Well, here it is, the day after. The Israeli elections are over, but the form of the next government is not at all clear. Most likely, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Beiteinu party will form a government with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party being the main partner. This is by far the most [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Well, here it is, the day after. The Israeli elections are over, but the form of the next government is not at all clear. Most likely, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Beiteinu party will form a government with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party being the main partner. This is by far the most likely scenario, though others possibilities exist, even a million-to-one long shot that Lapid could form a government. Labor is likely to be leading the opposition, unless Lapid surprises everyone and stays out of a Netanyahu-led government.

The new Knesset will be somewhat less tilted to the right than the last one, but this is not likely to make a big difference in terms of Israel’s approach to the Palestinians. Indeed, in some ways, it might serve Netanyahu to have a friendlier face in Lapid to cover policies that might be slightly different rhetorically but essentially the same on the ground. More than anything else, the shift in government is going to be felt domestically, in terms of greater attention to civic and economic issues. Indeed, no Israeli election in my memory compares to this one for the dominance of domestic over security issues.

Given that there’s still more to see before the full ramifications of the election are known, I’ll engage here with a few winners and losers.

Winners

Yair Lapid: Lapid comes out of this as a major power broker…for now. I suspect Bibi will try to convince him to take the Finance portfolio, because the looming budget cuts are very likely to undermine whoever takes that job. If Lapid has any sense, he will stay away from this job. Bibi might decide to make him Foreign Minister, allowing Lapid’s much more charming visage to replace both last term’s technical Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman (who had to quit when he was indicted) and the de facto one, a combination of Ehud Barak and Netanyahu. The idea is to improve Israel’s face in the international arena and stem of the criticism Israel has been facing, especially from Europe. Long-term, parties like Lapid’s, which are essentially cults of personality, tend to have a short shelf life. And Lapid doesn’t have much of a political program, as he wisely stuck to very broad, general and populist statements in his campaign. But for now, Lapid holds the key to Bibi’s ability to form a coalition, although it is possible for Bibi to form a government without him. Lapid had been doing well in polls and well exceeded those projections, so as of today, he is in really good shape.

Naftali Bennett/HaBayit HaYehudi: Many polls projected Bennett with the number of seats that Lapid got, so some see the 11 seats HaBayit HaYehudi won as a disappointment. But the party had all of three seats in the previous Knesset, and Bennett has put the national religious camp, as a distinct unit in the Israeli polity, back on the map. Bennett can now choose between a secondary role in the government or leading the rightward tug on Israel from outside the government. That’s not a bad place for him to be, long term. Bibi rebuilt Likud from that position after it was devastated by Ariel Sharon’s formation of Kadima nearly a decade ago. Either way, Bennett remains able to build himself into the face of the Israeli right for years to come.

Meretz: The only Zionist party that could remotely be called truly left-wing doubled its presence in the Knesset, from three seats to six. That’s the most seats it has won since the 1999 election. It’s still not a very influential party, but Zehava Gal-On has it back on track as the voice of the Jewish left, which has been terribly muted in Israel. Building on this momentum is likely to be just as difficult for Gal-On as halting Meretz’s downward spiral was. But she’s the best leader they’ve had in a long time, maybe ever. She is articulating a strong left-wing point of view, instead of mealy-mouthed political mumbo-jumbo, and that is bringing back leftist voters.

Barack Obama: No one will ever know how much of an effect Obama’s words to Jeffrey Goldberg, published mere days before the election, might have had on Netanyahu’s losses in this election. But count me among those who think it mattered. Yes, this was Israel’s most domestically focused election ever. And it’s also true that few Likud-Beiteinu voters like Obama. But Israelis are not fools; they know Israel needs to improve its relationship with both the White House and European leaders. Unlike most Americans, Israelis across the political spectrum know that Bibi actively interfered with the US election and, what’s worse, did so by backing the wrong horse. That has since faded from Israeli headlines, and Goldberg’s article didn’t make big news in Israel. But it did make news, and many Israelis follow the global and US media on Israel very closely. In any case, a second-term Obama will now be dealing with a chastened Netanyahu. At the very least, this was a pleasant night for Obama, and it could help support and embolden Obama if he decides to take Bibi on again.

Opposition to an Iran attack: This was actually taking shape in the election campaign. Iran was not a prominent issue at all. Israel still wants the US to take care of Iran, but the opposition to a unilateral Israeli strike among the military and intelligence brass remains just as strong as ever. A move toward the political center and, more importantly, an election that reflects looking within the country rather than outside it when identifying Israel’s biggest challenges blunts even farther the threat of Israeli action, which means less pressure on the US to act militarily. With Iranian elections looming in a few months, and the accompanying end of the Ahmadinejad era, an attack has almost certainly been pushed back, quite possibly to the point where an agreement can be reached to entirely avert one. Netanyahu’s need to use glamorous government positions like the Defense Ministry to entice coalition partners likely means Ehud Barak’s minimal chances of staying in his present job have been reduced to zero. An attack on Iran is considerably less likely today than it was before.

Losers

The Palestinians: The occupation was, at best, a minor question in Israel’s 2013 election. There were many pro forma statements from Labor’s Shelly Yachimovitch, HaTnuah’s Tzipi Livni and Lapid about supporting the two-state solution, usually with something like the Clinton Parameters outline or some such. But it was always an afterthought. Livni and Yachimovitch occasionally attacked Netanyahu for letting Israel’s global image suffer due to his intransigence on the Palestinian issue, while Lapid’s Yesh Atid platform had support for two states as its final plank. What seems to be looming is a Netanyahu who might moderate some of his public statements on the subject, but will head a government that will stick to the same policies of obstructionism that it has held to these past four years, but with a less confrontational tone when it comes to the US and Europe. That’s not a recipe for progress, but rather for maintaining the status quo while blunting the only pressure that could conceivably bring about change. If Naftali Bennett is in a prominent role in the government that might have some effect on the Palestinians (Interior Minister, perhaps) it just might mean that this new government is the same as the old one. In any case, Netanyahu remains in office, leading a party that is explicitly opposed to a two-state solution and has moved to the right. A coalition partner can push the weak-willed Bibi, but Lapid has shown little interest in this issue at all, and to the extent he has, he doesn’t sound much different from Netanyahu. Yachimovitch has stayed away from the entire Palestinian issue and Livni, who engaged it more than any other “centrist” candidate, had turned down a Palestinian offer that included most of East Jerusalem, full capitulation on the right of return and Israel keeping all three of the major settlement blocs. The Palestinians are, as usual, the biggest losers in this election, but that was always a sure thing from the very beginning.

Benjamin Netanyahu: The day Bibi announced that Likud and Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party would run a joint ticket, I said it was a panicked move and a big mistake. I had no idea how big. The combined party has lost 11 seats. The merger was far from the only reason. Likud’s sharp tilt even further to the right, with the accompanying loss of some of its more pragmatic and well-known leaders like Dan Meridor and Benny Begin, chased some of their voters to Lapid. Bennett’s rise allowed some national religious voters to feel they could credibly express that identity in their vote for the first time in years, and that certainly cost Likud Beiteinu. Lieberman’s indictment and the in-fighting within his party certainly didn’t help. Bibi also ran a terrible campaign, one where he almost ignored the budget crisis that prompted his move toward early elections in the first place. In fact, he dealt very little with substantive issues at all, trying to run on slogans and his experience. And the fact is, Israel is facing the same budget cuts it was before and Bibi now has a government that will not share his priorities about where the cuts should come. His obnoxious manner in international affairs will be harder for him to maintain with less of a mandate at home. Every part of this gambit came up snake eyes for Bibi who came into this being sure that no matter what, he would still have his job and today is only barely going to hold on to it. Netanyahu has confirmed his legacy as a weak-willed leader, a venal politician and a poor strategist.

Shelly Yachimovitch/Labor Party: Some will say that Labor was revitalized in this election. Surely Yachimovitch will spin it that way. But this was a big bust. Keep in mind, Kadima had essentially supplanted Labor’s role in Israeli politics. In 2009, Labor won 13 seats, but this was splintered when Barak formed his Atzmaut party, leaving Labor with only eight seats. So, Yachimovitch can claim she doubled Labor’s representation, but that’s nonsense. With Atzmaut disappearing and Kadima either missing the Knesset (which is still possible) or winning only two seats, there was a major opportunity for Labor to regain the center. They finished second, in large measure because Yachimovitch is not an inspiring leader. She has almost nothing to say about security and international issues, which matter to the centrist voters in general. On economic and social issues she has more appeal, but has not proven herself to be a strong leader who can build support for her ideas, nor as someone whose ideas on implementing a social-democratic program are particularly advanced. The election result reflects the lukewarm reaction Yachimovitch produces, as opposed to the charm that Lapid reflected, despite his not having much better ideas than Yachimovitch.

Yisrael Beitienu: Avigdor Lieberman maintained his reputation as a loudmouth by predicting that Likud-Beiteinu would win 40 or more seats in the election. Oops. Lieberman also lost his position as the voice of a “new right” to Naftali Bennett. Still dealing with criminal charges of corruption, Lieberman might yet get a prominent Ministry due to his position as the #2 on the Likud-Beiteinu list, but that is less of a sure thing than that position should imply. Lieberman still holds the Russian community, but his appeal beyond that is diminishing. Yisrael Beiteinu rose to prominence by appealing to the larger right wing. That is receding at a breakneck pace and it will be heading back to being an ethnic party. It won’t disappear, but its days of being the kingmaking party are over.

The Republican Party: Netanyahu’s major setback mirrors, in many ways, the losses the Republicans took in the US in November. Bibi’s party moved further right, and like the GOP, it went further right than mainstream voters wanted. Bibi ran his campaign in a similar way to Mitt Romney’s as well, and it had a similar feel: lots of style, little substance and less reason for those not already beholden to him to vote for him. But most importantly, the whole Netanyahu-neocon-GOP nexus has been rebuked in both countries. The Republicans tried to define themselves as the “pro-Israel” party, but both American Jews and Israelis made it clear that they don’t agree and don’t want to see the issue turned into partisan football. In some ways, that is unfortunate. It would be useful to get rid of the “bipartisan consensus” and have a real debate about the US’ special relationship with Israel. But the GOP attempt to own Israel through its close ally Netanyahu has, at this point, failed.

Photo: A Likud-Beitenu supporter. Credit Pierre Klochendler/IPS. 

“There is the possibility of progress in the next round [of Iran nuclear talks], but it’s going to require that both sides be more flexible and a little more creative,” says the Arms Control Association’s Daryl Kimball in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Whatever happens after [...]]]> via Lobe Log

“There is the possibility of progress in the next round [of Iran nuclear talks], but it’s going to require that both sides be more flexible and a little more creative,” says the Arms Control Association’s Daryl Kimball in an interview with the Council on Foreign Relations.

“Whatever happens after the election, the most important thing is that the P5+1 process resumes and that it be a much more dynamic negotiation that is not simply a reiteration of previous well-understood positions,” he said.

Iran expert and Lobe Log contributor Farideh Farhi also warns that inflexibility on both sides will impede a peaceful resolution to this decades-long dispute:

By contrast, a nuclear deal that gave something to both sides and promised both sides a significant stream of future benefits would give both actors an incentive to stick to the terms. It would also tend to silence the hawks in both camps who push for hardline solutions (i.e., those Americans who favor military force and those Iranians who might favor actually getting a bomb). The problem here, as my colleague Matt Bunn reminded me yesterday, is that the current level of mistrust makes it hard for either side to convince the other that it will actually deliver the stream of benefits that will have to be part of the deal.

This lonely press briefing issued today by the United Nations about ongoing political imprisonment in Iran reminds us that the more the international community focuses on Iran’s nuclear program, the less attention is given to Iranian human rights. These rights are consistently endangered and violated not only by the Iranian [...]]]> via Lobe Log

This lonely press briefing issued today by the United Nations about ongoing political imprisonment in Iran reminds us that the more the international community focuses on Iran’s nuclear program, the less attention is given to Iranian human rights. These rights are consistently endangered and violated not only by the Iranian government, but by sanctions and threats of war too.

Iran’s rial is once again in free fall while Iran and the United States remain in political gridlock. Bibi Netanyahu may have backed off his Iran campaign for now but is unlikely to stop agitating for conflict. Today during an event at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Mark Fitzpatrick said that Iran is unlikely to change it’s stance prior to the Iranian presidential election in June 2013 because no one wants to grant Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a diplomatic success while he is in office. Fitzpatrick added that the West is likely to implement even more sanctions during to this time.

So while Iranians are being strangled by the Islamic Republic’s ever-present hand in their public and personal lives, so too ar they being forced to endure a strangulated economy that will only worsen. This feeling of impending suffocation — imposed from above and below — was at the core of Asghar Farhadi’s oscar-winning film “A Separation” which resonated so strongly with Iranians. In Iran the personal is political and vice versa while absurdity has become the norm.

In a recent interview with Nazila Fathi, the Iranian human rights defender Shirin Ebadi explained that war on Iran would “stir nationalistic feelings and rally the people behind the government to defend the country” as well as “save Iran’s rulers.” But she didn’t or couldn’t provide any indication as to what can be done to ease the burden being imposed on Iranians by their government and foreign governments.

“I don’t favor more sanctions against Iran, but I do not want to see the world ignore what the regime is doing to its people,” said Ebadi.

What then is in store for Iran’s people?

Reposted by arrangement with Tom Dispatch

By John Feffer

The United States has long styled itself a Pacific power. It established the model of counterinsurgency in the Philippines in 1899 and defeated the Japanese in World War II. It [...]]]> Can Washington Move from Pacific Power to Pacific Partner?

Reposted by arrangement with Tom Dispatch

By John Feffer

The United States has long styled itself a Pacific power. It established the model of counterinsurgency in the Philippines in 1899 and defeated the Japanese in World War II. It faced down the Chinese and the North Koreans to keep the Korean peninsula divided in 1950, and it armed the Taiwanese to the teeth. Today, America maintains the most powerful military in the Pacific region, supported by a constellation of military bases, bilateral alliances, and about 100,000 service personnel.

It has, however, reached the high-water mark of its Pacific presence and influence. The geopolitical map is about to be redrawn. Northeast Asia, the area of the world with the greatest concentration of economic and military power, is on the verge of a regional transformation. And the United States, still preoccupied with the Middle East and hobbled by a stalled and stagnating economy, will be the odd man out.

Elections will be part of the change. Next year, South Koreans, Russians, and Taiwanese will all go to the polls. In 2012, the Chinese Communist Party will also ratify its choice of a new leader to take over from President Hu Jintao.  He will be the man expected to preside over the country’s rise from the number two spot to the pinnacle of the global economy.

But here’s the real surprise in store for Washington. The catalyst of change may turn out to be the country in the region that has so far changed the least: North Korea. In 2012, the North Korean government has trumpeted to its people a promise to create kangsong taeguk, or an economically prosperous and militarily strong country. Pyongyang now has to deliver somehow on that promise — at a time of food shortages, overall economic stagnation, and political uncertainty. This dream of 2012 is propelling the regime in Pyongyang to shift into diplomatic high gear, and that, in turn, is already creating enormous opportunities for key Pacific powers.

WWashington, which has focused for years on North Korea’s small but developing nuclear arsenal, has barely been paying attention to the larger developments in Asia. Nor will Asia’s looming transformation be a hot topic in our own presidential election next year. We’ll be arguing about jobs, health care, and whether the president is a socialist or his Republican challenger a nutcase. Aside from some ritual China-bashing, Asia will merit little mention.

President Obama, anxious about giving ammunition to his opponent, will be loath to fiddle with Asia policy, which is already on autopilot. So while others scramble to remake East Asia, the United States will be suffering from its own peculiar form of continental drift.

Pyongyang Turns on the Charm

On April 15, 1912, in an obscure spot in the Japanese empire, a baby was born to a Christian family proud of its Korean heritage. The 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung, North Korea’s founder and dynastic leader, is coming up next year. Ordinarily, such an event would be of little importance to anyone other than 24 million North Koreans and a scattering of Koreans elsewhere. But this centennial also marks the date by which the North Korean regime has promised to finally turn things around.

Despite its pretensions to self-reliance, Pyongyang has amply proven that it can only get by with a lot of help from its friends. Until recently, however, North Korea was not exactly playing well with others.

It responded in a particularly hardline fashion, for instance, to the more hawkish policies adopted by new South Korean President Lee Myung Bak, when he took office in February 2008. The shooting of a South Korean tourist at the Mount Kumgang resort that July, the sinking of the South Korean naval ship the Cheonan in March 2010 (Pyongyang still claims it was not the culprit), and the shelling of South Korea’s Yeonpyeong Island later that year all accelerated a tailspin in north-south relations. During this period, the North tested a second nuclear device, prompting even its closest ally, China, to react in disgust and support a U.N. declaration of condemnation. Pyongyang also managed to further alienate Washington by revealing in 2010 that it was indeed pursuing a program to produce highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium, something it had long denied.

These actions had painful economic consequences. South Korea cancelled almost all forms of cooperation. The North’s second nuclear test scotched any incipient economic rapprochement with the United States.  (The Bush administration had removed North Korea from its terrorism list, and there had been hints that other longstanding sanctions might sooner or later be dropped as part of a warming in relations.)

Only the North’s relationship with China was unaffected, largely because Beijing is gobbling up significant quantities of valuable minerals and securing access to ports in exchange for just enough food and energy to keep the country on life support and the regime afloat. Between 2006 and 2009, an already anemic North Korean economy contracted, and chronic food shortages again became acute.

To these economic travails must be added political ones. The country’s leadership is long past retirement, with 70-year-old leader Kim Jong Il younger than most of the rest of the ruling elite. He has designated his youngest son, Kim Jeong Eun, as his successor, but the only thing that this mystery boy seems to have going for him is his resemblance to his grandfather, Kim Il Sung.

Still, North Korea seems no closer to full-scale collapse today than during previous crises — like the devastating famine of the mid-1990s. A thoroughly repressive state and zero civil society seem to insure that no color revolution or “Pyongyang Spring” is in the offing. Waiting for the North Korean regime to go gently into the night is like waiting for Godot.

But that doesn’t mean change isn’t in the air.  To jumpstart its bedraggled economy and provide a political boost for the next leader in the year of kangsong taeguk, North Korea is suddenly in a let’s-make-a-deal mode.

Kim Jong Il’s recent visit to Siberia to meet Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, for instance, raised a few knowledgeable eyebrows. Conferring at a Russian military base near Lake Baikal, for the first time in a long while the North Korean leader even raised the possibility of a moratorium on nuclear weapons production and testing. More substantially, he concluded a preliminary agreement on a natural gas pipeline that could in itself begin to transform the politics of the region. It would transfer gas from the energy-rich Russian Far East through North Korea to economically booming but energy-hungry South Korea. The deal could net Pyongyang as much as $100 million a year.

The North’s new charm offensive wouldn’t have a hope in hell of succeeding if a similar change of heart weren’t also underway in the South.

The Bulldozer’s Miscalculation

On taking office, the conservative South Korean president Lee Myung Bak, known as “the Bulldozer” when he headed up Hyundai’s engineering division, promised to put Korean relations on a new footing. Ten years of “engagement policy” with the North had, according to Lee, produced an asymmetrical relationship. The South, he insisted, was providing all the cash, and the North was doing very little in exchange. Lee promised a relationship based only on quid pro quos.

What he got instead was tit for tat: harsher rhetoric and military action. Ultimately, although the North made no friends below the 38th parallel that way, the new era of hostility didn’t help the Lee administration either. South Koreans generally watched in horror as a relatively peaceful relationship veered dangerously close to military conflict.

Lee’s ruling party suffered a loss in last April’s by-elections, and in August, he replaced his hardline “unification” minister with a more conciliatory fellow. Still insisting on an apology for the Cheonan sinking and the Yeonpyeong shelling, the ruling party is nevertheless looking for ways to restore commercial ties and again provide humanitarian assistance to the North. Since the summer, representatives from North and South have met twice to discuss Pyongyang’s nuclear program. Although the two sides haven’t made substantial progress, the stage is set for the resumption of the Six Party Talks between the two Koreas, Russia, Japan, China, and the United States that broke off in 2007.

Even if the opposition party doesn’t sweep the conservatives out of power in the 2012 elections, South Korea will likely abandon Lee’s tough-guy approach. In September, his likely successor as the ruling party candidate in 2012, Park Geun-Hye, openly criticized Lee’s approach in an article in Foreign Affairs that called instead for “trustpolitik.”

One project Park singled out for mention is an inter-Korean railroad line that would “perhaps transform the Korean Peninsula into a conduit for regional trade.” That’s an understatement. Restoring the line and hooking it up to Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railroad would connect the Korean peninsula to Europe, reduce the shipment time of goods from one end of Eurasia to the other by about two weeks, and save South Korea up to $34 to $50 per ton in shipping costs. Meanwhile, the natural gas pipeline, which South Korea approved at the end of September, could reduce its gas costs by as much as 30%. For the world’s second largest natural gas importer, this would be a major savings.

Serious economic steps toward Korean reunification are not just a dream, in other words, but good business, too. Even in the worst moments of the recent period of disengagement, it’s notable that the two countries managed to preserve the Kaesong industrial complex located just north of the Demilitarized Zone. Run by South Korean managers and employing more than 45,000 North Koreans, the business zone is a boon to both sides. It helps South Korean enterprises facing competition from China, even as it provides hard currency and well-paying jobs to the North. The railroad and the pipeline would offer similar mutual benefits.

According to conventional wisdom, North Korea has a single bargaining chip, its small nuclear arsenal, which it will never give up. But a real estate agent would look at the situation differently. What North Korea really has is “location, location, location,” and it finally seems ready to cash in on its critical position at the heart of the world’s most vital economic region.

The train line would bind the world’s two biggest economic regions into a huge Eurasian market. And the pipeline, coupled with green energy projects in China, South Korea, and Japan, might begin to wean East Asia from its dependency on Middle Eastern oil and thus on the U.S. military to secure access and protect shipping routes.

Thought of another way, these projects and others like them lurking in the Eurasian future are significant not just for what they connect, but what they leave out: the United States.

Out in the Cold

The Bush administration anticipated Lee Myung Bak’s approach to North Korea by chucking the carrot and waving the stick. By 2006, however, Washington had made a U-turn and was beginning to engage Pyongyang seriously. The Obama administration took another tack, eventually adopting a policy of “strategic patience,” a euphemism for ignoring North Korea and hoping it wouldn’t throw a tantrum.

It hasn’t worked. North Korea has plunged full speed ahead with its nuclear program.  The U.S./NATO air campaign against Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, who had given up his nuclear program to secure better relations with the West, only reinforced Pyongyang’s belief that nukes are the ultimate guarantor of its security. The Obama administration continues to insist that the regime show its seriousness about denuclearization as a precondition for resuming talks. Even though Washington recently sent a small amount of flood relief, it refuses to offer any serious food assistance. Indeed, in June, the House of Representatives passed an amendment to the agriculture bill that prohibited all food aid to the country, regardless of need.

Though the administration will likely send envoy Stephen Bosworth to North Korea later this year, no one expects major changes in policy or relations to result. With a presidential election year already looming, the Obama administration isn’t likely to spend political capital on North Korea — not when Republicans would undoubtedly label any new moves as “appeasement” of a “terrorist state.”

Obama came into office with a desire to shift U.S. policy away from its Middle Eastern focus and reassert America’s importance as a Pacific power, particularly in light of China’s growing regional influence. But the president has invested more in drones than in diplomacy, sustaining the war on terror at the expense of the sort of bolder engagement of adversaries that Obama hinted at as a candidate. In the meantime, the administration is prepared to just wait it out until the next elections are history — and by then, it might already be too late to catch up with regional developments.

After all, Washington has watched China become the top trading partner of nearly every Asian country. Similarly, the economic links between China and Taiwan have deepened considerably, a reality to which even that island’s opposition party must bow. The Obama administration’s recent decision not to upset Beijing too much by selling advanced F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan, opting instead for a mere upgrade of the F-16s it bought in the 1990s, is a clear sign of relative U.S. decline in the region, suggests big-picture analyst Robert Kaplan.

Then there’s the sheer cost of the U.S. military presence in the Pacific, which looks like a juicy target to budget cutters in Washington. Key members of Congress like Senators John McCain and Carl Levin have already signaled their anxiety about the high price tag of a planned “strategic realignment” in Asia that involves, among other things, an expansion of the U.S. military base in Guam and an upgrading of facilities in Okinawa. In response to a question about potential military cuts, new Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has confirmed that reducing U.S. troops and bases overseas is “on the table.”

The future of East Asia is hardly a given, nor is an economic boom and regional integration the only possible scenario. Virtually every country in the region has hiked its military spending.  Tension points abound, particularly in potentially energy-rich waters that various countries claim as their own. China’s staggering economic growth is not likely to be sustainable in the long term. And North Korea could ultimately decide to make do as an economically destitute but adequately strong military power.

Still, the trend lines for 2012 and after point to greater engagement on the Korean peninsula, across the Taiwan Strait, and between Asia and Europe. Right now, the United States, for all of its military clout, is not really part of this emerging picture. Isn’t it time for America to gracefully acknowledge that its years as the Pacific superpower are over and think creatively about how to be a pacific partner instead?

John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies, writes its regular World Beat column, and will be publishing a book on Islamophobia with City Lights Press in 2012. His past essays, including those for TomDispatch.com, can be read at his website.  To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Feffer discusses the 2012 election season in Asia click here, or download it to your iPod here.

Copyright 2011 John Feffer

By Karen J. Greenberg

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the unexpected extent of the damage Americans have done to themselves and their institutions is coming into better focus.  The event that “changed everything” did turn out to change Washington in ways more startling than most [...]]]> Reposted by arrangement with Tom Dispatch

By Karen J. Greenberg

As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 approaches, the unexpected extent of the damage Americans have done to themselves and their institutions is coming into better focus.  The event that “changed everything” did turn out to change Washington in ways more startling than most people realize.  On terrorism and national security, to take an obvious (if seldom commented upon) example, the confidence of the U.S. government seems to have been severely, perhaps irreparably, shaken when it comes to that basic and essential American institution: the courts.

If, in fact, we are a “nation of laws,” you wouldn’t know it from Washington’s actions over the past few years. Nothing spoke more strikingly to that loss of faith, to our country’s increasing incapacity for meeting violence with the law, than the widely hailed decision to kill rather than capture Osama bin Laden.

Clearly, a key factor in that decision was a growing belief, widely shared within the national-security establishment, that none of our traditional or even newly created tribunals, civilian or military, could have handled a bin Laden trial.  Washington’s faith went solely to Navy SEALs zooming into another country’s sovereign airspace on aT moonless night on a mission to assassinate bin Laden, whether he offered the slightest resistance or not.  It evidently seemed so much easier to the top officials overseeing the operation — and so much less messy — than bringing a confessed mass murderer into a courtroom in, or even anywhere near, the United States.

The decision to kill bin Laden on sight rather than capture him and bring him to trial followed hard on the heels of an ignominious Obama administration climb-down on its plan to try the “mastermind” of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, or KSM, in a federal court in New York City.  Captured in Pakistan in May 2003 and transferred to Guantanamo in 2006, his proposed trial was, under political pressure, returned to a military venue earlier this year.

Given the extraordinary record of underperformance by the military commissions system — only six convictions in 10 years — it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the United States has little faith in its ability to put on trial a man assumedly responsible for murdering thousands.

And don’t assume that these high-level examples of avoiding the court system are just knotty exceptions that prove the rule.  There is evidence that the administration’s skepticism and faint-heartedness when it comes to using the judicial system risks becoming pervasive.

Pushing Guilt Before Trial

Needless to say, this backing away from courts of law as institutions appropriate for handling terrorism suspects began in the Bush-Cheney years.  Top officials in the Bush administration believed civilian courts to be far too weak for the Global War on Terror they had declared.  This, as they saw it, was largely because those courts would supposedly gift foreign terrorist suspects with a slew of American legal rights that might act as so many get-out-of-jail-free cards.

As a result, despite a shining record of terrorism convictions in civilian courts in the 1990s — including the prosecutions of those responsible for the 1993 attempt to take down a tower of the World Trade Center — President Bush issued a military order on November 13, 2001, that established the court-less contours of public debate to come.  It mandated that non-American terrorists captured abroad would be put under the jurisdiction of the Pentagon, not the federal court system. This was “war,” after all, and the enemy had to be confronted by fighting men, not those sticklers for due process, civilian judges and juries.

The federal courts have, of course, continued to try American citizens and residents (and even, in a few cases, individuals captured abroad) in terror cases of all sorts — with an 87% conviction rate for both violent and non-violent crimes.  In fact, 2010 was a banner year for terrorism prosecutions when it came to American citizens and residents, and 2011 is following suit.  As could have been predicted, in the vast majority of these cases — all the ones that mattered — there were convictions.

You might think, then, that the courts had proved their mettle against mounting criticism and distrust of a system said to be insufficiently harsh. And initially, Obama’s Department of Justice defended civilian courts as resilient and flexible enough to try terror cases.

But that didn’t last.  Recently, the Obama administration has reinforced a policy (begun under President Bush) which offers an ominous new twist on American justice: punishment before trial.  It has, for example, relied upon various extreme methods of pre-trial isolation — including a version of restrictive orders known as Special Administrative Measures, or SAMs — that reek of punitiveness and have often caused severe psychological deterioration in suspects awaiting trial on terrorism charges. The most noteworthy case of this is Syed Fahad Hashmi’s.  An American citizen arrested while studying in England, Hashmi had allowed an acquaintance, Mohammed Junaid Babar, to stay in his apartment for two weeks. Babar, who testified against Hashmi and was later released, allegedly had socks, ponchos, and raingear intended for al-Qaeda in his luggage and allegedly used Hashmi’s cell phone to call terrorist conspirators. Hashmi, accused of “material support” for al-Qaeda, was kept under SAMs for three years without trial — until he finally pled guilty.

The urge to punish before a verdict comes in reflects the same deep-seated conviction that the U.S. court system is simply not to be trusted to do its job.  Two recent cases — that of whistleblowers Thomas Drake and Bradley Manning — illustrate how, in cases where national security is believed to be at stake, Obama-era pre-trial treatment has taken up the distrust of the courts, civilian or military, that characterized the Bush years.

Drake, an executive for the National Security Agency (NSA), became a whistleblower over what he considered mistaken policy decisions about an ill-performing data-sifting program which, among other things, he thought squandered taxpayer money. Subsequently, he revealed his disagreement with the agency’s warrantless wire-tapping program, which he believed overstepped legal boundaries. Charged initially with violating the Espionage Act and threatened with a draconian 35-year jail sentence, Drake finally pled this past June to a misdemeanor count of “exceeding the authorized use of a government computer.”

In Drake’s four-year saga, his pre-punishment took the form not of pre-trial detention but of the destruction of his livelihood. He was initially fired from the NSA and from the National Defense University position to which the NSA had assigned him. Once indicted in 2010, he was forced to resign from a subsequent teaching post at Strayer University. All told, the formal and informal hounding of Drake resulted in the loss of his jobs and pension, as well as $82,000 in legal costs. Ultimately, Drake was sentenced to a year’s probation and 240 hours of mandatory community service. By that time, he had been ruined financially and professionally, thanks to the government’s disparagement of him and the multi-year delay between its accusations and the lodging of formal charges against him. Drake now works at an Apple Store. In other words, well before the government took its chances in court, Thomas Drake was punished.

Another highly publicized case where punishment preceded trial has been the mistreatment of Army Private Bradley Manning while in military custody in a Marine brig in Quantico, Virginia, awaiting charges.  The Obama administration believes he turned over a trove of secret military and State Department documents to the website WikiLeaks.  Following his arrest, Manning was kept in subhuman conditions.  He was forced to sleep naked and to strip for daily inspections, though as news about his situation generated bad publicity, he was eventually allowed to sleep in a “tear-proof” gown.

There is something deeply disturbing about the very different ways Manning and Drake were pre-punished by the government — both directly in the case of Manning and indirectly in the case of Drake — before being given due process of any kind.  Like bin Laden’s killing, both cases reflect an unspoken worry in Washington that our courts will prove insufficiently ruthless and so incapable of giving the “obviously guilty” what they “obviously” deserve.

The Courts Take Notice

As it turns out, the judicial system hasn’t taken the government’s new attitude lying down.  Various judges and juries have, in fact, shown themselves to be unfazed by both public and governmental pressures and have, in terror and national security cases, demonstrated signs of balance and of a concern for justice, rather than being driven by a blind sense of revenge.

In the past year, there has been an unprecedented number of high-profile terrorism trials. All have resulted in convictions, which have nonetheless not reflected the unstinting harshness that critics of court-centered counterterrorism insist upon.  In the case of Ahmed Ghailani, the sole Guantanamo detainee to face trial in the nation’s criminal justice system, the jury, having done its work of assessing the evidence, acquitted the defendant on 284 of 285 counts, including all the murder charges associated with the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.  On the single count on which he was convicted, however, Ghailani was given a life sentence without parole.

Meanwhile, a high-profile terrorism case — that of Tagawwur Rana — ended in a jury acquittal on its most serious charge.  Rana had been accused of cooperating in the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, which resulted in the deaths of more than 160 individuals. The jury found Rana guilty of material support, but not of helping to coordinate the attack.

These cases and others like them have, of course, been fodder for all the usual critics who consider anything but a 100% conviction rate on all charges in all cases to be a sure sign not of the justice system’s strength, but of its fundamental weakness.  And yet, such cases have showcased just how effectively the system still works, in a more nuanced way than in the previous near-decade, as well as in a subtler and more just way than Washington has managed to approximate over that same period.  Despite the fears, pressures, and scare tactics that are entangled with all such terror cases, we now have living proof that juries can think for themselves, and guilt can be a partial matter, rather than a Washington slam-dunk.

Of late, federal judges on such cases also seem to have been signaling to the government’s representatives that they must be more restrained in their approach to national security cases, both in and out of court. In late June, for instance, during the sentencing of three of the men convicted of conspiring to bomb two synagogues in Riverdale, New York, and to launch a Stinger missile aimed at aircraft over Newburgh’s Air National Guard Base, Judge Colleen McMahon struck back at the government’s case.  “I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt,” she said, “that there would have been no crime here except the government instigated it, planned it, and brought it to fruition.  That does not mean that there was no crime. The jury concluded that you were not entrapped, and I see no basis to overturn their verdict.”

In the Drake case, Judge Richard Bennett was similarly distraught about the evident excesses in the government’s approach. At sentencing for the single minor count to which Drake agreed to plead, the judge bluntly refused to impose the $50,000 fine the prosecution was pushing for on the grounds that punishment had already been administered — prior to the court process. “There has been financial devastation wrought upon this defendant,” said Bennett, “that far exceeds any fine that can be imposed by me.  And I’m not going to add to that in any way.  And it’s very obvious to me in terms of some of the irritation I’ve expressed… not only my concern over the delay in this case… [but also the prosecution’s] inability to explain … the delay in this case… I think that somebody somewhere in the U.S. government has to say… that the American public deserves better than this.”

In the recent jury decisions, as in the growing expressions of judicial dissatisfaction, an optimist might find signs that the system is finally starting to right itself.  On the other hand, a pessimist might come to the conclusion that the government will, in the future, simply put even more energy into avoiding the court system.

The bottom line is that the Obama administration, like its predecessor, defines success in terrorism prosecutions not by assessing whether or not due process and fair verdicts are administered, but solely in terms of what they deem proper punishment for those accused of violating national security — especially when doing so minimizes partisan political clashes. By refusing to rein in its evident distrust of the judicial system when it comes to national security, the government is perpetuating a legal landscape that, to this day, lies in the shadow of Osama bin Laden.

Karen Greenberg is the executive director of the New York University Center on Law and Security, a TomDispatch regular, and the author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo’s First One Hundred Days, as well as the editor of The Torture Debate in America.

Copyright 2011 Karen J. Greenberg