With the capture of Mladic, another ogre is brought to justice. Perhaps or hopefully the Balkans can heal

Another ogre was found today. While we felt justice had been done in the killing of Osama Bin Laden,  though a  decade passed,  it took  16 years to bring to justice another  mass killer, the Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic, indicted by the Hague Tribunal for crafting and carrying out ethnic cleansing in the Balkan wars.  Both Bin Laden and Mladic were driven by hatred…Bin Laden declared a jihadist war against the Christian West and Mladic set about systematically to cleanse parts of Bosnia of Muslims and Croatian Catholics.

 A three year siege of Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, but mostly Muslim, was overseen by Mladic and thousands were killed because of their ethnicity or the result of the siege and elsewhere. The world, and particularly Europe, dithered in the name of “fairness” to both sides.   9/11 was the final outrage that put Bin Laden on the most wanted list. The massacre of over seven thousand Muslim males between the ages of 10 and 77 was the catalyst for worldwide outrage, which ended that phase of the war that dragged on in Kosovo, ending with NATO bombing of Belgrade.

 The parallel comparisons between the two are easy to draw: both outraged the Western world and the West drew a line of behavior that was Post World War II unacceptable. Terror, which Mladic practiced to force Muslims out of predominantly Serbian areas, was honed finely, using rape as a calculated tool (not just as a spoils of war), and mass ethnic executions to eliminate groups of undesirable ethnics. The ethnic division he engineered exists today in modern Bosnia, which is ungovernable, ungoverned, and poor.  Osama Bin Laden’s calculated tactics of terror and mass killing of innocents in a mad attempt to bring the West to its knees do not need repeating. We are all too familiar with it as an effective tool for a small group to control and destroy a larger one by frightening and killing off innocents.

 It is suspected that Osama’s supporters within Pakistan made it possible for him to live in plain sight for 6 years there. Until 2001 Mladic had been living a normal, open life in Belgrade, Serbia under the protection of Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president, even though Mladic had been indicted by the Hague for war crimes and arrest warrants and rewards had been issued in 1995. Milosovic was finally deposed and brought to the Hague in 2001 (where he died of natural causes during the trial). After 2001, we now believe Mladic lived among cousins and other Bosnian Serb refugees in northern Serbia, though he kept undercover and was suspected to have been protected by elements of the Serbian military.

 In 2007, a new, younger generation of Serbs, looking to the West and feeling the results of a poor economy, elected a younger leader, Boris Tadic. Even then, it took three years to “find” Mladic. Serbians began to see membership in the European Unions as a way out of their depressed economy, enough so that the desire for moving on outweighed the Serbian nationalism that had protected Mladic. The EU was to meet in this coming November to begin the long process to admit Serbia to the EU, but failure to capture Mladic was their deal killer.   He was found (uttered on the BBC today that US and UK intelligence helped “find”him), but the actual arrest was credited to the Serbs themselves.

There the comparison is harder to make.  Bin Laden was not brought to the Hague, nor was Saddam Hussein of Iraq. Bin Laden faced justice at the end of a SEALS weapon, but he had admitted to and had taken credit for 9/11.  Saddam had a trial, fair or not, and was hanged by his own people. Mladic, as did Milosovic before him, will probably try to claim he knew nothing and was not in control. The Hague Court has always been condemned by die hard Serbian nationalist supporters as anti-Serb. Sixteen years of evidence gathering and a pledge by Pres. Tadic to bring to justice to Mladic’s lieutenants may make the Mladic defense a weak one.

Perhaps now Serbia can move forward toward a better economy and connections with Western Europe. Perhaps now Bosnia can begin to heal. Perhaps now that the tyrants of this world who are motivated by ethnic and religious hatred to use terrorism as a tool know that eventually they will pay for their outrages against humanity.

I will be visiting Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia this summer. I hope the “perhaps” will turn into “hopefully” as those in the region digest the closing of the Mladic chapter.

Obama brings cohesiveness to US foreign policy

My column published May 25, 2011
On May 19, President Obama addressed the world to outline a semblance of cohesiveness on U.S. foreign policy in the turmoil of the Arab Spring, the spontaneous uprising against rulers' corruption and oppression. It was about time. Swift moving events are closing doors on opportunities. 

The U.S. foreign policy apple cart of carefully maintained treaties and accommodation with long-lived dictators had been upset. Outcomes were uncertain and the US needed to shape them toward our interests. We may have gotten Bin Laden, though it is unknown yet is how much of a power al-Qaida will be without their iconic leader. 

U.S. policy toward the changes in the Middle East and North Africa has seemed to react to the grass roots revolts on an ad hoc basis. 

Obama pronounced an overarching policy that would underlie any U.S. aid and sympathy to the popular movements that supported universal rights, regardless if existing governments were friends or foes. He urged dictators and potentates to get out of the way and embrace reform. He announced billions in aid for both Egypt and Tunisia, no doubt to encourage their restructuring as more liberal, secular democracies. While he voiced moral support to the revolutionaries, he remained Sphinx-like about the extent he was willing to help depose heads of state or to force them to reform.

We have a way to go to establish our credibility and influence outcomes. 

Fareed Zakaria on CNN Sunday interviewed young Egyptian leaders of the reform movement who dismissed Obama's May 19 speech as just words, no action, and they looked with suspicion and resentment at the U.S. for our past support of the Mubarak regime. . 

The young Egyptians also blamed the U.S. for the failure to reach a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Though the issue was not a factor in the uprisings, Israel will be impacted by the results .We in the west do not always grasp the extent that hostility toward the U.S. is due to U.S. support of Israel, complicating our ability to influence the region. 

Israel itself is facing a new reality. Time to adjust is passing away. Carefully constructed alliances with Arab neighbors that protected borders or buried the hatchet are in jeopardy. The Palestinians threw a monkey wrench into any negotiations for a two state solution. U.S. negotiator, George Mitchell, had quit in disgust when Hamas joined Fatah in Palestine so that now one member of the negotiating power, Hamas, did not even recognize Israel's right to exist. Many countries had lost patience with the failed negotiations and were threatening.to bring a resolution before the UN to recognize Palestine as a sovereign state without a negotiated settlement. The timing of Obama's speech was aimed to head off that attempt

As the President noted in his speech before the pro Israel lobbying group, AIPAC, May 22, increasing numbers of Palestinians being born and living within current Israeli borders would make Jews in their own country the minority and threaten the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

The President had created a furor by explicitly stating a formerly implied policy that Israel's return to pre 1967 boundaries with land swaps. Israel had wished to discuss that matter later in the negotiation process, but Obama put it first on the agenda, perhaps hoping this concession would cause Hamas to soften its position. He hinted that land swaps could improve Israel's security and demographic situation, concluding that a two state solution was the only way to preserve Israel as a Jewish state and he made it clear the decision would be up to the Israelis. 

It appears nothing will happen until Israelis and their U.S. supporters see that is in their own enlightened self-interest to restart negotiations regarding pre-1967 boundaries. The time for Israel to decide is short since when the dust of their neighbors' turmoil settles, Israel will find neighbors more hostile and emboldened.to drive even harder bargains.

GOP: SAME TUNE, JUST WORSE

My column appearing in the Sky Hi Daily News on line edition May 17 2011 (note: in my submission to the newspaper, I did not call Boehner a bonehead.  I do consider the policies he supports to be boneheaded...but the editor repositioned the word in published version.  I have a great deal of respect for the
difficult tasks with which John Boehner is confronted and the adroitness he has demonstrated in meeting the challenges)

Now that the Bin Laden takedown is already fading to Page 2 and birthers have lost credibility, the economy is a cause cèlébre once again as the GOP sits down with Vice President Joe Biden to make the effort to hammer out a compromise.

Did John Boehner, speaker of the house, commit a bonehead move when he kicked off GOP strategy at an economics forum May 10? He raised the ante for conditions to agree to increase the debt limit while ignoring other serious plans. Hopefully this is only a position strengthening exercise prior to negotiations. Surely Republicans are not so irresponsible they would risk crashing the economy if they failed to get their way 100 percent. 

The Boehner address reminded me of that old camp sing song: “same song, second verse; could get better but it's gonna get worse.” 

He renewed the idea of holding the debt ceiling hostage on terms that were more of the same as yore, adding zeros to some figures and including some twists that others had long ago dissed . 

The prior GOP hostage deal was that they would lift the debt ceiling only if the president would present a “serious debt reduction plan.” 

The president proposed one, but the Republicans said it was only a speech that had not been put into an introduced budget bill and, in any case, included tax increases . They further upped the ante by adding cuts to current budget discussions to the hostage list.

Republicans probably hoped you would not remember that the Obama proposal would reduce the deficit by nearly the same as the plan House Republicans just approved without destroying Medicare as we know it. 

The key provision of the Obama plan, a trigger to force Congress to approve a plan to reduce the deficit if no progress was made by 2014, was simply blown off by Boehner because it did not rule out tax hikes, it kicked the can down the road, and he wanted to be specific about cuts now.

Boehner raised the hostage terms from cutting billions to cutting trillions in the long term, demanding more cuts than the amount the debt ceiling is raised.

Read Boehner's lips: “No new taxes.” Only cuts are acceptable. This is in spite of Obama's plan proposing $3 in cuts for every one dollar in tax hikes. The Simpson-Bowles debt commission and the gang of six in the Senate, including some heavy weight Republicans, came to the conclusion we could not reduce the deficit significantly without some tax increases

Boehner kept the Ryan plan on the table — the unpopular proposal House GOP members are all on the record as approving — which would substitute guaranteed Medicare benefits with vouchers that contain no guarantees they would keep up with escalating costs. The GOP still plots to kill “Obamacare,” thus eliminating health care cost containment provisions of the law, removing the $400 billion it saves to the Medicare system, and restoring the donut hole in drug benefits charged to seniors.

However, Boehner toned down support for the Ryan proposal by saying that everything is on the table except tax increases. What he put on the table was a warmed-over dinner: revival of the old GOP proposal to cut Medicare benefits to the wealthy. This is no more than a riff on the old GOP tune. 

Bonehead Boehner may have committed his insistence on Republicans being specific about what additional cuts they intend to make to meet their upped ante. Could it be they do not want more poster children of GOP heartlessness for Democrats to exploit?

Another bonehead move is that the hostage Boehner insists on holding to the debt ceiling issue is feeble. Republicans dare not execute it because it would wreck the economy, at least according to most economists. Most Republicans understand the risk and do not care to have it haunt them in 2012. 

Enhanced interrogation

Kevin, always with thoughtful comments about my blog postings, asked a question I have never addressed:
What about enhanced interrogation? I find it morally repugnant and not worthy of the US character and tradition.. The other question is whether it is really helpful to the US even if we could get over the moral hump:
I have never been in a position to compare torture vs more psych ops approach but in listening to the debate about it, I think that our intelligence and enforcement agencies have long experience in interrogation techniques not using torture that have worked best in getting a subject to cough up valuable information.Often information given by the subject being tortured is fabricated to stop the torture
It is a very counterproductive way to sell American Democracy as an alternative to dictatorships, whether by  clerics or by strongmen.   We espouse one thing; do another. 
It is easily used as a recruitment tool by our enemies.
In spite of Dick Cheney's pronouncements that KSM helped when he lied he did not know the courier and that flagged that the courier was indeed a person of interest does not answer the question if other techniques would have  gotten the same results.
John McCain has always given the most powerful argument of them all. As a victim of torture himself, it endangers any troops captured in a conflict because it keeps alive the approval of torture and marks the troops as a target for revenge for similar treatment of the captors by us.

Kevin later asked if I believed enhanced interrogation was the same as torture: Answer: a rose is a rose is a rose Whenever you physically cause someone enough pain to force them to cough up an answer to a question ...that is torture. From what I have read of the description of water boarding, controlled drowning, then it fits.   I  have no problem with psychological manipulation, threats, trick questions and other tools of the FBI interrogators or the army manuals. Websters: "intense pain or suffering of body or mind: the infliction of such pain or suffering".  
Felicia