12 elections in 12 months Posted by Adam Isacson

The twelve months between November 2005 and November 2006 will witness the most intense period of electoral activity in Latin America and the Caribbean since dictatorships gave way to elected civilian rule about twenty years ago. Like the planets of the solar system lining up as their orbits coincide, twelve countries in the region are choosing new presidents in rapid succession. (Nearly every country in the region has a presidential, not a parliamentary, system.)

Sounds like great news for democracy in the developing world, doesn’t it? Well, not everyone in the United States thinks so. The trouble, you see, is that there are a lot of left-wingers in the running, and they’re popular.

Hope Springs Eternal from Annan on Iran Posted by Suzanne Nossel

The Europeans and maybe even the Russians have concluded that Iran's decision to break the seals placed on its nuclear facilities by UN inspectors is cause for serious international concern and a likely referral to the UN Security Council.   As detailed here, the sounds emanating from the regime of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are worrying indeed.

Yet if his language today is any indication, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, charged with primary global responsibility for peace and security, is going soft on Tehran.   Reuters reports that Annan said:

Iran is still interested in "serious and constructive negotiations" with the European Union on its nuclear program, so long as the talks don't go on too long

The only viable solution to the dispute over Iran's nuclear intentions was "a negotiated one," Annan said.   

He said he had been talking to all sides in the dispute and felt the matter should remain for now before the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

Once that process was exhausted, the matter could yet end up before the U.N. Security Council, where it would be up to the council's 15 members to decide how to proceed, he said.

Amid menacing acts by an Iranian regime that seems oblivious to international opinion, while it may be important for Annan to distance himself from the governments that are taking the hardest line, he should not be in the position of comforting Iran that nothing tougher than more negotiations will result from its provocations.   

This is the kind of position that plays into the hands of UN critics who accuse the body of being a talkshop that shies away from the world's most serious threats.

The NRA versus the Rest of Us Posted by Lorelei Kelly

Another example of how well conservatives have staked out the terrain at the intersection of politics and ideas: This month's Foreign Policy magazine has a terrific article about the worldwide influence of America's highly influential gun lobby, the National Rifle Association.
Author David Morton, writing from South America, depicts how the NRA exploits the dark side of globalization--using shallow "feel good" messages about liberty and freedom to push its ideological agenda--one that allows no limits on individual ownership of guns.

The disappointing part of the NRA is not found in its basic premise, gun ownership, education and safety. The problem for society and, apparently, for the rest of the world is their "slippery slope" insistence that any regulation will lead to complete disarmament. When they decide to take their message international, therefore, the painstakingly constructed and maintained regime of international arms control is threatened. If gun control is bad in America, goes the NRA logic, then arms control must be bad for the world. The NRA and their flacks in other countries claim that gun control advocates want to leave citizens vulnerable to "criminals".  Well, in increasing circumstances those "criminals" just might be free-agent or organized jihadistas who want to get their hands on deadly devices to kill us.

In Iraq, the Enemy of my Enemy is Still My Enemy Posted by Suzanne Nossel

The New York Times has a fascinating piece about the widening rift between the indigenous Sunni insurgents in Iraq, and al-Zarqawi's foreign-infiltrated al Qaeda in Mesopotamia.  The article details a serious of battles and incidents that have inflamed tensions between the two groups, principally over al Qaeda's indifference to high levels of civilian casualties that, among other things, have quelled public support for the Iraqi insurgency. 

On the Times website, the subtitle given to the story is "The clashes present a rare opportunity to enlist local insurgents to cooperate with Americans and Iraqis against Al Qaeda."  Reading that, one concludes that either some crafty Baghdad-based DoD public affairs officer is finally making some headway in spinning the Administration's Iraq story and/or that the recent reports of growing contacts between the military and the insurgents may be bearing fruit.

But perusing the entire Times story, there's nothing remotely encouraging about what the al Quaeda-insurgent rift means for the US.   While the American forces want insurgent cooperation against al Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgent interviewed says that while he's happy when the US forces kill al Qaeda members, "It is against my beliefs to put my hand with the Americans."

Meanwhile, al Qaeda and its insurgent enemies are locked in cycles of vicious killing and revenge, but the bloodshed is only making Iraq more difficult to control.   A Sunni cleric who is part of a group that are outraged at the number of Sunni civilian victims of al Qaeda's holy war is quoted as saying "If you want jihad, the American military is there." 

The article states:

American and Iraqi officials believe that the conflicts present them with one of the biggest opportunities since the insurgency burst upon Iraq nearly three years ago. They have begun talking with local insurgents, hoping to enlist them to cooperate against Al Qaeda, said Western diplomats, Iraqi officials and an insurgent leader.

OK, so American officials are encouraged that al Qaeda which, by all accounts, had no active presence in Iraq prior to the US-led invasion, is now - -  in addition to attacking US forces and undermining Iraqi public confidence in the country's transition -  - locked in deadly conflict with other insurgent groups that are gradually beginning to hate al Qaeda to a degree that may ultimately approach the enmity they have for us?   

If that's the good news, what's the bad news?  This is.

The Latin Americanist's lament Posted by Adam Isacson

Many thanks to Democracy Arsenal for inviting me to be a guest blogger for the next week and a half. I’m Adam Isacson, and I work on security issues in Latin America, particularly Colombia, at the Center for International Policy. In my next few posts, I hope to turn your gaze southward to an important but usually forgotten region.

Because the rest of the Western Hemisphere gets so little attention here in Washington, being a Latin Americanist means putting up with a lot of small frustrations and indignities. If you want to read English-language news about what’s going on in the region, you’ve usually got to turn to the “World Roundup” of wire-story excerpts on page A27 of your paper. When you tell someone you’ve just been to Colombia, there’s a fair chance they’ll say, “Columbia South Carolina or Columbia Maryland?” People like Jesse Helms, Dan Burton, Oliver North and Pat Robertson tend to take a special interest in the region. But everyone else – from newspaper correspondents to academic departments to the Southern Command – complains of neglect and resource scarcity.

The biggest frustration by far, though, is watching the United States today repeating mistakes worldwide that it used to make only in Latin America.

Costs of War Posted by Heather Hurlburt

I re-watched the brilliant 2003 documentary Fog of War last week and can report that, if possible, it was even more depressing the second time.  Why?  Two reasons.  First, McNamara reminds that when he resigned as Secretary of Defense in 196?, the US had suffered only half the ultimate total of Vietnam combat deaths.  In other words, the worst came well after the height of public debate and angst.

Second, though, Johnson, McNamara and others come off as thoughtful, decent people who made tragic mistakes and knew it at the time.  Hard to imagine the current crew stepping back and seeing their own folly as clearly as Johnson sometimes did.  Not that it did Johnson -- or the soldiers, or the Vietnamese -- much good.

But in fact this post was intended to recommend to you the already-controversial study that Joe Stiglitz has co-authored on the "real" cost of the war.    I like Stiglitz for his genuine efforts to combine an economist's understanding of what trade can do for people and nations with a lefty's appreciation of what trade orthodoxies in fact do sometimes do for the people and nations it is supposed to help.  He's a one-man convergence.

The Christian Science Monitor gets this great quote on Stiglitz from Heritage:

Stiglitz rants against globalization, and generally barks louder than he bites," said Timothy Kane, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington. "That is, he is a champion to the lefties, but never really says that free trade is bad."

So, this study is a little bit of a publicity stunt or a big-think piece -- by including costs such as long-term health care for the wounded, he and co-author Linda Bilmes make it almost impossible to think about the costs in straightforward national security terms.  But, of course, they are right that society has to bear those costs and should know about them.

And the discussion around the study has already spawned these interesting figures:

"Direct operating costs" of the war are around $4.5 billion a month according to the Marines, $7.1 billion according to Stiglitz and Bilmes.

The Monitor and the paper recall that former White House economist Larry Lindsey got in trouble for predicting the war would cost $100-200 billion -- the Marines say it has already cost $173 billion. 

No wonder the economy and the stock market are ticking along so well.

How many formers does it take to fix an Iraq policy? Posted by Derek Chollet

Last week President Bush hosted an unusual dog and pony show at the White House, convening nearly all of the living former Secretaries of State and Defense to talk about Iraq (the only ones missing by my count were Henry Kissinger and Warren Christopher). 

The purpose of this pow-wow was to show that the President is indeed consulting and reaching out for a bipartisan solution in Iraq.  But as was widely reported, this “discussion” was really more of a lecture – most of the time was taken up by briefings from General Casey and Ambassador Khalilzad, and beyond that, as Maureen Dowd calculated, each person had about half-minute to say anything.  The President apparently went out of his way to call on the oldest timers in the room, and just as the discussion got going (notably after Madeleine Albright raised the concern that Iraq was sucking all the juice out of our diplomacy while problems like Iran and North Korea festered – a comment that got the President’s back up) he ended the meeting for a “family picture” in the Oval Office.  The photo is what most people saw and will remember – which is, of course, exactly what the White House wanted.

That the motives behind this meeting were so transparent has led some to wonder why the heck the five former Democratic Administration officials (Albright, Harold Brown, William Perry, Robert McNamara – and William Cohen, a Republican who served in the Clinton Administration) even bothered to show up.  They have come under some withering criticism – see this especially angry screed last week on Daily Kos.

But I think this was the right thing to do – importantly, for reasons of both public service as well as politics.

Will Iraq Tie Our Hands on Iran? Posted by Suzanne Nossel

With all eyes on an Iraq and an executive branch both out of control, Iran under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has not so quietly emerged as about as frightening a rogue state as can be imagined.  Iran has long kept us up at night as a proliferator, a terrorist haven, a theocracy, and a regime hostile to the United States. 

Ahmadinejad has added to that dangerous brew a streak of what appears to be meglomaniacal paranoia coupled with unfettered nationalism and utter disregard for what the rest of the world thinks.  If this streak continues, Ahmadinejad may given North Korea ’s Kim Jong Il a run for his money for the world’s weirdest and most dangerous despot.   The evidence:

• Though in the midst of sensitive negotiations with the Europeans on the future of Iraq’s nuclear programs, Ahmadinejad this week announced plans to resume research on nuclear fuels starting tomorrow, a key step toward building nuclear potential and a flagrant violation of a 2004 accord with the EU.
• On Thursday, a high-ranking Iranian delegation stood up IAEA Chairman and Nobel Prize Winner Mohamed El Baradei, rebuffing the nuclear watchdog's effort to glean more information about Tehran's nuclear plans.
• Ahmadinejad has made a series of noxious anti-Semitic public statements, saying that Israel should be wiped from the map and that the Holocaust was myth.  Harsh reproach from the US, Europe, the Pope and Kofi Annan has only egged him on. 
• Back home, Ahmadinejad has rhapsodized about the imminent return of the twelfth imam, a messianic figure who will rise only once sufficient chaos is created in the world.

Bottom line:  Ahmadinejad appears to be off the rails and bent on expanding Iran’s nuclear capabilities.  Meanwhile, the results of December’s Iraqi election could heighten his influence there as well.