The Progressive Response
Volume 7, Number 19
June 24, 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
THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF CRISIS PUBLIC DIPLOMACY: AMERICAN PUBLIC DIPLOMACY IN THE ARAB WORLD
By R.S. Zaharna, American UniversityU.S. WEAPONS AID REPRESSION IN ACEH
By Frida BerriganBRINGING THE WAR HOME: RIGHT WING THINK TANK TURNS WRATH ON NGOs
By Jim LobeIRAQ: INTEGRITY AND ETHICS IN FORMULATING AND INTERPRETING INTELLIGENCE
By Col. Daniel Smith (Ret.)
II. Letters and Comments
III. Power Trip Ordering Info
Power Trip
I. Updates and Out-takes
THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF CRISIS
PUBLIC DIPLOMACY: AMERICAN PUBLIC DIPLOMACY IN THE ARAB WORLD
By R.S. Zaharna, American University
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new policy brief available in full at http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol8/v8n02diplomacy.html .)
With the end of major military action in Iraq, U.S. public diplomacy in the Arab and Muslim world has entered a new, more challenging phase. In the post-September 11 phase of U.S. public diplomacy, America was the undeniable victim of a terrorist attack. That image fit with the underlying message of America's war on terrorism, namely, "join us in fighting evil aggression against innocent civilians." Even still, America's public diplomacy initiative failed. Now, with the U.S.-led military action in Iraq, America is no longer perceived as the victim but rather as the aggressor. If selling Washington's message was tough before, it just got infinitely harder. Before embarking on a new diplomacy phase, it is critical to understand what went wrong in the first.
The first phase of the current American public diplomacy was heralded in with great fanfare almost immediately after September 11. The terrorist attack on America was a wake-up call for many in Washington about the importance of public diplomacy. As Congressman Henry Hyde noted, "the perceptions of foreign publics have domestic consequences." President Bush echoed the sense of urgency when he said: "We have to do a better job of telling our story."
Efforts focused on the Arab and Muslim world. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice followed Secretary Powell's lead and also agreed to interviews on Al-Jazeera. The State Department compiled evidence linking Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attack into a brochure, "The Network of Terrorism." A new website and a series of ads about Muslim life were created to emphasize the "shared values" between America and Muslims. New Arabic, Farsi, Dari, and Pashto-language radio stations were launched, and plans were developed for an Arabic-language television network.
With such a concerted effort at the highest levels aimed at winning the hearts and minds of Arabs, Washington officials expected increased support in the Arab and Muslim world. That didn't happen. Despite more than a year of intensive public diplomacy aimed specifically at the Muslim and Arab world, study after study from November 2001 to December 2002 showed U.S. support steadily declining.
In March, when America's war on terrorism led to U.S. military action in Iraq, support for America plummeted. According to a newly released study by the Pew Charitable Trust, anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world has intensified and spread. In several Arab countries, more than 90% hold an unfavorable view of the U.S., and negative perceptions have spread from the Muslim countries in the Middle East to Indonesia in the Far East and Nigeria in Africa.
Public diplomacy may not have been the only answer to the post-9/11 crisis, but it was an important tool. The problem is, it backfired. The critical question remains: What went wrong? How did American public diplomacy result in decreased support in the Arab and Muslim world?
(R.S. Zaharna <zaharna@american.edu> is a Middle East analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org) and an assistant professor of public communication at American University. She specializes in international and intercultural communication.)
U.S. WEAPONS AID REPRESSION IN ACEH
By Frida Berrigan
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0306aceh.html .)
Far from the spotlight and far from Baghdad, another shock and awe campaign is underway. On May 19th, Indonesia launched a military campaign to "strike and paralyze" a small band of separatist rebels in the Aceh province. In a made-for-TV photo op, 458 soldiers parachuted onto the island from six C-130 Hercules transport aircraft manufactured by Lockheed Martin, the United States' largest defense contractor. As many as 40,000 Indonesian troops and a police force of 10,000 followed close behind, backed up by warships, fighter planes, and other high-tech military equipment, declaring war on 5,000 separatist guerillas armed with automatic weapons, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades.
The attack, which is Indonesia's biggest military campaign since its invasion and occupation of East Timor in 1975, follows the breakdown of five months of peace talks between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Indonesian government. Nongovernmental organizations working to bridge the gap between GAM's assertion of total Acehnese independence and Jakarta's insistence that Aceh remain part of the nation, campaigned for both sides to accept greater Acehnese autonomy and at least some say over how profits from the island's rich resources--including oil and gas reserves--are apportioned. While there was popular support for these compromises throughout Indonesia, and the peace talks had broad support--including from the Bush administration and international lending institutions--the negotiations broke off in mid-May.
For many years, the U.S. was Indonesia's largest weapons source, equipping the country with everything from F-16 fighter planes to M-16 combat rifles. From the bloody 1975 invasion through the 1990s, the U.S. transferred more than $1 billion in weaponry to Jakarta. Congress moved to ban some military exports to and training for Indonesia after the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre in East Timor, where soldiers wielding U.S. M-16s mowed down more than 270 unarmed people. And then, in response to military and paramilitary violence after East Timor's vote for independence in 1999, Congress strengthened the ban, establishing a set of criteria Indonesia must meet before military ties can be resumed. None of the criteria, including the transparency in military budget and the prosecution of soldiers involved in human rights violations, have been fully met.
Despite the worsening crisis in Indonesia, the U.S.'s military embargo is under serious pressure as the Bush administration seeks a closer relationship with the world's largest Muslim democracy. In an effort to win support in the war on terrorism, the White House is seeking to renew military aid and training. The embargo on commercial sales of non-lethal defense articles has been lifted and contact between the two militaries is on the rise. Now, Indonesia's military benefits from the Regional Defense Counter-terrorism Fellowship Program, a $17.9 million military training program for Asian militaries. These steps send a message of support to Jakarta, even as many of the problems that sparked Congress' decision to freeze all military aid have not been resolved.
There has been some good news though. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee recently passed an amendment restricting International Military Education and Training (IMET) for 2004 for Indonesia until the government takes "effective measures" to investigate and criminally prosecute those responsible for a 2002 attack on U.S. citizens. Indonesian police and NGO investigations have implicated the Indonesian military (TNI) in the attack, which killed two Americans. This is a step in the right direction, but the Indonesia military technically still has access to IMET funding for 2003.
Washington often argues that weapons sales allow the administration to wield influence over the policies of purchasing nations. Well, Indonesian General Endriartono Sutarto has a response to that. When asked about the use of UK-origin Hawk fighters in Aceh, he said, "I am going to use what I have. After all, I have paid already." The same can be said for U.S. weapons. These weapons do not go away. The Bronco planes bombing Aceh today are very likely the same ones that dropped napalm and missiles (and maybe even the bomb that killed the sister of Nobel Prize-winning Timorese leader Jose Ramos Horta) in East Timor in 1975.
Given the central role of U.S. weapons in this new round of government sanctioned killing, weapons that Indonesia has paid for already, how can the Bush administration wield its influence to demand more from our ally than "transparent" indiscriminate killing?
If the assertions that weapons sales equal influence are to be believed, the White House and Congress must muster the courage and compassion to demand an immediate cessation of military activities and a return to the negotiating table. Otherwise, our government bears some responsibility for the indiscriminate (but transparent) killing of unarmed Acehnese civilians.
(Frida Berrigan <BerrigaF@newschool.edu> is a senior research associate with the Arms Trade Resource Center, a project of the World Policy Institute. She writes regularly for Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org).)
BRINGING THE WAR HOME: RIGHT WING
THINK TANK TURNS WRATH ON NGOs
By Jim Lobe
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full online at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0306antingo.html .)
Having led the charge to war in Iraq, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an influential think tank close to the Bush administration, has added a new target: international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). AEI and its partner in the project, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, are setting their sights on those groups with a "progressive" or "liberal" agenda that favors "global governance" and other notions that are also promoted by the United Nations and other multilateral agencies.
The two organizations announced June 11th that they are launching a new website (www.NGOWatch.org) to expose the funding, operations, and agendas of international NGOs, and particularly their alleged efforts to constrain U.S. freedom of action in international affairs and influence the behavior of corporations abroad. The organizations are especially alarmed by what they see as the naiveté of the Bush administration and corporations that provide NGOs with funding and other support. "In many cases, naive corporate reformers, within corporations and in government, are welcoming them," complained John Entine, an AEI fellow.
To mark the site's launch, AEI, which is funded mainly by major corporations and right-wing foundations, also held an all-day conference entitled NGOs: The Growing Power of an Un-elected Few, which featured a series of presentations depicting NGOs as a growing and largely unaccountable threat to the Bush administration's foreign policy goals and free-market capitalism around the world. The conference was co-sponsored by the right-wing Australian think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA). "NGOs have created their own rules and regulations and demanded that governments and corporations abide by those rules," according to conference organizers. "Politicians and corporate leaders are often forced to respond to the NGO media machine, and the resources of taxpayers and shareholders are used in support of ends they did not sanction. The extraordinary growth of advocacy NGOs in liberal democracies has the potential to undermine the sovereignty of constitutional democracies, as well as the effectiveness of credible NGOs," they added.
Both the website launch and Wednesday's conference might normally be dismissed as a pep rally of a far right obsessed with left-wing and European conspiracies to impose world government on the United States and destroy capitalism. But the fact that no less than 42 senior administration foreign policy and justice officials have been recruited from AEI and the Federalists and that AEI "fellows" include such prominent figures as Lynne Cheney (the vice president's spouse), former UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and the influential Iraq hawk and former chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, suggests that Wednesday's events may herald a much more antagonistic attitude toward NGOs on the part of the government.
(Jim Lobe <jlobe@starpower.net> is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service.)
IRAQ: INTEGRITY AND ETHICS IN FORMULATING
AND INTERPRETING INTELLIGENCE
By Col. Daniel Smith (Ret.)
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0306ethics.html .)
On June 6, Randy Cohen, the New York Times' resident ethicist, appeared on CNN's NewsNight where he and host Aaron Brown began talking about ethics and integrity in the conduct of public business and in the statements and actions of public figures. Near the end of the time allotted for the discussion, Brown mentioned weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. Cohen replied in part: "I think this is the big ethical story of the week: Many people are asserting ... that the president lied about [WMD] in order to get our country into a war."
In fact, with each passing day, it is becoming more painfully obvious that the main categorical accusations against the regime of Saddam Hussein used by U.S. President George W. Bush and other senior administration officials to justify the war on Iraq simply are unsupported by facts on the ground. And because the rhetoric in the run-up to war appealed to the world to recognize the U.S. action within a religious-based paradigm--labeling the war as a moral undertaking, and stating that "our cause is just"--it raises for Cohen the question of the necessity of integrity in the public arena. It should also be a question for everyone in the body politic.
After five weeks of looking and a number of false starts, no extant chemical or biological weapons have been found in post-war Iraq. Nor have any precursor agents been discovered. Yet Saddam's possession of these weapons and the imminent threat these purportedly posed to the Persian Gulf region, to U.S. troops in the gulf, and even to the U.S. homeland constituted the administration's chief reason why war was necessary and just. Moreover, Washington hawks, who have little use for the UN, then declared that the "fact" that they knew Saddam possessed these weapons also proved the irrelevance of the UN and the ineffective nature of UN weapons inspections and verification measures.
A second (albeit a bit late) rationale designed to touch an emotional chord in the public memory centered on asserting that Saddam harbored and worked with al Qaeda operatives and was involved in planning the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Again, the claims became unequivocal, and, in line with the Bush doctrine that harboring or working with terrorists is a hostile act, preventive war by the United States was and still is declared to be a "just cause."
Lacking on-the-ground substantiation of either primary justification, the administration has tried two tacks simultaneously, with a third in reserve. One is to mount a continuing staunch offense, as Bush has done, regarding these rationales in the hope that at some point in time, something will turn up--ideally a smoking gun. The administration insists that U.S. forces simply need more time, something that in March it would not give the UN inspectors but now demands as it pours 1,400 new searchers into Iraq. This tack keeps faith with hard-line conservative supporters of the military remedy who saw the war as the only solution for what they deemed an extant threat to the United States. Thus, despite media revelations that the intelligence community, including senior analysts, were divided over the evidence of Saddam's WMD presented by the administration (e.g., aluminum tubes and mobile biological labs), the spin remains.
(Dan Smith <dan@fcnl.org> is a military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org), a retired U.S. army colonel and a senior fellow on Military Affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.)
II. Letters and Comments
Re: Terminating the Bush Juggernaut
I would be willing to bet that the first people to be stripped of citizenship and deported would be those publicly calling for sanctions against America.
- Ron Watson <k9disc@hotmail.com>
I follow with keen interest U.S. policy toward South Africa. The brief by Jennifer Davis was thorough. As a citizen of South Africa, I find the contents enlightening. Principally, the manner the U.S. is implementing its policies in the region is in line with your report.
- Shame Tarumbiswa <kuvita2001@yahoo.co.uk>
Re: Don't strengthen the WTO by admitting China
I would thank the authors of the article for their deep humanitarian stance on the issue. However, I would in addition stress another aspect of it, which seems totally neglected by western scholars. Right now, there are two Chinese governments in the WTO: that of the People's Republic of China and that of the Republic of China in Taiwan. China started to negotiate to become a member of GATT in 1986. Subsequently, U.S. administrations forced the governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait to recognize each other as "legal government." And for 15 years, the government in mainland China resisted the coercion. In November 2001, only by admitting the government in Taiwan was just as legal as the one in mainland, China was allowed to become member of the WTO. China was split up into two countries by "a sheet of paper and a pen" (in the words of Sun Yat Sen).
This is certainly the most sensitive issue for the Chinese, no matter where they live. Behind this is the tremendous suffering of the majority of the Chinese people, as you explained in your article. No matter how much the Chinese do not want a war to happen across the Taiwan Strait, and no matter how skillfully the western and Chinese media have covered up the fearful reality, a war to counter the declaration of Taiwan independence cannot be excluded. And if it happens, the U.S., the hegemonic boss of the WTO should be held responsible. I agree with you, but it seems the Chinese and the westerners tend to focus differently. Well, at least for now, the issue of Taiwan independence is the most heartbreaking part of the story. Again, thank you for your kindness!
- Yvonne Wang <yvonne8652@yahoo.com>
III. Power Trip Ordering Info
POWER TRIP: U.S. UNILATERALISM AND GLOBAL STRATEGY AFTER
SEPTEMBER 11
The Foreign Policy in Focus staff is proud to announce the publication of Power
Trip: U.S. Unilateralism And Global Strategy After September 11 from Seven
Stories Press. Edited by FPIF Advisory Committee member John Feffer, Power
Trip is a concise dissection of the new U.S. unilateralism, the first book-length
critique of this fundamental shift in U.S. foreign policy to consolidate and extend
U.S. global control. Exploring the transformation of U.S. foreign policy begun
by the Bush administration when it took office in 2001 and implemented with greater
ease and heightened zeal after September 11, Power Trip introduces the
cast of characters responsible for the new U.S. power trip and wrestles with the
consequences of the new trends in U.S. foreign policy. Featuring contributions
by Barbara Ehrenreich, William T. Hartung, Michael T. Klare, Jules Lobel, Ahmed
Rashid, Michael Ratner, Stephen Zunes, Tom Barry, Martha Honey, John Gershman
and others, Power Trip includes essays on:
- the new military strategy of the Bush administration and its preoccupation with controlling
- access to natural resources;
- the "Axis of Evil" and other targets of the war on terrorism;
- the cultural arm of the new unilateralism, from propaganda to Hollywood movies;
- the consequences of international critical response to the new U.S. policies;
- appropriate alternatives to current U.S. policies.
Books are $14.95 plus $3 shipping and handling and are available three ways:
By mail:
Interhemispheric Resource Center
Department PTPR
PO Box 4506
Albuquerque, NM 87196-4506
Please make checks payable to the IRCBy phone:
Call IRC with your credit card information at (505) 388-0208Online at http://www.fpif.org/advisers/feffer.powertrip.html
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