism over any values-based evangelism (in effect, the elevation of pragmatism to the status of directive principle). Commentators have observed that there is an element of Bush repudiation in Obama’s foreign policy. I would go further: Bush repudiation is not “an” element. It is “the” element.
To be fair, this is exactly the way George W. Bush viewed, and repudiated, Bill Clinton—and did so with a mulish refusal to entertain policies that were at odds with the neocon vision of Pax Americana. Recall that Bush, at first, spoke contemptuously of humanitarian intervention and said that he’d only pursue the most “vital” national interests abroad (ironic, since that is the gist of Obama’s repudiation of Bush). But Bush went on to overturn Clinton on every issue: He termed China a “strategic competitor” while Clinton viewed it through the lens of commercial diplomacy; he jettisoned all the emphasis on “globalization,” with its opportunities and threats (disease, global warming, etc.), and exchanged geo-economics for geopolitics; he turned his back on the U.N., while Clinton was usually working with it; he ditched, entirely, the Middle East “peace process,” which Clinton was addicted to; and finally, the most tectonic shift of all: He intervened militarily in countries where he saw threats to the U.S., whereas Clinton had merely Cruise-missiled empty tents and aspirin factories.
As Bush did to Clinton, so Obama has done to Bush. But the visceral displacement is not working, mostly because the other side—to wit, the rest of the world—is determined to have a say in international relations too, especially when faced with a complaisant Washington. Obama can profess his multilateralism till he’s azure in the face, but—as Kagan and others have pointed out—other countries have their own particular interests, and will sell nuclear reactors to Iran and arms to Venezuela, no matter how compelling Obama’s family history is.
There is also an unseemly side to the pragmatism that is Obama’s international leitmotif. Paradoxically for a man who incarnates the progress of civil liberties in his own country, the president has literally banished human rights (that quintessentially liberal and Democratic concern) from U.S. foreign policy—just because Bush took up the cause. Of rights in China, Egypt, and elsewhere, the Obama administration has spoken only with an excessive, and dispiriting, circumspection.
So one wonders—as Putin embraces Chavez and Karzai plays host to Ahmadinejad; as Russia asserts the right to repudiate any nuclear-arms reduction treaty and China gives us the bird on the yuan; as the alliance with India languishes and the one with Britain experiences unprecedented atrophy; as Israel expresses acrid disagreement with us and Japan seeks to rip pages out of its postwar rulebook—what all the pragmatism has really, truly accomplished…
…other than give our delighted adversaries a free pass and our friends a very rude wakeup call.
Tunku Varadarajan is a national affairs correspondent and writer at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a research fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and a professor at NYU’s Stern Business School. He is a former assistant managing editor at The Wall Street Journal.
The Poet Versus The Prophet
On standing up to totalitarian Islam
Mark Goldblatt
http://reason.org/news/show/1009978.htmlI got to know the poet Allen Ginsberg towards the end of his life. Not very well, just a nodding acquaintance, but after he died I attended a memorial in his honor at the City University Graduate School. At that service, his personal assistant related a story about Ginsberg’s reaction to the death sentence pronounced on the novelist Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. Rushdie’s “crime,” you’ll recall, was writing a provocative, perhaps even blasphemous novel inspired by the life of Muhammad called The Satanic Verses.
Though I might be screwing up a few details, the gist of the story was as follows: Soon after news of the fatwa broke, Ginsberg and his assistant climbed into the back seat of a taxi in Manhattan. After a glance at the cab driver’s name, Ginsberg politely inquired if he was a Muslim. When the cabbie replied that he was, Ginsberg asked him what he thought about the death sentence on Rushdie. The cabbie answered that he thought that Rushdie’s book was disrespectful of Islam, and that the Ayatollah had every right to do what he had done. At this point, according to his assistant, Ginsberg, one of the gentlest men ever to walk the planet, flew into a rage, screaming at the cabbie as he continued to drive, “Then I shit on your religion! Do you hear me? I shit on Islam! I shit on Muhammad! Do you hear? I shit on Muhammad!” Ginsberg demanded that the cabbie pull over. The cabbie complied, and, without paying the fare, Ginsberg and his assistant climbed out. He was still screaming at the cabbie as the car drove off.
I’ve had a couple of weeks now to think about Ginsberg cursing out that cabbie, and cursing out Islam and Muhammad. You see, I live in Manhattan, three blocks from Times Square. As near as I can determine, I was walking with a friend about thirty feet from the car bomb on May 1st right around the time it was supposed to detonate. Except for the technical incompetence of a Muslim dirtbag named Faisal Shahzad, I and my friend would likely be dead now. Note the phrase: “Muslim dirtbag.” Neither term by itself accounts for the terrorist act he attempted to perpetrate; both terms, however, are equally complicit in it. It might have been a crapshoot of nature and nurture that wrought a specimen like Shahzad, but it was Islam that inspired him, that gave his fecal stain of a life its depth and its justification. Why is that so difficult to admit?
Let me ask the question another way: Where’s the rage? Why won’t anyone say in public what Ginsberg said in the back seat of that cab? If Islam justifies, or is understood by millions of Muslims to justify, setting off a bomb in Times Square, then I shit on Islam.
There are times for interfaith dialogue, for mutual respect and compassion. This isn’t one of them. Shahzad’s car bomb was parked in front of the offices of Viacom, the parent company of the Comedy Central, which airs the program South Park. Last month, the creators of South Park decided to poke fun at the Prophet Muhammad—just as they’d poked fun at Moses and Jesus many times in the past. Death threats followed. It’s too early to connect the Times Square bomb plot to the South Park blasphemy, but police have not ruled it out.
If Shahzad was offended by an animated cartoon and decided to defend the Prophet’s name by killing hundreds of civilians—mothers with their babies in strollers, wide-eyed teenagers in tour groups, husbands and wives out for a night on the town—then I’ll say, along with the poet, I shit on Muhammad.
Americans characterize our collective deference towards the feelings of Muslims as “political correctness.” The phrase may be apt with respect to certain ethnic and religious minorities, but our tip-toeing around Islamic sensibilities is nothing more than plain, old-fashioned cowardice. MSNBC stooge Lawrence O’Donnell, for example, repeatedly slandered Mormonism during the 2008 presidential campaign as a sidebar to his creepily obsessive verbal jihad against then-candidate Mitt Romney. But when asked by radio host Hugh Hewitt whether he would insult Muhammad the way he’d insulted Joseph Smith, O’Donnell replied with rare candor: “Oh, well, I’m afraid of what the... that’s where I’m really afraid. I would like to criticize Islam much more than I do publicly, but I’m afraid for my life if I do.... Mormons are the nicest people in the world. They’ll never take a shot at me. Those other people, I’m not going to say a word about them.”
That’s the problem in a nutshell. But it’s not just O’Donnell’s problem. It’s our problem. America’s problem. The West’s problem. We lack the moral courage to walk the walk, to put our individual lives on the line in order to defend the principles of free thought and free expression—the very principles that allowed the Judeo-Christian West to leave the Islamic East in the dust, literally and figuratively, three centuries ago.
When Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered for producing a short movie critical of Islam’s treatment of women in 2004, where were the public screenings of the film? When Muslims in several countries rioted against pen and ink images of Muhammad printed in a Danish newspaper in 2005, where were the public billboards of those sketches? And when the creators of South Park trotted out the Prophet in a ridiculous bear costume, and received death threats in return, where were the mass-produced tee shirts of that image?
I’ll take a size-medium, cotton if possible, and I’ll wear it in Times Square.
Since 2001, many Americans have asked how they can contribute in a direct way to the war against totalitarian Islam. Now we have an answer. If it’s legal, and likely to offend the radicals, just do it. That seems straightforward enough. But how many of us will have the nerve to stand up to a million or so Muslim dirtbags, and to scores of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of their fellow travelers and psychic enablers, and say in unison, “You want to kill the Enlightenment, you’re going to have to come through me.”
Mark Goldblatt’s new novel, Sloth, has nothing to do with Islam, but he is pleased to announce that the cover image of a cockroach is in fact Muhammad. You can tell because his antennae form the letter “M.”
The Fruits of Weakness
By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/05/21/the_fruits_of_weakness_105676.htmlIt is perfectly obvious that Iran's latest uranium maneuver, brokered by Brazil and Turkey, is a ruse. Iran retains more than enough enriched uranium to make a bomb. And it continues enriching at an accelerated pace and to a greater purity (20 percent). Which is why the French foreign ministry immediately declared that the trumpeted temporary shipping of some Iranian uranium to Turkey will do nothing to halt Iran's nuclear program.
It will, however, make meaningful sanctions more difficult. America's proposed Security Council resolution is already laughably weak -- no blacklisting of Iran's central bank, no sanctions against Iran's oil and gas industry, no nonconsensual inspections on the high seas. Yet Turkey and Brazil -- both current members of the Security Council -- are so opposed to sanctions that they will not even discuss the resolution. And China will now have a new excuse to weaken it further.
But the deeper meaning of the uranium-export stunt is the brazenness with which Brazil and Turkey gave cover to the mullahs' nuclear ambitions and deliberately undermined U.S. efforts to curb Iran's program.
The real news is that already notorious photo: the president of Brazil, our largest ally in Latin America, and the prime minister of Turkey, for more than half a century the Muslim anchor of NATO, raising hands together with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the most virulently anti-American leader in the world.
That picture -- a defiant, triumphant take-that-Uncle-Sam -- is a crushing verdict on the Obama foreign policy. It demonstrates how rising powers, traditional American allies, having watched this administration in action, have decided that there's no cost in lining up with America's enemies and no profit in lining up with a U.S. president given to apologies and appeasement.
They've watched President Obama's humiliating attempts to appease Iran, as every rejected overture is met with abjectly renewed U.S. negotiating offers. American acquiescence reached such a point that the president was late, hesitant and flaccid in expressing even rhetorical support for democracy demonstrators who were being brutally suppressed and whose call for regime change offered the potential for the most significant U.S. strategic advance in the region in 30 years.
They've watched America acquiesce to Russia's re-exerting sway over Eastern Europe, over Ukraine (pressured by Russia last month into extending for 25 years its lease of the Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol) and over Georgia (Russia's de facto annexation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia is no longer an issue under the Obama "reset" policy).
They've watched our appeasement of Syria, Iran's agent in the Arab Levant -- sending our ambassador back to Syria even as it tightens its grip on Lebanon, supplies Hezbollah with Scuds, and intensifies its role as the pivot of the Iran-Hezbollah-Hamas alliance. The price for this ostentatious flouting of the U.S. and its interests? Ever more eager U.S. "engagement."
They've observed the administration's gratuitous slap at Britain over the Falklands, its contemptuous treatment of Israel, its undercutting of the Czech Republic and Poland, and its indifference to Lebanon and Georgia. And in Latin America, they see not just U.S. passivity as Venezuela's Hugo Chavez organizes his anti-American "Bolivarian" coalition while deepening military and commercial ties with Iran and Russia. They saw active U.S. support in Honduras for a pro-Chavez would-be dictator seeking unconstitutional powers in defiance of the democratic institutions of that country.
This is not just an America in decline. This is an America in retreat -- accepting, ratifying and declaring its decline, and inviting rising powers to fill the vacuum.
Nor is this retreat by inadvertence. This is retreat by design and, indeed, on principle. It's the perfect fulfillment of Obama's adopted Third World narrative of American misdeeds, disrespect and domination from which he has come to redeem us and the world. Hence his foundational declaration at the U.N. General Assembly last September that "No one nation can or should try to dominate another nation" (guess who's been the dominant nation for the last two decades?) and his dismissal of any "world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another." (NATO? The West?)
Given Obama's policies and principles, Turkey and Brazil are acting rationally. Why not give cover to Ahmadinejad and his nuclear ambitions? As the U.S. retreats in the face of Iran, China, Russia and Venezuela, why not hedge your bets? There's nothing to fear from Obama, and everything to gain by ingratiating yourself with America's rising adversaries. After all, they actually believe in helping one's friends and punishing one's enemies.
The Great Hezbollah Snipe Hunt
Michael J. Totten
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/totten/297276John Brennan, deputy national security adviser for homeland security, has come up with a new way to waste the foreign-policy establishment’s time — locate the so-called “moderate elements” within Hezbollah and somehow promote them.
“There is [sic] certainly the elements of Hezbollah that are truly a concern to us what [sic] they’re doing,” he said. “And what we need to do is to [sic] find ways to diminish their influence within the organization and to try to build up the more moderate elements.”
There are no moderates within Hezbollah, at least not any who stand a chance of changing Hezbollah’s behavior. Sure, the terrorist militia has sent a handful of its members to parliament, as Brennan says, and once in a while they sound more reasonable than its secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, but these people are employees. They don’t make policy.
If you want to catch a glimpse of Hezbollah’s org chart, just rent a car in Beirut and drive south. You’ll see billboards and posters all over the place in the areas Hezbollah controls. Some show the portraits of “martyrs” killed in battle with Israel. Others show the mug shots of Hezbollah’s leadership, most prominently Nasrallah and his deceased military commander, truck bomber, and airplane hijacker Imad Mugniyeh. Alongside the pictures of Hezbollah’s leaders, you’ll also see Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the two “supreme guides” of the Islamic Republic regime in Iran.
It’s obvious, if you know who and what you’re looking at, that Hezbollah is still subservient to Khamenei. His face is almost as ubiquitous as that of Nasrallah and the deceased faqih Khomeini himself. Hezbollah’s state-within-a-state doesn’t even look like it’s in Lebanon. It looks like, and effectively is, an Iranian satellite. Iran’s heads of state appear everywhere down there, while Lebanon’s heads of state are personae non grata.
I’ve met those you might call moderate supporters of Hezbollah, Lebanese citizens who believe Hezbollah is there to defend Lebanon from Israel rather than to attack — which is not at all what anyone at the top thinks. Even if second-tier leaders were less belligerent, it wouldn’t matter. The organization takes its order from Tehran. Hezbollah won’t change until its masters change in Iran, and the U.S. is no more able to “build up” any imagined moderates within its ranks than it is able to replace Khamenei’s hated dictatorship with the Green Revolution.