Policy vs. Process: An Alternative Strategy in the Middle East
Everybody has a plan to save the Middle East. That guy with the bumper sticker does. Most of your friends do. Neocons have a plan. Peaceniks have a plan. Likudniks have a plan. The Bush Administration certainly thinks it has one, and we're told the Democrats are working on theirs. Tom Clancy imagined deploying the Vatican's Swiss Guards to keep peace. Oakland Raiders owner Al Davis told the Contra Costa Times in July that he knew how to fix the situation--but he kept the details to himself. Like getting red wine out of a tablecloth, in this debate everybody has their pet solution and loudly shares their thoughts.
This public cacophony masks much agreement among experts--here, in Europe, and in the region--who share similar outlines of a durable regional peace: American redeployment from Iraq sooner rather than later, a "two-state solution" between Israel and a democratic and developing Palestine, the persistent disruption of terrorist groups, a commitment to Iraq's current borders with increased federalism and oil revenue sharing among its factions, the implementation of the agenda set forth in the United Nations' Arab Human Development Report, improved governance, allowing Iran nuclear energy but prohibiting nuclear weapons, negotiated settlement of the many border disputes, peace agreements between Israel and its neighbors, and the eventual integration of Arab states into global economic structures. Of course, there are areas of strong disagreement, such the final border of the West Bank or what to do with Hezbollah or Hamas. And, naturally, the devil is in the details.
But what the region lacks are not policy alternatives, but a policy process--a framework that helps regional powers focus their energy on negotiating those details, helps them eliminate bad policy alternatives, and inches them toward their shared goals.
The security framework established near the end of the Cold War offers some lessons. The so-called Helsinki Process began as a series of negotiations over several years between the Soviet bloc and the West--adversaries even more hostile and suspicious than today's in the Middle East. The Helsinki Process codified certain shared principals, which then formed a solid foundation for future conduct and negotiation: among them, the inviolability of borders, the principle of non-violent resolution of disputes, non-interference in domestic affairs, and--most importantly--a commitment to human rights. At the time, neoconservatives blasted this framework as capitulation to Soviet interests and sanction of the authoritarian regimes of Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, the Helsinki Process achieved results that would be significant in today's strategic context:
First, negotiations over the Helsinki Accords got the Soviet Bloc on record supporting human rights. Their flagrant hypocrisy immediately mobilized dissident movements in Eastern Europe. Today's dissidents in the Middle East need similar help.
Second, engaging the Soviets and addressing our shared security concerns eased pressure on the arms race, added stability to the balance of power, and gave the American military needed time to recover from the Vietnam War and the end of the draft. A comparable effort in the Middle East might temper the brinkmanship and deemphasize the military component of the competing national strategies in the region.
Third, restoring America's image as a pragmatic defender of human rights in the 1970s gave the United States and President Reagan far greater moral authority to challenge Soviet policy in the 1980s. Our "soft power" in the Middle East is at a nadir, and we desperately need to regain that policy lever.
Finally, the Helsinki Process established a little-known organization that was ready and able to help formerly communist regimes consolidate their incipient democracies in the 1990s: the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. The OSCE has a menu of competencies that are desperately needed in the Middle East: managing or averting state disintegration, disarming and demobilizing militias, helping prevent nuclear proliferation, settling border disputes, cooling ethnic strife. The OSCE also provides election monitors and training for media, public administration, democratic policing, and the rule of law--all needed in today's Middle East.
Despite some high profile setbacks, the Helsinki Process established a security framework--from Kosovo to Estonia, and Warsaw to Baku--that is trending toward peace, democracy, stability, and prosperity.
We need a similar policy framework in the Middle East today. Commencing a Middle Eastern equivalent of the Helsinki Process will not solve terrorism, democratize the region overnight, end the Iraqi civil war, solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or prevent Iran from obtaining the bomb. Bargains would have to be struck with authoritarian regimes we find dangerous in order to get them to the negotiating table, just as we did with the Soviets in the 1970s. Worse yet, this process may take 20 years to bear fruit.
But such a strategy might build some inertia toward our long-term objectives in the Middle East, and nudge the regional system toward a more peaceful, democratic, stable, and prosperous equilibrium.
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Ford Buyouts, the UAW, and Health Care
Ford announced yesterday that they would offer buyouts to many of their employees, as part of a massive restructuring to get the company back to profitability. Malcolm Gladwell and others have argued that private health care and pension costs are hamstringing Big Business and Big Manufacturing here in the US, compared to foreign companies who benefit from their home countries' public systems.
It looks like the UAW has signed off on Ford's buyout program, as they did with GM's earlier. This approval is probably necessary for Ford to move forward with its reform.
My question is (for Nathan Newman perhaps): why don't the unions demand an unequivocal statement from Ford that they would support a more robust public health care system? The details probably wouldn't be too important:
"Ford and other flagship American companies are under great financial stress from the lack of a public health care and pension systems. We compete with foreign firms that enjoy the freedom to focus on their core business, rather than benefit management. Ford and the UAW stand together and urge Washington to take this incredible burden off of American business and help make American firms competetive in the globalized economy." Yadda Yadda.
Just getting them on the record (even if Ford didn't back it with campaign contributions or political support) might change the health care debate's frame to "business competetiveness" or "pro-business". Frames which probably increase the liklihood of enactment of a comprehensive reform program.
So, why don't the UAW and other unions make this a plank in buyout (and, perhaps, collective bargaining) agreements? Would they really have to trade that much for such a statment?
p.s. I'm actually a member of the UAW because of my membership in the UC teaching assistant union!
The NSA Nuclear Option
Well, its pretty clear that George Bush will not yield on this NSA program. He will not turn over information to Justice or Congressional investigators. He refuses to lead a public discussion on the need for intrusive domestic surveillance, thereby depriving even legitimate programs of political sustainability (despite the fact that he thinks they're vital national security programs). He won't even shut off the programs that have caused so much controversy (this is, after all, a mere repackaging of everything forbidden after the Poindexter/TIA scandal).
It might be time for Congress (or at least filibustering Democrats) to deploy its last remaining nuclear option-- closing the national purse.
What about shutting down the government until Bush yields? Refuse to pass appropriations (especially for NSA). Shut down the government like in the mid 1990s.
This might be good politics for the Democrats as well as good policy for the Republic. We stand up for the bedrock principles in the Constitution, while sticking it to a vastly unpopular president. The more this stays in the news, the more we win. And it might just make a president determined to shred the constitution blink.
Any thoughts?
Slobodan Milosevic, Good Riddance
Cross-posted at PolicyMatters
I spent the summer working at a UN Mission-sponsored NGO in Kosovo, and I can guarantee that there will be parties in Pristina tonght celebrating the demise of this terrible man.
If we’re lucky, the death of Slobodan Milosevic will bring renewed American and European focus on the fate of the western Balkans, which is still recovering from the dictator’s deadly legacy. After 10 years of battlefield defeats, genocide, repression, and warlordism, Serbians overthrew the Butcher of the Balkans amid street protests in 2001. Milosevic died humiliated in a Dutch prison, on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The region faces still lingering ethnic and religious tension; and political the resolution of the region’s political conflict is still some ways off.
Kosovo was the site of Milosevic’s final military defeat. His decade-long effort to marginalize and eventually drive out the ethnic Albanian majority in the southern Serbian province—essentially a system of apartheid and state terrorism—erupted into full fledged ethnic cleansing in late 1998. NATO finally bombed the Serbians into retreat, and the UN Mission in Kosovo has since governed the province with the help of NATO troops.
All that is about to change. The international community has begun final status talks with regional leaders, including the current Serbian government, and representatives from the Kosovo Albanian and Kosovo Serb communities. The province’s final statues—independence or autonomy—will be decided within the next year. Whether final status can be resolved peacefully, through negotiation, is anybody’s guess. As recently as March 2004, Albanian mobs burned Serb villages after a spate of interethnic murder. Serb freedom of movement is very limited, and the remaining Serbs have retreated to ethnic enclaves around medieval Orthodox monasteries and to the north near Serbia proper. Serb leaders enforce a continuing boycott of the province’s nascent democratic institutions; Serbs in general avoid the new police force, and the gendarmerie established from the Kosovo rebel groups.
Perhaps most frightening is the dearth of realistic political dialogue between the two ethnic communities, particularly in the local media. Albanian-language media reflects Albanian demands for independence. Serbs almost universally support autonomous status under the sovereignty of the Serbian government in Belgrade. Both sides threaten violence if they do not get their way; June 2005 terrorist bombings that coincided with the arrival of a special UN fact-finding delegation reinforced the implicit Albanian threat of rebellion for any compromise short of full independence. A high-level contact in the north of Kosovo assures me that Serbian-majority municipalities will rebel if Kosovo is granted independence from Belgrade.
Yet neither community is preparing itself for these possible outcomes. Albanian-language media almost never addresses the threatened secession of Serb-majority municipalities; Serbian-language media seems to think that Belgrade will come the rescue at the last minute, protect their interests, and prevent independence. Milosevic’s legacy of hardened ethnic relations is still strong in Kosovo. As time runs out for the international community to broker an agreement on Kosovo’s final status, perhaps all parties may look at Milosevic’s legacy in the western Balkans and decide that violence is a road to travel no longer. We can be forgiven our hope that, in death, Milosevic will further ethnic reconciliation as well as he provoked hatred in life.
If we’re lucky, the death of Slobodan Milosevic will bring renewed American and European focus on the fate of the western Balkans, which is still recovering from the dictator’s deadly legacy. After 10 years of battlefield defeats, genocide, repression, and warlordism, Serbians overthrew the Butcher of the Balkans amid street protests in 2001. Milosevic died humiliated in a Dutch prison, on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The region faces still lingering ethnic and religious tension; and political the resolution of the region’s political conflict is still some ways off.
Kosovo was the site of Milosevic’s final military defeat. His decade-long effort to marginalize and eventually drive out the ethnic Albanian majority in the southern Serbian province—essentially a system of apartheid and state terrorism—erupted into full fledged ethnic cleansing in late 1998. NATO finally bombed the Serbians into retreat, and the UN Mission in Kosovo has since governed the province with the help of NATO troops.
All that is about to change. The international community has begun final status talks with regional leaders, including the current Serbian government, and representatives from the Kosovo Albanian and Kosovo Serb communities. The province’s final statues—independence or autonomy—will be decided within the next year. Whether final status can be resolved peacefully, through negotiation, is anybody’s guess. As recently as March 2004, Albanian mobs burned Serb villages after a spate of interethnic murder. Serb freedom of movement is very limited, and the remaining Serbs have retreated to ethnic enclaves around medieval Orthodox monasteries and to the north near Serbia proper. Serb leaders enforce a continuing boycott of the province’s nascent democratic institutions; Serbs in general avoid the new police force, and the gendarmerie established from the Kosovo rebel groups.
Perhaps most frightening is the dearth of realistic political dialogue between the two ethnic communities, particularly in the local media. Albanian-language media reflects Albanian demands for independence. Serbs almost universally support autonomous status under the sovereignty of the Serbian government in Belgrade. Both sides threaten violence if they do not get their way; June 2005 terrorist bombings that coincided with the arrival of a special UN fact-finding delegation reinforced the implicit Albanian threat of rebellion for any compromise short of full independence. A high-level contact in the north of Kosovo assures me that Serbian-majority municipalities will rebel if Kosovo is granted independence from Belgrade.
Yet neither community is preparing itself for these possible outcomes. Albanian-language media almost never addresses the threatened secession of Serb-majority municipalities; Serbian-language media seems to think that Belgrade will come the rescue at the last minute, protect their interests, and prevent independence. Milosevic’s legacy of hardened ethnic relations is still strong in Kosovo. As time runs out for the international community to broker an agreement on Kosovo’s final status, perhaps all parties may look at Milosevic’s legacy in the western Balkans and decide that violence is a road to travel no longer. We can be forgiven our hope that, in death, Milosevic will further ethnic reconciliation as well as he provoked hatred in life.
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Iraqi Election Results vs. Hypothetical National Elections
The Iraqi election results were released yesterday, more than a month after the election itself, and with early objections from Sunni groups unaddressed (at least publicly). While the Shia bloc did not obtain an outright majority, and will therefore have to govern in a coalition government or poach Assemblymembers from other parties, the Prime Minister will almost surely be a religiously leaning Shiite. Sunni slates won 55 seats; Kurdish parties 58. Two semi-surprises: former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's secular coalition won only 25 seats. Allawi, you will remember, was the most clearly American-backed candidate.
The second semi-surprise is that Ahmed Chalabi, whom some administration figures proposed as the "strongman" Iraq needed after the US invasion, and his list received exactly ZERO seats in the new Iraqi assembly.
The New York Times has one of their neat interactive graphics up.
To me, the most confusing part of this election is not the outcome, but rather the electoral regime itself. Poli Sci geeks know that one of the biggest problems with proportional representation is what to do with results that do not neatly round off, and what to do with the votes that went to very small parties that did not meet the threshold to enter parliament.
For instance, say you had 100 seats in the Assembly, and had a minimum threshold cutoff of 5 percent.
(This threshold was introduced in Germany after World War 2 to prevent the sorts of splintered parliaments that dominated the Weimar Republic. This requirement has been adopted most places to create centripetal forces in the election regime.)
If three parties each received 4 percent of the vote, together they would have received 12 seats in our hypothetical assembly. Separately, they received none. These extra, unallocated seats are called "hanging seats." What do you do with the seats that would have gone to those small parties? Usually, they are distributed among the larger parties according to some simple algorithm (i.e. the proportions they got). It's not too difficult; Europeans, at least, don't seem to mind this slightly undemocratic element of their systems.
However, in Iraq, the electoral regime compounds this problem by recreating it in each province. Instead of having national elections, and one reallocation of hanging seats, each province has its own proportional system and own reallocation.
To fix the quirks in this system, the Iraqi constitution invents "compensatory seats"-- seats reallocated by the Election Authority to parties that for one reason or another didn't receive seats approximating their electoral support.
In addition, to give the Assembly a national flavor and some stability, the constitution grants extra "national seats" based on Iraq-wide outcomes.
I've done some rough tabulations based on the New York Times and Washington Post vote totals, and compared the number of seats the parties got under the provincial system, and what they would have received under a purely national system. The biggest differences: the main Shia party received nine more seats that it would have; the main Kurdish party received eight fewer. Strangely, four parties that would have received no seats received one each. (If anyone knows how to post Excel tables, please let me know how.)
So to sum up:
1. 18 provincial party lists, rather than one national one.
2. Hanging seats in each province, to be reallocated within each province.
3. Compensatory seats for parties that, through the quirks of this system, did not receive seats that matched their vote totals (a process that seems at great risk for corruption and manipulation).
4. A smaller number of "national seats" allocated on national results.
Results:
1. Smaller parties received representation greater than they would have.
2. Shia received more seats.
3. Kurds received fewer.
I have yet to read any explanation for this confusing system. I also am unaware of any regime that uses provincial proportional representation and lists to determine the makeup of a national assembly. It is obviously the product of the intense negotiations among the political parties in 2004. To me, the system privileges the political parties, which control the reallocation mechanisms and can therefore negotiate political power among themselves. What remains to be seen is whether the stability the parties bring to the system is worth the trade-off of democratic legitimacy. Why the US would allow a system that promoted the Iranian-backed Shia at the expense of the US-backed Kurds is another matter.
The Four Securities
Family Security:
The institution of the family is weakening in this changing world. Families must continue to be the foundation stones of our national moral life. To secure the family, the Democratic Party pledges: 1) to protect families' financial security and health with universal, free health care, 2) to give more families a chance at homeownership through a deduction of rent payments from their tax bill, 3) to enact a "Family Time" law, guaranteeing each family enough time in the week to raise their children and enjoy the fruits of their labor, 4) to improve the chances of every child to succeed and to reward families who have made difficult, but correct choices with free, universal pre-kindergarten, professionalization of teacher pay and training, and the forgiveness of medical and educational debt.
Social Security:
The Democratic Party is proud of bringing America the most popular government program in the history of the United States. Social Security has eliminated elder poverty, built a community of shared responsibility, and gloved the often rough invisible hand of the free market. The Democratic Party pledges to protect Social Security from those who wish to destroy it. The Democratic Party will prevent Congress from stealing from the social security trust fund to pay its other bills, and will raise the income contribution limit to extend solvency an additional 50 years.
Human Security:
America is exceptional. As the world's first and most successful democracy, we have been blessed with the pre-eminent moral, political, and economic position in this unsafe world. Yet, the Revolution of 1776 is under attack from enemies both foreign and domestic: to secure our gift to mankind, we must protect ourselves, and we must protect those friends who stand with us. We have a duty to be both a shining beacon on a hill, and the chief promoter of democracy and prosperity around the world. The Democratic Party pledges to protect the Spirit of 1776 by: 1) rebuilding the Army, 2) acting as chief conservationist of the world environment, 3) reestablishing America's long-standing alliances to build a coalition to fight the nihilistic chaos gripping so much of the world, 4) fostering sustainable human development and responsible governance world-wide.
The institution of the family is weakening in this changing world. Families must continue to be the foundation stones of our national moral life. To secure the family, the Democratic Party pledges: 1) to protect families' financial security and health with universal, free health care, 2) to give more families a chance at homeownership through a deduction of rent payments from their tax bill, 3) to enact a "Family Time" law, guaranteeing each family enough time in the week to raise their children and enjoy the fruits of their labor, 4) to improve the chances of every child to succeed and to reward families who have made difficult, but correct choices with free, universal pre-kindergarten, professionalization of teacher pay and training, and the forgiveness of medical and educational debt.
Social Security:
The Democratic Party is proud of bringing America the most popular government program in the history of the United States. Social Security has eliminated elder poverty, built a community of shared responsibility, and gloved the often rough invisible hand of the free market. The Democratic Party pledges to protect Social Security from those who wish to destroy it. The Democratic Party will prevent Congress from stealing from the social security trust fund to pay its other bills, and will raise the income contribution limit to extend solvency an additional 50 years.
Human Security:
America is exceptional. As the world's first and most successful democracy, we have been blessed with the pre-eminent moral, political, and economic position in this unsafe world. Yet, the Revolution of 1776 is under attack from enemies both foreign and domestic: to secure our gift to mankind, we must protect ourselves, and we must protect those friends who stand with us. We have a duty to be both a shining beacon on a hill, and the chief promoter of democracy and prosperity around the world. The Democratic Party pledges to protect the Spirit of 1776 by: 1) rebuilding the Army, 2) acting as chief conservationist of the world environment, 3) reestablishing America's long-standing alliances to build a coalition to fight the nihilistic chaos gripping so much of the world, 4) fostering sustainable human development and responsible governance world-wide.
