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The Progressive Response (PR) is a weekly service of Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF)—a "Think Tank Without Walls." A joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies, FPIF is an international network of analysts and activists dedicated to "making the U.S. a more responsible global leader and partner by advancing citizen movements and agendas." We encourage responses to the opinions expressed in the PR and may print them in the "Letters and Comments" section. For more information on FPIF and joining our network, please consider visiting the FPIF website at http://www.fpif.org/.

Tom Barry, editor of Progressive Response, is a senior analyst with the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) www.irc-online.org and codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus. He can be contacted at <tom@irc-online.org>.

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Editor: Tom Barry (IRC)

Table of Contents

I. Updates and Out-Takes

NEOCONSERVATIVE/CHRISTIAN RIGHT POLICY AXIS FOR U.S. MIDEAST POLICY
By Jim Lobe and Tom Barry

U.S. HIT LIST AT THE UN
By Ian Williams

U.S. SECURITY ASSISTANCE TO ISRAEL
By Joseph Yackley and Stephen Zunes

SELF-DETERMINATION ANALYSIS

II. Outside the U.S.

U.S. EYES CASPIAN OIL IN "WAR ON TERROR"
By Armen Georgian

III. Letters and Comments

TIME FOR HEGEMONY, NOT REASONING

RUBBISHING AFRICA

I. Updates and Out-takes

NEOCONSERVATIVE/CHRISTIAN RIGHT POLICY AXIS FOR U.S. MIDEAST POLICY
By Jim Lobe and Tom Barry

(Editor's Note: Excerpted from new FPIF policy analysis available in its entirety at: http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/5545 .)

U.S. policy in the Middle East is tottering precariously, and President George W. Bush, despite his efforts to negotiate provisional freedom for Yasir Arafat, still has some hard decisions to make. Will he pull back from his mostly unconditional support for Ariel Sharon, whom he described recently as a "man of peace," and put real pressure on the Israeli leader to negotiate a land-for-peace bargain with the Palestinians, such as the one put forth by Saudi Prince Abdullah?

Or will he continue to heed the radical, hardline coalition of neoconservatives and Christian Right activists who back Sharon's quest to dismantle the Palestine Authority, and who seek to take the war on terrorism to Baghdad and beyond?

The hawks--from within and outside the administration--bolstered by Powell's failure to mediate a cease-fire, are pressing on with a powerful propaganda campaign to expand the war in the Middle East. Their message is simple: The conflict between Israel and the Palestinian is an integral part of a black-and-white war against terrorism. Upholding this view inside the administration are the hawks clustered mainly around Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld. Others work in the State and Justice Departments and within the National Security Council (NSC). On Rumsfeld's staff, chief hawks--both Jewish neo-conservatives--include Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith. On Cheney's staff, the principals include Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Eric Edelman, and John Hannah. They can also count on the support of Elliott Abrams, who holds a senior position in the NSC. On the outside, key actors include a number of right-wing front groups and think tanks, most notably The Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Center for Security Policy (CSP), and Empower America. These groups, which have overlapping directorates, regularly lobby sympathetic lawmakers, particularly Christian Right forces led by House Majority Whip Tom DeLay.

The hawks' most prominent spokespeople include former drug czar and Empower America co-director William Bennett; former CIA director James Woolsey; Weekly Standard editor and PNAC founder William Kristol; nationally syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer; AEI foreign policy dean, Richard Perle, who also serves as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board; and CSP director Frank Gaffney, who worked under Perle at the Pentagon in the 1980s.

"In the Middle East, America's awe--the key element that gives both us and our Israeli and Arab friends security--can only be damaged by a Bush administration publicly fretting about Ariel Sharon's prosecution of his war against the Palestinian Authority," wrote AEI scholar and former CIA covert operator, Reuel Marc Gerecht, in Kristol's Weekly Standard before Powell's trip. "Though the Near East Bureau at State hates the notion, the tougher Sharon becomes, the stronger our image will be in the Middle East."

According to Gerecht, who directs PNAC's Middle East Initiative, Washington must stop thinking of the Israeli-Palestinian collision as the center of the Middle East. This point is echoed frequently in the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, which has insisted throughout the most recent violence that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is simply a sideshow to the main event in the region, the ouster of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. "America is actually now in a far stronger position to prosecute a war against the Baathist regime in Iraq than it was before the Israeli Defense Forces reoccupied the West Bank," Gerecht recently wrote. "[Washington's] standing in the Arab world, that is, its ability to achieve its strategic goals, has gone up, not down, because of Israel's recent military operations."

This kind of thinking, which prevails among the right-wing radicals in the Pentagon and in Cheney's office, is 180-degrees opposite the analysis provided by the vast majority of Mideast specialists at the State Department and the CIA, as well as by independent experts both in the United States and elsewhere.

But so far, Bush hasn't heeded them, if he's even heard them. So far, Bush has sided with the hawks.

(Jim Lobe <jlobe@starpower.net> writes regularly for Inter Press Service and Foreign Policy In Focus. Tom Barry <tom@irc-online.org> is a senior analyst at the Interhemispheric Resource Center and codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus.)

For FPIF coverage of the influence of Christian Right and neoconservatives on U.S. foreign policy, also see:

Foreign Policy: Face Right
By Tom Barry and Jim Lobe

U.S. Middle East Policy: "Enough is Enough"
By Jim Lobe and Tom Barry

U.S. HIT LIST AT THE UN
By Ian Williams

(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new FPIF Global Affairs Commentary available in its entirety at: http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0204un.html .)

Quietly, and without the fanfare that accompanies the campaign in the mountains of Afghanistan, the administration has begun a long march through multilateral institutions. At the UN and elsewhere, the U.S. has mounted a campaign to purge international civil servants judged to be out of step with Washington in the war on terrorism and its insistence that the U.S. have the last word in all global governance issues.

The first and most prominent to go was Mary Robinson, the former Irish president whose work as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has been acclaimed by human rights groups across the world. Officially, she retired after a one-year renewal of her contract. In fact, the U.S. ferociously lobbied against here reappointment. UN officials and Western diplomats also said she was "difficult to work with"--the usual euphemism for not taking dictation. Most human rights activists see this as precisely her strength in an organization where not rocking the boat seems to be genetically engineered into many officials. The U.S. could not forgive her for her stands on the Middle East issues or for her endorsement last year of the results of the UN's Durban Conference on Racism, which both the U.S. and Israel walked out of. The rest of the world stayed and adopted a toned-down document, and subsequently Washington began its campaign to force Robinson out.

Another recent victim of the U.S. campaign was Robert Watson, the much-respected chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. On April 19, the U.S. administration succeeded in replacing him with Rajendra Pachauri, an Indian economist. The panel is (or perhaps was is the correct tense) an independent scientific body established to assess the degree of climate change and the contribution made by human activities such as burning fossil fuels. The panel's work had come to a consensus, not shared by the Bush administration, that human activity is a factor in climate change. A leaked memo from ExxonMobil had previously asked the White House, "Can Watson be replaced now at the request of the U.S.?" The memo goes on to recommend that the administration "restructure the U.S. attendance at upcoming IPCC meetings to assure none of the Clinton/Gore proponents are involved in any decisional activities." Apparently, the administration heeded ExxonMobil's recommendation. Pachauri himself attributes his selection to being the developing world candidate, but environmental NGOs ascribe it to U.S. lobbying.

The right wing has long had a reflex hostility to international and multilateral organizations. But during the Reagan administration, which was the first time that the right wing exercised such control over U.S. policy, there was the fear that the U.S. could not pull out of the UN and leave it in the hands of its cold war enemy. Today, however, the U.S. has no counterweight at the UN, and the Bush administration officials are unabashedly insisting on exercising the influence that comes from being the world's only superpower. Playing upon its indispensability in this unipolar world, the Bush team is playing hard ball at the UN--in effect, threatening to render the multilateral organization impotent unless it gets its way.

It bodes ill for global affairs the way the administration has managed to achieve these recent coups with little or no public awareness, let alone discussion. In the case of Mary Robinson, the U.S. did fear that any open campaign to unseat her would upset Irish American voters. Instead of tapping its public diplomacy, the administration used stealth tactics against Robinson. Human rights organizations complained, but this administration has successfully sidelined these organizations from foreign policy decisionmaking and now routinely dismisses the concerns of these organizations.

Kofi Annan, himself, may also be targeted soon. Even though he has only just started his second term, and even though he is immensely popular, Kofi Annan has recently become stronger in his public exasperation with Sharon's behavior. Given the recent pattern of arrogant American diplomacy, one cannot help but suspect that, but for Colin Powell and Shimon Peres--who have a strong rapport with the secretary-general--the anti-Iraq and pro-Sharon hardliners in the Bush administration will soon begin a campaign to invite Annan to retire. It's likely that they will first suggest that he could retire with honor and that this decision would be for his own good. If that strategy doesn't work, they will likely accuse him of managerial incompetence and inability to work well with member states combined with yet another threat to withhold dues.

If the U.S. purges continue and rise to higher levels, other UN member nations may regret their pandering to Washington as they see the entire post-World War II framework of multilateralism start to disintegrate.

(Ian Williams <uswarreport@igc.org> writes for Foreign Policy In Focus and is the author of The UN for Beginners.)

U.S. SECURITY ASSISTANCE TO ISRAEL
By Joseph Yackley and Stephen Zunes

(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new FPIF policy brief available in its entirety at: http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol7/v7n03israel.html .)

Unfortunately, rather than focusing on the issues that have derailed the peace process, American assistance is emerging as a disjointed policy that urges a peaceful resolution to the conflict while boosting military aid to Israel. This military aid has been used in the widespread killings of civilians, destroyed large sections of the infrastructure in Palestinian society, and hardened Arab attitudes toward Israel.

The increases in military aid grow out of a central pillar of U.S. policy in the Middle East: strengthening America's "strategic cooperation" with Israel. This cooperation currently centers on two categories of U.S. military-related assistance to Israel, Economic Support Funds (ESF) and Foreign Military Financing (FMF). The larger of these two, FMF, is intended to help Israel finance its acquisition of U.S. military equipment, services, and training. FMF is scheduled to increase by $60 million each year, for a total of $2.04 billion in FY2002, as part of an ongoing plan to phase out ESF support by 2008. Previous discussions about Israel's security needs following peace agreements with Syria and the Palestinians and a withdrawal from the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip foresee an additional $35 billion of U.S. military assistance, raising the potential total to more than $7 billion per year over the next seven years. This is roughly the same amount currently spent by all of the former Soviet republics combined. Such an enormous increase is based on the confusing assumption that peace agreements with once-hostile neighbors somehow make Israel less secure and require a greatly expanded Israeli military.

Already the strongest military power in the region and the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid, Israel does not need additional military assistance. It has one of the most sophisticated, well-equipped, and best-trained armies in the world, and its armed forces are growing faster than those of its neighbors, whose military expenditures decreased during the 1990s. Israel's annual military expenditures are consistently two to three times as high as those of other countries involved in previous Arab-Israeli wars combined, and Israel leads the region in the number of heavy weapons holdings, armored infantry vehicles, airplanes, and heavy tanks. Israel outpaces Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon in every major category of arms spending.

The U.S. must recognize that Israeli security and Palestinian rights are not mutually exclusive, but mutually dependent. Just as the Palestinians will not be granted their rights until Israel's legitimate security needs are recognized, Israel will not be secure until the Palestinians are granted their legitimate rights. The U.S. should maintain its moral and strategic commitment to Israel to ensure its survival and its legitimate strategic interests in defending its internationally recognized borders. At the same time, however, the U.S. must also be willing to apply pressure whenever the Israeli government refuses to make the necessary compromises for peace, which requires withdrawal from the occupied territories, removing colonists from the illegal settlements, sharing Jerusalem, and pursuing a just resolution for Palestinian refugees. This would require an immediate suspension of all military assistance to Israel as long as the Israeli government continues to engage in violations of international human rights standards and international law.

Such a position not only would be morally right and would be in Israel's own security interest, but it would also end the Bush administration's ongoing violation of the Foreign Assistance Act, which forbids security assistance to any government that "engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights" without a waiver [22 U.S.C. Secs. 2034, 2151n].

(Joseph Yackley <joeyackley@hotmail.com> is a recent graduate from the University of Chicago, with master's degrees in Middle Eastern Studies and Public Policy Studies and currently serves as a Robert Bosch Foundation Fellow with a focus on economic development issues in the Middle East.
Stephen Zunes <zunes@usfca.edu> is Middle East editor for the Foreign Policy in Focus Project and serves as an associate professor of Politics and chair of the Peace & Justice Studies Program at the University of San Francisco.)

SELF-DETERMINATION ANALYSIS

Self-Determination In Focus (online at www.selfdetermine.org) has two new pieces of analysis available, one presenting an overview of indigenous self-determination issues in Latin America and another looking at ethnic conflict in Côte d'Ivoire.

Indigenous Self-Determination in Latin America
http://www.selfdetermine.org/regions/latam.html

By Melina Selverston-Scher

Scholars and politicians in Latin America have long expressed concern about what they have called the "indigenous problem." The debate continues today, although the challenge is most commonly framed as protecting cultural minorities from the potentially negative impacts of development while guaranteeing that they enjoy the benefits of it. The future of political and economic development in Latin America is increasingly tied to the aspirations for more control voiced by indigenous communities. It will be incumbent upon national political leadership to find ways to respond to indigenous calls for self-determination. This may be achieved through legal frameworks that recognize indigenous rights in national constitutions, through indigenous representatives in government, or through different types of autonomy. Most important for the success of any of these models, however, will be demonstrating to indigenous people that the national government not only represents but is equally loyal to all of the ethnic groups in the country.

Côte d'Ivoire Conflict Profile
http://www.selfdetermine.org/conflicts/cotedivoire.html

By Laura E. Boudon

The continuing ethnic violence has had a definite impact on the Ivoirian economy. Foreigners working on Southern plantations, including 300,000 Burkinabes, fled the country in horror and thus were not available to harvest the coffee or cocoa crops. International aid agencies have been quite concerned about the situation and are holding back needed financial assistance. Ethnic tensions in Côte d'Ivoire are thus no longer just a passing phenomenon and need to be seriously addressed by the government and the country as a whole.

II. Outside the U.S.

(Editor's Note: FPIF has a new component called "Outside the U.S.," which aims to bring non-U.S. voices into the U.S. policy debate and to foster dialog between Northern and Southern actors in global affairs issues. Please visit our Outside the U.S. page for other non-U.S. perspectives on global affairs and for information about submissions at: http://www.fpif.org/outside/index.html.)

U.S. EYES CASPIAN OIL IN "WAR ON TERROR"
By Armen Georgian

(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new FPIF Global Affairs Commentary, available in its entirety at: http://www.fpif.org/outside/commentary/2002/0204oil.html .)

The arrival of U.S. troops in Georgia on April 29 raised as many glasses in Ankara and Baku as it did jitters in Moscow. Touted as a new front in the "war on terror," the Bush administration is in reality scrambling for Caspian oil in a bid to oust Russia from its traditional backyard. Washington insists its "train and equip force'" of 10 combat helicopters and 150 military instructors is solely intended to help Georgia combat Islamic radicals in the lawless Pankisi Gorge, allegedly a safe haven for al Qaeda militants and their Chechen allies. But other motives became apparent, although largely unnoticed by the Western press when Georgian Defense Ministry official Mirian Kiknadze told Radio Free Europe on February 27: "The U.S. military will train our rapid reaction force, which is guarding strategic sites in Georgia--particularly oil pipelines." He was referring to the embryonic Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) project, set to reduce Georgia's and Azerbaijan's energy reliance on Russia and bring the southern Caucasus into the U.S. fold.

Russia's military establishment and domestic opinion are clearly furious, although President Putin has played soft on the issue, delighted to see his Chechen campaign rebranded as a "war on terror" in return for supporting the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan.

The Bush administration has particularly compelling reasons to back BTC. Vice President Dick Cheney was until 2000 chief executive of Halliburton Co., an oil services company named a finalist last year to bid on engineering work in the Turkish sector of the route. National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was a director of Chevron, a lynchpin of the BTC consortium with extensive operations in Azerbaijan. Richard Armitage is a former co-chairman of the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce.

Bush family adviser James A. Baker III has especially thick oil ties to the region. Baker, who spearheaded George W. Bush's victory in the Florida election dispute, heads U.S. law firm Baker Botts, which represents a consortium of companies drilling and exploring the Caspian, including Exxon-Mobil, Pennzoil, BP, and Unocal. Baker sits on the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce advisory council, as did Cheney.

While America has successfully used the "war on terror" to wrestle the oil- and gas-rich central Asian region from Moscow, the south Caucasus could prove a much tougher nut to crack. Pankisi is not the only unruly enclave beyond Tbilisi's writ. The breakaway leaderships of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, fearful the U.S. deployment could also be used against them, have already appealed to Moscow for associate status within the Russian Federation. Such a move, which would seriously undermine the pro-Western Georgian President Eduard Shervardnadze, is widely supported by the Russian parliament and public opinion. In addition, Moscow could foment separatism in Adzharia and Dzhavaketia, where ethnic Armenians might seek to disrupt the oil earnings of arch-foes Turkey and Azerbaijan.

"There is a danger that Shervardnadze will lose control of Georgia. Russia will fight more actively for influence in the region," said political analyst Otar Kharabadze. In early March a top Russian general ominously remarked: "Georgia had better be aware it cannot exist without Russia." If this veiled threat is carried out, Washington's Great Game in the south Caucasus could end up as little more than a pipe-dream.

(Armen Georgian <Georgetown8@aol.com> writes for Agence-France Presse in London and writes regularly on international issues.)

III. Letters and Comments

TIME FOR HEGEMONY, NOT REASONING

Re: "U.S. Foreign Policy: Face Right," by Tom Barry and Jim Lobe," (online at http://www.fpif.org/papers/02right/index.html). It seems you have a fairly basic view of history, or are a left-wing ideologue with visions of Utopia that would make Thomas Moore blush; perhaps both. The U.S. is practicing a hegemony that has been a constant in the world since the earliest dynasties. This is not due to an over-agressiveness on the part of the U.S., as much as it has been for many empires throughout time. The world needs a leader; the fact that many in the world reject that particular leader's ideals is irrelevant to the fact. Politics simply cannot exist in a power vacuum; to suggest otherwise is to ignore history as it has unfolded.

That the U.S. should adopt the Clinton-era philosophy toward foreign policy is debatable at best; since 9/11, it is laughable to suggest this. Clinton's policy was a derivative of much of the ideology practiced in a decaying and powerless Europe. We all know what incessant reasoning and discussions got Chamberlain, don't we?

- Mike Ellis <mike66ssm@sault.com>

RUBBISHING AFRICA

Re: "Obstacles to Change in Africa: NEPAD, Zimbabwe, and Elites" by Ian Taylor at http://www.fpif.org/outside/commentary/2002/0204nepad.html. With friends like these, who needs enemies? This article makes for depressing reading and is reminiscent of the Western media, which is always out to bash and discredit Africa. He goes ahead to discredit respected African elected leaders as "elites." This amounts to rubbishing the African electorate. The low esteem in which Taylor holds Africans is further depicted in his shabby treatment of Africa observer teams. What makes him believe what the other observer teams said, or was he an observer himself; in which case he should tell us about his experiences for comparison purposes? And anyway, what morality does the West have of observing elections in Africa? Do Africans interfere in the elections of the West, say of the U.S. or France?

Zimbabwe's elections were in no way a test case for NEPAD. The latter is already a winner in that it is already a recognition by Africans that their destiny lies in their hands, not in the hands of the increasingly repugnant and retrogressive Washington-based World Bank and IMF. Yes, let Africa Renaissance (for the record this is a vision of former South African President Nelson Mandela, not of President Thabo Mbeki as the author claims) and NEPAD be declarations and talking shops; these are but the first steps to a long and torturous liberation of Africa by Africans, led by their elites. Yes, elites, not only because they are the ones at the forefront and entrusted with the running of African countries but also because "the person on the street" mostly does not have the insights or capabilities to envision the big picture. In fact it would be a blessing in disguise for the North to ignore NEPAD "as an irrelevancy" because we have had enough of their unworkable meddling. British and Canadian Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Jean Chretien may be interested in Africa but only toward their selfish ends. How else would one explain Blair's "whirlwind visit to strategic African countries just before the Commonwealth meeting," and concomitant "pushing and shoving and cajoling and pleading"? The overdrive by Jean Chretien for a successful G8 agenda is not missed by many.

If the Zimbabwe elections drove a wedge and led to a sobering up of relations between the elites of the North vis-à-vis of Africa, then that in itself is a success of the elections. It is high time Africa stopped being deluded by the sweet blah blah of the North, and see the wolves in the sheep-skins for what they are. To Africa, the recent meeting of the Africa heads of state in Senegal is more important than the G8 meeting--if only because there is commitment, and the issues at hand are not viewed or tossed about according to other parties' whims. Suffice it to say Mbeki's and President Olesegun Obasanjo's treatment of the tripartite final announcement inspires Africans' confidence in them as leaders with the times.

Democracy, human rights, good governance, et al. are all very good. Unfortunately, these cannot be viewed in isolation. Zimbabwe's land issue and the U.S. after September 11 have something in common--namely that there are more basic and pertinent issues to democracy and human rights.

Africa Renaissance and NEPAD may be media buzzwords, but they are slowly getting into Africans' subconscious. It may take twenty, fifty, or even a hundred years, but Africa will finally live these dreams, maybe as an African civilization akin the Egyptian civilization. It is gratifying that our friend Taylor notes that "Africa is indeed willing and able to police itself;" he should only appreciate that our leaders are a mirror of that willingness and ability.

- David Ng'ang'a <01214540@brookes.ac.uk>

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