The Progressive Response
Volume 7, Number 7
March 7, 2003
The Progressive Response (PR) is produced weekly by the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org) as part of its Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) project. FPIF, a "Think Tank Without Walls," 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." FPIF is joint project of the Interhemispheric Resource Center and the Institute for Policy Studies. 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/, or email <feedback@fpif.org> to share your thoughts with us.
John Gershman, editor of Progressive Response, is a senior analyst with the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC) (online at www.irc-online.org). He can be contacted at <john@irc-online.org>.
Editor: John Gershman (IRC)
Table of Contents
I. Updates and Out-Takes
WOMEN, HIV, AND THE GLOBAL GAG RULE: THE DIS-INTEGRATION OF U.S. GLOBAL AIDS FUNDING
By Jodi L. Jacobson
TWO FUTURES, AND A CHOICE
By Tom Athanasiou
UNITY--BUT ON WHOSE TERMS?
By Col. Dan Smith (Ret.)
THE MEXICAN FARMERS' MOVEMENT: EXPOSING THE MYTHS OF FREE TRADE
By Laura Carlsen
II. Outside the U.S.
AFGHANISTAN: BETWEEN WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
By Mark Sedra
III. Letters and Comments
WHY SINGLE OUT ISRAEL? and RESPONSE BY STEPHEN ZUNES
BOGUS LIST and RESPONSE BY STEPHEN ZUNES
I. Updates and Out-takes
WOMEN, HIV, AND THE GLOBAL GAG RULE: THE DIS-INTEGRATION OF U.S. GLOBAL AIDS FUNDING
By Jodi L. Jacobson
(Editor's Note: As we celebrate International Women's Day on March 8th, it seems appropriate to review some aspects of the Bush administration's policies toward women. Analyst Jodi Jacobson explores how the Bush administration's commitment to anti-choice policies risks undermining its new initiative on combating HIV/AIDS and reveals it to be part of a broader policy agenda aimed at attacking women's reproductive rights at home and abroad. This is excerpted from a global affairs commentary available in its entirety at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0303aidsfund.html.)
In his proposed "Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief" announced during last month's State of the Union Address, President Bush promised, among other things, "a comprehensive plan [to] prevent seven million new HIV infections." International organizations working to prevent the spread of HIV and improve women's health worldwide met the announcement with a mixture of hope and skepticism. Hope because prevention is critical to reducing the toll of HIV worldwide. Skepticism because sound AIDS prevention depends on effective promotion of safe sex, an obvious area of contention for the Bush administration.
For the past two years, President Bush has been waging what can only be called a religious war on sexual and reproductive health programs both at home and abroad, undercutting the very foundations on which prevention strategies are built. He began this crusade by reneging on the U.S. contribution to the United Nations Population Program. Since then, State Department operatives tried--and failed--to undermine a global consensus on the need for universal access to reproductive health services. The President is slashing funds for sex education and family planning while touting unproven "only-abstinence" strategies domestically and internationally. He is replacing scientific and medical information in the public domain with unsubstantiated findings on condoms and abortion cooked up by the far right. And he regularly panders to groups that define both IUDs and contraceptive pills as "abortifacients" and refer to HIV as a "gay plague." The list goes on.
Now comes the announcement last week by the administration that U.S. funding for global HIV programs will be saddled by ideologically driven restrictions aimed at separating "family planning" from "HIV prevention" in developing countries. The so-called Mexico City policy or "global gag rule" will now be applied to all integrated family planning and HIV prevention programs. This policy denies funding to any international organization that, in addition to routine contraceptive and other essential reproductive health services, performs abortions in countries where they are legal (like, say, the United States), collects data on, provides referrals for abortion services, or advocates for changes in laws regulating abortion (which, thanks to the First Amendment, still includes the United States). Seeing an abortion behind every clinic wall, but clearly just opposed to family planning generally, the administration has now decided to apply these restrictions wholesale to integrated HIV and family planning programs.
The most immediate victims of this new assault will be women and children for whom integrated services often make the difference between life and death. These restrictions are morally and ethically indefensible and contradict basic principles of public health, human rights, and economic efficiency. If the President seriously believes that the U.S. has "a calling to make this world better" he should devise an HIV/AIDS initiative in which actions speak louder than words.
(Jodi L. Jacobson is the Executive Director of the Center for Health and Gender Equity (online at www.genderhealth.org) an international reproductive health and rights organization, and writes regularly for Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org).)
TWO FUTURES, AND A CHOICE
By Tom Athanasiou
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in its entirety at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0303choice.html.)
Whether to invade Iraq, and whether to act aggressively to prevent catastrophic climate change may seem to be two separate decisions, but in fact they represent a single fateful choice about the future.
The war, it seems, is now all but inevitable. The Bush people are committed, and so too, inescapably, are we. For despite all we know about bombings and bitterness, and all we can safely predict about "unintended consequences," the lock is in. The problem now is to compose a decent protest sign.
The climatic future, for its part, is still open, but it's closing in significant ways, and more rapidly than most people realize. And this despite the fact that 2002, for all its other grim distinctions, was also the year in which the "greenhouse skeptics" were finally recognized as the spiritual cousins of tobacco company PR men. Let one fact stand for them all: the Arctic ice is melting, fast; before the end of the century, polar bears will be extinct outside of zoos.
One recent protest sign asked "Just war or just oil?" Alas, we know the answer all too well. The administration's view, after all, is available for all to read in the May 2001 report of the National Energy Policy Development Group, better known as the "Cheney Report." Here we learn that the vice president expects U.S. oil imports to rise from 52% of total consumption in 1999 to over 70% percent in 2020, and that because total oil use will also rise, the U.S. will have to import 60% more oil in 2020 than it does today; Cheney's team sees U.S. oil imports rising from the current 10.4 million barrels per day to an estimated 16.7 million barrels per day in 2020.
But many analysts, including those at the Department of Energy's own National Laboratories and Boston's Tellus Institute, have shown that there is another future, a cleaner but not poorer future in which oil imports can be reduced without drilling in America's remaining wilderness areas. The DOE's Clean Energy Futures study shows that U.S. oil consumption can remain near 2000 levels through 2020--a 21% reduction below their own "business as usual" projections and more than 30% below Cheney's inflated numbers--without harming the economy one whit. And Tellus' 2001 report, The American Way to the Kyoto Protocol, goes further, projecting even greater reductions in both energy use and greenhouse pollution at a net savings of $50 billion per year.
None of these scenarios eliminate U.S. oil imports completely; nor do they reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions to a long-term, sustainable per capita level. But they show that policies and technologies available today can put us on a new path--a path to both a cleaner environment and real global cooperation.
That path, of course, would be a long one, and full of surprises. But unlike the path that the Cheney team would have us think inevitable, it would open into a future worth having.
(Tom Athanasiou <toma@ecoequity.org> is the co-author of Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming and a regular contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org).)
UNITY--BUT ON WHOSE TERMS?
By Col. Dan Smith (Ret.)
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in its entirety at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0303draftrez.html.)
The answer used to be effective disarmament of Iraq. Now it is the "necessity" to unite to enforce UN Security Council resolutions concerning Iraq, to be "relevant" in the 21st century by adhering to Washington's demands.
The Bush administration accuses the French, Germans, and Russians of splitting the unanimity of the Security Council over the inspection and disarmament process in Iraq. Yet it is the White House, by its unwillingness to seriously consider any other alternative to war to unseat Saddam Hussein, that is fomenting the very division it decries.
Despite White House rhetoric about war as a last resort, it has been apparent for some time that the decision to employ the "last resort" had already been made. This was made crystal-clear by a senior diplomat from a non-permanent member of the Security Council who was told by Bush administration officials: "You are not going to decide whether there is war in Iraq or not... That decision is ours, and we have already made it. It is already final. The only question now is whether the council will go along with it or not." (Washington Post, Feb. 25, 2003, p. 1) Another diplomat noted that the message his government is hearing is that a lack of support for the new U.S.-UK-Spanish draft resolution would be considered an "unfriendly act."
All agree that the Security Council needs to press hard for Iraq's full compliance. But a full-scale war now will only destroy the region's relative peace that has existed for the past 12 years. Given Turkey's demands to send its troops into northern Iraq and the strong prospect that the Iraqi Kurds will resist what they will regard as a Turkish invasion, war with Baghdad will inflame a new and unwanted conflict that, among other consequences, could threaten vital supply lines for advancing U.S. forces.
As long as Iraq cooperates with the inspectors and complies with their requirements, it seems wrong-headed to launch a war whose ostensible objective is the same as the inspectors': to disarm Iraq. Yes, suspicions remain. Blix has presented an advisory board of weapons experts a lengthy list of issues that remain unresolved. Only Iraq can clear the air on these points, and it must do so quickly. Otherwise, it will create the very consensus in favor of military action that the U.S.-UK-Spanish draft resolution has failed to forge among UNSC members.
And that--Why should the world throw in with the U.S. line against Iraq?--remains the original question with the elusive answer.
(Dan Smith <dan@fcnl.org> is a military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org) is a retired U.S. army colonel and Senior Fellow on Military Affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.)
THE MEXICAN FARMERS' MOVEMENT: EXPOSING THE MYTHS OF FREE TRADE
By Laura Carlsen
(Editor's Note: Thanks to our colleagues at the Americas Program of the IRC, the following excerpt is from a new policy report available in its entirety at http://www.americaspolicy.org/reports/2003/0302farm.html.)
Even long-time Mexico observers sat up and took notice on January 31. The march that day by campesino organizations, which counted on the support of unions, universities, and civil society groups, broke the mold in a city accustomed to large demonstrations.
By the time they reached the Zócalo, the sum of the tidy contingents--each filed behind its identifying banner--came to nearly a hundred thousand. Not since agrarian reform under President Lázaro Cárdenas in the late thirties had so many campesinos marched in the nation's capital. And perhaps not since the revolution had such a diverse crowd united behind such radical demands. The farmers no longer demanded government programs to alleviate their poverty or help sell their products. The central demands of the march--renegotiation of the agricultural chapter of NAFTA and a far-reaching national agreement on rural development-shot straight to the heart of the neoliberal model and called for a new vision.
The reemergent Mexican farmers' movement reflects not only the serious crisis in the country's rural sector but also a crisis of faith in free trade itself. With the common slogan "El campo no aguanta más" (The countryside can't take it anymore), a wide range of rural organizations have set off a national debate on NAFTA. As a result, some of the fundamental myths of the free trade model are being questioned as never before in Mexico.
The farmers' movement is saying that it's time to discard the myths and permit more human values to play a role in agricultural policy. Mexican farmers not only reject an asymmetrical trade agreement that destroys their livelihoods and their communities, they also reject being railroaded onto a one-way street. To compete with the U.S. means to adopt the U.S. transnational-dominated model of agriculture. Competing on these terms--the only ones understood by a market driven solely by prices--could unravel Mexican society. Buying into this corporate myth could jettison nine thousand years of culture, domesticated agriculture, and biological and agricultural diversity.
The month of January 1994 opened with the NAFTA paradigm of a neoliberal future and closed with an armed Zapatista rebellion that galvanized national and international support for a "world of many worlds." January of 2003 opened with NAFTA tariff eliminations to enforce the free trade model, and the month closed with 100,000 people in the streets calling for immediate renegotiation of NAFTA, food sovereignty, and a national rural development pact. These two Januarys are the bookends of a period of disputed definitions in Mexico. Recently, U.S. congressional members recognized that failure to resolve the Mexican agricultural crisis would increase migration and complicate relations between the two nations. But the problem goes beyond migration. The United States will face serious risks in all aspects of the binational relationship if it insists on imposing a unilateral future on Mexico. In the not-so-distant future, Indians and farmers could be joined by thousands from other walks of life demanding national development that responds to their needs and not to a myth-ridden model.
(Laura Carlsen <laura@irc-online.org> is an associate of the IRC's Americas Program and co-editor of Community Control in a Global Economy (Kumarian 2003) and Enfrentando la Globalización: Integración Económica y Respuestas Sociales en México (Miguel Angel Porrua 2003).)
II. Outside the U.S.
AFGHANISTAN: BETWEEN WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
By Mark Sedra
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new special report available in its entirety at http://www.fpif.org/papers/03afghan/index.html.)
The internationally supported reconstruction and nation-building effort in Afghanistan can boast many successes in the period since the Taliban's collapse in November 2001. Two million Afghan refugees have returned to the country; three million Afghan children, particularly girls, have resumed school; a new currency, the Afghani, has been established; and a central government, chosen on a democratic basis, has grown more assertive and effective with each passing day.
In spite of these achievements, which would have been the stuff of fantasy three years ago under the repressive rule of the Taliban, a security vacuum has emerged across the country that threatens to undermine the entire nation-building effort. The resurgence of warlordism and the persistence of insurgency activities by the remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda have fostered insecurity and obstructed the reconstruction process.
The fundamental dilemma facing the international community is how to advance reconstruction amid conditions of political and social insecurity and a continuing low-intensity war. To solve this dilemma, international support to the Afghan Transitional Administration (ATA), whether it be political, economic or military in nature, should be devised and channeled with the clear objective of addressing its causes: warlordism and spoiler groups. Regrettably, donor action to confront these underlying causes, most notably U.S. military intervention, has in many cases exacerbated insecurity.
Equally disconcerting and detrimental has been donor inaction on a number of critical areas, including security sector reform, which has progressed slowly. Consequently, it is important that donor support be redesigned and expanded to make it more efficacious. By promoting institution-building and dialogue among key power-brokers at the political level; increasing and more effectively disbursing aid at the economic level; and assisting the reform of the ATA's national security apparatus and deploying peacekeepers at the military level, the international community can overcome the present insecurity impasse.
This FPIF policy report provides recommendations on how to refocus and reinvigorate donor support in the political, economic and military spheres, to better equip the ATA to confront insecurity and its causes. It aims to offer draft blueprint for the reform and revitalization of international donor policy and practice in Afghanistan.
Political Recommendations
1. Secure the adherence of neighboring states to a strict policy of non-interference
2. Accelerate the security sector reform process
3. Address human rights violations
4. Encourage the growth of civil society
Economic Recommendations
1. More donor aid must be funneled to the ATA
2. More, and longer term, aid is needed
3. The reconstruction strategy must shift from short-term relief to long-term infrastructure development
Military Recommendations
1. Expand the International Security Assistance Force
2. The United States should adjust its military strategy in Afghanistan while continuing to apply pressure on spoiler groups.
Conclusion: Critical Phase of Nation-Building
The nation-building process in Afghanistan is entering a critical phase. The ATA, in its second year of power, must deliver on its promise of a better life for the Afghan people in 2003 or risk losing their allegiance. By expanding its involvement with a focus on fostering the creation of sustainable policies and structures, the donor community can help the ATA confront the omnipresent problem of warlordism, integrating partial spoilers into the new polity while purging the country of total spoilers. This will be a long-term and multi-faceted process that could take generations to complete, thus it is essential that the donor community resist the inevitable pressures to shift spending and attention to other trouble spots before this mammoth task is completed.
(Mark Sedra <sedra@bicc.de> is a research associate at the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC). He is the author of a report entitled "Challenging the Warlord Culture: - Security Sector Reform in Post-Taliban Afghanistan" (November 2002).)
III. Letters and Comments
WHY SINGLE OUT ISRAEL? and RESPONSE BY STEPHEN ZUNES
Re: United Nations Security Council Resolutions Currently Being Violated by Countries Other than Iraq
Why did you exclude resolutions that involve far greater human rights violations (like government-sponsored slaughters) just to make it look like Israel has violated more resolutions than any other country?
- Bernard Wilson <wmbwilson@yahoo.com>
Stephen Zunes responds:
I did not try to make any country look like it violated any more resolutions than any other. I didn't even count which country had the most. I simply ran the list of all countries (other than Iraq, which has been getting virtually all the publicity recently) that are currently in violation of UN Security Council resolutions. This list does not pass judgement as to whether there should have been others that should have been passed that were not. For example, the United States, the former Soviet Union, and others have vetoed or otherwise blocked a number of resolutions that perhaps should have been passed. Also, the UN Charter limits the ability of the United Nations to interfere in the internal affairs of most countries. As a result, human rights abuses by Israel--which primarily take place not within Israel but in parts of other countries that are occupied by Israel--would be subjected to scrutiny by the United Nations whereas human rights abuses taking place within a country's internationally recognized borders would not. This does not reflect a bias against Israel, but a bias in favor of national sovereignty. (Personally, I would like to see a greater role for the UN against human rights abuses even within a sovereign country.) To my knowledge, I did not leave out a single UN Security Council resolution that is currently being violated. I challenge you or anyone to find any that I did and I resent any implication that this empirical study was biased against any government.
BOGUS LIST and RESPONSE BY STEPHEN ZUNES
Re: United Nations Security Council Resolutions Currently Being Violated by Countries Other than Iraq
Your list is bogus if you aren't willing to make the distinction between chapter VI and chapter VII resolutions. Resolutions passed under chapter VII are binding not only on the state they are passed against but the Security Council is also obligated to fulfill the mandate they set forth and make sure the resolutions are complied with. Chapter VII allows for enforcement measures from sanctions to military force.
- Lisa Sutton <lsuttonl@msn.com>
Stephen Zunes responds:
While there are indeed different enforcement mechanisms for UN Security Council resolutions under Article VI and Article VII, it still does not detract from the fact that all the resolutions on the list are being violated. Furthermore, while the Security Council is obliged to enforce resolutions under Article VII, military force is allowed only if the Security Council as a whole has determined that all non-military enforcement mechanisms have been exhausted.
More importantly, whether a resolution is placed under Chapter VI or Chapter VII is not necessarily a reflection of their importance. For example, many of the resolutions that are currently being violated under Chapter VI are more threatening to international peace and security than some of those that were placed under Chapter VII, but the United States threatened to veto the entire resolution if the Security Council tried to do otherwise. For example, one could make a case that invading, occupying, annexing, and colonizing all or part of a neighboring state--which is a direct violation of the UN Charter and applies to all nations--is more serious than whether a government has proven it has completely disarmed as a result of an unprecedented resolution targeted at a single country to unilaterally disarm.
It is abundantly clear that after 9/11, armies will never again be able to protect us as they once could. The pursuit of power through militarism has always brought with it a decline in vitality of the people. Our only real hope of security is through the support and development of international law and alliances. Democracies, by their very nature, have a bias toward peace, and faith in the resolution of problems through peaceful means. The real question is how was the Bush administration able to make such far reaching and radical shifts in both domestic and foreign policy with little if any public debate?! This just astonishes me. Have we lost our democracy?
- John Millen <jmillen@abs.net>
Re: The Coming War with Iraq: Deciphering the Bush Administration's Motives
This is the most articulate analysis I've seen on what this war is truly about. I'd like to see every American read it.
- Pamela B. Pride <pride@montanadsl.net>
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