The Progressive Response
Volume 8, Number 5
February 20, 2004
Editor: John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
| Foreign Policy In Focus | |
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) and co-director of FPIF. He can be contacted at <john@irc-online.org>.
Table of Contents
I. Updates and Out-Takes
THE MILITARIZATION OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
By Mel GoodmanTHE MORE THINGS CHANGE: FOREIGN AID BUDGET LOOKS LIKE A RETREAD FROM THE COLD WAR
By Jim LobeIRAQ WAR PRODUCT OF NEOCON PHILOSOPHY OF INTELLIGENCE
By Tom BarryWHY NEPAD AND AFRICAN POLITICS DON'T MIX
By Ian TaylorSTANDING UP FOR WORKERS' RIGHTS
By Stewart AcuffMILOSEVIC AND GENOCIDE: HAS THE PROSECUTION MADE THE CASE?
By Stacy Sullivan
II. Letters and Comments
A Series of responses to Dan Connell's article on Ethiopia and Eritrea
WHY SHOULD ERITREA TRUST THE U.S. AND THE UN?
III. Job Announcement
I. Updates and Out-Takes
THE MILITARIZATION OF U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
By Mel Goodman
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new policy brief available in full at http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol9/v9n01military.html.)
The fall of the Soviet Union handed the U.S. a unique opportunity, as the surviving superpower, to lead the world toward a period of greater cooperation and conflict resolution through the use of diplomacy, global organization, and international law. This great opportunity is being squandered, as the world becomes a more dangerous place. Military force is now looming larger than ever as the main instrument and organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy. In our new national security doctrine, in the shape of our federal budget, and in the missions of the agencies the budget funds, our government is being reshaped to weaken controls on its use of force and further incline our country toward war.
With the invasion and occupation of Iraq, we have witnessed the end of the so-called post-cold war era and the escalation of a continuous, worldwide war on terrorism that has increased global insecurity. Nearly 150,000 American forces are occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, and the result is growing anarchy in both countries. President Bush has declared that the war against terrorism centers on Iraq. This has the ring of self-fulfilling prophecy, since Iraq had no terrorism problem the U.S. invasion. A growing number at home and abroad are concerned Washington will resort to the use of preemptive force again, perhaps against other so-called “axis of evil” members, North Korea or Iran, before this year's election.
Reversing a trend that pre-dated the fall of the Soviet Union , the U.S. has increased its military budget to more than $400 billion and its intelligence budget to more than $40 billion. Current projections point to a defense budget of more than $500 billion before the end of the decade, with another $50 billion for the intelligence community. Led by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Department of Defense has moved aggressively to eclipse the State Department as the major locus of U.S. foreign policy, arrogating management of the intelligence community, and abandoning bipartisan policies of arms control and disarmament crafted over the past four decades. Funding cuts have prompted the Department of State to close consulates around the world and assign personnel of the well-funded CIA to diplomatic and consular posts. Though current defense costs represent nearly 20% of Washington's expenses, less than 1% of the federal budget is devoted to the needs of the State Department.
The misuse of sensitive information to justify the war against Iraq has precipitated the worst intelligence scandal in U.S. history, compromising the Bush administration's integrity. As former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski argued, this intelligence failure has been “fueled by a demagogy that emphasizes worst-case scenarios, stimulates fear and induces a dichotomous view of world reality.”
So instead of living in a new era of conciliation and conflict resolution, we are witnessing an ugly epilogue to the cold war that finds Washington acting alone instead of working with its traditional allies. It is important to understand how the U.S. was lured into this terrible cul-de-sac and how the nation should debate and adopt policies to reverse the Bush administration's dangerous neoconservative course.
(Melvin A. Goodman is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and co-author of the forthcoming Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk (Prometheus Books, March 2004).)
THE MORE THINGS CHANGE: FOREIGN AID BUDGET LOOKS LIKE A RETREAD FROM THE COLD WAR
By Jim Lobe
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402budget.html.)
If the "war on terror" is beginning to look increasingly like the cold war, then President George W. Bush's fiscal year (FY) 2005 foreign-aid request will not change that impression.
While Bush is proposing to increase funding for his two key anti-poverty initiatives, the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) and anti-AIDS money for African and Caribbean countries, he is also cutting funds for other key humanitarian and development accounts. At the same time, the president is asking Congress to increase by more than one billion dollars military and security assistance, particularly to key "front-line" states in the "war on terror." Those two categories, which include anti-drug aid and proliferation categories, would make up nearly one-third of all U.S. foreign aid under Bush's request, roughly the same percentage of total foreign aid when the cold war reached its height during the 1980s.
Under Bush's proposals, credits for foreign militaries to buy U.S. weapons and equipment would increase by some $700 million to nearly $five billion, the highest total in well over a decade. Even including the military credits, the total foreign aid proposal, which is included in a record federal budget request of some $2.4 trillion, amounts to a mere five percent of what Bush is requesting for the Pentagon next year.
Under his plan, military spending--which already constitutes roughly one-half of the world's total military expenditures--would rise by some seven percent, to $402 billion in FY 2005, which begins Oct. 1. That figure does not include an anticipated $50 billion more that the administration is expected to request to fund military and related operations in Iraq and Afghanistan later in the year.
The total budget request now goes to Congress, where even members of Bush's own Republican Party say he is unlikely to get everything he wants in view of the record budget deficits being forecast well into the future as a result of the president's tax cuts and military spending hikes.
(Jim Lobe is a political analyst with Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org). He also writes regularly for Inter Press Service.)
IRAQ WAR PRODUCT OF NEOCON PHILOSOPHY OF INTELLIGENCE
By Tom Barry
(Editor's Note: As the debate over the pre-war intelligence vís-a-vìs Iraq continues, IRC policy director Tom Barry explores the role of the neocons in the new debate over restructuring intelligence agencies. Excerpted from a new commentary from the Interhemispheric Resource Center 's Right Web project, available in full at http://rightweb.irc-online.org/analysis/2004/0402pi.php.)
The deepening quagmire in Iraq and the failure of the Bush administration to produce evidence to back its arguments for invading Iraq have stymied the neocons' agenda for preventive war and regime change around the world. But the right's assault on what it regards as the “liberal establishment” in foreign policy has not completely stalled.
Neocon groups such as the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP) have seized on the report by U.S. weapons inspector David Kay to advance their decades-old campaign to reform U.S. intelligence operations. They have adroitly brushed aside critiques that Kay's statement that “we were all wrong, probably.” They have attempted to focus the deepening concerns about faulty U.S. intelligence on the CIA alone.
The neocons, along with the Republican-controlled Congress and the president himself, regard the failure to find the purported stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) as another opportunity to push ahead with their agenda to overhaul the U.S. intelligence apparatus. In announcing the creation of a bipartisan commission in the wake of the Kay Report, President Bush said that the investigation would recommend reforms that would enable the U.S. government to do a better job in fighting the war on terrorism.
It's not that intelligence reform isn't needed or that the CIA isn't due for some serious housecleaning. But the right wants to permanently disable the CIA as the government's main intelligence agency. Over the past four decades, the ideologues of the right have repeatedly charged that the CIA has routinely underestimated threats to U.S. national security. It's been their contention that the CIA is so caught up in the minutiae of intelligence that they are unable to see the big picture of actual and future threats. The CIA is thus being set up as the main institutional fall guy in the Iraq WMD scandal. However, the true problem rests with the very type of intelligence that right-wing groups such as the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) and PNAC are now hoping to institutionalize.
In a maddening and bizarre twist of the Iraq invasion scam, the neocons are attempting (and may likely succeed) to have the U.S. intelligence apparatus overhauled--not so that it provides more fact-based intelligence to policymakers but to further decentralize intelligence gathering and to further politicize intelligence.
(Tom Barry is policy director of the Interhemispheric Resource Center (online at www.irc-online.org).)
WHY NEPAD AND AFRICAN POLITICS DON'T MIX
By Ian Taylor
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402nepad.html.)
It is now over two years since the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) was launched in Abuja, Nigeria and perhaps time to review the progress that this project for supporting development in Africa has made. Stripped to its bare bones, the NEPAD is a "partnership" with the developed world whereby African countries will set up and police standards of good government across the continent--whilst respecting human rights and advancing democracy--in return for increased aid flows, private investment, and a lowering of obstacles to trade by the West. An extra inflow of U.S.$64 billion from the developed world has been touted as the "reward" for following approved policies on governance and economics.
The sad fact is that there has been very little concrete progress, although plenty of meetings, summits, pronouncements, and speeches have marked the NEPAD thus far, the latest being in Kigali last weekend. Why there has been little concrete progress so far is because of the very nature of post-colonial African politics. Most commentaries ignore the reality that power in African politics must be understood as the utilization of patronage and not as the performance of legitimacy drawn from the sovereign will of the people. In other words, in spite of the façade of the modern state, power in most African polities progresses informally, between patron and client along lines of reciprocity. It is intensely personalized and is not exercised on behalf of the public good. Zimbabwe is a good example of this, but most other African countries broadly follow this pattern, including such NEPAD stalwarts such as Nigeria, Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, etc. Very few countries (Botswana a prime example) have avoided such a state of affairs.
Any monitoring of governance standards and the improvement in democratic principles on the continent cannot remain elite-driven nor, from the perspective of the donor community, dependent upon the whims of the elites within government. It is a nonsensical strategy to rely on the Big Men to be the engines of positive change in Africa. Whilst the NEPAD remains so dependent upon corrupt dictators to miraculously embrace good governance and democracy, something which goes against the very logic of their own rule, its project to promote the continent's regeneration in the new millennium, will likely remain stillborn. Africa 's peoples must be the engineers of their own liberation, not wait passively, hoping for "change" to emerge from the clouds or fall from the table of the Big Men like so many crumbs of bread. The international community's role should be to support this self-liberation, not legitimize the illegitimate.
(Dr. Ian Taylor is a senior lecturer in african politics & international relations in the Department of Political & Administrative Studies at the University of Botswana and a frequent contributor to Foreign Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org).)
STANDING UP FOR WORKERS' RIGHTS
By Stewart Acuff
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402workers.html.)
"The boss said he would sell the company or burn it down before he would see a union at Sterling ." To the cheers of a responsive Washington, DC audience on December 10, 2003, Sterling Laundry worker Evelyn Thomas vowed to continue the battle for the freedom to form a union at her workplace, in spite of fierce employer opposition.
Thomas' tale was just one of the dozens of horror stories told by workers who rallied on International Human Rights Day to call attention to the widespread abuse of the rights of workers. In 90 events in 37 states, tens of thousands of workers and their allies campaigned to restore the freedom to form a union guaranteed under American law and international human rights codes, but sadly eroded in our country today.
In the United States, when private sector workers in America try to form a union through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) process, they are subjected to weeks, months, or even years of harassment, surveillance, subtle and overt intimidation, and retaliation--including demotions, suspensions, firings, and sometimes beatings.
Three years ago, Human Rights Watch issued a report documenting the fact that the United States is in violation of international law and internationally accepted human rights standards for failing to protect the rights of American workers to freely form unions. According to the NLRB, an average of 20,000 American workers a year are victimized by their employers for organizing and union activity.
Cornell University scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner has documented the abuse. According to her research:
- In 90% of unionization efforts, the employer hires a consultant to frustrate the will of the workers;
- In 70-80% of campaigns, the employer conducts forced meetings to harangue the workers against the union and, more insidiously, holds one-on-one supervision meetings;
- 50% of the time, the employer threatens to close the worksite; and
- In over one-quarter of all unionization efforts, activists are fired.
The facts are astounding and frightening, and the effects on our society of depriving workers of a fundamental human right are devastating: declining civic and political activity, steadily eroding retirement system, an ever-widening wage and income gap, growing poverty, and a dangerous rightward drift of our cultural and political life.
Internally, we have to teach union members that there is an all-out, coordinated assault on their collective bargaining rights and the right of other workers to organize. We have to tie that fact to declining union density which makes it all but impossible to win advances at the bargaining table or even maintain current contracts and standards. To begin to achieve this, we have piloted a member education and mobilization program in selected cities and unions.
Most importantly, progressives outside the labor movement have to own this. It may be true that such progressives will not engage in this current human rights crisis at the necessary level until they see more workers in motion, but workers cannot win unless and until a much broader community demands change. The single greatest internal threat to the success of progressive policies and values is the evisceration of the right to organize. The consequent decline of the labor's voice and power will put an end to any dreams of the struggle for equality and freedom.
We will not resolve this human rights crisis in the coming months. We have no way of knowing how long it will take, but now is the time for us to increase greatly the intensity of this work, increase the resources allocated to this work, and make the long-term commitment to this fight. For the workers, for the labor movement, and for the nation, the consequences of delay, timidity, or hesitation are too great.
(Stewart Acuff is the AFL-CIO's Organizing Director (www.afl-cio.org). He wrote this piece for Foreign Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org), and a longer version appears in the February 2004 issue of New Labor Forum (http://qcpages.qc.edu/newlaborforum/).)
MILOSEVIC AND GENOCIDE: HAS THE PROSECUTION MADE THE CASE?
By Stacy Sullivan
(Editor's Note: Excerpted from a new global affairs commentary available in full at http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2004/0402milosevic.html.)
When prosecutors opened their case against Slobodan Milosevic on February 12, 2002, they told the court that not only would his trial provide the world with a full picture of the “medieval savagery” that stalked the Balkans throughout the Nineties, but that they would also prove that the former Serbian president was guilty of the gravest crime known to mankind--genocide.
Two years on, after hearing nearly 300 witnesses--some of them high-level insiders who have turned on their former leader--and presenting thousands of pages of documents, including telephone intercepts, military orders, and transcripts of political meetings, they are resting their case.
But many legal experts say they fear that the prosecution has not made the case for genocide, in part because the United Nations tribunal has set the bar for doing so extremely high.
Already, in what appears to be an effort to brace tribunal observers for a possible acquittal, chief prosecutor Carla del Ponte has warned that the Belgrade authorities have jeopardized the genocide case by failing to provide her with access to military documents from the state archives.
Milosevic is the man alleged to have orchestrated the break-up of Yugoslavia and the horrific atrocities that went with it. Given the mountain of evidence prosecutors have tendered as evidence, showing his active involvement in arming Serbs in both Bosnia and Croatia --not to mention his role in Kosovo--few have any doubts that the former president will be convicted of crimes against humanity.
But in order to prove genocide, prosecutors need to show that Milosevic orchestrated the crimes with the specific intent to destroy Bosnian Muslims as a people. Since the prosecution has not been able to present unequivocal evidence of genocidal intent--a military order calling for the liquidation of all of the Bosnian Muslims, for example--the experts say that based on earlier rulings, they have serious doubts that the judges will issue a guilty verdict.
An acquittal, they say, would have serious implications not only for attempts to prosecute genocide in the future, but also for efforts that might be undertaken to prevent it from occurring. It would also disappoint victims, and provide ammunition for those who would deny that genocide took place.
Samantha Power, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem From Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, which examines why states don't act to prevent genocide, said she feared an acquittal would provide governments another reason to remain passive. “If the bar is that high, it will be so much easier for states to argue that something is not genocide.”
That will make it difficult to prosecute future genocide cases. “If Milosevic is acquitted, and if the Iraqi tribunal were to take the standards set by the UN tribunal, Saddam Hussein in the Kurdish case would probably not meet that standard,” said Power.
By far the most serious consequences of an acquittal on genocide charges, however, would be for Bosnia's victims.
According to Power, “One of the downsides in the creation of a stigma around the word and the crime of genocide is that victims often feel somehow that they are being told that their suffering isn't worthy if they don't get a genocide conviction. Bosnian Muslims may be made to feel that they didn't make the cut.”
(Stacy Sullivan is the Institute for War and Peace Reporting's Hague Tribunal Project (www.iwpr.net). This is reprinted by permission for Foreign Policy in Focus (www.fpif.org).)
II. Letters and Comments
(Editor's Note: This week we have a series of letters in response to Dan Connell's recent article on Ethiopia and Eritrea followed by a response from Dan.)
WHY SHOULD ERITREA TRUST THE U.S. AND THE UN?
Re: Eritrea/Ethiopia War Looms as Washington Watches & Waits
Thanks for a great article. President Bush needs to read it.
While I disagree with you in punishing Eritrea for accepting and adhering to the UN Ethio-Eritrean border resolution, I agree that Ethiopia needs to be told strongly in uncompromising terms, there's a lot at stake for NOT respecting the Algiers "Final & Binding" agreement.
What were the origins of the conflict? The UN, Great Britain, and the U.S. have been complicit in repeated failures to enforce UN resolutions aimed at resolving the conflict, beginning in 1950 with UN Resolution 390A/V that created the Ethio-Eritrean federation. But when Ethiopia violated that resolution, the UN failed to enforce it, leading to thirty years of bloody war. Now the pattern is repeated, as the UN, the U.S., the UK, and the African Union are silently watching while Ethiopia refuses to comply with the UN-sponsored Ethio-Eritrean border agreement signed in Algiers and the subsequent UN resolutions Ethiopia's demand for dialog is simply a way out of the tight noose final & binding Ethio-Eritrean border agreement that it voluntarily signed.
After the border is demarcated according to the Algiers agreement & UN Resolution, then Ethiopia's demand for Ethio-Eritrean "dialog" could help heal the wounds, reconcile the differences, & rebuild relationships therefore a natural outcome of good neighbors peace with themselves & with others will benefit both Ethiopians & Eritreans. To get there... How credible are the UN, UK, U.S., & African union in wanting to "guarantee" this conflict resolved & Ethio-Eritrean peace prevailed & restored?
- Gerrie Lijam <Ghebrehuwarshek@yahoo.com>
Re: Eritrea/Ethiopia War Looms as Washington Watches & Waits
Dan Connell's commentary regarding Ethiopia and Eritrea being "on the verge of going back to war, as the U.S. twiddles its political thumbs...." is absurd! The U.S. should definitely be loathe to step into this quarrel. The UN has failed again to enforce its own decisions. The U.S. has already incurred the disdain of world opinion for its actions regarding Iraq. If Eritrea and Ethiopia go back to war, it will be their decision and further proof of the UN's inability to perform as an international peacemaker. Let us ask why other nations twiddle their political thumbs. The U.S. is embroiled in dealing with UN failures in Iraq. Let Germany or France take this one for action.
- Kenneth Brahmer <kbrahmer@smnet.net>
Re: Eritrea/Ethiopia War Looms as Washington Watches & Waits
As a former resident of Ethiopia I found portions of this article insufficient and inaccurate. The reference to Meles' government as “narrowly based” belies his overwhelming popular support in favor of the disgruntled military who oppose him for his willingness to call a ceasefire. An important, yet missed, historical element to relations here is the fact that the Eritrean province separated peacefully from post-Communist Ethiopia by a referendum. Your article noted the sad expulsion of Eritreans from Ethiopia, but neglects to mention that some were raising money for the Eritrean war effort and that Eritrea imprisoned and expelled many Ethiopians in like manner. When referring to the unrest caused in Somalia you neglected to mention that Ethiopian military involvement in Somalia is backed by the United States due to claims of terrorist activities there. Your article mentioned the deaths of Eritrean officials in Badme but neglected to report Ethiopian deaths in the same conflict.
These are unfortunate slip-ups, but I am most concerned with the recommendation that aid be withheld and sanctions imposed if these countries do not immediately resolve this impasse. First of all, it belittles the complexity of the situation. Recently Meles faced a near-coup by military renegades because of his insistence on a peaceful solution with Eritrea. During this time, much was made of the little-known fact that Meles is a first cousin of [Eritrean president] Isaias. If in any way Ethiopia is made to look wronged by the accord, it will fuel these renegades' campaign to create unrest. A successful coup would destabilize the entire region, and an unclear compromise would surely be wielded as a weapon of public persuasion to supplement the force these renegades already control.
The more serious issue I have with such a recommendation, however, is that such actions by the international community would cripple the citizens of both countries, people already weakened by war and facing a horrible famine.
It is also essential that the international role in this conflict be acknowledged. The only reason for widespread availability of weapons in the area was the western-backed fight against Sudan by Ethiopia and Eritrea as well as the Somalian factor mentioned above.
No, the threatened removal of aid combined with economic sanctions in this situation would be a band-aid solution, and a band-aid covered in thorns for innocent civilians. Please consider recommendations like this more carefully in the future.
- Jeffery Coleman <jeffceth@softhome.net>
Several responses to this article bemoan the shortage of historical material. I agree that without adequate context, it is difficult to understand what is happening in this crisis and why. But the sheer weight of this history also has a tendency to block the parties to the crisis from seeing a way out of it.
Jeffrey Coleman insists on the importance of Eritrea's peaceful separation from Ethiopia via a referendum. He is right that this is a milestone, but what is he implying? What he leaves out is that the referendum only took place because Eritrea won a 30-year war for independence and helped bring down the Mengistu dictatorship. To mention the 1993 vote as if it were a gift from Ethiopia omits more history than it illumines.
Gerrie Lijam recites a litany of international sell-outs on Eritrea's national rights going back a half-century--by the U.S. , the UN, the UK and others. He is right about them--all of them. Anyone trying to mitigate this crisis must take into account that every Eritrean knows this history and brings the same skepticism as Lijam does to any new international initiative.
The danger is that this history can--and has--become a rationale for trusting no one, for taking no action, and, by default, for leaving progress toward the resolution of the crisis in the hands of others--precisely those others whom the Eritreans do not trust. Being right about the past is not enough (even about the peace accord)--how does this help us to see a practical way forward? What can Eritrea do to facilitate resolution beyond proclaiming its righteousness?
As to the specifics of what is now happening, the danger in assessing a crisis like that between Eritrea and Ethiopia from one side or the other is obvious. The viewer sees part of the picture and draws conclusions from there. I run this risk, as do several of the responders to the article. What to do?
One has to draw on sources outside one's field of immediate vision and one's own experience and extrapolate. But simply projecting one's experience onto the other side, as Coleman does, will not do.
Ethiopia's mass expulsions of Eritreans and Ethiopians of Eritrean origin in 1998-2000 has no equivalent. There were reprisals in Eritrea , and there was eventual population transfer but not on the scale or in the form that took place in Ethiopia . And not until both sides were well into the conflict. I defy Coleman to document the charge that the Eritrean expellees from Ethiopia were fifth columnists--raising money for the war or passing information. The Ethiopian government may have feared this, based on past experience, but what erupted in Ethiopia in May-June 1998 was spontaneous, intemperate vigilantism that hurt vast numbers of innocents in an outburst of bitterness that was driven by emotions, not intelligence.
Likewise, Coleman's suggestion that because he saw Russian mercenaries in Ethiopia, he concludes there were foreign mercenaries in Eritrea. This is the first I have even heard such a fanciful charge. It did not happen. And Coleman's suggestion that most aid in both countries is managed by NGOs is so far removed from reality that it raises questions for me about how much he knows about the actual situation on the ground. NGOs are far more active in Ethiopia than in Eritrea, but in neither case do they control the flow or the distribution of aid. Nor is the Sudan civil war the source of arms in the region. There are huge stores in Eritrea and Ethiopia from the cold-war-era conflicts there, but most new weaponry was purchased by the warring parties at the end of the 1990s.
But these assertions-without-evidence are part of a bigger misrepresentation: By proposing moral equivalence on every contentious point, Coleman obscures the core obstacle to resolving this crisis. Like many arguing Ethiopia's position, he lays out a tit-for-tat “history” and then proposes a tit-for-tat solution: Both sides screwed up, so both should now compromise.
But the compromise already happened. The peace agreement in 2000 was a compromise--one that both sides agreed to and that now remains to be implemented. There is only one side refusing to do so-- Ethiopia--because it does not like the compromise. There is only one solution--implement the agreement. What can be discussed, however, is how to make the implementation more palatable.
Where there is some equivalence in this impasse is in the fact that both leaderships have made uncompromising statements about the situation and have great difficulty moving off that position--the Ethiopians because they made Badme the basis for the war in the first place, the Eritreans because they accepted humiliating compromises in 2000 and have said they will go no further. These compromises included a 15-mile wide security zone entirely within their borders and a prior acceptance that they might lose on some of their claims--as they did.
What next? I argued that the international community needs to consider penalties and incentives to break this impasse. On the question of sanctions and how they hurt civilians, Coleman has a point, but it is not as simple as he suggests. I agree that blanket sanctions such as those imposed on Iraq would be a disaster for the civilian populations and should be avoided. (I also opposed them in Iraq.) Such sanctions are all the more inappropriate at a time when both countries face the threat of famine.
However, some mix of pressures and rewards is needed. Walking away, as Kenneth Brahmer suggests, is not an option. The U.S. is too deeply implicated in the origins of this crisis and too invested in its outcome--a stable Horn of Africa--to do nothing. The UN has only done what it has so far because of behind-the-scenes U.S. action going back to the Clinton administration. Its only role, in fact, has been to organize the peacekeepers and pass occasional resolutions. To expect the UN to drive a solution to this conflict is to do nothing. Action has to originate elsewhere.
Sanctions could focus on military aid and cooperation, diplomatic initiatives, and other measures that do not have a direct impact on civilian populations. Incentives could go beyond the obvious areas of aid and trade to focus on infrastructure repair and development (road and rail transport, power grids, health-care delivery, for example) that fall outside the traditional parameters of USAID's mandate. And Europe could help.
The question here is how serious is the Bush administration about resolving this confrontation short of renewed conflict. And how serious Ethiopia and Eritrea are about finding a way out of it.
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