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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (52802)	10/18/2002 12:41:47 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

For a macabre dance in the rubble: how Arafat conducts PA politics these days. Reform? don't hold your breath (though the stench may make you want to): Living in the ruins By Danny Rubinstein For the second time in the past few months Mohammed Dahlan has quit. After the Palestinian Authority was formed, Dahlan built up a lot of power in Gaza, as head of the Preventive Security forces. He has political ambitions that he does not hide, and he was among the few aides Arafat took to Camp David more than two years ago. Dahlan's resignation from the Preventive Security forces was the result of his ambition to get a high-ranking political job, perhaps interior minister, responsible for the entire security apparatus in the PA. Arafat preferred the veteran Gen. Abdel Razak Yahya. Dahlan was appointed Arafat's security adviser, but some say that Arafat never actually signed the document appointing him, only verbally promising Dahlan the position. Dahlan's associates leaked to the Arab satellite TV station Al Jazeera that he had been given the new position, and Arafat never denied it. That's an old method of the chairman, who likes to keep the people around him in a state of uncertainty. Now Dahlan has resigned from the adviser's job, and again, the background to the resignation is the scrambling around Arafat as he plans a new cabinet after the current one didn't win approval from the Palestinian Legislative Council. Will Dahlan get a job in the new cabinet? Nobody knows. Arafat has to please two large camps of PLC members who toppled the previous cabinet. The first camp is the Gazans. Out of the 88 members of the PLC, 40 are from Gaza and most refused to vote confidence in Arafat's government. The Gazans are angry that he fired Gazans like Freih Abu Medein, and the Minister for Prisoner Affairs, Hisham Abdel Razak, from the previous cabinet. There's a Gazan bourse of names of candidates for the new government: Ruhi Patuah, the secretary general of the council, and other members of the PLC - Ziad Abu Amar and Abdel Karim Uda. The other bloc Arafat has to satisfy is a group of PLC members from Hebron, who have a 10-seat faction in the PLC. Arafat's difficult problem is not only the question of who to put in the new cabinet, but who he will have to fire. The candidates for dismissal include Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, who is from the tiny Pada party that split from the Democratic Front. He is considered arrogant, and Fatah activists demand Arafat name someone instead of him. The same is true for Interior Minister Abdel Razak Yahya, who isn't a member of Fatah, so there are demands he be fired. Veteran government ministers like Jamil Tarfif, Intisar al Wazir (Umm Jihad), and Ali Kawasmeh are also being mentioned as likely candidates for replacement. But much more interesting than the political gossip is the way Arafat plans to name his ministers. He consults with everyone, but doesn't say anything clear to anyone. Everyone is scrambling around him, exchanging rumors and talking about their impression from the fragments of sentences they heard from him. He's confusing and exhausting all the people around him. With one hand he draws the top-level members close to him and with the other hand he pushes them away. Even Abu Mazen, whom everyone regards as Arafat's No. 2, needed to acquiesce to the Fatah leadership's decision not to name him as prime minister right now, and he was forced to apologize and say that he actually didn't want the job. Arafat told Al Hayyat "I'm the leader and I appoint the leadership." Everyone makes the pilgrimage to his office in the heart of the rubble of the Muqata. Dozens of smashed cars surround what remains of his offices, piled one on top of the other. Visitors say his offices are dirty. He doesn't want to get rid of the piles of rubble, which give off a stench. For the Palestinian public that's a clear message. Arafat is telling his people: I live like you, in the rubble. And they know how to appreciate it. That's why the entire world can talk about his waning days, but meanwhile, there's not even a glimmer of the appearance of a new leader. haaretzdaily.com

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (52802)	10/18/2002 1:09:22 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (6) \| Respond to of 281500

Andrew Sullivan has dug up some commentary on the North Korean agreement of 1994 -- the one Carter brokered, where they agreed to be paid not to develop nuclear arms. A personal note here. I know you consider me an extreme right-winger on foreign policy. But I didn't come to this way of thinking all in a minute. I used to be far more to the left, but several years ago I began a habit of making a mental note any time a pundit made a prediction that would be verifiable or disprovable by the passage of time, for example, a pundit might say "today's agreement will be seen as a major achievement of this administration" or "today's agreement is a nonsensical side-show, which will be forgotten inside a month." I would then try to remember the remark, and see which pundit had been proved right in the event. After doing that for a while, I began to say, boy, Charles Krauthammer is really ahead of the curve, isn't he? because his commentary has been proved right, again and again. So I began listening to him more carefully, and my own way of thinking changed as I did so. With that in mind, here is some commentary on the 1994 North Korea deal, first from the New York Times editorial page, then from Charles Krauthammer. See how they read today: The New York Times: "Diplomacy with North Korea has scored a resounding triumph. Monday's draft agreement freezing and then dismantling North Korea's nuclear program should bring to an end two years of international anxiety and put to rest widespread fears that an unpredictable nation might provoke nuclear disaster. The U.S. negotiator Robert Gallucci and his North Korean interlocutors have drawn up a detailed road map of reciprocal steps that both sides accepted despite deep mutual suspicion. In so doing they have defied impatient hawks and other skeptics who accused the Clinton Administration of gullibility and urged swifter, stronger action. The North has agreed first to freeze its nuclear program in return for U.S. diplomatic recognition and oil from Japan and other countries to meet its energy needs. Pyongyang will then begin to roll back that program as an American-led consortium replaces the North's nuclear reactors with two new ones that are much less able to be used for bomb-making. At that time, the North will also allow special inspections of its nuclear waste sites, which could help determine how much plutonium it had extracted from spent fuel in the past." - The New York Times, October 19, 1994 Charles Krauthammer: (1) The NPT is dead. North Korea broke it and got a huge payoff from the United States not for returning to it but for pretending to. Its nuclear program proceeds unmolested. In Tehran and Tripoli and Baghdad the message is received: Nonproliferation means nothing. (2) The IAEA, if it goes along with this sham, is corrupted beyond redemption. It is supposed to be an impartial referee blowing the whistle on proliferators. Yet if Washington does not want to hear the whistle, the IAEA can be bullied into silence. (3) American credibility - not very high after Clinton's about-faces in Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti - sinks to a new low. This is a president easily cowed and dangerously weak. Said one government official to the New York Times, "It's one of these cases where the administration was huffing and puffing and backed down." Better though, said another, than "falling on our own sword over phony principle." If nonproliferation, so earnestly trumpeted by this president, is a phony principle, then where do we look for this president's real principles? This administration would not recognize a foreign policy principle, phony or otherwise, if it tripped over one in the street. The State Department, mixing cravenness with cynicism, calls this capitulation "very good news." For Kim Il Sung, certainly. For us, the deal is worse than dangerous. It is shameful.

To: Karen Lawrence who wrote (52802)	10/18/2002 3:51:51 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Bait and Switch By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF Columnist The New York Times October 18, 2002 KUWAIT — Listen to the American hawks after a few glasses of wine, and you might be seduced into thinking that after overthrowing Saddam Hussein we're going to turn Iraq into a flourishing democracy. But I'm afraid it's a pipe dream, a marketing ploy to sell a war. We haven't even been able to nurture full democracy in modern, bustling Kuwait, where women still cannot vote, or in Saudi Arabia, which is more egalitarian — neither men nor women can vote. I had a nice insight into the limits of democracy in Kuwait the other night when I was at the palatial home (come to think of it, the reason it was palatial was that it was a palace) of a top Kuwaiti. A cellphone rang, and my hosts beamed and informed me of the arrest of Muhammad al-Mulaifi, a young government official who had been quoted in The New York Times a few days earlier as gushing sympathetically about two terrorists who had shot an American marine to death and wounded another. I asked the sheik (I'm trying to protect my source, and fortunately there are enough sheiks and palaces in Kuwait that I still am) what the charges were against Mr. Mulaifi. Speaking too openly to an American journalist? Insulting the Great Father Across the Sea? The arrest underscored the risks of expressing a dissident view publicly at a time when Kuwait was shocked and embarrassed by the killing of the marine. The episode is a reminder that while Kuwait is one of the freest countries in the gulf region, with a lively press that dares scold even members of the ruling Sabah clan, it is also a family-run venture that falls well short of being a full-fledged democracy. In the immediate aftermath of the gulf war, the first Bush administration leaned on the Sabahs, and the result was a restoration of a Parliament that the emir had dissolved in 1986. The Parliament has since grown more important, with members periodically trying to do their best to embarrass cabinet members in the finest tradition of democratic rule. But the U.S. soon lost interest in prodding the Sabah family, and so 11 years after the gulf war progress has been modest, even in peaceful sandbox-sized Kuwait. Then there's Iraq. A central challenge is that democracy would effectively take power from the 16 percent Sunni Muslim minority that has always run Iraq and hand it to the 60 percent Shiite population, and this transfer could be very bloody. "You can't expect to have a real democracy in Iraq, such as we're dreaming of," notes Abdullah Sahar, a political scientist at Kuwait University. Building a democracy in Kuwait is "very easy," he says, compared with doing the same in Iraq. (Perhaps it's a bit odd for the not entirely democratic Kuwaitis to scoff at prospects for democracy in their neighbor, but most do so.) Even if we could find an Iraqi version of Hamid Karzai (no, no, Ahmed Chalabi, don't leave London yet), and even if Iraq were ready for democracy, there would be another huge obstacle — the neighbors. "There will not be a democracy in Iraq, not a real democracy," said Mohammed Al-Jassem, editor of the newspaper Al-Watan in Kuwait. "That would mean allowing a Shiite state. America and the gulf countries cannot afford that." The rise of a Shiite state in Iraq could strengthen Iran and lead to clashes with Shiite minorities in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and other countries, he warned. Actually, it seems to me that the risks of democracy are smaller than the risks of military rule. But that may be academic, because odds are that the neighboring governments would do their best to block popular rule from ever emerging in Iraq. Kuwaiti rulers seem to think, based on assurances from U.S. officials, that Shiite domination is potentially so destabilizing that democracy is not even an option for Iraq. As Kuwait sees it, the possibilities range from a Tommy Franks viceroyalty to the installation of a Sunni Hashemite king, some relative of Jordan's King Abdullah II. Jordan already seems to be quietly lobbying for this outcome. "Democracy is just not in the cards there," one Kuwaiti official said. Of course, even a nicer tyrant — Saddam Lite — would be a huge improvement for the Iraqis. But I'm afraid that the prattle about creating a democratic model on the Tigris is just a shrewd White House marketing attempt to bait and switch. nytimes.com