David Trinh

I was a little floored a few days ago when I read this piece on Sarah Palin by Chris Good:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will travel to Hong Kong for her first commercial speaking engagement, a keynote address at the CLSA Investors’ Forum September 23. Given that foreign policy was a soft spot for Palin during the 2008 campaign, this will give her a chance to boost her foreign policy cred (and she’ll be able to see Taiwan from her hotel room) (Bold mine DT)

I’m sorry, but in what world does a trip to Hong Kong constitute foreign policy experience?  Does anyone seriously believe that a person can gain meaningful insight into the weighty issues of international affairs by going to a hotel ballroom in another country and giving a speech?   I mean really, by this standard I should be considered an expert on Iceland.  Ambassadorship please.

On Tuesday, Aluf Benn, the editor of Haaretz, published a bizarre editorial in the New York Times in which he chastised Obama for failing to “speak directly to Israelis.”  Benn further argued that it is this failure by Obama to open up a dialogue with Israel that has let Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu enjoy “a virtual domestic consensus over [Netanyahu’s] rejection of the settlement freeze.”  The implicit case Benn makes is that Obama could turn Israelis against Netanyahu, and thus sway popular Israeli opinion on the settlements, if only he would bother talking to Israel.

Color me confused.  Hasn’t Obama already had a series of high-profile White House meetings with Netanyahu?  And the President sure hasn’t invited the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to share a beer at the White House.  Also, I seem to remember President Bush being fairly popular in Israel throughout his presidency which is funny because Bush never visited Israeli to “speak directly to Israelis” until January of 2008.

Benn makes a cute argument but I have a hard time taking it seriously.  I mean, I suppose it’s possible that Israelis feel so slighted by Obama that they’re embracing Netanyahu’s draconian settlement policies to spite him.  Or because of a power vacuum.  Or something.  However, I think it’s far more likely that Israelis dislike Obama because they disagree his policies.  And you know what?  This is fine!  Israelis are perfectly within their rights as a free people to disagree with Obama about the merits of their illegal settlements.   Let’s not pretend though that Obama could smooth over this situation simply by sitting down to coffee with the people of Israel writ large for a nice candid conversation.

Benn makes a few other strange arguments in his piece, one of which I’ll excerpt here:

Fourth, as far as most Israelis are concerned, Mr. Obama has made a mistake in focusing on a settlement freeze. For starters, mainstream Israelis rarely have anything to do with the settlements; many have no idea where they are, even when they’re a half-hour’s drive from Tel Aviv.

More important: in the past decade, repeated peace negotiations and diplomatic statements have indicated that larger, closer-to-home settlements (the “settlement blocs”) will remain in Israeli hands under any two-state solution. Why, then, insist on a total freeze everywhere? And why deny with such force — as the administration did — the existence of previous understandings between the United States and Israel over limited settlement construction? There is simply too much evidence proving that such an understanding existed. To Israelis, the claim undermined Mr. Obama’s credibility — and strengthened Mr. Netanyahu’s position. (Bold mine- DT)

Is it really true that Israelis have next to no knowledge about the settlements?  The same settlements that are a PR nightmare for Israel and perhaps the biggest reason why Israel is losing popular support in the West?  Even Americans eventually figured out that Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay weren’t too popular with friends of the United States.  Is the Israeli street really so insulated from the pulse of world opinion that it doesn’t realize these settlements have become a big deal?    Honestly, if ‘mainstream Israelis’ know so little about these land grabs that they “have no idea where they are,” Obama is doing Israel a huge favor by warning the country that continued settlement expansion is akin to political suicide.

Finally, Benn’s contention that the United States should continue to allow settlement expansion because it may have previously had a clandestine agreement over illegally expanding settlements is crazy.  The settlements are illegal!  While we may have indulged in a supporting a dangerous policy in the past, that’s no reason why we should continue to embrace it today.  I almost understand Benn’s argument that the United States should fess up to any secret agreement it may have previously abided by, but, at least from a pragmatic standpoint, it doesn’t make much sense to admit this at the risk of incurring the ire of the Arab street.  It’s also totally possible that Netanyahu is making this entire secret agreement up!  I certainly haven’t seen the mountain of evidence Benn claims proves such an understanding once existed.

All in all, this is a pretty concerning article.  Haaretz is widely described as a left of center publication that, at least according to Jonah Goldberg is “Israel’s most vehemently anti-settlement daily paper.”  The fact that a senior editor from Haaretz would hold opinions this out-of-sync with, errr, reality does not bode well for the peace process.

Let’s face it, agriculture subsidies are a totally unsexy issue.  And, unfortunately because agriculture subsidies are pretty dull, they don’t receive a tremendous amount of public scrutiny.  Consequently, these handouts have a tendency to get hijacked by special interests and eventually distort the free market in all sorts of perverse ways.  According to the Times, things have gotten so out of control in the EU that agriculture subsidies are now supporting gummy bear manufactures and European royalty.

However, not only do agriculture subsidies end up lining the pockets of the wrong sorts of farmers but they also have some pretty destructive effects in the wider world:

European officials and some economists believe that much of the cash from those subsidies ultimately trickles down to local farmers, since without them companies might buy cheaper food elsewhere. But the rebates have a powerful effect on global trade by depressing world prices and undercutting poor farmers outside Europe, whose incomes are damaged.  (Bold mine-DT)

Here we can see one hand of the industrialized world trying to help developing nations build up their economies, while the other hand of that same industrial titan strangles those same nations with agriculture subsidies that make it impossible for poor farmers to compete with big agribusiness.

If you focus on the surface of agriculture subsides they are pretty boring—not many people are interested in the going rate for a bushel of corn—but if you concentrate on the pernicious effects they have in the developing world they can actually be interesting and important!   Sure, focusing on glamorous project to build school, hospitals and cure malaria is very exciting business but there’s certainly a good deal we could do about our own boring domestic policies which could make just as much difference in the lives of the people we all would like to help.  Just a thought.

Sometimes this isn’t easy, but it always needs to be done:

A top conservative German politician is making headlines on Tuesday for his unusually sharp stance against Israel’s settlement-building policies. Ruprecht Polenz, who is chairman of the Bundestag’s foreign policy committee and a member of Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union party, has warned Israel that it will be committing “political suicide” if it doesn’t cease construction of settlements in the Palestinian territories.

If the government in Jerusalem continues with construction, Polenz told the Düsseldorf daily Rheinische Post, it would run the danger “of gradually committing suicide as a democratic state.”

I took a little heat in the comments yesterday for suggesting that Israel was staging a land grab through its aggressive use of settlements in East Jerusalem.  The debate over the legitimacy of Israel’s actions aside, I hope we can all agree (although I suspect we won’t) that these settlements are a really bad idea from the Israeli perspective.  Polenz advice to Israel is dead on: if Israel is serious about peace and a two-state solution, it has to allow the Palestinian state to use East Jerusalem as its capital.   Absent some Palestinian control over Islam’s third most holy city, peace would be unattainable and Israel would be dooming itself to a less than optimal status quo of rocket attacks, suicide bombers and rule over a de facto apartheid state.

Ugh:

Israel on Sunday rejected a U.S. demand to suspend a planned housing project in east Jerusalem, threatening to further complicate an unusually tense standoff with its strongest ally over settlement construction.

On Sunday, Netanyahu told his Cabinet there would be no limits on Jewish construction anywhere in ”unified Jerusalem.”

”We cannot accept the fact that Jews wouldn’t be entitled to live and buy anywhere in Jerusalem,” Netanyahu declared, calling Israeli sovereignty over the entire city ”indisputable.”

”I can only imagine what would happen if someone suggested Jews could not live in certain neighborhoods in New York, London, Paris or Rome. There would certainly be a major international outcry,” Netanyahu said.

Good lord.  You don’t need to be a Middle East scholar to take issue with this particular charge.  Israel has no legitimate claim to East Jerusalem.  The only reason that this contentious settlement is being constructed is because Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967 and has since decided to seed the area with settlements in an effort to secure an illegal land grab.  None of this has to do with anti-Semitism!

No one is saying that Jews shouldn’t be allowed to live in East Jerusalem by virtue of being Jewish.  These settlements have drawn an international outcry because they’re being built on stolen land in violation of international law.  Netanyahu’s willingness to toss around hyperbolic statements about anti-Semitism like this is shocking and belies his failure to take the peace process seriously.

Last week I mentioned an Amnesty International Report which detailed human rights abuses by the IDF during their excursion into Gaza last fall.  Now, Breaking the Silence, an Israeli human rights organization, has released some even more damning interviews of veterans of the conflict—all of which show a stunning disregard for civilian casualties and, in some cases even, a brutal effort to run up the body count.  The Der Spiegel writes:

Israel has claimed that everything was done to protect innocent lives during its recent military operation in the Gaza Strip. But according to statements from Israeli soldiers there were malicious acts of destruction, white phosphorus was used and civilians were deliberately targeted….According to the report by Breaking the Silence, Hamas’s cynical conduct of war can no longer be solely blamed for the large number of civilian casualties. (Bold mine- DT)

From what I can tell, there were only isolated instances where Israeli battalion commanders actually officially encouraged civilian casualties, but at least according to this report, there were far too many subtle insinuations on the part of Israeli military commanders that minimizing civilian casualties was not a top priority.  For instance, the report says that “standard procedure was to fire shots when they [the IDF] entered residential buildings” and according to other testimony “fundamental rules designed to protect civilians were even deliberately ignored at times.”  This kind of behavior is not the mark of the ‘most humane army in the world’

This really made me cringe:

Some veterans also confirm that the army sent local residents into houses where Hamas fighters were holed up, as a kind of vanguard. This method, known as the “neighbor procedure,” is expressly banned in Israel. According to one soldier, his unit placed a gun barrel on the shoulder of a Palestinian and forced him to walk ahead of them into a suspicious building. If this is true, Hamas fighters were not the only ones who misused civilians as human shields.

Look, I have to give Israel credit for officially banning the practice of using human shields (I’m sure Hamas has never issued an injunction against this practice), but honestly, crossing out those sorts of tactics from your military playbook is really a pretty low bar to cross.  Who could possibly argue that deliberating placing civilians in harms way is acceptable?  However, while the IDF is content to officially ban the practice they seem to have no qualms about using this horrendous tactic when they think that no one is looking.  Sure, Hamas and Hezbollah’s outright defiance of human rights norms is awful, but, at least on this matter, is the IDF’s clandestine behavior any better?

Maybe this report is inaccurate.  It could very well be that the IDF is simply getting smeared by human rights activist who disagree with some of the IDF’s harder-edged but not actually illegal military tactics.  It’s worth noting though, that recently these charges against the IDF have been crescendoing to a roar.  If these allegations are true, can Israel continue to insist it deserves a special relationship with America?

Last year I was told dozens and dozens of times by Israel hawks that the civilian casualties which Israel was causing in Gaza were actually Hamas’ fault because Hamas had the temerity to use civilians as ‘human shields.’  Turns out that claim wasn’t entirely true:

Amnesty International on Thursday accused both Israel and Hamas, the militant movement that controls Gaza, of committing war crimes during the three weeks of fighting there early this year…

Amnesty International, which is based in London, released its 117-page report on Thursday. It explicitly rejected Israeli claims that Hamas used civilians as human shields but said that in several cases, Israeli soldiers used Palestinian civilians, including children, as “human shields, endangering their lives by forcing them to remain in or near houses which they took over and used as military positions.”

“The scale and intensity of the attacks on Gaza were unprecedented,” the report said, citing the deaths of hundreds of unarmed civilians, including many children. (DT- bold mine)

We all know that Hamas employs some less than savory tactics, but I think, more often than not, we forget that the IDF also uses some pretty reprehensible tactics.  And, while there’s obviously no objective yardstick we can use to measure which side is more in the moral wrong, I think it’s safe to say that using civilians as human shields usually qualifies as some sort of moral evil.  If Israel’s most militant supporters want to strengthen their justification of Israel’s use of force, it really would help if the Israeli military refrained from using tactics typically associated with terrorist organizations.

This Monday, Prime Minister Netanyahu sat down with CBS news to discuss his most recent speech, an address in which he finally agreed to a two-state solution but simultaneously imposed a few punitive conditions that will likely serve to scuttle any peace plan before it gets off the ground.  One of these conditions was Netanyahu’s insistence that the new Palestinian state be ‘demilitarized,’ an incredible demand that led the interviewer to ask if Netanyahu really believed a regulated Palestinian military would resemble “terrorists lobbing rockets at random opportunities from Gaza.”   Netanyahu’s answer, unsurprisingly, was less than satisfactory:

There– there are two questions about this. One is– what is the military force that we face? And obviously we don’t wanna see a– an army with rockets– tanks, mortars, artillery– because the Palestinians don’t really need that to govern themselves. To govern themselves or even to– deal with terrorists internally you don’t real [sic] anything– need anything beyond– small arms and– rel– relatively– simple– security measures.

Watch CBS Videos Online

Well, yes.  One can very well argue that Palestinians “don’t really need [a military] to govern themselves,” but it’s also true then that no nation really needs a military to govern itself.  Indeed, there are a few nations in the world that really do go without standing armies such as Nauru and Iceland; however, it’s also important to remember that this is because these nations have their security guaranteed by other nations or bodies (Australia and NATO defend Nauru and Iceland respectively).  If Israel really insists on living next to a demilitarized Palestine, what country will guarantee Palestinian security?  The United States, Israel, the Arab League, the Vatican?

Short of a Tom Clancy novel springing to life, all of these options are extremely problematic.  The United States can’t defend Palestine because there’s a good chance that this would lead to some sort of awkward and armed confrontation with our ally Israel.  Likewise, putting Palestine under the wing of the Arab League is a terrible idea, because really, does anyone want to make this new state a protectorate of Israel’s historic enemies?  And, for reasons that should be obvious to all, the Palestinians will not be totally cool with being protected by a state which has violated their borders and killed their citizens scores of times.

Netanyahu’s demand for a demilitarized Palestinian state is unreasonable.  Even without delving into the emotionally charged issues such as respect, legitimacy and humiliation which go along with depriving a people of their means of self-defense, Netanyahu’s plan fails because it lacks a mechanism to guarantee Palestinian security.  Even if Netanyahu could convince the Palestinians to sign a treaty stripping them of their ability to defend themselves (as far as I know, no people have ever agreed to such terms), he would in all likelihood, be unable to find a nation to safeguard the new state.   In the end, Netanyahu’s ‘equitable formula for peace’ seems to come with a crippling poison pill.

There’s been loads of coverage of the Iranian presidential elections.  And, while I have been following the news as well as one can, because I don’t read Farsi I know no more than any other well-read person.  Having said that though, I would like to emphasize how sad this electoral debacle has become.  In particular, I was thinking today of what it was like on November 4^th when Barack Obama was elected President of the United States.  As soon as the news anchors announced he had won, my friends and I all gathered in a circle, sang the national anthem boisterously (twice!) and swarmed outside to join a growing throng of jubilant students of Old Campus in New Haven.  The entire spectacle went on for hours: singing, chanting, hugging, the odd brass piece here and there ringing out the Stars Spangled Banner-it was a moment of my life I will never forget.

To have been a young Iranian reformist last Friday night must have been devastating.  Having an election stolen from you, after you have staked your sincerest hopes on it is one thing, but to have your dormitory raided in crackdown against protestors, to be beaten bloody by government goons and gassed by the police is altogether unimaginable and truly beyond the pale.

Not to be overly sentimental, but I teared up a little bit today while I watched the coverage of the rally in Tehran from my little cubicle.  Here’s hoping Iran turns green soon.