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The ‘Virgil Goode Position’ eschewed in Obama’s speech

In his speech yesterday, Obama referenced Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, who is the first and only Muslim member of Congress.  Ellison was elected in 2006.  As is standard procedure, Members of Congress often choose to take a symbolic oath of office by placing their hand on a bible.  Well, when he took office, Ellison -- being Muslim -- thought it more appropriate to take his symbolic oath on the Koran. And deeper still, he used Thomas Jefferson's Koran. Nothing wrong with that, right? 

Well, some dark forces of American body politic took this to be an insidious display of anti- Americanism. Leading the charge was former Virginia Congressman Virgil Goode, who wrote in a letter to his constituents.

"The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don't wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration, there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran."

Just imagine if Goode had his way and Ellison was prevented from taking his oath of office on the Koran.  How would Obama have explained that to his audience in Egypt and to Muslims around the world? Deeper still, how would this kind of bigotry have affected American strategic interests in the Middle East and beyond?

For the record, in 2008 Goode was narrowly defeated by Tom Perriello, who is a distinctly internationally minded member of congress and former director of Avaaz.org.   

UPDATE: Reader M.B. writes: Keith Ellison isn’t the only Muslim in Congress, Andre Carson is as well although I don’t know if he was also sworn in on a Koran. He was elected in a special election to replace his grandmother, Julia Carson, in March 2008.

Live From the UN: Pakistani UN Ambassador on Obama’s Cairo Speech, Hafiz Saeed and More

I just sat down with the Pakistani Ambassador the United Nations, Abdullah Hussain Haroon.  I asked Amb. Haroon to respond to Obama's Cairo speech and to the news that Hafiz Saeed, the leader of a terrorist group affiliated with al Qaeda, was released from house arrest in Pakistan today.  We later discuss the humanitarian crisis in the Swat valley and the expansion of the Afghanistan conflict to Pakistan. 

Note: The audio and video are slightly out of sync.  We are working to get this corrected. However, in the interest of expediency and the fact that the Ambassador is responding to breaking news we wanted to post this raw video as soon as possible.

Diplomacy and causation

This Wall Street Journal editorial wants to argue that diplomacy is somehow the culprit behind the expansion of North Korea's nuclear program. The inconvenient fact, of course, is that the reinvigorated six-party talks did result in the shutting down of North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear reactor. Did Pyongyang ignore other provisions of the agreement? Yes. Did it not fulfill all of the expectations brought about by the talks? Yes. This is a wily and confrontational regime we are dealing with, after all. But this seems to me a reason for more talks, not fewer.

Plus, look what happens when military strikes are involved:

Amid this Western accommodation, in September 2007 Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear facility that U.S. and Israeli intelligence believe was supplied by North Korea. Pyongyang denied any role, and the U.S. kept its diplomacy active. However, North Korea ignored its end-of-year deadline for producing its nuclear declaration. When it did finally produce one, six months later, it included an incomplete plutonium record and nothing about its uranium nuclear program. The North did publicly destroy the cooling tower of its reactor at Yongbyon for the TV cameras, but it balked at any credible verification process.

The editorial doesn't even try to argue that any positive results in terms of relations with North Korea followed from the Israeli strike. Nor, of course, does it suggest that North Korean intransigence was a result of this bombing. Yet some positive results -- destroying the Yongbyon reactor has to count for more good than to just television cameras -- and some negative results ensued from both military and diplomatic pressure points.

And this is the problem of attributing causation, with crazy paranoid regimes no less (in fact only more) than with anything else. There are plenty of examples to pick and choose, then mix and match, to befit whatever ideological bent one already has. But to assume diplomacy claims an ability reduce nuclear stockpiles at a stroke misses the point. This is not an easy game, and the only thing we can pretty much be universally assured of is that that oft-hinted at option of "try[ing] something different" -- presumably involving missiles -- will only result in disastrous consequences.

Settlement or not, the U.S. is still an ally of Israel

The Israeli press is seizing on the line in the Helene Cooper story that Mark discusses that suggests that the Obama Administration might consider "stepping back from America's near-uniform support for Israel in the United Nations if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel does not agree to a settlement freeze." It's not hard to see why this "could get the attention of the Israeli public," as a quoted administration official opines. But lest anyone get caught up in a tizzy of paranoia that the United States will be "abandoning" Israel to the wolves any time soon, it seems pretty obvious that Israel will remain a major U.S. ally, in the United Nations and out.

Policy-wise, the portrayal of a "threat" here is a ruse: exerting pressure for a settlement freeze will not result in the United States delegation allowing any anti-Semitic or Israel-bashing resolution to go through the UN. I cannot envision a scenario in which the United States will "condition support for Israel," as Ha'aretz scarily forecasts, in any of the Security Council scenarios in which it would need to use a veto. The veto -- or more often, the threat of the veto -- is a step that is used to remove certain language, or when a country cannot convey any support for a resolution whatsoever. The United States will rightly use its veto whenever a resolution attempts to malign Israel or criticize its existence; this rarely if ever happens in the Security Council, but the position is not going to change.

The issue of halting settlement growth is crucial to achieving peace in Israel and Palestine. The Obama Administration has been refreshingly honest in emphasizing this point, but it is not going to throw Israel under the bus over it. Whatever pressure it exerts on Israel to stop building settlements will be related to the issue of settlement construction. If a juvenile attack on Israel's existence is somehow raised in the Security Council, I'm sure the United States will not shy from wielding its veto. To imply otherwise is simply creating a controversy that doesn't exist.

(image of an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, from flickr user Decode Jerusalem under a Creative Commons license)

Netanyahu’s Dilemma

Helene Cooper reports a fascinating tidbit that the Obama administration may back away from America's near uniform support of Israel at the United Nations should the Netanyahu government fail to halt settlement activity.

What would this mean in practice?  For one, it could portend a new dynamic at the Human Rights Council, which the United States is set to join in just a couple of weeks.   The council has in the past not been shy in addressing Israel, and currently on the Human Rights Council docket is the so-called Goldstone investigation of alleged Israeli and Hamas crimes during operation Cast Lead. 

Israel has so far not cooperated with the investigation. But should the United States in some symbolic way voice its support for the investigation it could have a profound effect on domestic Israeli politics.   Israeli voters place a high premium on their leadership's relationship with the United States president. (Indeed, Netanyahu had a famously frosty relationship with President Clinton, and one of his main goals in visiting the White House two weeks ago was to show the Israeli public that he can get along with Democratic administrations.)

The point of this kind of "threat" is not to punish Netanyahu so much as make it easier for Netanyahu to face down his allies on the right, who adamantly oppose the dismantling the settlements.   For his part, Netanyahu will have to decide what matters more to him politically:  staying on Obama's good side or hewing to the demands of his right-wing coalition.

photo from flicrk user talkradio news under a creative commons license

Don’t just blame the Human Rights Council

The Human Rights Council's failure to pass a resolution authorizing a commission of inquiry in Sri Lanka was, as we've already stressed, deeply disappointing.  The 29 countries that voted for Sri Lanka's own proposed resolution are undeniably guilty of letting the fox control the henhouse.  But as the Guardian's Julian Borger reports, the lackluster efforts of Western countries to pass a stronger resolution should not be overlooked:

A European diplomat admitted that if EU states had been more organised they might have put forward a more critical resolution that could have been accepted by the council.

This is the sad -- but by no means insurmountable -- fact of the Human Rights Council; there will always be countries who vote to protect repressive regimes, or to ward off human rights investigations out of a concern for their own poor records.  It will always be an uphill climb to ensure that the Council makes investigating all human rights violations a priority.  But this doesn't make the climb any less worthwhile; when the United States formally joins its Western counterparts on the Council, it should work tirelessly to make the Human Rights Council the most effective body it can be.  A lack of organization is not an excuse when the rights of so many human beings are at stake.

A Good Year for Pittsburgh

Come September, we may see Nicolas Sarkozy throw some fries on his sammy and Angela Merkel crack open an Iron City Light. The White House announced today that Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania will host the next G-20 Summit. Here's the gleeful Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs said the U.S. agreed to host the next summit during the London meeting earlier in the spring. Pittsburgh is "a good place" to hold the summit because of its recovery from the decline of the steel industry in the 1980s, he said.

[snip]

"With leaders already scheduled to be in the United States in September to attend the United Nations General Assembly, President Obama offered to host the Summit and leaders of the G20 welcomed the invitation," a White House statement said. "Pittsburgh has demonstrated a commitment to employing new and green technology to further economic recovery and development. The summit will be held at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center in Downtown Pittsburgh, an exemplar of that commitment. The facility is proud to have a LEED Gold Certification from the U.S Green Building Council for leadership in energy and environmental design."

This has been a good year for the Steel City. Steelers win the Super Bowl, Pens make the Stanley Cup finals (for the second year in a row), Netroots Nation coming to town in August...and now this. I have no doubt that Pittsburgh's 29-year-old mayor will rise to the occasion. Who knows, years from now history teachers may look back at the "Pittsburgh Agreement" as the moment the global economy got back on track?


Image from flickr. Creative commons n'at

No, the S-G was not “blackmailed” by Russia

To the spat over the wording of a UN report on security in Abkhazia, Georgia has added the charge of blackmail.

"It is very unfortunate (and) alarming that the (U.N.) Secretariat submitted to the Russian blackmail," Georgia's U.N. Ambassador, Alexander Lomaia told, Reuters.

This is getting silly. At issue between Russia and Georgia is Abkhazia's national status; it is still an autonomous part of Georgia, but after declaring its sovereignty after the war last August, Abkhazia's independence was recognized by Russia (and Nicaragua). At issue for the UN here, though, is quite simply the status of its observer mission, regardless of what you call where it is stationed.

The geopolitical situation is complicated, contentious, and needs to be resolved, to be sure. But it shouldn't impede on a relatively anodyne report on the current security situation in Abkhazia. The question of wording is tricky, but in not using this report to wade into a Russia-Georgia sovereignty dispute, the UN Secretariat is not being "blackmailed" by Russia. It'd help for both sides to stop levying accusations of bias at the UN and to focus on coming to a meaningful accord over Abkhazia instead.

(image from flickr user openDemocracy under a Creative Commons license)

Iran confronts “foreign threats” in the Gulf of Aden

Iran has sent warships to the Gulf of Aden. An opportunity for some unexpected anti-piracy collaboration? Well...maybe.

The move to dispatch the warships "is indicative of the country's high military capability in confronting any foreign threat on the country's shores," Sayyari said.

The [Iranian state news agency] report did not mention the threat of pirate attacks, which, fuelled by large ransoms, have continued almost unabated despite the presence of an armada of foreign warships patrolling the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden.

It obviously makes no sense for the world's fifth-largest oil exporter not to instruct its warships to ward off pirate attacks (and other reports in fact contradict the suggestion that this is the case). But why the deployment is couched in such adversarial language, when there is already an eclectic assortment of bedfellows on the anti-piracy patrol, is probably just a quirk of Iran's need to appear bellicose to the rest of the worlds. Everybody's interest here is protecting oil, though, so they might as well work together and cool the military chest-thumping.