Nation Topics - Foreign Policy | The Nation

Resentment against immigrants, even those seeking asylum, is at the boil.

Immigrant workers fuel the ecomony, but still they're treated with suspicion.

On April 3, a high-octane collection of thirty-three conservatives sent George W. Bush a letter urging him to lend Washington's "full support to Israel as it seeks to root out the [Palestinian] terrorist network." These hawks--including William Kristol, William Bennett, Rich Lowry, Martin Peretz and Richard Perle--called on Bush not to force Israel to negotiate with Yasir Arafat and to "accelerate plans for removing Saddam Hussein." They wanted Bush to adopt Israel's offensive as part of his war on terrorism and let Ariel Sharon roll. The next day, Bush replied, sort of, by declaring that Israel should withdraw from the West Bank. He slammed Arafat, but his aides noted that negotiations should resume, perhaps before a complete cease-fire has been achieved.

The hawks were not pleased. Bush's actions were "a show of weakness," says Marshall Wittmann, a signatory to the crush-them-now letter. Other parts of the hard-line pro-Israel coalition were disheartened. The Anti-Defamation League complained, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee protested, "It is no more appropriate to place a time limit on Israel's acts of self-defense than on America's acts in its own defense." Christian right supporters of Israel--many of whom believe that God granted Israel to the Jews and that Jewish control of Israel is a prelude to the Second Coming--had reason to be disappointed. The Rev. Jerry Falwell stated, "I believe Israel must aggressively defend its borders." Americans for Peace Now, however, praised Bush's new stance.

So Bush frustrated key elements of his support base and won huzzahs from peaceniks (even as he winked at Sharon's continuing operations). How did this come to pass? It was not because of domestic pressure. Democrats criticized Bush for not addressing the crisis, but that didn't mean they wanted Bush to lean on Israel. Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, for example, said, "I don't know that the Israeli government has any choice but to be as aggressive as they are." Senator Joe Lieberman remarked, "I believe strongly we should not ask Israelis to stop their war against terrorists until they have achieved greater homeland security." As Bush was pondering what to do, I contacted the Progressive Caucus of the House--no Bush friends there--and asked a spokeswoman if the group was responding to the crisis. "No," she said. Why not? "I don't know." Few if any Democrats were deviating from an Israel-first line. Before heading to the Middle East, Secretary of State Colin Powell remarked that he cared as much about Palestinian rights as Israel's security--a sentiment not echoed by lawmakers, Democratic or Republican.

"All the political pressure is on the side of the pro-Israel lobby," says Hussein Ibish of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. A staffer to a Congressman who occasionally voices concern for Palestinians notes, "There are not many of us in Congress." In fact, there are almost none, hardly enough for Bush to worry about. Kristol and neocon writer Robert Kagan claim that Bush caved because he "could not withstand a few days of heckling from the European Union and the New York Times." But once pressure from home and abroad forced a reluctant Bush into action, it could well be that he saw little choice but to press for Israeli restraint and negotiations, for the other option was to back Sharon's offensive. That would have risked rifts between Washington and its allies in Europe and the Middle East, undermining Bush's war on terrorism (and his designs on Saddam Hussein).

Hawkish backers of Israel are nervously watching how far Bush will go to rein in Sharon and restart negotiations. They vividly recall that Bush I opposed $10 billion in loan guarantees to Israel in an effort to force Israel to halt settlements in the West Bank. "There is a division within my camp," says Wittmann. "One school wants to cut the President slack for now, and the other believes Bush is already down the road of policy incoherence." Wittmann is hoping Bush's current stance is "ad-hocism, that his actions come from a desire to impose order upon chaos and out of a fear of destabilization in the Arab world. I'm not divining a long-term foreign policy message out of his handling of the current crisis--not yet."

Bush has not threatened to reconsider the fundamentals of US-Israel relations--such as $3 billion in annual assistance to Israel. The various groups that lobby for the Israeli hard-core retain influence in and out of the Administration. "There will be more Congressional involvement in the Middle East in the coming weeks," says the House staffer. That means further opportunity for pro-Israel hawks to shape the debate and Bush's decisions. Still, against the odds--and campaign donations and political clout--Bush spurned the Israel-all-the-way forces this round. A significant shift or a short-term plan? Bush himself probably doesn't know.

On April 11, as John Anderson notes in this issue, the International Criminal Court was scheduled to go into effect after being ratified by the required sixty nations. Although Bill Clinton signed the treaty, conservatives in Congress have opposed ratification. Now the Bush Administration is reportedly considering "unsigning" the treaty. Such an action would be but one more instance of this Administration's commitment to a reckless, destructive unilateralism.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright liked to say that America was "the indispensable nation." That formulation, however arrogant, at least implied a web of international obligations of which the United States was a part, even if it was sometimes AWOL (e.g., when it failed to support UN intervention in Rwanda). Bush Administration conservatives support a US policy aptly summed up by Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment: "Distrust treaties, increase defenses and assert American authority." State Department planner Richard Haass puts it less crudely: "à la carte multilateralism." National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice set guidelines in the 2000 election: We should "proceed from the firm ground of national interest and not from the interest of an illusory international community."

But the "community" of Arab and European nations that demanded that the Administration intervene in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before it engulfed the entire region was hardly "illusory"--witness Bush's sudden about-face in sending Colin Powell there. Voices from overseas (along with the specter of rising oil prices and falling regimes in Jordan and Egypt) got his attention.

Unilaterally focused on the domestically popular war on terrorism, the Administration had averted its eyes from the pustulating Israel-Palestine sore. As a result, as Richard Falk writes on page 11, Bush overplayed the "antiterrorist card," not only greatly broadening "the scope of needed response" but giving "governments around the planet a green light to increase the level of violence directed at their longtime internal adversaries." None ran with that ball harder than Israel's Ariel Sharon.

Israel-Palestine aside, the Administration's Pentagon-geared, campaign-donor-friendly brand of American unilateralism has had harmful consequences for both national and international "interests." We walk away from the Kyoto Protocol, increasing the danger that oceans swollen by global warming will inundate our coasts. We abandon the ABM treaty, opening the door to a renewed nuclear arms race that makes us less secure. We threaten "rogue states," in the recent Nuclear Posture Review, with tactical nuclear bombs if they misbehave, thus erasing the threshold that confined the use of nukes to self-defense. We claim a military victory over terrorism in Afghanistan but fail to support adequately a multinational effort to provide food and security, protect women's rights and rebuild the nation (see Jan Goodwin on page 21).

The British scholar Timothy Garton Ash complained recently in a New York Times Op-Ed that the United States simply has too much unwonted power and needs a counterweight--a stronger Europe. That may be, but we believe that the American future lies in supporting international norms and treaties and cooperation with other nations--not in projecting military power in pursuit of "interests" while building a garrison state at home.

The Bush Administration has vigorously and effectively responded to the terrorist attack of September 11. The country seems united behind that effort. Certainly there was no hint of a doubt in the repeated standing ovations Congress gave the President's State of the Union address, including his bold declaration that the war on terrorism has just begun. The President singled out Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the most likely next targets of America's aroused ire against terrorists and governments that attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction that we, the Russians, the British, the French, the Chinese, the Indians, the Pakistanis and the Israelis already possess.

No longer in government, I do not have the benefit of national security briefings or Congressional committee deliberations. So perhaps instead of making assertions, it may be more appropriate for me to ask some questions that have been on my mind both before and since September 11.

Which course might produce better results in advancing American security? Is it by continuing to boycott, diplomatically and commercially, such countries as Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya and Cuba and threatening to bomb them? Or would we be better off opening up diplomatic, trade and travel relations with these countries, including a well-staffed embassy in each? If we are fearful of a country and doubtful of its intentions, wouldn't we be safer having an embassy with professional foreign service officers located in that country to tell us what is going on?

Our leaders frequently speak of "rogue nations." But what is a rogue nation? Isn't it simply one we have chosen to boycott because it doesn't always behave the way we think it should? Do such nations behave better when they are isolated and boycotted against any normal discourse? What do we have to lose in talking to "rogue nations" diplomatically, trading with them commercially and observing their economic, political and military conditions?

Instead of adding $48 billion to the Pentagon budget, as the President has proposed, wouldn't we make the world a more stable, secure place if we invested half of that sum in reducing poverty, ignorance, hunger and disease in the world? We are now twentieth among nations in the percentage of gross national product devoted to improving life in the poor nations. If we invested half of the proposed new military spending in lifting the quality of life for the world's poor we would be the first among nations in helping others.

Is it possible that such an achievement would reduce some of the gathering anger that the poor and miserable of the earth may be inclined to direct at the rich and indifferent? Why does a wealthy zealot like Osama bin Laden gain such a huge following among the poor and powerless of the world? Acting on the old adage "charity begins at home," why not invest the other half of the proposed new money for the Pentagon in raising the educational, nutritional, housing and health standards of our own people?

Our military services are the best in the world. But with a military budget at record levels, do we need to allocate another $48 billion--an amount greater than the total military budget of any other nation? Is not the surest foundation for our military forces a healthy, educated, usefully employed citizenry? And is not the best way to diminish some of the international trouble spots, which might embroil our young men and women, by reducing the festering poverty, misery and hopelessness of a suffering world?

Of course we need to take reasonable precautions in our airports and other strategic points to guard against terrorists or nut cases. As a World War II bomber pilot, I appreciate the role of both tactical and strategic bombing in all-out warfare. But is sending our bombers worldwide in the hope that they might hit terrorist hideouts or such hostile governments as Iraq an effective way to end terrorism? May it not more likely erode our current international coalition, while fanning the flames of terrorism and hatred against us as the world's only superpower, hellbent on eradicating evil around the world?

The Administration now has seventy-five officials hidden in bunkers outside Washington poised to take over the government in the event of a terrorist attack. Is it possible that paranoia has become policy? No such extreme measures were undertaken in World War II, nor in the half-century of cold war between the two nuclear giants, Russia and the United States.

All of us who love this land want our President to succeed. Nothing would give me greater happiness than to see him become a great President. But is it possible that our well-intentioned President and his Vice President have gone off the track of common sense in their seeming obsession with terrorism? Is there still validity to the proverb "whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad"?

For half a century, our priorities were dominated by the fear of Russian Communism--until it collapsed of its own internal weakness. As I listen to the grim rhetoric of Messrs. Bush and Cheney, I wonder if they are leading us into another half-century of cold war, with terrorism replacing Communism as the second great hobgoblin of our age.

The Bush Administration, urged by the oil industry, has embraced a corrupt regime.

What was originally billed as Dick Cheney's mission to recruit Arab nations' support for ousting Saddam Hussein became a lecture tour on the urgency of dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--with Cheney as the lecturee. By the time he reached Israel the Vice President was promising that the United States would become "very actively engaged" in peace efforts in the Middle East.

Was this a Paul-like conversion on the road not quite to Damascus? Hardly. Whether it evolves into a full-scale US diplomatic effort to achieve a workable peace settlement remains to be seen, but there are new glimmers of hope as other key parties are now speaking out. Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah's proposal injected a fresh impetus into the bloody Israeli-Palestinian impasse. The Saudi plan--which calls for Israeli withdrawal to its pre-June 1967 borders in exchange for a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and normalization of relations with the Arab nations--is, of course, nothing new. But its source, a conservative Arab state, carried weight, and its enunciation was timely. Such a vision still offers the best framework for a lasting solution. To the Israelis it promises peace, security and commerce with its neighbors; to the Palestinians it promises an end to the occupation and the establishment of a viable Palestinian nation. As Israeli novelist Amos Oz recently wrote, "Even Ariel Sharon and Yasir Arafat know the solution: peace between two states, established by the partition of the land roughly in accordance with demographic realities based on Israel's pre-1967 borders."

The United States, for its part, has taken several mildly positive steps, including engineering a UN Security Council resolution for a Palestinian state and Bush's admonition that Sharon's massive incursion into the Palestinian refugee camps was "not helpful." US disapproval stopped Sharon's invasion, and the Prime Minister also dropped his condition that peace talks would proceed only after seven days without Palestinian violence.

The Bush Administration's let-'em-fight-it-out policy, coupled with continued military and economic aid to Israel, has been a disaster, tacitly encouraging Sharon in his admitted attempt "to increase the number of losses on the other side. Only after they've been battered will we be able to conduct talks." Also a disaster was Washington's myopic ritual of blaming everything on Arafat's alleged failure to stem Palestinian terrorism. The US stance ignores what UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recently called Israel's "illegal occupation" of the West Bank and Gaza. Annan notably followed up those words with an indictment of the Israelis for unleashing the military in what resembled "all-out conventional warfare" against heavily populated civilian areas.

The Administration must now recognize that the best tactic in this renewed peace process is to work for a political settlement in tandem with a military truce. Achieving such a settlement will require a deep and evenhanded involvement on its part. Peace in the Middle East, not toppling Saddam Hussein, should be the United States' top priority. Many Arab leaders don't like the Iraqi dictator, but they know that military action against Iraq would further destabilize the region at a time when Arab opinion is inflamed against Israel and America.

Implementing the Saudi plan would mean taking some difficult steps, including the removal of Israeli settlements and the creation of a contiguous Palestinian state. The issues of the Palestinians' right of return and the location of their capital in East Jerusalem must be faced. These aren't intractable once the principles of full withdrawal for full peace are agreed on. International monitors should be introduced into the region to implement and enforce a peace agreement--particularly on the Palestinian side, because Arafat's power to curb terrorist elements (and curb them he must) has been undermined by Israeli incursions as well as his own weakness. Once a just settlement has emerged, Washington should impose compliance, if necessary, by cutting off aid and support to the recalcitrant party.

Washington must bring to bear its immense power, in coordination with the good offices of the European Union and the UN, and work to resolve this conflict. Such an outcome would be the most effective measure yet in the so-called war on terrorism.

A Mexican migrant acquaintance once told me that he'd love the opportunity to brief Congress on immigration policy. Let us imagine him now, walking into the hallowed chamber, dressed in his typical migrant attire: a fading Oakland Raiders jersey, oversized bright orange painting pants, imitation Air Jordans. He wears a baseball cap with the epigram ¡qué viva México, cabrónes! rendered in red, green and white--the colors of the Mexican flag. He reaches into his well-worn backpack and pulls out some handwritten notes on crumpled sheets of paper, and begins:

First, I would like to tell the distinguished sirs and madams a bit about the migrant life. I'm from a luckless southwestern Mexican town whose timber-based economy is in tatters--no sign of economic development on the horizon, NAFTA or no. I made my first trip to the States at 13, a solo journey that included a few months of indentured servitude to a "coyote," a real cabrón. I paid off what I owed him by picking aluminum cans out of the garbage. When I finally broke free, I took to the road.

I never had a problem getting a job. With a cheap forgery of a green card, the bosses never looked twice. As the years went by, I cruised from state to state. I got married to a girl from home and soon we were on the road together, hopping back and forth across the border that supposedly separates our nations.

Beginning in the latter half of the 1990s, our border-crossings became increasingly difficult. Suddenly, you built walls on the US-Mexico border. Big ones, made of coppery steel. These you have referred to as "interdiction measures," which include programs with names like Gatekeeper, Safeguard and Hold the Line. Since 1995 as many as 1,400 migrants died on that line, pushed by your Border Patrol into the remote, deadly desert and lonely stretches of the Rio Grande.

You recently deployed the first of more than 1,600 National Guard troops along the frontiers with both Canada and Mexico, to provide "tactical" support to the other agencies on the line. The last time you put the military on the line, the result was the shooting of an 18-year-old who was out herding his goats; you did the sensible thing and pulled them out. Now they're back; so far, thankfully, they are unarmed.

I tell you that this is a dangerous situation, and yet, in the wake of September 11--when I grieved as much as if Mexico herself had been attacked--I am mindful of your security concerns. I submit to you that you cannot secure your borders alone. I humbly suggest consultations at the highest levels between the federal law-enforcement agencies of our two countries, a starting point for recognizing that American homeland security is Mexican homeland security and vice versa.

We must re-imagine the border between us. All the money you've poured into "holding the line"--some $4 billion a year for the total INS budget--does nothing of the sort. Yes, it makes it more difficult, and sometimes deadly, to cross. But we still do cross back and forth over that line.

Dear legislators, I watch CNN en Español and have been following your recent debates over immigration policy very carefully. Let us speak frankly here: You've been playing an age-old shell game--appeasing the rabid dogs of nativism but leaving the border open enough to supply labor to big business, which keeps getting you re-elected.

What a great buzz there was in the migrant communities before 9/11! You were speaking (well, some of you) about an amnesty--pardon me, a regularization--of the immigration status of the nearly 9 million estimated "illegals" in your midst. Then for several months you shied away from such discussions. But now your President is on his way to Latin America, and he will meet with my President. It is clear to us, the migrants, that these men want to see some movement on the issue--Bush, to bolster his standing among Latinos and his business cronies, and Fox, to please paisanos like me--but this makes many of you uncomfortable. I know why. It's Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Now, I might look a bit like Caliban (especially in these surroundings), but I'm no Taliban, no terrorist! What are my weapons? Leaf blowers and dishrags?

You must place regularization and some version of a "guestworker" program back on the fast track. Everybody wins with real reform: Your labor-hungry industries will be happy, and you might even get some of that coveted Hispanic vote. But you need to understand one thing: We migrants will not accept any kind of program modeled on the infamous, exploitative Bracero Program. Braceros, my grandfather among them, had no right to leave an abusive boss, had no recourse to better their working conditions and wages, could not join unions. The guestworker program of the new century must give us the rights that all American workers enjoy. And there must be a mechanism for affording those workers who spend, say, six years living and working in your country the opportunity for permanent legal status.

When Vicente Fox rose to power two years ago, he made a statement that caused you much anxiety: He foresaw the border between the United States and Mexico disappearing within a decade. I tell you today that this prophecy will come to pass. There are no lines in nature, dear sirs and madams. The fact that I am here before you today proves that this is so. I thank you for your kind consideration in allowing me to speak before you today. ¡Qué vivan los mojados! Long live the migrants!

Targeted by authorities, immigrants are organizing to defend their rights.

It is now widely acknowledged that what sparked the most devastating attack on the American mainland in history was the continued presence of US troops on Saudi Arabian soil after the Gulf War--which, in 1991, prompted the disaffection of Osama bin Laden, until then part of the Saudi political/business establishment. With US troops, warplanes and other military hardware stationed in all the gulf Arab monarchies, and the Pentagon's Fifth Fleet headquartered in the island state of Bahrain, why does the United States need to maintain a military presence on Saudi soil?

It would be naïve to expect a straight answer from US authorities, so one has to make do with the explanations offered recently by unnamed Pentagon officials, especially the one "who has worked intimately with Saudi Arabia" and who told the Washington Post in mid-January that the United States promised to withdraw its contingent from the Saudi kingdom "when the job is done." As the Post reported, "Saudis interpreted that to mean the job of expelling Iraq from Kuwait [in 1990-91], but many US officials think the job remains undone as long as Saddam Hussein remains in power in Baghdad."

The official was referring to the written promise from President Bush Senior, secured by King Fahd before he invited US troops to his country, in August 1990, after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. So, out goes the explanation dished up routinely by the State Department and the Pentagon for many years--that the troops and warplanes are based inside Saudi Arabia to monitor the US/UK-imposed no-fly zone in southern Iraq, implying that the discontinuation of this zone would end the Pentagon's presence in the desert kingdom. Secretary of State Colin Powell made the logic even more explicit in a January 20 Fox-TV interview quoted in the International Herald Tribune: The US military presence in Saudi Arabia, he said, "might end only when the world turned into 'the kind of place we dreamed of. They [US forces] serve a useful purpose there as a deterrent to Saddam Hussein, but beyond that as a symbol.'"

Fahd extracted Bush Senior's promise in 1990 in order to overcome stiff opposition from ranking clerics, who provide legitimacy to the rule of the House of Saud. The presence of US troops under their own flag in Saudi Arabia violates a cardinal Islamic principle that the kingdom has enforced since its inception in 1932, treating all Saudi territory as a mosque, based on Mohammed's deathbed injunction: "Let there be no two religions in Arabia." Clearly King Fahd was apprehensive about US troops in his kingdom acting as an independent force to achieve their anti-Iraq objective without regard for its impact on Saudi interests or sovereignty. Twelve years on, he and Crown Prince Abdullah, the de facto ruler, find Washington trying to impose its interpretation of what "the job" entails and when it is "done."

America's insistence on imposing its will on Riyadh is fueling the anger many Saudis feel toward Washington, especially regarding its unquestioned support for Israel in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which generates sympathy for Osama bin Laden. A secret survey in mid-October by the kingdom's intelligence agency, Istikhabart, showed that 95 percent of educated Saudis in the 25-to-41 age group supported "bin Laden's cause." Given this sociopolitical fact, it seems unlikely that the regime in Riyadh can continue its tight military links with Washington. The writing is on the wall. "Since September 11 America has lost the Saudi people," said Dr. Abdulrahman al-Zamil, chairman of the al-Zamil business group. "America tried to convince people that they are here to protect the [Saudi] regime, and that is total garbage. Their presence is a liability to the Saudi government." The airing of such a view by an affluent businessman, who is also a member of the consultative council appointed by the monarch, could have happened only with the connivance of the royal family.

Perceiving widespread opposition to the presence of US troops in the kingdom, the top decision-makers in Riyadh may have decided to raise the previously taboo issue in public, if only to signal to their subjects that their views are being taken into account. However, along with their American counterparts, they face a dilemma: How can US military presence in the kingdom be curtailed or ended without appearing to reward bin Laden? There is no easy way out.