A former Senate staffer of his stopped by for a drink last week and told me that, without fanfare, the socialist president of Chile had come in person to the Kennedy home a few months ago to bestow one of her nation’s highest human rights awards on him. His work on that subject alone was a part atonement for his siblings’ deployment of what Lyndon Johnson himself called “a goddam Murder Incorporated” in the Southern Hemisphere. So, of course, was his labor on health care (where Richard Nixon had a better political track record than the Kennedy administration) and his last decision to keep looking life in the face for as long as he had breath. In those waning months, after being disgusted by malicious anti-Obama propaganda being spread in the Democratic primaries—later picked up and used by the right in the general election—he withdrew his support from a candidate whose victory would have meant the continuation of the dynastic politics represented by the family names Bush, Gore, and Clinton. What a favor he did us all by that repudiation! And how fitting that it should have been a Kennedy who did it. The political rhetoric of Obamaism, alas, is even more bloviating at times than Camelot was, but you can’t have everything.
It is true, then, and not just in America, that people do instinctively respond to redemption, atonement, the making up for missed opportunities and squandered time. Call no man happy until he is dead, as the Greeks had it. Kennedy’s very last year was quite possibly his best, and how many men or women will be able to say that?
(Slate, August 31, 2009)
Engaging with Iran Is Like Having Sex with Someone Who Hates You
LIVING IN THE Islamic Republic,” wrote Azar Nafisi in her book Reading Lolita in Tehran in 2003, “is like having sex with a man you loathe.” This verdict has gathered extra force and pungency as the succeeding years have elapsed and as more women have been stoned, hanged, beaten, raped, and silenced. Lately has come the news that Iranian men in prison are being raped, too, for trying to exercise their right to vote. And now the US government has come to a point where it must ask itself: What is it like to enter negotiations with a man who loathes you and who every Friday holds public prayers that call for your death?
Last Friday brought the news that the Obama administration had accepted an offer from Tehran, delivered the preceding Wednesday, for the holding of what the New York Times called “unconditional talks.” It was further reported that the administration had spent “less than 48 hours” deliberating whether to respond to the invitation, which yields the interesting if minor detail that this must have been the most significant decision taken by Obama’s people on or about the eighth anniversary of the attacks of September 11.
Well, I am all for talks without preconditions, and I have said several times in this space that I think we should offer the Iranians cooperation on a wide spectrum of topics, especially the very pressing one of helping to “proof” Iran against the coming earthquake that could devastate its capital city. There may even be areas of potential interest in our having common enemies in the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But things have changed a little since the president and his secretary of state were sparring over the word “unconditional” during the primaries. First, it has become ever clearer that Iran’s uranium-enrichment and centrifuge program has put it within measurable distance of the ability to weaponize its nuclear capacity. Second, it has become obscenely obvious that the theocracy is prepared to govern by force alone and to employ the most appalling measures to remain in power without a mandate.
So it would be nice to know, even if no “conditions” or “preconditions” (this seems like a distinction without much difference) are to be exacted, whether the administration has assured itself on two points. The first of these is: Do we seriously expect the Islamic Republic to be negotiating in good faith about its nuclear program? And the second is: What do we know about the effect of these proposed talks on the morale and the leadership of the Iranian opposition?
One presumes that the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad regime had its own reasons for firing off a five-page document proposing negotiations and including Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and China—the much-stalled group of countries that have conducted business with Iran so far—in the offer. The letter was sent out in the same period that the Russian government opposed any further sanctions on Iran for noncooperation, in the same period that Ahmadinejad announced that Iran would never halt its nuclear fuel production, and in the run-up to Ahmadinejad’s next appearance at the podium of the United Nations toward the end of this month.
Might it be possible—you will, I hope, forgive my cynicism—that this latest initiative from Tehran is yet another attempt to buy time or run out the clock?
Meanwhile, it is certainly the case that at least three of the six countries approached are being asked to negotiate under some kind of duress. In an unpardonable violation of diplomatic immunity (a phrase that may remind you of something), employees of the French and British embassies in Tehran have been placed under arrest and subjected to show trials since the convulsions that attended the coup mounted by the Revolutionary Guards in June. And the Iranian correspondent of Newsweek magazine—who is also a Canadian citizen—has been held incommunicado for almost the same length of time. Without overstressing any “preconditions,” it doesn’t seem too much to require of the Iranian regime that it not send out invitations to countries whose citizens or locally engaged diplomatic staff it is holding as hostages.
On the larger question of the breach by Iran of all its undertakings about nuclear weapons, and the amazing absence from its diplomatic note of any mention of its own program, one wasn’t too reassured by the lazy phrasing of Susan Rice, the US ambassador to the United Nations. The Obama administration, she said, would not impose “artificial deadlines” on Ahmadinejad. Why is this not reassuring? Because it’s impossible to tell what is meant by an “artificial deadline.” Would one prefer a “genuine” deadline, whereby, for example, the United Nations required Iran to demonstrate compliance with the relevant Security Council resolutions on nuclear proliferation—we have a bushel of these—or face further UN-mandated sanctions? Certainly one would, but this isn’t what Ambassador Rice appears to have meant.
From all appearances, then, this seems like another snow job from the mullahs. And did the State Department or the CIA take any soundings, in those forty-eight hours between receipt of the mullahs’ letter and our response to it, among the leaders of Iranian civil society? Given the short interval, it seems that the thought did not even occur to them. Here is what I heard from Professor Abbas Milani, the director of Iranian studies at Stanford University:
When you read [the Iranian letter] and realize how empty of earnest negotiating positions it in fact is, you are left with no choice but to conclude that they are relying on their ally in Putin’s Russia to veto any resolutions against them. For the Russians to be able to even pretend to be serious in their talk of no need for more pressure on the regime, Tehran has also to pretend to be serious in negotiation.
This analysis appears to conform to all the available facts as we know them. A bit too much like having sex with someone who loathes you.
(Slate, September 14, 2009)
Colin Powell: Powell Valediction
AS I WAS completing this essay, I experienced one of those random moments that make my supposed profession worthwhile. I had been invited for a Foggy Bottom chat with Ambassador Richard Boucher, the State Department’s chief spokesman. He took me deftly over and around the various hurdles involved in any Colin Powell retrospect, and demonstrated the diplomatic adroitness that has endeared him to so many correspondents, and seemed almost to smooth away much of the jaggedness. And then we got to Darfur.
Boucher began a practiced response, speaking about “process” and bargaining and about pipelines of food and medicine and all of that, especially stressing the horrible fate of those herders and villagers who had been “caught in the middle.” I like to think that he saw the question forming on my lips, but, before I could get any further, he suddenly unde
rwent a complete change of expression. “Actually,” he said, as if half-talking to himself, “they aren’t ‘caught in the middle.’ There is no middle. No middle to be caught in. The word ‘middle’ doesn’t apply.” After a short pause I asked if that had been, or could now be, for the record. He said “Yeah.”
This was a useful tip-off to the content of Secretary Powell’s testimony on Capitol Hill about a week later, when he broke with the cautious language that some had been employing and stated in more-or-less round terms that the conduct of the racist Arab-Muslim death squads in Darfur conformed to the definition of genocide. It is always encouraging when the department shakes off the dusty euphemisms that make up the small change of diplomatic habit. Taken together with the focus he has developed on the AIDS catastrophe now menacing Africa, it can be said of Darfur that Powell will be able to point to a monument, or at any rate a benchmark, for his time in office. It may also be said, of this high point, that few things became Secretary Powell’s tenure more than the leaving of it.
Previously, a sense of dankness and exhaustion was palpable in the department. I might instance the uninspired announcement, shortly before I paid my call, that the secretary of state would not be traveling to Athens to represent the United States at the closing ceremony of the Olympic Games after all. The Department of State, which made the announcement only on the day of Powell’s planned departure, gave various official and unofficial explanations for this extremely short-notice cancellation. No, the secretary was not especially concerned about security. (A demonstration of two thousand people organized by leftists and anarchists on the preceding Friday had been mild by Athenian standards, and much worse was predicted. The forces of international terrorism had stayed away altogether.) On the other hand, one State Department official said, the secretary “didn’t want anything untoward and did not want the complications of any visit to distract from the end of a very successful Olympics.” Poorly phrased as it was, this might have been an intelligible reason for declining to attend the ceremony in the first place. But as an excuse for withdrawing at the last possible moment, it sounded a bit hollow and graceless. Another State Department aide only made matters worse (and perhaps went somewhat “off message”) when he revealed that Secretary Powell had been the one to ask the White House if he could represent the United States at the ceremony. It shows a fair degree of vanity to suppose that one’s own presence, booked or unbooked, could by itself be a “distraction” from a global gala on the Olympic scale. And by this standard, if it is a standard, the United States should always avoid high-level attendance at major international gatherings.
Would I be straining the patience of the reader if I extended this example just a little further? The Greek authorities spent an estimated $1.2 billion on surveillance and security systems for the games, much of it at US urging. The newly enlarged NATO alliance contributed air, land, and sea forces to guarantee further protection. In addition to attending the ceremony, the secretary was to have met officials in Athens to review developments in Cyprus. And Colin Powell canceled just like that.
The combined weariness and solipsism of this behavior sent me back to read the profile of the secretary, by Wil Hylton in an issue of GQ two months earlier. Here we were told on the record by Powell’s chief of staff, Larry Wilkerson, that the secretary was “tired. Mentally and physically. And if the president were to ask him to stay on—if the president is reelected and the president were to ask him to stay on, he might for a transitional period, but I don’t think he’d want to do another four years.” In addition to this, we gathered from Wilkerson, it had been a bit much putting up with all the neoconservatives the president had also seen fit to hire. A bit more than a bit much, to judge by this remark: “I don’t care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin on a sealed train to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz.” (This allusion to Washington Bolshevism is eclipsed in an undenied remark in Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack, in which the secretary himself refers to Dick Cheney supporters in the Pentagon as the “Gestapo office.”)
From William Jennings Bryan to Cyrus Vance, history used to suggest a remedy for secretaries of state who became demoralized or disillusioned with the policies pursued by their presidents: resignation. More than just quitting, resignation also at least implies an acceptance of responsibility (as it did, for example, when Lord Carrington resigned as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s foreign secretary over the Falklands imbroglio). But with Powell, one has never been entirely sure whether he considers collective responsibility to be a part of his cabinet rank. Instead, he offers a grudging willingness to stay on, for a little bit at least, if invited—no, make that pressed—to do so. This attitude is normally associated either with insufferable guests, or with people who appear to believe that they are performing the thankless task of holding up the sky.
Neither a Bush nor—one assumes—a Kerry presidency will now feature Colin Powell as secretary of state. So the time has come to ask: Will he be as much missed as all that? What were the qualities that defined his stewardship? One can be reasonably certain of what the secretary, and his partisans, would want to have said of him. In general, he preferred the arts of diplomacy, patience, and negotiation to the murk of war and the yells of combat. Very well. How ably did he vindicate this preference?
In the early months of the Bush administration, Powell certainly did crucial work in defusing a potentially ugly and vertiginous conflict that erupted suddenly after the April 1, 2001, collision of a US EP-3 spy plane with a perhaps overzealous Chinese fighter aircraft. Those in Washington who had been undismayed by the idea of a confrontation with Beijing on various matters of principle would probably now agree that, whatever those matters of principle are and were, that would not have been the ideal moment, or indeed pretext, at which to put them to a trial of strength. And the bad moment passed, without the United States having to humiliate itself by making too many apologies. One might wish for the return of the time when our world was so easily managed.
But here is exactly what Powell’s critics maintain: he does not sufficiently understand that the world has since become more dangerous and less “manageable,” and he is too willing to bargain with, and perhaps even to apologize to, those who do not wish the United States well. He may indeed favor the venerable traditions of negotiation and multilateralism. Yet what reward has this touching faith brought him? The chief evidence against him would be his attempt to prolong the political life of Yasir Arafat; his reluctance to believe that Saddam Hussein was incorrigible short of war; his belief in the good faith of the Saudis; and his willingness, right up until September 2004, to extend deadlines in Sudan. (Some on the Virginia side of the Potomac have duly noted that he had no difficulty recognizing a deadly enemy, and leaking accordingly, when that enemy was in the Department of Defense.)
There would be no need to mention the “Quartet”—the all-inclusive Powellite force that comprises (or comprised; it’s hard to say) the United States, the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia—if its utter failure had only involved that cemetery of diplomacy, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. More important to us is the question, Does the dogma of multilateralism outweigh all experience? Recent history suggests an answer. The Europeans failed their very first post–Cold War test, in directly neighboring Bosnia and Herzegovina, and had to implore American help. The Gulf Arabs, and their partial allies in Egypt and Syria, could not have recovered statehood for Kuwait on their own, and had to beseech the help of the United States, which—on that basis—was able to recruit an overpowering majority in the United Nations. Colin Powell as national security advisor and Colin Powell as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sternly opposed both rescue operations until the balance in Washington shifted decisively against him. On the issue of the former Yugoslavia, he had a celebrated confrontation with then UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright, who accused him of being unwilling to employ military superiority in any circumstances.
We have a fairly accurate picture of what this secr
etary thought, and did, after September 11, 2001. No serious person needs even to read between the lines of Woodward’s two volumes, Bush at War, succeeded by the much superior Plan of Attack. To the annoyance of many within the administration, especially concerning the first book, Powell was to all intents and purposes being quoted firsthand.
But he was also being cited, in his own name and in real time, and in his own capacity, in public. It’s true that directly after September 11, he expressed skepticism about Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz’s plan for “ending states who sponsor terrorism,” and a more general skepticism about regime change, a skepticism quite consistent with his entire political past. But he also made the most cogent presentation of any cabinet member, right in front of the UN General Assembly and the entire world, making the case that time had run out for Saddam Hussein.
Here, then, might be the nub. Powell, and his most loyal subordinate Richard Armitage, assured us in minute detail that the secretary was not content to spout any form of words handed to him. He is known to have spent many painful hours winnowing and refining that presentation. George Tenet, then the director of US central intelligence, sat conspicuously behind him as if in confirmation that the two US government agencies most doubtful about regime change were, at any rate, of one mind about the regime in question. Yet, several months later, while being interviewed by NBC journalist Tim Russert, the secretary appeared to suggest that he had been led astray by opportunistic intelligence provided through the Iraqi National Congress of Ahmad Chalabi: a man who was a bête noire at State and CIA for many years. One need only imagine what Dean Rusk or Adlai Stevenson might have done, had they learned too late that someone had faked or “improved” the U-2 photography over Cuba that they waved in the face of the world and shook in the face of the Soviet delegation. Resignation would have been the least of it. And somebody would have been fired (which, strangely enough in this case, nobody has).