And Yet ... by Christopher Hitchens
During this same period, the Department of State had every opportunity to prove the relative superiority of diplomacy and alliance building over “saber rattling,” or whatever we agree to call it. European and other capitals could have been subject to a vast American effort of persuasion, and free media across the world could have been offered some “public diplomacy,” too. Powell inaugurated his tenure at Foggy Bottom with a speech to the staff in which he had said that he would be a friend of the diplomatic corps. He even got the president to come to the department and speak encouraging words. Yet can anyone cite any effort, by any accredited American representative overseas, to make the administration’s case? And can anyone recall, without acute embarrassment, the expensive and useless tactics of soft-core public relations and pseudo-MTV with which former Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Margaret Tutwiler and others briefly attempted to boost America’s “image”? So dire was this defeat, in fact, that the lack of enthusiasm or allies was used as evidence in itself that the policy must somehow be wrong.
The official historian of the State Department has calculated that Powell will have traveled less than any secretary in more than three decades. His three immediate predecessors voyaged abroad an average of 45 percent more than him. “Shuttle diplomacy” may well have been overpromoted by Henry Kissinger, but a politique de présence has an importance of its own, and Powell should not forget that it was very largely his own personality—large, affable, calm, and, yes, originally Caribbean—that landed him the post to begin with. I myself doubt that a diplomatic “offensive” by Powell would have melted the heart of the Élysée, but he incurs criticism not for failing, but for not trying. And then he incurs further criticism for indicating dissent from a major policy, partly on the grounds that it did not command enough sympathy overseas.
So why didn’t Powell resign? The kindest explanation would seem to be that it didn’t cross his mind. He assumed himself unsackable, almost certainly correctly. And he could therefore continue to have things both ways, conducting his own private diplomacy through Woodward if things didn’t suit him. This experience was not exactly a first: as chairman of the joint chiefs, he had expressed himself freely on matters more properly decided by civilian authority, such as the future of Bosnia or the role of homosexuals in the military. Indeed, it’s thinkable that he exerted more influence on policy when he was not secretary.
To inquire about his stand on the principle of resignation is a bit like asking whether he’d ever have deigned to run for president. Here again, he felt entitled to be flirtatious and noncommittal, keeping the voters (or rather the book buyers) guessing until he’d finished his tour with the 1995 memoir, My American Journey. It was in those pages, incidentally, that he disclosed what has since become evident: “Having seen much of the world and having lived on planes for years, I am no longer much interested in travel.”
It’s not only the frequency, or lack of it, in Powell’s trips. It’s also the duration. By July of this year, he had spent less than twenty-four hours in Sudan. He may possibly have been right that the Sudanese authorities needed to be engaged rather than isolated, condemned, and subjected to hostile pressure, in respect to their conduct in Darfur and elsewhere. (He had better have been right: even as Powell cautioned against military intervention, Slobodan Milosevic employed similar breathing spaces to carry out ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia.) But how much seriousness does this level of “engagement” show?
There is, one cannot help feeling, something in Colin Powell that likes to give away the store. While bidding, not too hard, for the Chilean vote at the United Nations, he stated during a televised town hall interview that the United States had nothing to be proud of in the 1973 overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende. When the terrible revelations from the Abu Ghraib prison were published, Powell, in the course of one interview, at first denied that he had ever seen anything like it in Vietnam, and then proceeded to evoke the memory of My Lai. This writer had better come clean and agree that it was high time to make an official statement about Chile, and indeed about My Lai. But perhaps not when vote-hunting in the Chilean case.
A more solemn and considered remark at an earlier or later date might have been more dignified. And perhaps not to pile on the agony as secretary of state in the Abu Ghraib case, where there had been neither a massacre nor a proven high-level cover-up. (And perhaps especially not if, as a young officer in Vietnam—as Powell was—one had been all too willing to dismiss early reports of atrocities.)
Colin Powell reportedly became incensed on January 20, 2003, when, after many exhausting negotiations at the United Nations, he discovered from Dominique de Villepin, then the French minister of foreign affairs, that Paris thought that “nothing! nothing!” justified the armed enforcement of Resolution 1441 compelling Iraq to yield to UN inspections. This, Powell felt, was something that he might well have been told before he wasted his time. But it is also something that he could have known before he wasted that time (and, dare one hint) the time of others, too. In a much-underreported speech to France’s assembled ambassadors on August 26, 2004, the new French minister of foreign affairs Michel Barnier said that it was France that has become isolated, even “arrogant,” and that it could not flourish without allies. He was noted for not even mentioning the United States in his cautious remarks.
Thus, one might mark the end of the Powell tenure by noting that there is always room for quiet diplomacy, but by adding that “quiet diplomacy” may not necessarily involve deniable smirks and disclaimers concerning a central policy; that such smirks and disclaimers are especially unpersuasive when the policy is in trouble; that to tell the hometown paper that your rivals and critics are Communists and Nazis isn’t all that “diplomatic” in any case, and that faintness and ambiguity are not the same as patience, discretion, and reticence.
(Foreign Policy, October 26, 2009)
Shut Up about Armenians or We’ll Hurt Them Again
APRIL IS THE cruelest month for the people of Armenia, who every year at this season have to suffer a continuing tragedy and a humiliation. The tragedy is that of commemorating the huge number of their ancestors who were exterminated by the Ottoman Muslim caliphate in a campaign of state-planned mass murder that began in April 1915. The humiliation is of hearing, year after year, that the Turkish authorities simply deny that these appalling events ever occurred or that the killings constituted “genocide.”
In a technical and pedantic sense, the word “genocide” does not, in fact, apply, since it only entered our vocabulary in 1943. (It was coined by a scholar named Raphael Lemkin, who for rather self-evident reasons in that even more awful year wanted a legal term for the intersection between racism and bloodlust and saw Armenia as the precedent for what was then happening in Poland.) I still rather prefer the phrase used by America’s then-ambassador to Turkey, Henry Morgenthau. Reporting to Washington about what his consular agents were telling him of the foul doings in the Ottoman provinces of Harput and Van in particular, he employed the striking words “race extermination.” (See the imperishable book The Slaughterhouse Province for some of the cold diplomatic dispatches of that period.) Terrible enough in itself, Morgenthau’s expression did not quite comprehend the later erasure of all traces of Armenian life, from the destruction of their churches and libraries and institutes to the crude altering of official Turkish maps and schoolbooks to deny that there had ever been an Armenia in the first place.
This year, the House foreign affairs committee in Washington and the parliament of Sweden joined the growing number of political bodies that have decided to call the slaughter by its right name. I quote now from a statement in response by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the current prime minister of Turkey and the leader of its Islamist party:
In my country there are 170,000 Armenians. Seventy thousand of them are citizens. We tolerate 100,000 more. So, what am I going to do tomorrow? If necessary I will tell the 100,000: OK, time to go back to
This extraordinary threat was not made at some stupid rally in a fly-blown town. It was uttered in England, on March 17, on the Turkish-language service of the BBC. Just to be clear, then, about the view of Turkey’s chief statesman: if democratic assemblies dare to mention the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in the twentieth century, I will personally complete that cleansing in the twenty-first!
Where to begin? Turkish “guest workers” are to be found in great numbers all through the European Union, membership of which is a declared Turkish objective. How would the world respond if a European prime minister called for the mass deportation of all Turks? Yet Erdogan’s xenophobic demagoguery attracted precisely no condemnation from Washington or Brussels. He probably overestimated the number of “tolerated” economic refugees from neighboring and former Soviet Armenia, but is it not interesting that he keeps a count in his head? And a count of the tiny number of surviving Turkish Armenians as well?
The outburst strengthens the already strong case for considering Erdogan to be somewhat personally unhinged. In Davos in January 2009, he stormed out of a panel discussion with the head of the Arab League and with Israeli president Shimon Peres, having gone purple and grabbed the arm of the moderator who tried to calm him. On that occasion, he yelled that Israelis in Gaza knew too well “how to kill”—which might be true but which seems to betray at best an envy on his part. Turkish nationalists have also told me that he was out of control because he disliked the fact that the moderator—David Ignatius of the Washington Post—is himself of Armenian descent. A short while later, at a NATO summit in Turkey, Erdogan went into another tantrum at the idea that former prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark would be chosen as the next head of the alliance. In this case, it was cartoons published on Danish soil that frayed Erdogan’s evidently fragile composure.
In Turkey itself, the continuing denial has abysmal cultural and political consequences. The country’s best-known novelist, Orhan Pamuk, was dragged before a court in 2005 for acknowledging Turkey’s role in the destruction of Armenia. Had he not been the winner of a Nobel Prize, it might have gone very hard for him, as it has for prominent and brave intellectuals like Murat Belge. Turkish-Armenian editor Hrant Dink, also prosecuted under a state law forbidding discussion of the past, was shot down in the street by an assassin who was later photographed in the company of beaming, compliant policemen.
The original crime, in other words, defeats all efforts to cover it up. And the denial necessitates continuing secondary crimes. In 1955, a government-sponsored pogrom in Istanbul burned out most of the city’s remaining Armenians, along with thousands of Jews and Greeks and other infidels. The state-codified concept of mandatory Turkishness has been used to negate the rights and obliterate the language of the country’s enormous Kurdish population and to create an armed colony of settlers and occupiers on the soil of Cyprus, a democratic member of the European Union.
So it is not just a disaster for Turkey that it has a prime minister who suffers from morbid disorders of the personality. Under these conditions, his great country can never hope to be an acceptable member of Europe or a reliable member of NATO. And history is cunning: the dead of Armenia will never cease to cry out. Nor, on their behalf, should we cease to do so. Let Turkey’s unstable leader foam all he wants when other parliaments and congresses discuss Armenia and seek the truth about it. The grotesque fact remains that the one parliament that should be debating the question—the Turkish parliament—is forbidden by its own law to do so. While this remains the case, we shall do it for them, and without any apology, until they produce the one that is forthcoming from them.
(Slate, April 5, 2010)
Hezbollah’s Progress
WRITING FROM SOUTHERN Lebanon in the mid-to-late 1970s, during the continuing war of attrition between Israel and the PLO and at a time when the country’s long-relegated Shiite minority was just beginning to get itself organized, I noticed the presence of an almost unremarked token force of Iranian troops. These had been dispatched by the Shah of Iran, who (as we tend to forget) was ever-mindful of his title Shadow of God and of his anointed role as protector of the Shiites. Commenting more presciently than I knew, I said that these soldiers would probably be needed back home before too long to safeguard the peacock throne.
At that time, it would have been entirely impossible to picture any Iranian head of state visiting multicultural Lebanon as a plenipotentiary and being feted all the way to within yelling distance of the Israeli border. Yet last week President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad managed this feat almost without effort. A man who has managed to escape serious inconvenience for his illegal pursuit of nuclear weapons and who has pitilessly repressed and cheated his own people can appear on neutral soil as the patron of the Party of God because his regime shares that party’s pitiless attitude toward the state of Israel and its biting contempt for all the Arab and Muslim “moderates” who would even consider a compromise with it.
In a way, an even more dramatic measure of the progress of Hezbollah and its patrons involves a comparison with only a few years ago. In February 2005, former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri was blown to shreds in broad daylight, his murder capping a series of assassinations of politicians and journalists who had been critical of the Syrian presence in their country. So immense was the democratic popular revulsion against this criminality that Damascus was compelled to withdraw its occupying forces, and an international tribunal was convened to investigate the complicity of the Syrian Baathists, and by implication their holy Hezbollah proxy, and in turn that proxy’s other supporter in Tehran. Aided, in my opinion, by the momentum created by the fall of Saddam Hussein, and encouraged even by French support for the relevant UN resolutions, the local prestige of the United States became very high.
Now mark the sequel. The leaders of all other parties and factions in Lebanon, from Christian to Druze, cringe with fear when the name of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, is mentioned. The once-vaunted tribunal, long stalled, has been preempted by highly credible threats of violence if its belated findings turn out to be awkward for Syria or Hezbollah. The son of the murdered Hariri, like the son of the previously murdered Druze leader Kamal Jumblatt, has been forced to “make nice” in the most degrading fashion with the capo Bashar Assad, whose family almost certainly slew the heads of theirs. And the Party of God possesses two vetoes, one over the outcome of any Lebanese election it does not win and another on the timing of the next war with Israel to be launched from Lebanese territory.
What brought about this stark reversal? The first cause is Israel’s crass intervention in Lebanon in 2006, responding to a clever Hezbollah provocation (a raid and a kidnap of Israeli soldiers) that was almost certainly designed to produce the response that it did. The second cause is the palpable loss of interest in Lebanon on the part of the United States. The March 14 coalition—named for the date of the triumphant intercommunal rally against Syria that followed Hariri’s assassination—is splintering back into sectarianism and impotence. And what prudent Lebanese citizen, with Syria so nearby, Iran acting like a pre-nuclear regional superpower, and a humiliated Washington squandering all its effort on the predictable and pathetic failure of the Israel-Palestine “peace process,” would not begin to adjust to the rugged new reality?
A depressingly excellent book on the contours of that new reality is provided by Thanassis Cambanis. A Privilege to Die lays out the near-brilliant way in which Hezbollah manages to be both the party of the downtrodden and the puppet of two of the area’s most retrograde dictatorships. Visiting Beirut not long after Hezbollah had been exposed as an accomplice to Syria and as the party that had brought Israel’s devastating reprisals upon the innocent, I was impressed, despite myself, by the discipline and enthusiasm of one of Nasrallah’s rallies in the south of the city. Cambanis shows how the trick is pulled. With what you might call its “soft” power, the Party
In Greek legend there was a fighter named Antaeus who drew strength from the earth even when he was flung down. It took Hercules to work out his vulnerability as a wrestler. Hezbollah loves death, thrives on defeat and disaster, and is rapidly moving from being a state within a state to becoming the master of what was once the most cosmopolitan and democratic country in the Middle East. Meanwhile, a former superpower—no Hercules—is permitting itself to be made a hostage and laughingstock by a squalid factional fight within the Israeli right wing involving the time and scale of petty land theft by zealots and fanatics. Only a few years from now, this, too, will seem hard to believe, as well as shameful and unpardonable.