I The Bush War on Diplomacy

    War has been styled diplomacy by other means, not its permanent alternative.  What good is war if it doesn’t lead to enhanced security or increased power?  What good is war that never reaches an end?  Iraq and the so-called “war on terror” have achieved neither of these things – at great, great cost to the American people.  The only bearable thing about war is the end of war and the advantages that accrue to you from its prosecution yet the wars of the Bush administration are designed profitlessly, as if they were intended to go on forever.  This is a fatal flaw in their system that is never acknowledged by their supporters.  Diplomacy is the consolidating and management side of foreign affairs.  It is a mistake to ignore it. 
     In the same way one should “never say never”, in general in diplomacy it is unwise to issue an excess of ultimata.  But this administration has taken a simple virtuous (when specifically applied) principle of “we never negotiate with terrorists” to include, by merely expanding the meaning of the term terrorist, to include nearly everyone, from Ted Kennedy, Iran, various news outlets, the courts, congress, the American people to anyone else who disagrees with this administration.
     This may be rational for an unsophisticated junior high school student who was upset when they saw Suzie talking to that nasty girl Emily, who may or may not have stole her boyfriend in the gym; but it hardly befits the foreign policy of the world’s only superpower.  Our name calling, saber rattling bellicosity has rendered us little better than a regional, provincial, cheat and bully in the eyes of the world.  This has left our policies noticeably devoid of subtlety, tact, strategy and support.  Our cynical, myopic unilateralism has steadily radically reduced our available options and therefore our influence in the world, while limiting all avenues of potential solution to world problems across the map. 
Submission to our will, do what we say or else war, is not diplomacy, it is merely a protection racket.
 
There are four good reasons not to negotiate with terrorists.

1) When hostages are involved it is correctly viewed as a reward for bad behavior which can only lead to more hostage taking.
2) In the case of violent blackmail, when the terrorists want something from you which they do not deserve and you will not grant, compliance with a demand for negotiation may be seen by them as a sign of weakness and lead to an escalation of violence over time.
3) Because frequently terror groups are amorphous organizations with no clear lines of succession and authority, who to negotiate with and who should be held liable should any agreements reached later be reneged on, often leaves the matter an exercise in futility. 
4) For negotiations to succeed there must be something to negotiate for and to negotiate about, a give and take which goes both ways.

    These are all quite valid principles in the proper context.  None of these four rules apply in the least to Iran.  State to state or nation to nation negotiations have as a general rule never been avoided by the United States.  In diplomacy you have negotiations to solve disputes and avert crises.  The act of negotiation itself is neutral, neither advantageous nor penal.  It may work to your advantage or disadvantage based on a variety of subjective variables including the skill of your negotiating position and the reality of your goals.  Competent states and able leaders are never afraid of negotiation.  To refuse to negotiate with another country is not a sign of strength but of weakness and implies insecurity or cowardice on the part of the recalcitrant party.  
     This administration seems to be reluctant to negotiate with other nations based on
a sort of selective xenophobia or fear of failure, lack of ambition to succeed, lack of confidence in our position or fear that our skills do not measure up to other nations because we are unable and unwilling to work hard enough and haven’t the patience to master all the potential details and intricacies of diplomacy.  It can’t be because we are in a position of weakness, because we are the stronger party.  It can’t be because of the weakness of our position because we are right according to international law (or at least if we are true to our own principles, should be).  
     To a competent nation diplomacy is a much sought after opportunity to make its
opinions known and grievances felt, even more strenuously and artfully and in a way that can better be communicated in private than in public.  A weak nation shuns diplomatic overtures because of a lack of belief in the quality or rectitude of their position.  Why is our government then afraid of diplomacy?  You needn’t be a slave to diplomacy to remain amenable to it.  Even if we think it’s a waste of time, time is something there is in abundance.  If they think it will diminish our stature and reputation, they’re wrong, peacemakers are always ennobled by their efforts even when their efforts fail.
     On the other hand, public diplomacy has always been known as a lesser, default category of undertaking best avoided when possible and when no other choice is available.  It is all loud voices and big sticks.  It’s shrill, crude, unruly, imprecise and usually counterproductive to be calling out to foreign leaders through the imperfect, uncontrolled medium of the press from thousands of miles away.  Merely calling another nation names or calling them out in a way to embarrass them or shout them down leaves all such “negotiations” fatally tainted and distorted by the inevitable political involvement of each nation’s public opinion.  This leads to demagoguery and generally to a hardening of preexisting positions while sowing a worrying yeast of growing misapprehension at each other’s intentions. 
    Why this is preferable to meeting in quiet, dignified rooms where matters of concern may be gone over in considerable depth calmly and rationally with mutual respect of all parties is beyond understanding.  Things may actually be said in private far more bluntly and in far greater frankness and detail, with a full measure of carrots and sticks, than in public and history has long shown this to be a far more sincere and efficacious way to actually solve a crisis.  Not talking, on the other hand is the premiere way to either create a crisis or take a small crisis and make it large.  
    Private, well structured, high level talks afford a better gauge of another nation’s true intentions aside from all posturing and give a shrewd negotiator the means to probe for weaknesses and strengths in the opposing side’s arguments.  To a good strategist the more information that can be gleaned about your opponent’s psychology and intentions the better you will be able to counter and persuade them to a position more to your own liking.  At the same time, wars and aggressive tactics seldom (though this is not always the case) break out while negotiations are under way but only after they have finally broken down.  In many instances the delay negotiation provides is itself enough to diffuse a crisis until calmer heads and mutually acceptable solutions have arisen and prevailed.
    But, of course, all this is really just diplomacy 101. It shouldn’t need to be explained but that the Bush folks have consistently taken foreign policy out of the hands of competent professionals at the State Department and given it over to amateurs and ideologues in the Defense Department and vice President’s office.  This has had predictably disastrous results for our policies.
     Therefore when Bush/McCain have continued to dismiss diplomacy out of hand
and claim that any negotiations with Iran equate to “appeasement” it is an astonishing leap across the line of reality into the realm of complete incoherence.  To impart an onus on the medium of the communication rather than the quality of its result is like whispering that people should never go to hospitals to be cured because that’s the place where people are rumored to get sick.  They are ascribing the worst possible result to an act which it should be in our interests to undertake.  Is it a sign of fatal insecurity, a considered lack of knowledge, or simple juvenile superstition which motivates them?
     Whatever the reason for it, it is inescapable that the “body language” of this
administration seen through the weakness and fearfulness of our leaders, like the nervous needle of a pressure gauge on a boiler about to blow or the proverbial cat on a hot tin roof, has become one of visceral paranoia and lack of proportion and self control, calm rationality, personal responsibility, inner confidence and quiet calm assurance and resolve that must be present for any policy to succeed.  
    They seem too insecure in their own skill to trust their ability to deal properly with the challenges with which we are faced.  Far worse crises than this have been handled by leaders far better than these while keeping all of our principles and intact for any of us to think that the performance of this administration since 9/11 has been adequate to the task at hand.  
     They are like the weak creature in nature that must engage in elaborate displays
of menacing wing waving, squawking and strutting around because they have so few defenses.  But we are the strongest nation in the world, what are our fearless leaders afraid of exactly?  What do they think the danger is when even a child can see that from diplomacy there is perhaps much to gain and nothing to lose?
     Therefore it is sad to see John McCain parroting George Bush and speaking of
diplomacy as appeasement in a timid voice of unanimity for the first time in our history, even dragging nightmare visions of Hitler into the debate as if consciously trying to terrify themselves further.
     Even that infamous example is inappropriate to this discussion.  As has been well pointed out by others, Neville Chamberlain meeting with Adolf Hitler, going the extra mile for peace with a tyrannical, warmongering despot, was not in itself misguided.  Talking is diplomacy, it is not appeasement.  If well done it is the prevention of appeasement and ultimately the prevention of war.  The appeasement only occurred in 1938 when, to achieve “peace” at all costs, Czechoslovakia was bartered away with nothing in return. 
     As smarter, more experienced humans know, being either too strong or too weak often leads to exactly the same place in time.  Not talking is not a proper option to avoid war, but the single thing in history which renders warfare most nearly inevitable.  Appeasement is a craven act of the heart, not the words which signal its intention.  The only alternatives to diplomacy are ultimatums and war which, one has to wonder (given the prelude to Iraq), is what George Bush and his advisors really seek.  In Iraq, in the end, we chose war instead of diplomacy and it has cost us dearly.  Is this what McCain wants in Iran too?
 
II The Shell Game
    of the War on Terror

    But then the badly misnomered “war on terror” as waged by the Bush administration has been a series of shell games, where one war often causes and then leads directly into another, like a series of nests one within the other, growing bigger along the way.  In the process, they have long since lost the simple pea of intent of what the metaphorical “war” against terrorists was all about in the first place.  Meanwhile, their behavior acknowledges no boundaries and their complete lack of ability to compartmentalize has led one crisis to bleed into another until they have all united in an agglomeration that has become enormous beyond their imaginations’ ability to deal with rationally.
    Now they are threatening to morph a war with Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11 into a larger war with Iran which has very little to do with Iraq and Saddam Hussein and nothing at all to do with al Qaeda.  They have called Iran a terrorist state for trying to develop nuclear weapons when many countries from Israel to Pakistan, to India to Korea, have done precisely the same thing as a function of  trying achieve a national identity.  Yet the administration is now trying to cobble, confuse and conflate garden variety terrorist acts with nuclear proliferation, as if terrorists groups and legitimate nations or car bombers and national efforts to construct a nuclear reactor should be dealt with exactly the same way, when they are entirely different animals and respond in entirely different ways to the exact same stimuli.  
     Moreover, we are trying to cow Iran by the same bullying methods that recently so singularly failed to achieve any notable success with North Korea.  The situation in Iran is far more volatile than the one with Korea and yet the Bush administration has been willing to rely on the same non negotiating methodology and ploy which finally failed so badly in Korea that they recently had to reverse it.  Very quickly thereafter they achieved an agreement that even their friends say could have been reached six years before. Unfortunately, our refusing to negotiate with North Korea for all that long time merely allowed them to acquire the nuclear weapons that the negotiations we avoided having with them were designed to keep them from acquiring.  This allowed them to greatly strengthen their negotiating position in the interim as ours steadily grew weaker.
     With Iran this is brinksmanship that drives us up to the very cliff of reason.  This is a very high stakes gamble with a very nervous Israel, a contentious, unpredictable, belligerent Iran and our leadership team that has frequently evinced a propensity to misjudge situations and mismanage our affairs.  To be employing the same tried and true method of intimidation tactics of steadily ratcheting rhetoric without moderating negotiations which has just so spectacularly failed to achieve the desired results in the Korean Peninsula, now Middle East, a part of the world that rests on a razor’s edge of volatility, is reckless and irresponsible.
     When Iran and Israel each have elements in their makeup and history which cause them to distrust each other beyond reasoning the US should be operating as a moderating or mediating force in the region. Instead George Bush has acted as if he is the one cocked on a hair trigger and continues to be one of the chief instigators and loudest name callers in the relationship between the countries.  George Bush’s advisors are urging him to continue along the very same lines that led to war with Iraq and allowed Korea to arm itself with nuclear weapons in a part of the world where dangers are more bristling and immediate and the unintended consequences of war breaking out are almost incomprehensible.
     This lack of judgment is tantamount to reckless endangerment or criminal malfeasance of our affairs.  Given their record, rest assured that the Bush administration has given not a minute’s worth of thought as to what, if violence does break out between Israel or America and Iran, would happen next.
    With behavior and rhetoric like this is it any wonder that the respect the world has for us today is so lately deeply diminished?  We have moved from the high water mark of our power in the world after the Gulf War to the nadir of our respectability and trustworthiness inside the course of a decade and a half and inside the presidential and generational inheritance of just one family, father to son, George Bush to George Bush.
    Yet to hear John McCain aping George Bush’s diplomatic simplicities and supporting his unjust, ill fought war in Iraq, the sword up to the hilt, does not bode well for the type of foreign policy he would pursue if he were elected president.  Equating all intelligent diplomacy with “appeasement” is dishearteningly short-sighted and shows he has learned nothing first from Korea, then Vietnam and now from its genealogical heir apparent – Iraq.  At this last date, it makes one wonder if he will ever learn at all.
    Like Bush, McCain has signified that he doesn’t believe you need a policy where you have a polemical slogan to provide you cover nor does he apparently have the steadfastness, nuance or firmness of purpose to operate with depth on several tracks simultaneously.  For instance, to oppose Iranian nuclear pretensions at the same time we encourage them to be constructive regionally, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, should not be considered mutually exclusive.  But our insistence on both of these conditions being met simultaneously (sometimes known as “diplomatic preconditions”) greatly increases the probability that we will get neither.
    On the contrary, the case might be made that both these goals are in their interests and where our interests coincide we should capitalize on them individually because clearly success on either front would be very helpful in achieving success on the other.  This also takes into account that by compartmentalizing issues we can abide the temporary presidency of Ahmadinijad and negotiate longer term accords of common interest with the Iranian people with a view to dealing more even handedly with a better Iranian government later.  
    On the other extreme, we are great supporters of Israel.  This is as it should be.  But if we merely unthinkingly adopt their goals as our own we neuter ourselves and our great power.  While often similar, the interests of Israel and United States are not identical and when we submerge our interests to theirs, our influence in the region and ability to effect other goals we may support disappears.  Two become one, our world power is subsumed in their lesser regional power, potential and perspective and we wind up helping neither Israel nor ourselves.
    Unfortunately such strategy takes finesse and careful, patient diplomacy not in thrall with its own ultimatums and driven by its own frightened, restless haste and only works if you are interested in results rather than in love with crude threats and bravado uttered for political purposes.  By uncritically adopting the Bush foreign policy as his own, John McCain seems to be throwing in his lot with the former option rather than the latter and to prefer a crude and niggling foreign policy filled with misperceptions to a supple and subtle one using reality and pragmatism as his guide.  
    Recently the Bush administration has shown a bit more flexibility in being willing to talk on a limited basis with the Iranians though it still remains to be seen whether this is a real change of heart or a feint (or faint) of the same organ.  McCain has yet to speak on the matter though the right wing supporters of Bush have already been very vocally critical.
Up to now this has been the most backward leaning presidency in our memory.  This administration is filled with anti-social, anti-science, and anti-democratic Luddites, no-nothings, anti-expert xenophobes, stick their heads in the mud deniers of obvious truths, glasses permanently half full, roll back the clock and avoid the evidence of the ruins growing all around them, type people.  They avoid the future by looking through a prism of their own self-interests toward a past evocative of a time that never existed using historical examples that they don’t understand out of context that would no longer apply even if they had ever existed.
    Unsurprisingly then, perfectly befitting the lack of capacity of our current leaders this has been the most shortsighted, simplistic and smallest minded foreign policy we have ever seen in America.  We need to raise our horizons considerably and begin acting like a confident superpower again.  When George Bush gets into a spitting match with Ahmadinijad he makes himself, the President of the United States, of no greater stature than the president of Iran.  When he claims a nonentity like Saddam Hussein is a threat to America, he diminishes our concept of our own power to a point as negligible as Saddam’s before he was deposed.  When he engages in non stop name calling, threats and saber rattling, he makes America sound as insincere, childish and vindictive as he is.  Finally, when he drops the ball against al Qaeda and starts a war in Iraq only to settle an old personal, family grudge by attacking Iraq, 1,500 miles from the nearest al Qaeda member, he betrays us all.
     We have to believe John McCain would have a better toned foreign policy than this, but to the chagrin of us all, so far on this point he has shown no inclination toward one.

VI  The Vertigo of Power

    We need to find a finer more graceful wisdom to conform to our great strength.  Yet after the fall of the Soviet Union this generation of American leadership, unlike our forbearers, like a man deathly afraid of heights, has gradually begun to look down and not been able to maintain balance as the world’s only superpower without overreaction.  Now when it’s far more important to get our position in the world right and keep our policies on an even keel, our leadership is increasingly demagogic externally and divided internally, prone to false manhood and empty displays of posture and overt masculinity to mask the fact that they haven’t the guts to know what to do to live up to our own past glory and maintain it in the future.   
    The phony militarism and faux political machismo displayed by this generation of politicians has generally been much louder and yet far emptier than the situation generally requires, while the real work of winning the fight against terrorists has often been allowed to fall between the cracks of the rhetoric of their own empty debates.
    Currently, faced with a threat from a rag tag group of fools and nihilists doomed to eventually fail of their own self destructive delusions, offering nothing to the world to compete with us, our leaders chose to magnify these predictable challengers to our unquestioned preeminence to a level far beyond what they have earned, in some respects as if they were our equals on the world stage.  Apparently finding it lonely and vertiginous at the top of the world as heads of the most powerful country in the world, this administration has felt the need to elevate these easily beaten terrorists into a global threat of nearly equal weight, strength and challenge that the Soviet Union, an actual global empire, truly represented. 
    Unfortunately then, rather than rise to the challenge we unjustifiably elevated these cretinous terrorist adventurers to, as worthy adversaries to us, we have chosen to descend to the level of ethics and amorality on which they actually exist. 
    Fighting terrorism this way is like fueling a motor car with nuclear power.  It busts the seams of policy, explodes the outlines and blurs distinctions beneath a fog of bombast and smoke until the policy careens out of control and becomes little more than a hopeless jam of traffic in which we catch ourselves in constant counterproductive contradictions to our own nobler intentions.  Obviously we need a finer, more carefully calibrated policy of consensus and sagacity than the one we have been pursuing since 9/11/01.  
    Though it is not directly germane to this discussion or technically within the scope of this piece it may still be important to understand this administration’s approach to our country and the world.  They came to power with a warped agenda, nursing an old grudge against the country.  Bush-Cheney began their administration at the point where Richard Nixon’s discredited one left off, determined to do it to us all over again.  And, by and large, they have.  George W. Bush’s presidency might be thought of as Nixon’s third and fourth terms.  
    When the country was attacked on 9-11 they didn’t primarily see their duty to fight terrorists but saw terrorism as an excuse to enact their preconceived agenda.  They weren’t opposed to fighting terrorists but at the very least their attention was not undividedly directed to that one goal.  Therefore their egregious use of “enhanced terror techniques” or torture is an executive power grab as much as a sincere attempt to gather intelligence to try to protect the nation.  In either event, of course, such behavior is disgraceful.  Listening to the facile soulless attorneys, the amoral apologists and George Bush himself blithely justify the unjustifiable by excusing any atrocity or horrific act they should feel like engaging in to “defend democracy”, brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s famous reference to the “banality of evil” to describe the Nazis.  There is no question that this administration has broken our laws, disgraced our nation’s past, betrayed our ideals and debased their offices, all for next to nothing in return.
    George Washington in the heat of battle, his head truly on the line in a way the current leaders of the most power country in the world can’t even conceive, still behaved with much greater essence and class when he told his troops to treat war prisoners “with humanity and let them have no reason to complain of us copying the brutal manner of (others)… while we are contending for our own liberty we should be very cautious of violating the rights of conscience in others, ever considering that God alone is the judge of the hearts of men, and to Him only in this case, are they answerable.”
    In a similar instance it is hard not to notice the vast gap in dignity, pride and ethics between Washington’s approach and that which the current leadership of the United States possesses.  It seems that Bush-Cheney have replaced their own names for the name of God in the quote above and took the founding ideals of the nation and traitorously compromised them in the process.  It is very hard to dispute that the all-powerful Untied States since 2001 is in more jeopardy and under greater threat than the fledgling Continental Army was in the Revolutionary War, and yet there is no comparison between the quality of men and morals in full display then and those ruthlessly ignored now.
After abasing every principle on which the nation has been founded this administration doesn’t deserve to be office holders in the city that carries that name.  That is why, true to what one should have expected, George Bush’s highly successful emulation of Richard Nixon’s policies have driven him pretty much to the very lowest rung of the totem of respect and love in the hearts of his people as Nixon enjoyed.  Last in war, last in peace and last in the hearts of their countrymen.  
    Unfortunately, as bad as this administration has been, though he has occasionally apparently dissented from them, in foreign affairs John McCain has done very little since he became his party’s nominee for president to separate and distinguish himself from it.
In foreign affairs the unilateralism and moral relativism they have practiced, by their very nature, are thoroughly foreign to the spirit of the world’s oldest, largest and most successful democracy which considers open debate and fair competition vital to progress and freedom.  In a multifaceted and multicultural world such dictatorial behavior by a democracy can only fail to succeed.  On the contrary, we can afford a certain magnanimity and magnificent breadth of vision because we have earned it.  It is both the prerogative and necessity of being the world’s only superpower.  To talk and debate diplomatically and seek consensus democratically is a function of our very disposition.  To deny this is to deny the roots of our own being.  
     When we seek to evade international norms and abandon conventions which better generations of Americans helped inaugurate for temporary political expedients to satisfy the fearful natures of our present lesser minded leaders we invite international fragmentation and chaos which can only visit harm back upon us in multiples far beyond whatever advantage we think we gained by our ethical corner cutting in the first place.   As the world’s largest economy and the political shareholder having the most to lose from anarchy in the world, why would we want to systematically promote chaos by undercutting and denying the value and viability of international law?
    Prior to the invasion of Iraq, with grand sweep, we used UN sanctions and international law as the ultimate international authority which, according to our leaders, virtually compelled us to attack Iraq.  Then, when it suited our purpose, we immediately reversed ourselves and dismissed the necessity and integrity of the UN and claimed it had no authority over any of our own actions.  To use international law when it suits us and ignore it when it doesn’t does us no great credit and eventually vitiates the very universality on which any law in the world may be effectively maintained. 
    Apparently our leaders regarded their transparently amoral tergiversations as harmless and fiendishly shrewd of them even though unworthy of us and so frankly duplicitous as to fool no one.  Like the behavior of a lying and undisciplined child, to be this self serving and feckless in the exercise of our powers in pursuit of our desires is to invite the opposition and opprobrium of the world against us – which, despite our power, is far stronger collectively than we are individually.  To stand alone, as the small minded neocons would have us do for transitory and paranoiac reasons, is to destroy the solid basis of our power and directly lead to its permanent diminution.
    We cannot hope to rise above all the petty disputes of the world especially when through terrible provocation by our worst enemies they intentionally try to draw us into them, but we must endeavor to keep our heads.  To let these anti-humans drag us down to their level is not only what they want but it is to play a losing game against the odds.  It is the most self-destructive thing we can do to ourselves, far worst than they could ever do.  To become fixated on these fears of our small minded men in power and sink to the level of the terrorists of the world is to cease and abandon being an honest broker of world events and carelessly constrain our power to the limits of our enemies’ imaginations. 
     It is a high debt of honor we owe to our own heritage to not become narrow and vile and over sensitive of slights and selfish of honor and petrified of nations we could destroy in one concentrated hour.  We should be an honest broker because we must be an honest broker, we are the only nation which can.  To support our current policy of no internal dissent and no external opposition is to misunderstand the very nature of what it is to be American.  To be petty and prickly is to flaw and limit ourselves.  To be undignified and mean is to demean our reputation and our own better democratic history and betray our hard won stature in the world.
    It is exactly the ability of dignified restraint and class and forbearance we have recently abandoned that allows the body of power to truly consolidate power.  To use this right and duty foolishly and squander it needlessly is to lose it permanently.  Similarly we must rigorously apply to ourselves the same principles we apply to the world and demand of others.  This is what will spread democracy in the world, not coercion at the point of missiles and guns.  This is the capacity that made us great to begin with.