The Progressive Response

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

BUSH PLAYS SHELL GAME WITH AFRICAN LIVES
By Salih Booker

G8: FAILING MODEL OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
By Tom Barry

A CURE FOR THE CIA'S DISEASE
By Melvin Goodman

II. Outside the U.S.

PRESIDENT BUSH THE MARTYR
By Sam Bahour and Michael Dahan

III. Letters and Comments

POPULATION GROWTH ALSO A FACTOR

SERIOUS OVERSIGHT

"RETURN" TO JORDAN

I. Updates and Out-takes

BUSH PLAYS SHELL GAME WITH AFRICAN LIVES
By Salih Booker

(Editor's Note: The following Global Affairs Commentary is also available at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0206aids.html .)

On the eve of a meeting of rich country leaders in Canada, President Bush has brought out a "new initiative" promising $500 million to prevent transmission of HIV/AIDS from mothers to children. Intended to stave off the embarrassment of coming empty-handed to a summit trumpeted as focusing on Africa, the White House initiative is in fact a cynical move to derail more effective action against AIDS.

With a bipartisan congressional coalition poised to approve an additional $500 million or more in AIDS funding for fiscal year 2002, President Bush first put the squeeze on Republican senators to cut the total back to $200 million, half of which could go to the Global AIDS Fund and half for bilateral programs to cut mother-to-child transmission. Then he offered his plan, which claims the $200 million as his own while only promising to ask Congress for another $300 million two years from now. His plan would allow no additional money for the Global Fund.

The administration justifies the smaller amounts and the go-slow timetable by the need to first show "results." But, with 8,000 people around the world dying of AIDS daily (some 6,000 of them in sub-Saharan Africa), the results of Bush's stalling action are crystal-clear: more dead people.

Demonstrably successful anti-AIDS programs run by governments, nongovernmental organizations, and mission hospitals are starved for funds. Fewer than 2% of AIDS sufferers in sub-Saharan Africa, including pregnant mothers, have access to anti-retroviral drugs that can save lives. The Global AIDS Fund, which is estimated to require some $10 billion a year, is already out of funds less than halfway through its first year, while the U.S. has supplied less than a tenth of the $3.5 billion a year that would be its fair share.

When the issue is saving African lives, the administration says "Let's wait." In contrast, there is no hesitation in shelling out more than $5 billion a year in new subsidies for rich U.S. farmers, or more than $6 billion a year to pay for suspending the state taxes on the richest Americans.

President Bush has also recently announced a trip to Africa for next year and $20 million a year for African education (beginning in 2004). But public relations gestures and budget shell games do not save lives. The American public--and Congress--need to tell the President to change course.

(Salih Booker <sbooker@africapolicy.org> is executive director of Africa Action, which is based in Washington, DC, and is FPIF's (online at www.fpif.org) policy adviser on U.S.-Africa affairs.)

G8: FAILING MODEL OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE
By Tom Barry

(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new FPIF policy brief, available in its entirety at: http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol7/v7n09g8.html .)

The G8 summit in 2001, which sparked massive street demonstrations in Genoa, raised new questions about the legitimacy and value of this annual gathering of world leaders. To avoid a clash with anti-globalization protesters, the isolated Canadian town of Kananaskis was chosen as the site for the 2002 summit. Although questions about the legitimacy of the G8 persist, the summit did offer a welcome opportunity for world leaders to discuss ways to improve international cooperation.

Africa's development, fighting terrorism, and the stagnating global economy were the preestablished priorities of the summit. The G8 leaders were also slated to review progress on priorities from previous meetings, including promoting universal primary education, fighting infectious diseases primarily HIV/AIDS, bridging the digital divide, and debt reduction. While summit pronouncements were expected on all these topics, the expectations for the 2002 summit were uniformly low. Newly aggressive U.S. unilateralism has created new fractures in the cross-Atlantic and cross-Pacific alliances, thus undermining one of the original reasons for the summit--namely, to reduce U.S. hegemony and build collective global leadership. Since the mid-1990s, the annual summits have incorporated more social issues and developing country concerns into their agendas, but they have failed to demonstrate much progress on these issues. Similarly, the G8 has failed to produce the kind of global leadership necessary to jettison the failed neoliberal model for managing the global economy. For many NGOs and developing countries, the G8 summit remains a symbol of elite global governance, but concerns about the legitimacy of this self-constituted forum are increasingly overshadowed by criticisms of the forum's ineffectiveness.

Global governance lies in shambles, but there is little indication that the world's most powerful political leaders have the inclination or will to reform current institutions or create new ones. Within the multilateral institutions, blame and recriminations abound, leaving no room for self-criticism and change. Neither have the various groupings of like-minded nations--the G8/G7 and the G77 being the most prominent--provided the kind of enlightened leadership necessary to upgrade global governance.

Due to its powerful economy, its lead in information technology, and its lack of military competitors, the U.S. once again exercises hegemonic power in the capitalist world--which now encompasses virtually the entire planet. Washington and the other G8/G7 leaders could begin by taking the representation and legitimacy critiques more seriously. Within successful global governance, there can be a constructive role for self-constituted groupings of like-minded countries such as the G8/G7. The G8/G7--with its annual summits, ministerial meetings, and consensus process of agenda-setting--has established a valuable process for setting international policy agendas for groups of countries with similar interests and concerns. However, without the presence of other similarly strong country groupings (particularly of developing countries) and in the absence of more democratically constituted multilateral institutions, the G8/G7 countries have assumed an unhealthy degree of power.

Rather than working to foster forums of other like-minded nations, the U.S. has historically sought to undermine groups that it cannot or does not control. Just as the wealthy industrialized countries benefit from sessions involving only other like-minded nations and leaders, so too will poor and developing countries benefit from strategy meetings with their counterparts throughout the South and in the transitional states. The concerted campaign in the 1970s led by the U.S. to crush the factions within the UN supporting a "new international economic order" and its aid embargo against leaders of the nonaligned movement are cases in point. The reemergence of the G77 at a meeting in April 2000 is a positive development that deserves U.S. support and encouragement, and more weight needs to be given to the G24, a smaller grouping of developing countries and emerging markets.

Standing at the center of global governance there must be effective, representative intergovernmental institutions, starting with the United Nations. The representation and legitimacy problems of the G8/G7 need to be addressed, but these problems cannot be solved without first addressing the representation and structural problems that beset the UN. Policies are needed that will ensure a system of global governance that has both strong decisionmaking institutions at the center and informal, consultative groups around the perimeter.

In their role as responsible global leaders, G8/G7 policymakers should adopt agendas that foster such a global governance system. At the same time the leaders and ministers can advocate policies that will go a long way toward meeting its stated objective in 1975 of "strengthening democratic societies everywhere." These include:

• Proceed with earlier commitments made during the Asian financial crisis to reform the international financial architecture to address the problem of large, speculative capital flows instead of its present focus on patching the architecture's cracks and its asymmetric attention to reforming the policies of borrowing nations.
• Increase economic aid commitments at least to the UN target of 0.7% of the donor's gross domestic product. (The U.S. contributes less than one-seventh of this target, the lowest level of any major industrialized nation.)
• Substantially expand the 1999 Cologne summit's commitment to IMF/World Bank debt relief programs, eliminating 100% of the bilateral and multilateral debt of the poorest nations.
• Commit (without demanding parallel commitments from developing countries) to substantial cuts in carbon emissions at least as deep as those called for in the Kyoto Protocol.
• Provide leadership in countering international terrorism that focuses on multilateral action, maintains respect for human rights, and addresses crises like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that spark terrorism.

The G8/G7 would go a long way toward improving its credibility as an important forum of global leaders if it distanced itself from the professions of belief in free trade ideology that have characterized past summits. At the same time, the G7 leaders should refocus their attention on the grave global affairs crises--including security (arms proliferation), economic (increasing social polarization and marginalization), and environmental problems (global climate change)--for which the wealthy nations are primarily responsible.

(Tom Barry <tom@irc-online.org>, a senior analyst at the Interhemispheric Resource Center, is codirector of Foreign Policy In Focus.)

See other FPIF analysis on G8-related issues:

Developing Countries, Global Financial Governance, and the G20
By Gerald Helleiner

Thabo Mbeki's New Partnership for Africa's Development Breaking or Shining the Chains of Global Apartheid?
By Patrick Bond

A CURE FOR THE CIA'S DISEASE
By Melvin Goodman

(Editor's Note: The following Global Affairs Commentary is also available at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0206cia.html .)

In 1986, CIA Director William Casey and his deputy, Robert Gates, created a flawed Counter-Terrorism Center. Casey and Gates believed that the Soviet Union was responsible for every act of international terrorism (it wasn't), intelligence analysts and secret agents should work together in one office (they shouldn't), and the CIA and other intelligence agencies would share sensitive information (they won't). The Center never understood the connection between Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the coordinator of the 1993 World Trade Center attack, and the al Qaeda organization until it was too late. And the Center expected an attack abroad, not at home. Last year's WTC attack exposed the inability of analysts and agents to perform strategic analysis, challenge flawed assumptions, and share sensitive secrets. The intelligence community claims that it must protect sources and methods, but that is not the issue. Each agency is trying to protect its position in the bureaucratic competition for access to the president. So what needs to be done?

First, the CIA must separate its secret operational activity from its analytical work or continue running the risk of tainted and incomplete intelligence. The CIA's heavy policy involvement in the war on terrorism will have a direct impact on the clandestine collection of intelligence and will be dominated by worst-case assessments of the problem. Walter Lippmann reminded us 70 years ago that it is essential to "separate as absolutely as it is possible to do so the staff which executes from the staff which investigates." His admonition is a good place to start for revamping the Counter-Terrorism Center. Last week's firing of the director of the center is merely a first step.

Second, the CIA must revamp both its directorate for intelligence and its directorate for operations. The intelligence directorate has become far too large and unwieldy and, because of its major failures during the past decade, has become permeated with the fear of being wrong or second-guessed. The directorate lacks people with language skills and the regional expertise needed for dealing with post-cold war intelligence challenges. The operations directorate relies too heavily on junior people abroad, working out of U.S. embassies with State Department covers. The directorate must assume greater risks by assigning experienced people abroad without diplomatic cover. Significant gaps in clandestine collection can be filled with greater reliance on foreign liaison intelligence services, which provided sufficient intelligence to prevent last year's attacks in Washington and New York. Just as we shouldn't waste the time of the FBI doing background investigations on government officials, we shouldn't waste the time of clandestine agents collecting non-essential information that is available from open sources.

Third, we must demilitarize the intelligence community and the CIA, which has become merely another support agency for the war fighter. The mismatch between the tools of the past and the missions of the future has given rise to an increased militarization of the thirteen intelligence agencies. The Pentagon controls 90% of the budget, personnel, and collection requirements of the intelligence community, which has led directly to such failures as missing the Indian nuclear tests in 1998. This failure led to the egregious failure to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Retired General Brent Scowcroft, who has conducted a comprehensive review of the intelligence community for President Bush, favors transferring budgetary and collection authority from the Pentagon to a new office that reports directly to the director of central intelligence, but Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and high-ranking members of the Senate Armed Forces Committee oppose this move.

Fourth, we need to revive congressional oversight of the intelligence community. The House and Senate intelligence committees have done nothing in the past ten years to reverse the precipitous decline of the CIA, and congressional leaders have proclaimed themselves "advocates" for the intelligence community instead of overseers. During this period, there has been an astonishing exchange of personnel between congressional intelligence staffs and the agencies they oversee, including the post of director of central intelligence and director of CIA.

Finally, it is time to ask why CIA Director George Tenet, facing the greatest political challenge of his stewardship of the intelligence community, is in the Middle East on a feckless policy mission. Former Secretary of State George Shultz told his own intelligence director in 1986, in the wake of arguments over policy toward the Philippines, to "stop being an advocate or get out of the intelligence loop." He told CIA deputy director Gates in 1987 that the CIA had developed "its own strong policy views" and had given President Reagan "bum dope." Apparently, the CIA has returned to the policy world, which calls into question the kind of dope it is willing to provide to the White House.

(Melvin A. Goodman <goodmanm@ndu.edu> is senior fellow of the Center for International Policy and national security analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus, and was a senior Soviet analyst at the CIA from 1966 to 1986. His most recent books are The Phantom Defense: America's Pursuit of the Star Wars Illusion and The Wars of Eduard Shevardnadze.)

Also see:

CIA: The Need for Reform
FPIF Special Report
By Melvin Goodman

II. Outside the U.S.

(Editor's Note: FPIF's "Outside the U.S." component 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. )

PRESIDENT BUSH THE MARTYR
By Sam Bahour and Michael Dahan

(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new Outside the U.S. Global Affairs Commentary, available in its entirety at: http://www.fpif.org/outside/commentary/2002/0206bushisrael.html )

Last night's long-awaited speech by President Bush was to set the pace for the Palestinians and Israelis to step back from the vicious and bloody cycle of violence that has gripped them for nearly two years. Instead, President Bush and his administration have publicly adopted the Israeli agenda of battering the Palestinians into submission. President Bush's delusion that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict may be "talked away" in a series of speeches is not only a poor example of leadership but places U.S. interests in the region at seriously high risk.

President Bush's administration has utterly failed to comprehend the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and in particular the Palestinian predicament today--which is an Israeli re-occupation of the small parcels of land that were transferred to the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo Peace Accords. To add insult to injury, President Bush continues to mismanage U.S. policy with unprecedented unaccountability to the U.S. Congress or the world community. Bush's chronological attempts to address the crisis are as follows: ignore the conflict--failed; send Powell to the region--failed; the Mitchell Report--failed; the Tenet Plan--failed; Bush's UN speech--failed; Secretary of State Powell's policy speech in Kentucky--failed; send General Zinni on multiple missions--failed; and the most recent, call for an international conference (completely ignored in Bush's latest speech)--failed. If the same creativity applied to avoiding real U.S. action were used to end the Israeli occupation, the region would be well out of the conflict by now.

To a naive audience President Bush's speech may have sounded like a sensible framework for progress, but for anyone with any understanding at all of the Middle East, it was clearly a shallow attempt that amounts to U.S. surrender of its Middle East foreign policy to the ranks of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Israel's lobby in America. Indeed, the speech was praised by Israel's right, which has rejected Palestinian statehood outright.

Israeli Prime Minister Sharon, President Bush's advisers, the powerful pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., and the U.S. Congress have clearly provoked President Bush to become a martyr in the name of continued Israeli military occupation of Palestinians. As with most martyrs who fail to see how their emotionally charged act will negatively reflect on the real issues at hand, President Bush stands proud and tall in support of Israel while the U.S. economy, U.S. allies in the region, U.S. homeland security, and the U.S. global leadership position all take the brunt of his misaligned and ill-advised policy--if it can even be considered policy.

The authors of this article have written throughout the past two years on every one of the issues the President spoke about in his speech. We predicted each failed U.S. step. Every time we have advised the U.S. on the way out of the crisis--to put forth action, not words, in ending the Israeli occupation. We still strongly believe that as long as Israeli occupation is permitted to survive, the U.S. can revisit the issue in 10 days or 10 months or 10 years and still face the same--Palestinians, stripped of their rights, dignity, land, and freedom will continue to struggle, with Arafat or without, to end their predicament, and Israelis will continue to suffer.

It is time--past time, to use Secretary of State Powell's words--for the U.S. to put actions behind its policies. Until then we await the next speech by President Bush and brace ourselves for the next series of bombings.

(Sam Bahour is a Palestinian-American businessman living in the besieged Palestinian City of Al-Bireh in the West Bank and can be reached at <sbahour@palnet.com>. He is co-author of HOMELAND: Oral Histories of Palestine and Palestinians (1994). Dr. Michael Dahan is an Israeli-American political scientist living in Jerusalem and can be reached at <mdahan@attglobal.net>.)

III. Letters and Comments

POPULATION GROWTH ALSO A FACTOR

I do not doubt the facts of "The World Food Summit," by Peter Rosset [available online at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2002/0206hunger.html ]. My problem is no attention is paid to population growth and environmental devastation as factors in growing poverty and hunger.

- David Bernard <david@aquariusplumbing.com>

SERIOUS OVERSIGHT

Re: "Foreign Military Training," by Lora Lumpe at: http://www.fpif.org/papers/miltrain/index.html I think perhaps the writer has a serious oversight. You want a result that is good for humanity but you have not examined the methodology. You are inaccurate to think that governmental control of any type will ever aid the human condition. Peace keeping (forces) is a ridiculous contradiction. Control is the wrong system. You might find insight into the real reasons behind you valid concerns in the book by Henry Grady Weaver, The Mainspring of Human Progress.

- Mark Sudbury <mark@parcelnumber.com>

"RETURN" TO JORDAN

The Arab refugees have always had an Arab Palestine, it is called Jordan. Why don't they simply return to Jordan and live life?

- S. Roger Cox <srogercox@aol.com>

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