The Progressive Response

The Progressive Response is a publication of Foreign Policy In Focus, a joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies. The project produces Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) briefs on various areas of current foreign policy debate. Electronic mail versions are available free of charge for subscribers. The Progressive Response is designed to keep the writers, contributors, and readers of the FPIF series informed about new issues and debates concerning U.S. foreign policy issues.

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Table of Contents

I. Updates and Out-Takes

TERRORISM: HISTORY DIDN'T BEGIN ON AUGUST 7
by Phyllis Bennis and Martha Honey

CAPITAL FLOWS AND ENVIRONMENT
by Hilary French, Worldwatch Institute

II. Comments

BEN & JERRY'S SUPPORT FOR ISRAELI SETTLERS
by Phyllis Bennis, Fellow, Institute for Policy Studies

I. Updates and Out-Takes

TERRORISM: HISTORY DIDN'T BEGIN ON AUGUST 7
by Phyllis Bennis and Martha Honey

In 1986 Ronald Reagan tried to stop terrorism with missile strikes on Tripoli. They didn't get Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi, but they did kill Qaddafi's three-year-old daughter. Bill Clinton tried in 1996 with missile strikes against Baghdad. Saddam Hussein escaped unscathed, but among the numerous civilians killed was Leyla al-Atar, Iraq's leading woman painter. He tried again last week, sending cruise missiles against suspected terrorist targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. Osama Bin Laden apparently walked away.

Most Washington critics of Clinton's military strikes denounce them only as ill-timed, an effort to use a standing-tall military action to divert public attention from the presidential scandals. But the issue isn't "Wag the Dog." Whatever their timing, the U.S. missile attacks were wrong: morally, politically, legally, and even practically wrong. This type of tit-for-tat retaliation--U.S. cruise missiles to counter terrorist car bombs--however deadly, just doesn't work. Countering terrorism does represent a serious challenge to the U.S. and the international community. But what is being dubbed the Clinton Doctrine (namely, unilateral strikes against supposed terrorist targets) is far more likely to increase terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its citizens.

As a moral question, the U.S. is a global leader and should not accept the terrorist logic of attack/retaliate. If we are indeed a nation of laws, we must be bound by and accept a higher standard of respect for that law --including the understanding that even the most heinous criminals, let alone people living or working near them, do not deserve to be murdered before they are even brought to trial.

Despite efforts to begin history on August 7, the date of the horrifying embassy bombings, the U.S. must be forced to acknowledge its own responsibility in destabilizing this arms-bloated and volatile region. While bin Laden is now portrayed as the world's number one terrorist threat, his relations with the U.S. have a longer history. During the 1980s, U.S. officials hailed bin Laden and his recruits as "freedom fighters" in the CIA-financed war to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan. Bin Laden's associates were trained and armed by the CIA, and the camp in Khost hit by U.S. missiles was a former CIA camp. The U.S. is now suffering "blowback" from arming and training such international criminals and terrorists.

This type of counterterrorism operation reinforces widespread views in the Middle East and Africa that the U.S. exercises a double standard with respect to issues of human rights, political support, retaliation, and more. Opposition to U.S. arm sales to the antidemocratic absolute monarchy in Saudi Arabia, and resentment of American troops there, is hardly limited to bin Laden or other terrorists; it is widespread. Throughout much of the world, there is indignation at the U.S.'s strong support for Israel and failure to advance a genuine Middle East peace settlement. Responding to terrorism with military strikes only deepens those anti-American views.

At the political and diplomatic level, international terrorism requires a multinational response. In the wake of the embassy bombings, the U.S. began working with Kenyan, Tanzanian, and Pakistani authorities to track the bombers and analyze the evidence. The missile strike derailed this initially collaborative investigation--and the FBI has since revealed that none of the evidence collected was used in deciding whether and when to launch the retaliatory strikes.

The U.S. failed to seriously pursue diplomatic efforts that might have borne fruit. In 1996, the U.S. successfully convinced Sudan's repressive Islamist government to expel bin Laden. There is no reason such diplomacy would not work there again, as well as in Afghanistan. Pakistan is desperately eager to please the U.S. in hopes of getting anti-nuclear sanctions lifted. The U.S., working jointly with Islamabad, would be in a much stronger position to pressure the isolated Taliban government, recognized only by Pakistan, to expel bin Laden. U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson's single brief visit to Taliban leaders in Kabul earlier this year was clearly an insufficient diplomatic effort towards arresting bin Laden. In the wake of the U.S. Embassy bombings, further diplomacy was urgently called for.

Legally, the U.S. claims that the missile attacks were covered by Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which permits unilateral military action only in self defense. But Article 51 does not include preemptive or retaliatory strikes. Washington has yet to make available to UN officials (let alone to the American public or our allies) the ostensibly "compelling" evidence on which the self-defense claim is based. Without such evidence, the U.S. stands in continued defiance of the world body, and thus it is hardly surprising that the U.S. remains isolated by its military attack. In all the Middle East only Israel, in all Africa only Uganda, in all of Europe only Britain and Germany offered unequivocal support. Boris Yeltsin is hardly the only world leader fuming at being informed only after the fact.

Further, the Clinton Doctrine now opens the way for what the Times of India calls, the "rule of anarchy." It would legitimate numerous attacks on countries across the globe, including our own. What if, for example, Iranians frightened of Iraq's biological weapons in the 1980s decided to eliminate the factory manufacturing the "precursor chemicals" required for those weapons of mass destruction? Tehran would have sent missiles against the American Type Culture Collection, in Rockville, Maryland, which was then supplying Saddam Hussein's government with biological warfare germs under U.S. Commerce Dept. license. Would the U.S. view such an attack on U.S. territory as legitimate "self defense" for Iran?

And even what little is known raises more doubts than certainties. Mohammed Sadiq Odeh, the leading embassy bombing suspect now in custody, has refused to repeat for American and Kenyan interrogators the link of the bombing to bin Laden that Pakistani authorities say they extracted from him. Some U.S. officials admit his confession in Pakistan may well have been extracted through torture.

As for the Khartoum factory that was targeted, more doubts abound. While U.S. officials are now claiming that soil samples collected from around the factory before the missile strike prove it was manufacturing ingredients to make nerve gas, the London Observer reports that before the missile attack a U.S. reconnaissance mission was sent to overfly the factory in Khartoum to track identifiable trace chemicals linked to the VX precursor. No such traces were found, but Clinton went ahead with the strikes anyway.

As a suspect in a number of international crimes, the priority should be to arrest bin Laden and hold him for trial before an international court. The U.S. failure to make bin Laden's arrest a priority before launching punitive military strikes against his followers matches Washington's rejection this year of the new International Criminal Court, a body created precisely to bring to justice international outlaws, war criminals, terrorists, and major human rights abusers.

So What Should Be Done?

• Terrorism is a global problem; it can only be solved through collaboration with other governments, and it will not be solved overnight. The U.S. must take the lead to pressure those harboring suspected terrorists, including Osama bin Laden, to turn them over to an International Criminal Court or other tribunals with international jurisdiction. Regarding the Kenyan and Tanzanian bombings, investigations, and aftermath, the Organization of African Unity should be involved, as well as influential leaders such as Nelson Mandela. Regarding ongoing terrorist threats, the U.S. needs to work with regional and international institutions, most importantly the United Nations.
• The U.S. needs to assume full medical and financial responsibility for the East African victims of embassy bombings, including ALL those injured and family members of those killed. Whatever the cost, this is both the politically appropriate and morally required response. Efforts must be made to reverse the current perception in Nairobi and elsewhere that the U.S. is preoccupied with protecting only American lives and that others are sacrificed too quickly.
• There must be a serious bottom-up review of U.S. Middle East policy. Arab anger, felt far beyond those few who carry out attacks against U.S. targets, is fueled by widespread popular frustrations with the failed Middle East peace process. Washington needs to retool its regional role, rejecting its short-sighted uncritical backing of Israel's intransigence--which means tackling critical issues such as Israel's nuclear weapons and Saudi Arabia's weapons-bloated absolutism--in favor of a new, more open and more democratic policy. Washington must seize the post-cold war challenge by scaling back on its Middle East military bases, taking the lead in curbing international arms exports to the over-armed region, stopping its covert operations, and supporting instead multilateral peacekeeping missions and diplomatic efforts.

(Phyllis Bennis and Martha Honey are Fellows at the Institute for Policy Studies. Bennis is a Middle East and UN expert and Honey is Co-Director of the Foreign Policy in Focus project.)

CAPITAL FLOWS AND ENVIRONMENT
by Hilary French, Worldwatch Institute

(Ed. Note: Increased flows in capital around the world economy inevitably result in increased degradation of the environment, through growth in manufacturing, extraction of primary resources, and associated waste generation. In her In Focus brief entitled "Capital Flows and Environment," Hilary French notes that the increase in the proportion of private investment heralds a new threat to the environment in the form of reduced accountability. To encourage more responsible private investment, French calls for new regulatory standards to be built into bilateral and multilateral funding. What follows is an extract of the brief, the full text of which can be accessed from the Foreign Policy In Focus website.)

As investors search the globe for the highest return, they are often drawn to places endowed with bountiful natural resources but handicapped by weak or ineffective environmental laws. Many people and communities are harmed as the environment that sustains them is damaged or destroyed--villagers are displaced by large construction projects, for example, and indigenous peoples watch their homelands disappear as timber companies level old-growth forests. Foreign investment-fed growth also promotes western-style consumerism, boosting car ownership, paper use, and Big Mac consumption rates toward the untenable levels found in the United States--with grave potential consequences for the health of the natural world, the stability of the earth's climate, and the security of food supplies.

Yet international capital can bring environmental benefits as well, such as access to cutting-edge technologies that minimize waste generation and energy use. These new processes can help developing countries leapfrog over the most damaging phases of industrialization and avoid the kind of costly cleanup bills that many industrial countries are now saddled with.

Policy reforms are needed to steer private capital flows in a more environmentally sound direction. But the levers of change are shifting: the influence wielded by public aid agencies is waning while private sector clout is on the rise. The amount of private capital flowing into the "emerging markets" of the developing world exploded in the early 1990s, rising from $42 billion at the beginning of the decade to an all-time high of $256 billion in 1997, according to World Bank estimates. Meanwhile, spending on official development assistance fell by nearly a quarter over this period in the face of large government budget deficits in donor countries and declining political support for aid. This shrinking public presence coupled with expanding private flows dramatically changed the complexion of North-South development finance. Whereas in 1990 only 43% of the international capital moving into the developing world came from private sources, by 1997 this share had risen to 85%.

This shift in the sources of capital poses a policy challenge as the private sector is (by definition) less accountable to the public interest than are government agencies. But the challenge is not insurmountable: a growing array of "green" international investment strategies are taking shape in hopes of shifting private capital out of environmentally damaging activities and into enterprises that sustain the natural world rather than degrade it. These initiatives must be launched quickly and on a large scale if they are to turn around a global economy that pumps 17 million tons of climate-warming carbon from fossil fuel burning into the atmosphere every day and extinguishes thousands of plant and animal species annually.

Problems With Current U.S. Policy

The first step in reorienting private capital flows is to track them better, a task made difficult by a paucity of publicly available data. Official development assistance, such as that provided by the World Bank, requires detailed reports spelling out what the money is being spent on--whether it is dams, highways, and other infrastructure projects, social services such as health care and education, or environmental projects such as reforestation and pollution control. But private capital flows are something of a black box. We know they are growing fast, but the available statistics tell us little about what exactly is being financed. Nonetheless, a rough map can be sketched.

Most private funds have flowed to a relatively small group of countries: in the first half of the 1990s, just 12 nations received some three-quarters of all private inflows, with China alone accounting for a sizable share of the total. These 12 countries have an enormous impact on the health of the planet by virtue of their relatively large populations, economies, and land masses.

Countries rich in natural wealth all too often squander this bounty by investing in ill-conceived projects that mine natural resources for the short-term economic gain of political elites at the expense of local peoples and future generations. A wiser long-term strategy would be to funnel capital into economic activities that preserve natural endowments, such as timber operations that are certified as sustainably managed, small-scale ecotourism enterprises, and "bioprospecting" ventures in which pharmaceutical companies pay for the rights to seek out commercially valuable species.

In recent decades, the manufacturing and services sectors have expanded rapidly in many developing countries, making them increasingly attractive targets for foreign investors. The World Bank estimates that manufacturing now accounts for just under half of all FDI flows to developing countries and that services--including construction, electricity distribution, finance, retailing, and telecommunications--constitute more than a third, while the "primary" sector, which includes agriculture, forestry, and mining, now accounts for only some 20% of the total.

From an environmental point of view, the manufacturing takeoff is a double-edged sword. International investment in manufacturing sometimes helps developing countries adopt new technologies that produce less waste and use fewer raw materials than standard machinery, yet it can also bring highly polluting industries that jeopardize human and ecological health.

Toward a New Foreign Policy

The global nature of today's economy means that individual governments have less power than they once did to chart their own environmental courses. The buying preferences of consumers continents away can determine the fate of a country's rainforest, and concerns about international competitiveness are often used to block meaningful environmental reforms. Action at the international level is thus essential.

One approach is to attach environmental conditions to bilateral and multilateral aid programs that support private investments, thereby using a limited amount of public money as an environmental screen to influence far larger pools of private capital. The U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), for instance, provides political risk insurance for private investment. At the urging of environmental groups, OPIC is in the process of phasing in strengthened environmental guidelines that, among other things, require the agency to track and report on greenhouse gas emissions from its power projects and forbid it from underwriting projects in primary tropical forests or other ecologically fragile areas.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank (Eximbank), which provides subsidized loans to other governments for the purchase of U.S. goods and services, has also taken steps to strengthen its environmental policies. In May 1996, Eximbank announced that its environmental guidelines prohibited it from extending export credit support for China's Three Gorges project-a blow to companies such as the heavy equipment manufacturer Caterpillar. But the bank's counterparts in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and Switzerland stepped into the breach, undermining the effectiveness of the U.S. action. Stung by the Three Gorges experience, the U.S. is trying to persuade other donor countries to apply comparable environmental conditions to their bilateral export credit and investment promotion agencies.

At the multilateral level, significant potential clout over the private sector lies in the hands of the World Bank and its two affiliated organizations that underwrite private sector investments, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA). After a decade of pressure from nongovernmental organizations and determined efforts by committed insiders, the World Bank now has an extensive set of environmental and social policies. In theory, all World Bank agencies (including the IFC and MIGA) are bound by these policies. Yet World Bank officials acknowledge that actual operating procedures have sometimes been different in private sector operations. And, by its own admission, the World Bank itself--let alone the IFC and MIGA--has not always followed its own rules.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is another economic institution that needs an injection of environmental sensitivity. The IMF's prominent role in the Asian economic crisis is demonstrating the organization's power while stirring controversy as to the wisdom of its financial advice. Little understood, however, are the profound effects that its economic recommendations have on the ecological health of recipient countries.

The IMF and the World Bank both make structural adjustment loans, in which recipient countries agree to a range of policy reforms in exchange for access to credit. Countries are often encouraged to boost exports in order to generate foreign exchange with which to repay debts. This creates pressure on them to liquidate natural assets in order to come up with the money. Structural adjustment loans also often require countries to cut government spending, which can mean that the budgets of already overburdened environment and natural resource management ministries are cut to bare-bones levels. Although many of the policy changes required under structural adjustment programs contribute to environmental destruction, the IMF and the World Bank could instead choose to use their influence to promote needed reforms, such as reducing environmentally harmful subsidies or implementing environmental taxes.

Environmental considerations also must be integrated into the official forums where the rules of international commerce are now being written, such as the World Trade Organization and the negotiations on the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment. And perhaps the UN should be charged with developing baseline environmental standards for industry comparable to those that the International Labor Organization drafts on matters such as workplace safety and child labor. This effort could build on the World Bank's environmental policies and guidelines, which are already a common point of reference for private investors.

(Hilary French (hfrench@worldwatch.org) is Vice President for Research at the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, DC. She is the author of Worldwatch Paper 139, "Investing in the Future: Harnessing Private Capital Flows for Environmentally Sustainable Development," upon which this brief is based.)

Sources for more information

Focus on the Global South
Email: N.Bullard@focusweb.org
Website: http://www.focusweb.org/

Friends of the Earth
Email: mchan@foe.org
Website: http://www.foe.org/FOE/

National Wildlife Federation
Email: tanner@nwf.org
Website: http://www.nwf.org/international/

Worldwatch Institute
Email: hfrench@worldwatch.org
Website: http://www.worldwatch.org/

World Resources Institute
Email: navrozd@wri.org
Website: http://www.wri.org/iffe/

II. Issues of Debate

BEN & JERRY'S SUPPORT FOR ISRAELI SETTLERS
by Phyllis Bennis

(Ed. Note: In a letter to Ben and Jerry's Homemade, Inc., every progressive's favorite ice cream maker, Phyllis Bennis comments on the company's association with Israeli settlers and the resulting contract for a supply of spring water.)

Perry Odak
Chief Executive Officer
Ben & Jerry's Homemade, Inc.
30 Community Drive
South Burlington, VT 05403-6828

Dear Mr. Odak,

Many of us were not surprised when owners of the Haagen Daz company were revealed to be major supporters of far-right Israeli settler groups in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. After all, your competitor had never claimed to be anything remotely progressive.

But Ben & Jerry's has made its name largely on the basis of a widely held believe that it is DIFFERENT from the other corporations concerned only with bottom line profits. Your company provided a vision of how a company could support workers' and environmental rights, back wide-ranging peace and justice issues, and generally act as a model of what corporate responsibility could look like while still making major league profits.

That vision has now proved false. Once again we consumers find out we have been framed. The announcement in Ha'aretz that you are now purchasing spring water from a settler-controlled company in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, recognized by the world and international law as being illegally occupied by Israel since 1967, demonstrates that any claim of Ben & Jerry to represent anything more than traditionally profit-driven, politically bankrupt corporatism is a lie. Claiming a commitment to "local ingredients" or "local suppliers" cannot justify negotiating a purchase agreement with illegal occupiers, whose product is itself expropriated from the rightful owners of the land.

This is an outrage--not because it's so different from what other corporations do all the time, but precisely because you CLAIM to be something different. For those of us who once believed your company was different, this is appalling. Your generous and appreciated donations of ice cream "Peace Pops" to peace and justice organizations' events now ring sadly hollow.

The prospect of having to organize a consumer boycott against a company we believed to be progressive is indeed a sad one.

But unfortunately, unless your June 7 contract with the Israeli settler owners of Mei Eden mineral water company is cancelled, we will have no alternative but to add Ben & Jerry's to the companies already subject to a wide-ranging European and U.S. boycott because of their trafficking in goods produced on or exported from the Israeli-occupied territories. It will be not only because of the travesty of providing support for a settler-colony responsible for the expulsion of thousands of Syrians and Lebanese from their homes, but as well because of your company's fraudulent claims of progressive credentials. Such a boycott will target precisely the consumers whose purchases have made your "corporate-responsible" profits possible: the progressive community across the country.

I hope you will change your policy, and thus render such a boycott unnecessary.

Sincerely,

Phyllis Bennis
Institute for Policy Studies
733 15th Street NW #1020
Washington DC 20005
tel: (202) 234-9382 ext. 206
fax: (202) 387-7915

(Phyllis Bennis (pbennis@compuserve.com) is a Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, Washington, and an author of past In Focus Briefs for the Foreign Policy Project.)

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This page was last modified on Monday, February 26, 2001 12:00 AM