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CIAO DATE: 10/00
Volume XVII, No 2, Summer 2000
The war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which began in August 1998, is unprecedented-at times involving armies from eight African states. Soldiers from Chad are fighting alongside regiments from Namibia, Angola, and Zimbabwe in defense of President Laurent Kabila. And on offense, the two main rebel groups, the Congolese Assembly for Democracy (which is known by the acronym RCD) and the Movement for the Liberation of Congo (MLC), are backed by troops from Uganda and Rwanda. As Susan E. Rice, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, warned the House International Relations Committee in September 1998, "The fighting threatens regional stability, hampers economic progress, endangers the lives of millions of people, perpetuates human rights abuses, and impedes the democratic transformation of Africa's third-largest country." This war, Rice said, is potentially "among the most dangerous conflicts on the globe."
Yet, the war in Congo goes on almost unnoticed outside of Africa. While African heads of state spent much of the last year shuttling across the continent, wrestling with the crisis and searching for a peaceful solution, Congo has been largely missing from the agendas of the Western powers and multilateral organizations. Only in January, when the U.S. representative to the United Nations, Richard Holbrooke, taking advantage of his tenure as Security Council president to draw attention to Africa, did the war enter Western consciousness.
The conflict in the DRC is the first interstate war in sub-Saharan Africa since Uganda invaded Tanzania in 1978, and only the third since 1960. Although Africa is seen as a hotbed of violence and warfare, most conflicts have been intrastate in nature. Norms of sovereignty reinforced by clauses in the charter of the Organization of African Unity (OAU) and the constitutions of the various subregional organizations have effectively prevented cross-border conflict from the time of independence until now. The Ugandan and Rwandan-led invasion of Congo, as well as the presence there of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) intervention force, therefore represents a watershed in the recent history of African conflict. It appears that the forces preventing cross-border conflict since 1960 have become seriously weakened. back
A decade of unprecedented global peace has also seen local and regional conflict of epidemic proportions. The Cold War is over, but hot wars have flared between-and within-individual states. No continent has been spared. Peru and Ecuador have re-fought an old border dispute. India and Pakistan have slugged it out, yet again, over Kashmir, this time in the shadow of nuclear weapons tests. Numerous former republics of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia barely had time to celebrate their independence before plunging into a welter of blood feuds. Indonesia and Sri Lanka have battled separatists.
But Africa has suffered worst of all, especially in recent months. A year that began with the United Nations Security Council's proclamation of January as "the month of Africa" quickly turned ugly and discouraging. Peacekeepers fell victim to hostage-takers in Sierra Leone. Ethiopia and Eritrea returned to trench warfare reminiscent of the Battle of the Somme. Fighting reignited within the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Angola. Violence, much of it along racial lines, broke out in Zimbabwe.
Each of these conflicts around the world is in many ways unique, but they all dramatize the complex nature of security. That vital requirement of any state includes social, political, economic, environmental, and public health factors as well as military ones. The international organizations best able to bolster security are those that foster development in all
Victory in the Cold War has left American policymakers and military personnel, not to mention the public at large, in a frame of mind in which triumphalism and uncertainty coexist uneasily. Not without justification, Americans believe, to use the reigning cliché of this period, that the United States is the sole remaining superpower. Having witnessed the inability of the great European powers to deal even with such regional crises as Bosnia and Kosovo and learned from the Asian financial crisis that the twenty-first century may not "belong" to Asia after all, Americans are faced with the prospect of their predominance continuing for the foreseeable future. At the same time, neither a coherent moral worldview nor a coherent strategic compass has emerged on which to base general foreign policy decisions, particularly those that involve the use of military force. The America that defeated the Soviet empire has become an indecisive, inconsistent, and increasingly beleaguered hegemon. It is too set in its ways of world domination to relinquish them, but too confused about what the post-Cold War version of that role could actually consist of to exercise it either effectively or farsightedly.
Historically, such cognitive drift has been a common feature of postwar epochs. It is, perhaps paradoxically, more familiar a destiny for the victors than the vanquished. In the American case, the difficulty the American public has had in focusing on foreign policy, or in subscribing to any consensus about what it wants of its armed forces, is at the root of the difficulty policymakers have had in the past ten years in defining either US interests or US values coherently and the military has had in coming up with a strategy. US strategic doctrine is based on the idea of not simply defending the country but of being able to fight what, in the sanitized language of the policy establishment, is referred to unblushingly as two "medium-sized" wars. And yet everyone knows-the military most of all-that there is no will in the country to fight even one war that would bring serious casualties. Look at the media frenzy that accompanied the capture of only three US soldiers by Yugoslav forces during the Kosovo campaign.
Two myths surround this year's presidential race. The first one is that foreign policy is largely irrelevant. The second is that even when they do address foreign affairs, Republicans and Democrats do not fall neatly into opposing camps as they did during the Cold War.
In fact, foreign policy may well be decisive in determining who becomes the next president, and sharp differences between the two parties do exist. Unlike social security or campaign finance reform, where the outlines of the debate are clear, foreign policy is unpredictable; crises can flare up overnight that catch candidates off guard or unprepared. Already Al Gore and George W. Bush have stumbled badly in foreign affairs. For Gore, it has been the Elián González imbroglio; his declaration that he supported legislation granting the six-year-old Cuban refugee permanent residency and that a family court should decide whether he should be reunited with his father triggered an uproar in the Democratic Party. Once more, Gore looked like an unprincipled opportunist, pandering to Miami Cubans in the faint hope that he might sway them to vote for him in the general election. For Bush, the biggest embarrassment came when he was sandbagged on a radio talk show, unable to answer a pop quiz about the names of leaders of various foreign countries.
To be sure, these missteps have scarcely been on the level of Gerald Ford declaring in 1976 that Poland was free from Soviet domination-the kind of big foreign policy issues that dominated the Cold War are simply not in evidence, or at least not on the minds of voters. During this spring's primaries, no issue, from the proposed "star wars" US missile defense system to US intervention in Kosovo, from the START II treaty with Russia to relations with China, served as a serious battleground. Patrick Buchanan briefly caused palpitations in the Republican Party with his new book declaring that American intervention in the Second World War was a mistake and part of a larger pattern of American's betrayal of its republican virtues.1 Unlike John McCain, George W. Bush refused to denounce Buchanan. McCain himself went on to make a few noises about rolling back rogue regimes, but that was about it.
Things were not all that different on the Democratic side. Bill Bradley intimated that he was going to call for America to minimize its global commitments and shun triumphalism, but the best he could do was to give a meandering foreign policy talk at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University a few days before he withdrew from the race; for his part, Al Gore never bothered to give a foreign policy address.
Since then, however, Gore has tried to make an issue of Bush's inexperience in foreign affairs so as to portray him as jejunely unfit to be the next commander in chief. In a major foreign policy address in Boston at the end of April, Gore blasted Bush for embracing the Strategic Defense Initiative, calling it Bush's "risky foreign policy scheme." He also rather contradictorily painted Bush as captive of the "isolationist, partisan Republican majority in Congress" and as someone "stuck in a Cold War mind-set." Whatever the merits of Gore's criticisms, a number of issues could shake up the presidential race.
Consider Colombia. America is currently involved in helping the Colombian army fight a guerrilla war under the guise of combating narco-terrorism. The Clinton administration has announced a $1.6 billion emergency aid package for Colombia that includes training and equipping counter-narcotics battalions. Will American military advisers be pulled into a Vietnam-like struggle? Then there are the more traditional issues-what to do about North Korea, Russia, Taiwan, China. Since he remains an integral part of the Clinton administration, whatever his attempts to distance himself from it, no one has more to gain, or lose, on the foreign policy front than Vice President Al Gore.
Reportage
Since the Islamic Revolution in Iran toppled the Shah in 1979, political Islam has become widely regarded as the preeminent threat to "modern" civilization and Western values. From Afghanistan to Algeria, Islamist movements have typically flourished in societies that found themselves in an ideological vacuum after expelling colonial or communist overlords. Perhaps the most alarming instance of Islamism rearing its head has been in Turkey, the only Muslim member of NATO and a country long considered to be a model of secular checks and balances.
In the last week of 1999, Istanbul police launched a dragnet operation against Hizbullah, a Turkish terrorist organization that wanted to bring Islamic law to Turkey. The police suspected Hizbullah of having abducted three businessmen connected with a moderate Islamist benevolent foundation. On January 16, a heavily armed police assault team raided a house on the Asia shore of the Bosophorus Strait that runs through Istanbul. In the course of the raid, the police riddled one militant with over 30 bullets. The dead man was later identified as Huseyin Velioglu, leader of Hizbullah's most violent wing. Police captured the other two militants not only alive but unscratched. The captured militants immediately led police to another Hizbullah hide-out in a poor neighborhood farther down the shore. Inside, police found the decomposing bodies of ten missing businessmen tied in the fetal position who had apparently been buried alive. A week later the body count from Hizbullah houses in several cities stood at 31.
Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit said the grisly violence demonstrated the danger of mixing religion and politics. Ecevit's remarks echoed statements by the General Staff that even more pointedly blamed the moderately Islamist Virtue Party, then and now the main opposition party, and its forerunners for fostering the atmosphere that led to Hizbullah's killing spree. Virtue Party chairman Recai Kutan responded to the criticism by calling for an investigation of the origins of Hizbullah, which many in Turkey believe to have been supported, if not created outright, by state security forces to do the dirty work in the state's fight against the Kurdistan Workers' Organization (PKK). When the generals growled in disapproval, Kutan quickly backtracked, saying he meant no offense to the military.
No evidence tying Hizbullah to the Virtue Party has surfaced, and peaceful Islamists in fact had the most to fear from Hizbullah, since it targeted Kurds and observant Muslims who refused to cooperate with the organization. One Virtue supporter chilled by the Hizbullah violence was Sibel Eraslan, an outspoken lawyer who wears the headscarf that identifies politically conscious Islamists and who ran the effective women's volunteer organization that in March 1994 had helped bring the charismatic and handsome Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Istanbul's city hall.
From the perspective of those Turkish secularists who regard the headscarf as the banner of benighted Islamic tradition, Eraslan herself illustrates the danger of mixing politics and religion-as the state does as a matter of course-much more tellingly than Hizbullah terrorists. Eraslan's father was an army officer and her family adhered to the Turkish army's traditional combination of being staunchly secular and left-wing. While she was studying law in university, the state began expelling female law students who wore the turban, the tightly pinned headscarf that identifies politically conscious Islamists. In defiance of this infringement of civil liberties, Eraslan began wearing a turban and was duly kicked out of the law faculty. Though she finished her education independently, an archaic law barring women who wear headscarves from appearing in court prevented Eraslan from joining the bar. Instead, she gives briefs she has prepared to her husband, also an Islamist lawyer, to present in court and channels the rest of her considerable energy into political activism among Istanbul's poor.
Why would Turkey blame its leading opposition party, with no concrete evidence, for a string of horrific murders? Why would secularists enforce a dress code that drives talented women like Sibel Eraslan away from secular institutions and into the arms of their supposed enemies? Turkey's military-dominated regime has alternately used the most zealous Muslims as scapegoats for the country's ills and, many Turks believe, as henchmen for the state's dirty work. Much the way the United States stigmatized as Soviet fifth columnists any Third World politician who called for land reform, Turkey brands any high-profile assertion of Muslim identity as a threat to state security.
Reflections
It is time to reconsider American policy toward Russia and the other countries that emerged from the dead ideological carcass once known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Consider some of the changes that have taken place in the region: Russia has just elected a dynamic but controversial new president; Ukraine has recently re-elected its president and installed in office the first true reformer as prime minister; political ferment seems to be increasing in Central Asia and the Caucasus, as evidenced by attempted assassinations and a creeping authoritarianism.
In the United States itself, the moment for reflection is approaching. The Clinton team is about to leave office. The Democratic candidate has developed a special interest in the former Soviet Union, and the Republican candidate has as his principal advisor someone with special knowledge of this area of the world. Thus it is virtually certain that the next administration will take a fresh look at the policy the United States has followed over the past decade.
When this reassessment takes place, the judgment is likely to be mixed. Clear successes there certainly have been. The Bush administration skillfully handled the potentially explosive collapse of the Soviet Union. The Clinton administration helped the successor states drive the crampons of political independence into the rocky face of history. There seems little prospect of a return to the Soviet past.
An honest reassessment of US policy will also reveal setbacks and disappointments, however. In the former Soviet Union, the economic policies advanced and adopted over the past decade have failed to deliver the results that the people in the region hoped for and that many outside specialists expected. In light of these setbacks and disappointments, the next administration will have to consider corrective steps. What adjustments should they consider in America's approach to this important part of the world?
Reconsiderations
On April 2, 1917, the president of the United States addressed a joint session of Congress and "advised" it to declare "the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be nothing less than war against the Government and people of the United States."1 The end of the long period of American neutrality in the Great War had come very painfully to Woodrow Wilson. From his reelection in November 1916, to the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare on January 30, 1917, he had nourished the hope, at times bordering on the expectation, that he might mediate an end to the war. If Germany would only confide in him, he had plaintively written to his closest counselor, Edward M. House, when his efforts appeared on the verge of failure, he could yet show her the way out. It was an astonishing request in the light of all that had passed between Washington and Berlin in the preceding two and a half years. Yet Wilson had never been more sincere. By the end of 1916, the president had come close to, perhaps even achieved, the neutrality in thought he had urged upon his fellow citizens at the outset of the war. In Berlin, however, there were only skeptics left.
Given the depth of Wilson's desire to avoid American participation in the war and the intensity that marked his last and greatest effort to mediate an end to the conflict, the president seemed utterly unprepared for the denouement. The day following the German declaration of unrestricted submarine warfare, Colonel House wrote in his diary that Wilson said "he felt as if the world had suddenly reversed itself; that after going from east to west it had begun to go from west to east and that he could not get his balance."
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