[My commentary published today on Foreign Policy's AfPak Channel]

[My two-part commentary published in today's Asia Times.]

In the early stages of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Adlai Stevenson, JFK’s notoriously dovish UN Ambassador, suggested that the US offer Moscow a non-confrontational trade to stave off a nuclear exchange: we withdraw our missiles from Turkey, and the Soviets withdraw their missile components from Cuba.  Upon hearing his advice, President Kennedy and every member of his secretive ExComm group (assembled to troubleshoot the crisis) scolded Stevenson for recklessly forgetting the obvious lessons of Munich, when Britain and France appeased Hitler prior to the Second World War.  Only a fool, they said, would reward the aggression of tyrants like Hitler and Khrushchev with diplomacy.  But then, lo and behold, under cover of absolute secrecy, President Kennedy went ahead and made nearly the exact same ‘appeasing’ trade that Stevenson recommended.[1]

It would seem, then, that if Kennedy handled the situation well—and there is a virtual consensus that he did—then appeasement is appropriate so long as no one knows about it.  Ironically, the only party with whom we ever felt a need to be secretive was the USSR, and they were the only ones privy to the deal.  The subterfuge, then, was apparently for the sole benefit of the American people, who would have likely seen this trade as a sign of capitulation and weakness, even if it came (as it eventually did) on the heels of a forceful blockade of Cuba.  Kennedy knew that Americans were just as likely as anyone to mistake the feeling of humiliation for the presence of weakness, and proceed to throw him under the bus.  But why?

With enemies ranging from empires to nation-states to terrorist organizations, the policy of appeasement has been scorned for the last 70 years to rouse the rabble out of its comfortable apathy and confront unadulterated evil. Unsurprisingly, however, our disdain in the West for any scent of appeasement has led to a widespread and knee-jerk tendency to identify and dismiss any policy of restraint or conservation, frequently at the expense of grounded foreign policy.  Not only, then, is appeasement wildly over-diagnosed, but even when accurately identified, the policy is quickly discarded as a tool of the weak.  And with the Obama Administration making numerous overtures of reengagement with Syria, Iran and other controversial parties, a close examination of both the legitimate and delusional perils of appeasement is long overdue.  Anti-appeasement rhetoric and survival instincts run amok have clouded our judgment, and it is time to right the ship.

Appeasement 1.0

In September 1938, after Adolf Hitler annexed and occupied part of Czechoslovakia for the ostensible purpose of taming ethnic conflict, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and French Premier Edouard Daladier signed the Munich Agreement that allowed Hitler to keep the territory, despite a previous French security guarantee protecting Czechoslovakia’s sovereignty.  In return for this concession, Hitler promised not to seize any more territory, but he soon invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia and Poland, forcing Britain and France to declare war.

By the close of the war, the appeasement lesson had been drawn quickly and fiercely, leaving behind a legacy with a seemingly eternal shelf life.[2] Barely beneath the surface of every subsequent history textbook, the parable of Munich is loud and clear: the longer we wait to stand up to a bully, the more the bully will take by force—and the weaker we will be when war inevitably ensues.

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to exploring the nuances of appeasement is that the approach of the British and French toward Nazi Germany in the 1930s is widely regarded as perhaps the most catastrophic example of appeasement on record.  As a result, it would have been impossible for us not to forge a nearly unbreakable association between raw appeasement and cataclysmic disaster.  Nor has anyone really resisted this impulse.

Before Munich, however, the policy of appeasement was almost institutional in its prevalence and application, both in Britain and elsewhere.[3] Yet while historians in recent decades have been reconsidering just how abnormal or scandalous British and French decisions were, the popular package of appeasement today is still painted thick with cavalier weakness, much in accordance with the policy’s notable detractors.

“It is precisely when the vital interests are bartered in return for minor concessions, or none at all, that appeasement has taken place,” says Frederick Hartmann.[4] Chamberlain’s mistake, then, was his assumption that Hitler would keep his promise not to demand more territory when nothing had been asked of Hitler to begin with.  “Appeasement is a corrupted policy of compromise, made erroneous by mistaking a policy of imperialism for a policy of the status quo,” according to Hans Morgenthau, the father of realpolitik.[5] Chamberlain and Daladier thought Hitler would settle for the status quo, when really it turned out that he would settle for nothing less than world domination.  In other words, Morgenthau argues, the appeaser’s error is the failure to see that “successive demands are but links of a chain at the end of which stands the overthrow of the status quo.”[6]

In the case of the Second World War, Britain and France hoped to avoid war by appeasing Germany on several occasions, but both eventually recognized that war was unavoidable, given the unlimited nature of Germany’s demands.  Britain and France, the thinking goes, should have known in Munich—if not earlier—that neither Hitler’s character nor his ambitions could be trusted, and that appeasement would only whet his appetite.  Accordingly, Hitler should have been confronted as soon as possible to prove Europe’s resolve, to mitigate the costs of war, and to ensure victory.

Much of this surely sounds like common sense. When confronted with such a threat, the most common response is to close ranks and project as strong an image as possible.  After all, weakness is not just bad for a nation’s ego.  “The lesson of Munich,” writes Steve Chan, “is that appeasement discredits the defenders’ willingness to fight, and encourages the aggressor to escalate his demands.”[7] But appeasement does so much more than that.

Given the tight fit between appeasement, the Second World War and the Holocaust, it is critical to note that any defense of appeasement need not defend all appeasement—no more than defending one war requires a defense of all wars.  To date, our very powerful psychological association between appeasement and Hitler’s behavior has prevented us from considering alternatives to our understandable gut feeling that appeasement will always lead to a Holocaust.  Such a fallacious assumption is based not on sound public policy, but rather on the sensation that “doing something”—or anything, for that matter—is always better than “doing nothing,” which leaves us feeling impotent.

Rhetorical Baggage

The most difficult hurdle inevitably facing any advocates of negotiated settlement is the thin line between compromise and appeasement, but their vague differences do not merely point to word games.  Technically speaking, Munich was a compromise; it assured Germany that it could keep its annexed territory, and it assured the British and French that they could avoid a war.  Hitler had to make a concession, as did the British and French.  Granted, it quickly became clear that Hitler’s promise not to claim any more territory was completely insincere, but it was still promised in a compromise.  Believing Hitler’s pledge may have been a disastrous mistake, as most people believe, but the way this mistake and others like it are framed actually points to an important distinction.

At the time, before Hitler had violated the agreement, Winston Churchill—then only an outspoken figure in the British opposition—denounced Munich as appeasement. “It is not Czechoslovakia alone which is menaced,” Churchill noted in September 1938, nine days before Munich, “but also the freedom and security of all nations.  The belief that security can be obtained by throwing a small state to the wolves is a fatal delusion.”[8] Hitler was known for breaking promises, so in Churchill’s eyes, the futility and danger of appeasing Berlin with part of Czechoslovakia should have been patently obvious.

Yet if appeasement is simply what happens when we are fooled into trusting a liar, then Churchill (and anyone else) could only determine if Munich was appeasement after Hitler violated the agreement’s terms. Appeasement, in other words, is an entirely retrospective phenomenon, and if decried during a negotiation process, the label is simply a moral judgment and a prediction.  From a historical perspective, however, to be fairly labeled ‘appeasement,’ an agreement—implicit or explicit—has to backfire; one party has to violate the agreement’s terms and make a fool out of the other party. Otherwise, we would still view the agreement as a ‘compromise’ rather than ‘appeasement’.

Even still, because the doom of Munich has been seared into virtually every political decision-making process in the West, we have come to assume that foolish appeasement can be easily diagnosed and discredited before the allegedly unreliable party even violates the agreement.  Still, given Hitler’s propensity for breaking promises, we cannot imagine how anyone could fall for his tricks.  But this fallacious notion demonstrates that hindsight is not only 20/20, but blindingly so.  Put differently, why do we never hear about successful appeasement?  Is it because appeasement never works, or because we merely call it something else entirely?

Appeasement 2.0

In 1978, US President Jimmy Carter brokered a landmark peace treaty at Camp David between Egypt (led by President Anwar Sadat) and Israel (led by Prime Minister Menachem Begin).  In what was called a ‘Land for Peace’ treaty, Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt—which had controlled the land before Israel captured it during the Six Day War of 1967—and in exchange, the Peninsula would be completely and verifiably demilitarized to give Israel the reassurance of a strategic buffer and retain its vital early-warning defense system.

At the time, Egypt was Israel’s most powerful and dangerous enemy—one that had (in the eyes of Israel and its Western supporters) mounted 4 strategic assaults on the Jewish nation in the previous 30 years.  To put it mildly, then, the Israelis did not trust the Egyptians.  Cairo had broken numerous previous agreements with Israel, including several acts of war. Between the two most recent wars, Cairo had warned Jerusalem that Egypt was preparing for war to regain the Sinai, but Israel only began listening to these warnings in the wake of the 1973 war, which naturally gave Israel reason to believe that the Egyptian military could still inflict enough pain to warrant plenty of attention, even if Cairo no longer posed a threat to Israel’s existence itself.[9]

Although many of the details (and obviously the outcome) of this treaty are quite different from those of Munich, the principal arguments remain just as potent.  Both Berlin and Cairo were allowed to hold on to territory to which each claimed a strong national connection.  The fact that Berlin succeeded (while Cairo failed) to secure that land by force is nearly irrelevant because the messages coming from Cairo and Berlin were the same: if you concede this territory, we will stop fighting you.  Israeli, British and French leaders all traded land for the promise of peace.  We merely insist that Camp David was smart (and not appeasement) because Egypt has held up its end of the bargain, while Hitler did not—despite comparable evidence at the time that made each likely to violate their respective agreements.[10]

In fact, while there is a near consensus in theory that it is unwise to reward aggressors by negotiating with (or appeasing) them, every White House and virtually every contemporary foreign policy analyst hails the Camp David Accords as a monumental success.  Even former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently said that he was wrong to have questioned and undermined Begin’s efforts at the time and wrong to vote against the ratification of the Accords in the Israeli parliament.  Olmert even went so far as to say that Begin was “smarter than I was” for having made such a wise decision.[11]

Nevertheless, the Israel-Egypt treaty that followed the Camp David Accords had the same public policy implications and sent the same messages to tyrants that Munich did: first, if you are aggressive enough, rest assured that powerful countries like Israel will be forced to listen and make concessions (though probably not surrender); second, if you are able to get those concessions through a compromise, then that compromise will likely give you a tactical advantage, enabling you to easily take the modest reward for your aggression (as Egypt did), or go double-or-nothing for the jugular, as Hitler did.  Aggression, according to Camp David’s lessons, will give you options, credibility and power.

Some could argue that Egypt’s power paled in comparison to Germany’s, so appeasing Egypt was not as risky as appeasing Hitler; but thousands of dead Israelis and their families certainly felt otherwise in 1978.  And besides, it would be a fantasy to think that Jerusalem ever negotiates with powerless parties; Israelis only negotiate when they have to, and frequently not even then.

Nor did the US push this peace summit because Israel would be just as safe without the buffer territory.  Israel’s strategic interest in keeping the Sinai was just as “vital”[12] as Chamberlain’s interest in stopping the spread of fascism, and far more vital than his interest in the actual Czech territory ceded at Munich.  Likewise, trading such a vital interest for what was essentially a mere promise of peace had no bearing on Cairo’s decision to stick to the deal.  For whatever reasons, Cairo did not exploit the concession and go for Israel’s jugular.  Therefore, while many accused the Israeli government in the late 1970s of trading vital interests in exchange for “minor concessions, or none at all,” that paradigm has proven to be completely unfounded.  In fact, Israelis have now recognized and come to value Egypt’s promise in 1978 and its legacy of peace—albeit a cold one.[13] And in retrospect, few would call Egypt’s promise of peace a “minor concession”—one that led to Egypt’s expulsion from the Arab League and widespread celebrations in the Arab World when Sadat was assassinated in 1981—though Sadat’s promise was little more than what Hitler offered.

Remarkably, then, even by the loose standards of the most vehement anti-appeasers, Camp David should have backfired, just as Munich backfired.  Every simplistic red flag that we have been taught to look for as a result of Munich should have prevented Camp David from ever taking place.  But we somehow ignored those red flags.  We let it slip through, and ironically, the Camp David Accords is likely the only blessing the Middle East has seen in the last half century.

Strangely, despite discrepancies like this one—where the behavior of leaders should be consistent but is not—we still seem to insist that it is easy to identify and reflexively dismiss the policy of appeasement; the Holocaust’s legacy is simply too powerful to deny.  Yet these inconsistencies hardly mean that appeasement is always wise or always foolish; they simply show the fallacious assumptions we make about what it takes to prevent or end wars.  Simply put, there are no rules to this game.  After all, if people we deem equally trustworthy or untrustworthy at the time of negotiations frequently surprise us by pursuing entirely different agendas, then isn’t there something wrong with our barometer?  And if only history can prove our judgments right or wrong (and those judgments frequently turn out to be very wrong indeed), then why the moral self-righteousness?

Without a doubt, some of our enemies have unlimited demands that we simply cannot and should not indulge, but sometimes—contrary to what they publicly say to us and even to their own communities—our enemies will actually settle for concessions that we could tolerate losing.  In the meantime, however, the fact that we have little predictive power to discern the pathological bullies like Adolf Hitler from the hideously opportunistic and practical ones like Kim Jong-Il, Robert Mugabe and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has left our foreign policy a tattered patchwork of improvised disaster.

Reputational Wars

Beyond appeasement’s rhetorical and emotional barriers, however, just how dangerous is the policy itself in practice, and when?  After a modest inquiry, most of the oft-cited liabilities of appeasement lack the kind of argumentative support that should always accompany such a widespread and knee-jerk assumption that dominates our policy discussions.

For instance, integral to any argument against appeasement is the assumption that appeasing—before or during a conflict—wreaks havoc on the appeaser’s reputation and (therefore) vital security interests.  Hand-in-hand with any discussion of appeasement is how we want others to see us—usually as a force to be reckoned with—because that perception is said to affect our enemies’ behavior.  In particular, if we demonstrate our strength with a consistent refusal to appease our enemies, then those same enemies will be less likely to misbehave or try to call our bluff.  Unfortunately, by focusing almost exclusively on how others view us, we have lost our grounded sense of reality and mistaken the phantom of weakness for the real thing.

In the years since Munich, our political discourse has relied on war as a tool to bolster our reputation, and remarkably, this justification seems to be resonating more as the years go by.  Such rhetoric, for instance, has played an instrumental role in the public justification and private rationalization of every US war and most of its conflicts.[14] Even before the end of the Second World War, President Roosevelt was already saying that America’s readiness to fight would show (and is showing) aggressive nations that their hostile policies would not be indulged.[15]

Ever since, image maintenance has been at the center of our foreign policy discussions, and perhaps even more so since the end of the Cold War.  During the Gulf War, President Bush (41) was intent on making up for Vietnam’s legacy of American weakness, while President Clinton had his own foreign policy demons to exorcise in Kosovo, after years of being excoriated for avoiding tragic wars in Somalia, Bosnia and Rwanda.  “If you don’t stand up to brutality and the killing of innocent civilians,” Clinton warned, “you invite them to do more,[16] but “action and resolve can stop armies and save lives.” After the NATO bombing campaign successfully expelled Serbian forces from Kosovo, Clinton noted that

I believe what we did was a good and decent thing, and I believe that it will give courage to people throughout the world, and I think it will give pause to people who might do what Mr. Milosevic has done throughout the world.[17]

President Bush (43) drove the point home even further in the traumatic wake of the 9/11 attacks, when he argued that it was his predecessor’s transient appeasement that had enabled al-Qaeda to escalate its methods and successes.  In a September 2006 speech, for instance, President Bush framed America’s resolve in the context of al-Qaeda’s understanding of American weakness:

Bin Laden and his allies are absolutely convinced they can succeed in forcing America to retreat [from Iraq and Afghanistan] and causing our economic collapse. They believe our nation is weak and decadent, and lacking in patience and resolve. And they’re wrong.  Osama bin Laden has written that the “defeat of… American forces in Beirut” in 1983 is proof America does not have the stomach to stay in the fight. He’s declared that “in Somalia… the United States [pulled] out, trailing disappointment, defeat, and failure behind it.” And last year, the terrorist Zawahiri declared that Americans “know better than others that there is no hope in victory. The Vietnam specter is closing every outlet.”[18]

According to this logic, then, the only way to undermine al-Qaeda’s hope for success was to prove that it would be impossible to compel any kind of American withdrawal—militarily, politically, economically, or ideologically.  Even disregarding the fact that it was al-Qaeda’s express intention to draw the US into a war, President Bush was so eager to avoid the appearance of weakness that he disregarded the implications of what it might mean to actually be weak.  And it is this distinction that has haunted appeasement’s detractors for the last 60 years.

To be sure, weakness is certainly a strategic liability, but it should come as no surprise when public officials err on the side of overkill.  Whether our leaders cite the threat of appeasement to garner support or because they actually believe what they say, game theory research has come to illustrate that anti-appeasement rhetoric frequently leads us to dismiss available and effective policy options.[19] Once we recognize and unpack the complexities of our understandable aversion to appeasement, only then can we harness and control that aversion—rather than be controlled by it.  To that end, when we are trying to determine how our behavior will deter or encourage certain behaviors among our current and future enemies, there are a number of key factors to consider and several misconceptions to abandon.

The Stakes Game

Brand management is at the heart of public diplomacy, especially for a superpower.  And as in the business world, it is important to discern the differences in the brand’s interpretation.  When President Reagan withdrew American forces from Lebanon in the wake of a 1983 car bombing that killed 241 American Marines, bin Laden claims he saw that withdrawal as a weakness, and President Bush (43)—at least in retrospect—saw it as appeasement.

Yet even if one believes that the 1983 withdrawal from Lebanon was appeasement, our reflexive disdain for appeasement prevents us from asking the much-needed follow-up question: “Was the appeasement worthwhile?  That is, did withdrawing do more for our reputation and national interests than staying would have?”  And the answer is yes.  For perspective, consider why it took so long for the US to pull out of Vietnam, while only a few substantive attacks by Hezbollah compelled a US withdrawal from Lebanon?

Simply put, victory over communism in Vietnam was considered to be a strategic necessity.  For years we thought we had to win, no matter the costs.  Adding more pressure, we knew the Soviets were scrutinizing American resolve for weak points, learning how we coped with losing a war that we regarded as a strategic necessity.  Granted, after we finally withdrew from Vietnam, it seemed that the vaunted ‘domino theory’ of contagious communism had been discredited, but our civilian and military leadership believed otherwise at the time.

In contrast to Vietnam, however, Lebanon’s civil war was dangerous, but in the grand scheme of things, the Lebanon effort was regarded by the US as little more than a humanitarian mission gone awry in a woefully chaotic region.  The same dynamic could be said for Somalia.  Again, from a strategic perspective, the US mission in Somalia was not nearly important enough to continue beyond the loss of 19 soldiers, especially after such a public and gruesome spectacle like the ‘Black Hawk Down’ incident televised on CNN.

In other words, only if we abandon high-stakes missions does it cause significant damage to our reputation.[20] Merely because we feel humiliated—as we did in the wake of our withdrawals from Lebanon and Somalia—does not mean others will doubt our resolve when the stakes are high.  After all, sizing up your enemy when that enemy is fighting a mere nuisance does not provide even moderately reliable intelligence as to how that enemy might behave if confronted by a strategic threat.  Vietnam gave the Soviets a reason to doubt our resolve; Lebanon did not. By leaving Lebanon and Somalia, the message we sent was not that we had no resolve; the message we sent was merely that we had no resolve on relatively unimportant missions.[21]

Admittedly, learning that we had no resolve on these two unimportant missions was apparently sufficient to convince bin Laden that we were weak enough for his purposes, and this should certainly be taken into consideration when determining foreign policy, even the humanitarian kind.  Yet solely because bin Laden used these withdrawals to convince others that the US was weak was not enough to actually make us weak.  As countless investigators, analysts and journalists have revealed, bin Laden knew he could not truly weaken the US unless he lured America into a larger war that rallied the support of millions of Muslims who were traditionally indifferent to his war cries.  If Lebanon and Somalia were so instructive, then bin Laden would have devoted all his resources towards duplicating those relatively small-scale incidents, forcing our piecemeal military withdrawal from Muslim lands.   But he didn’t.  He went big.

The mere fact that he cites those two withdrawals should point to the limited threat he knew he could pose—short of a wider war that he needed us to start.  Both then and now, Al-Qaeda’s leaders are not counting on our hasty retreats; they are counting on our over-reaction.  Bin Laden needed to make us feel so humiliated and vulnerable that we would forget our powerful place in the world, rashly take his bait, and continue warring with the Muslim world until our military and economy broke from the strain.  In terms of policy-formulation, however, this distinction has been entirely ignored in Washington.

The Humiliation of Appeasement

Though counter-intuitive, even the painful withdrawals from important missions have a certain degree of ambiguity as to the lessons learned by our enemies.  When we withdrew from Vietnam, the costs of the conflict had simply become too high to justify staying.  In the end, however, the same judgment and cost/benefit rationalization that compelled us to withdraw was also employed by the Soviets, thus mitigating our reputational fallout.  Similarly, when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in the late 1980s—after nearly a decade of disastrous occupation and insurgency—we questioned their resolve to a certain degree, but we also knew from our Vietnam experience that occasionally even vital missions become too costly to continue.  And it hardly meant the Soviets were weak.

Ultimately, the relevant difference here is between words and actions.  If the bulk of US forces soon withdraw from Afghanistan with anything remotely resembling defeat, hostile observers in Russia, Iran, Pakistan, Venezuela, Cuba and China will undoubtedly rub it in our faces.  (We certainly rubbed it in the Soviets’ faces when they withdrew from Afghanistan.)  Our enemies and geopolitical competitors will insist that our withdrawal from Afghanistan proves that we have become a pathetic, sniveling mess.

But they will not attack us as a result.  In fact, they are most likely to employ aggressive tactics at a time (like now) when our military is too preoccupied to retaliate effectively, if at all.  So like any country or nation with self-confidence and an investment in the status quo, we see any verbal insistence that we are weak as a sign that we are, in fact, weak—even if no one acts on those claims.  To be sure, our most basic tool for gauging our weaknesses should be the prevalence of force used against us—not the extent of our enemies’ teasing.  But we are human, and a sense of humiliation seldom inspires productive or even rational behavior.

Consider, for instance, that after the Israeli Air Force bombed a Syrian nuclear facility in the fall of 2007, it seemed that every analyst of Middle East affairs said that Israel had re-asserted its dominance, warned Syria and Iran, and regained the respect it lost after the Second Lebanon War against Hezbollah in the summer of 2006.  Yet if Israel were so vulnerable and weak, then Hezbollah would have launched another war as soon as its arsenal was restocked several months after that war ended.  But it didn’t, and it hasn’t.

In fact, if Israel were actually more vulnerable after the Second Lebanon War, it was only more vulnerable to teasing and gloating.  As is frequently the case when any top dog gets a bloody nose, Israel felt the need to retaliate to reassure itself, not the rest of the world, of its staying power. And to that end, Israel succeeded.  But humiliation is a feeling, not a state of military readiness, and accordingly, countering a sense of humiliation is a bizarre method for ensuring adequate defenses, though boosts in morale are always helpful.

Ultimately, if we cannot distinguish between taunts and threats, then we cannot distinguish between humiliation and genuine vulnerability.  More than anything else, the obstacle of humiliation is emotional in nature, and our insistence that appeasement, by definition, is necessarily weakening is frequently the product of a bruised or threatened ego, nothing more.  There are times, in fact, when “appeasement from strength,” as Churchill (of all people) once noted, can be “magnanimous and noble, and might be the surest and perhaps the only path to world peace.”[22]

Looming Threats and Limited Resources

In the early stages of the Vietnam War, Robert Kennedy insisted that no one would believe we could take on communism in Berlin if we did not do so in Vietnam.[23] Yet not only were the stakes drastically different in Berlin and Vietnam—as discussed above—but going to war to preserve or bolster our image was risky given our limited resources.[24] That is, while proving to the world that we had the stomach to fight proxy wars with the Soviets, we also spent valuable resources that were needed to convince the Soviets that we could and would actually take Berlin, if and when the time came to do so.  As in any war, proving that we have the stomach to do something is irrelevant if—in the process—we spend all of the resources and capital vital to actually doing that something.  Fortunately, the Soviets never pushed us so far that we felt compelled to try to take Berlin.  In our new wars, however, we might not be so lucky.

Appeasement 3.0

For the last six years, the US has been so consumed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that any and every threat we issue to our current and potential enemies has been a laughingstock.  When the Iraq War started, Russia was preoccupied with domestic matters, North Korea was only dabbling with nuclear technology and Iran was trying to accommodate the US effort in Iraq as best it could.  But as it became clear that the US would be allocating far more time, soldiers, money and attention to Iraq than Washington had anticipated, Russia, North Korea and Iran have all turned to increasingly aggressive tactics in countless public and private arenas.

After all, what reality are the Iranians, North Koreans and Russians more likely to base their policies on?  That the Americans are unpredictable cowboys who must be feared?  Or that these same unpredictable cowboys have spent their gunpowder, starved their horses, and earned the democratic wrath of the Cherokee, Navajo, and Apache nations?

In this way, avoiding appeasement or going to war to preserve/bolster our reputation is just as likely to backfire as appeasement is, if not more so.  The war in Afghanistan was a direct challenge to the people who attacked us on 9/11 and thus was not predominantly focused on frightening our other adversaries.  First we had to take out our immediate enemies, and then focus on deterring our potential ones. But after Afghanistan, we lacked the resources to simultaneously attack and invade Iraq, Iran, North Korea and (perhaps) Libya and Syria, so Washington hoped to use a successful image-maintenance invasion of only Iraq to scare the other regimes into terminating their WMD programs and cooperate fully to root out the terrorists whose activities they had traditionally overlooked.

As intended, Libya caved, but the others only mildly cooperated until they saw impending disaster in Iraq.  They waited to see how serious and reckless we were—which is what we wanted them to do—but more importantly, they waited to see how competent and powerful we were. Being serious and “unpredictable”—as urged by Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—is frequently helpful when confronting an enemy, but that approach loses its value if all of your unpredictable options are equally weak.[25]

And this is the danger of fighting wars in an effort to avoid appeasement. When the primary (if private) justification for going to war is sending a message, then you have to win and win big; no war at all is better than even an ambiguous victory.  Yet today, not only is our military overwhelmed, but there is no way to hide this reality from our enemies, as we are operating at full capacity.

After 9/11, we had enough power, clout and flexibility for a limited war that aided American interests more than it undermined them.  Had the US not intervened in Iraq, our success in the war in Afghanistan might have demonstrated US resolve without using the bulk of America’s armed forces—thus maintaining America’s reputation as a force to be reckoned with, willing and ready for deployment. But for whatever reasons, the invasion, occupation and overthrow of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan was not enough—in Washington’s eyes—to solicit a sufficient degree of security- and WMD- cooperation from Pyongyang, Riyadh, Tehran, Damascus, Tripoli and certainly Baghdad.

Six years later, we now we have the worst of both worlds: our military is preoccupied in zero-sum nation-building when it should be preparing for increasingly credible threats in Moscow and Tehran, and exponentially more terrorists than before 9/11.  Meanwhile, America’s domestic tolerance for misadventure abroad is plummeting, and there is little we can do about any of these developments.  A war to bolster our reputation has been instrumental in overthrowing it, and in the process, we have revealed our immature grasp of what it means to be strong.

With simplistic ‘anything-but-appeasement’ policies, we forget that strength is more than simply appearing strong, and far more than simply feeling strong.  Strength is anticipation and longevity.  And while weakness and humiliation sometimes overlap—as weakness is often humiliating—usually they do not, especially not for a superpower.  It does not take much to humiliate us, but it takes an awful lot to weaken us.

Unfortunately, even though President Obama seems more likely to discard his predecessor’s myopic concept of strength and anti-appeasement insecurities, the problems Obama has inherited deny him the freedom Bush possessed to set America’s agenda.  So re-thinking appeasement might only be possible when we face a new set of challenges abroad that allow us to spend more time acting and less time reacting.

Either way, however, this means we must resist the temptation to grant our primordial instincts exclusive domain over the formulation of our foreign policies. Hitler’s legacy is overwhelming, much as it should be.  But whether we like it or not, and regardless of what we call it, the idea of appeasement is little more than a compromise that we come to regret.  And because we consistently fail to accurately predict who will stick to our deals and who will not, the corrosive compromises only become distinguishable from the successful ones after the negotiation is over.  By focusing so heavily on how strong we appear to others, it is easy to forget how strong we actually are, and how easily we crack the ice beneath our feet by recoiling from appeasement.

It is time, then, to develop a more accurate method for gauging the likelihood that an enemy will abide by the tenets of any given agreement, or if war must be declared or continued.  This new gauge would likely pivot on the axis of geostrategic interests, rather than on how ‘evil’ a leader or government may be.  The first step, no doubt, is to recognize that appeasement is no more crippling to our national security than war is, and appeasement should be regarded in the same light—no better, no worse.  Just another tool in the toolbox.  We have restricted our own policy options for far too long, and only now has the cost truly become unbearable.

[2] Every US President since Munich has cited various enemies, who, presidents insist, should never be appeased—including North Korea, Vietnam, the USSR, Libya, Iraq, Serbia, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Iran.  For a detailed analysis of Munich’s impact on US foreign policy during the last 60 years, see Joseph Siracusa’s chapter, “The Munich Analogy,” in the Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy (Simon and Shuster, 2002).

[3] See Paul Kennedy, “The tradition of appeasement in British foreign policy 1865-1939.”  British Journal of International Studies, 2(1976), p.195-215.   See also, Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987), 16, 39, cited in Jeffrey Record, “Retiring Hitler and ‘Appeasement’ from the National Security Debate”, Parameters, Summer 2008, pp.91-101. See also Arnold Offner, “Appeasement Revisited: The United States, Great Britain, and Germany, 1933-1940.”  The Journal of American History, Vol. 64, No. 2 (Sep., 1977), p.373-393.  See also Paul W. Schroeder, “Munich and the British Tradition.”  The Historical Journal, Vol. 19, No.1 (1976), p.223-243.  See also Donald Lammers, Explaining Munich, (Hoover Institution, 1966).

[4] Frederick Hartman, The Relations of Nations, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1967), p.96.

[5] Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace, 4th ed. (New York:

Knopf, 1967), p.61.

[6] Morgenthau, p.247; see also, Ralph Dimuccio, “The Study of Appeasement in International Relations: Polemics, Paradigms, and Problems,” Journal of Peace Research, 35(2): 245-259.

[7] Steve Chan, International Relations in Perspective: The Pursuit of Security, Welfare and Justice (New York: Macmillan, 1984), p. 88-89.  See also, J.L. Richardson, “New Perspectives on Appeasement: Some Implications for International Relations,” World Politics, 40(3): 289-316.

[8] Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Vol.1: The Gathering Storm, (Mariner Books, 1986), p.273.

[9] See John G. Stoessinger, Why Nations Go to War (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s), p.163-73

[10] See Lammers, Explaining Munich, 1966.

[11] Jeffrey Goldberg, “Is Israel Finished?” Atlantic Monthly, May 2008.

[12] See Hartman, The Relations of Nations, 1967, p.96.

[13] One 2001 poll put the portion of Israelis who support Israel’s treaty with Egypt at well above 85%.  See Jerusalem Post, 7 June 2001.

[14] Social psychology research has suggested that US presidents frequently employ anti-appeasement rhetoric to sell wars to doubtful constituencies, but equally often—the research suggests—presidents and their administrations privately believe very strongly in the necessity of confronting the enemies of their time.  See Jack Snyder, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition (Cornell UP, 1991).

[15] In a fireside chat on December 24, 1943, President Roosevelt said that so long as our allies remained united “there will be no possibility of an aggressor nation arising to start another world war.” Cited in Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy, p.446.

[16] See CNN, “Clinton: Serbs Must be Stopped Now,” 23 March 1999.

[17] NewsHour Interview with Jim Lehrer, PBS, 11 June 1999.

[18] Presidential Speech, 5 September 2006.

[19] As a literature review and original contributor, the best analysis of this game theory research and its implications is Daniel Treisman, “Rational Appeasement,” International Organization, 58(2): 345-73.

[20] Because nearly every military mission is framed as ‘high-stakes’ to rally support for the cause, the best indicator for what actually is ‘high-stakes’ is the level of our investment in the mission—militarily, politically, and economically.  Under this lens, Somalia and Lebanon pale in comparison to Vietnam.

[21] See Treisman, “Rational Appeasement,” p.360.

[22] Speech in 1950, cited in Daniel Moran, “Appeasement,” Strategic Insight, 1 April 2003; Center for Contemporary Conflict, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California.

[23] See Treisman, “Rational Appeasement,” p.361.

[24] With an enemy as vast as the Soviet Union, it would be virtually impossible to argue that our political, financial, and military resources were, in fact, unlimited.

[25] Washington Post, 1 May 2008.

[Syndicated by the Middle East Times, Beirut's Daily Star, Egypt's Daily News and Al Arabiya]
[Read this column in Arabic, Urdu, French and Indonesian]

Negotiating with our adversaries is a tricky business, and with President-elect Barack Obama on the way in, most observers of US foreign policy are confident that negotiating is about to become the predominant foreign policy approach — for better or worse. They are mistaken, however, if they think this approach will be a drastic change.

In fact, in the last two years, though it is sometimes difficult to discern from White House press releases, President George W. Bush has actually been relying more and more on the very tactics that most observers have come to associate with Obama. In fact, in terms of broad foreign policy strategy, when it comes to opening the channels of negotiation and dialogue, four more years of Bush could have been alarmingly similar to those of Obama’s upcoming ones.

Consider, for instance, that after six years of refusing to negotiate with “rogue” governments or liberally labelled “terrorist groups”, the Bush administration has, since 2006, negotiated a long-lasting alliance with the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, many of whom are held responsible for killing thousands of American soldiers between the summer of 2003 and the fall of 2006. In addition, Washington led successful multilateral negotiations with North Korea to ensure a verifiable dismantling of Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons programme, which produced and successfully tested a nuclear device in 2006.

Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Bush administration has negotiated with Iran in order to reduce Tehran’s military and financial support of the Shi’a militias in central Iraq, and Washington has expressed increasing openness to negotiating with the non-Al Qaeda elements of the Taliban.

To claim, however, that Bush has been rectifying his disastrous policies is hardly absolution. Without a doubt, Bush has spent the last half of his second term unravelling the fabric of much of his foreign policy because his previous methods were failing at every turn.

Yet, change he has.

After all, the Bush administration is well into negotiations — on one level or another — with numerous declared “enemies” of the United States, with particular emphasis on the “axis of evil”.

Obama’s policy of pro-engagement might feel visionary and new, but only because Bush has been so quiet in his engagement with these parties, unlikely to celebrate a policy that was dead last on his initial list of priorities.

In order to provide a clean roadmap for his own foreign policy, Obama essentially ignored the seemingly pro-engagement tactics in the final two years of the Bush presidency on the campaign trail. However, it is no coincidence that Obama decided to keep Secretary of Defense Robert Gates at the Pentagon. For much of the last two years, Gates and Obama seemed to be virtually quoting each other’s policy speeches, especially regarding the importance of renewing US focus on Afghanistan/Pakistan in the so-called “war on terror”.

While most of us were distracted with how the presidential candidates framed their campaign objectives, Bush was busy creating the momentum for a series of negotiations that he never had the talent or political capital to finish.

If Obama, in contrast, possesses the talent and the capital to engage our adversaries effectively and with follow-through, then his best chance resides in his ability to complement, not replace, his predecessor’s recent diplomatic efforts abroad.

Reaching an appropriate balance of introducing new policy approaches and building on those of the past administration is what Obama’s transition team is supposed to ensure, but Obama’s supporters are expecting the appearance of clean breaks and fresh policies come 20 January, if only because Bush’s belated progress was inspired and stained by a failed presidency.

Obama has the benefit (and foresight) of knowing on Day 1 what his predecessor learned in Year 6, which might mean fewer political and military mistakes, especially the hubristic kind. If they do not succeed, however, he too will have to know when to change course.

There is frequently a healthy dose of wisdom that accumulates after years of defeat, and learning lessons the hard way doesn’t mean the lessons are any less valuable; it simply means they came at an exorbitant cost. Obama stands to reap the benefits of Bush’s about-face. To fully benefit from this lesson, however, Obama must acknowledge that while he was campaigning for change, change was already under way.

[View this commentary at the Common Ground News Service]

There are certain fundamentals to an international negotiation that simply cannot be massaged or altered, even with the political momentum fostered by America’s incoming president, Barack Obama.

In the last five years, Tehran and Washington have jockeyed for influence in Iraq and occasionally negotiated with each other to shape the country’s democratic Shia majority to their own advantage.

And while Tehran’s nuclear weapons program has inspired greater international concern, Washington has kept any talk of nukes on the sidelines for years, hoping that the US could tackle that problem once Iraq stabilized—much as it has in recent months.

But two immediate obstacles threaten American stakes in Iran’s nuclear ambitions.  The first is President-elect Obama’s repeated pledge to withdraw all combat forces from Iraq by the summer of 2010, and the second is the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA), which was approved by Iraq’s cabinet and parliament last week after months of acrimony in Baghdad.  The SOFA timetable requires all US combat forces to be out by the end of 2011, and for Iraqi authorities to control all military bases, cities and decision-making apparatuses by this time next year.

Yet however it happens, a unilateral US withdrawal from Iraq will leave Washington with virtually nothing of substance to offer Iran in return for the verifiable termination of Tehran’s nuclear weapons program.

Control of Iraq is the most important card that Washington holds right now—a card, no less, that Tehran wants more than any other, and one that the US is about to give away for free.  Iran has a vital interest in keeping their fellow Shias in power in Iraq and in ensuring that the US is unable to use Iraqi bases to launch attacks on Iran.  Yet from Iran’s perspective, SOFA and the new administration’s pledge to be out in 16 months both provide Tehran excellent reason to sit on its hands and ample time to develop a nuclear weapon.

Granted, the US intelligence community believes that Iran terminated its nuclear weapons program in 2003, but simply taking Langley’s word seems a bit amnesiac, especially when Washington already has the leverage to solicit verified guarantees about a critical national security concern.

Once US forces pull out of Iraq, Washington will have no credible stick or carrot with which to persuade Iran to terminate its weapons program.  Sanctions will fail so long as Russia is a thorn in America’s side—providing Tehran with everything it needs—and Moscow is becoming increasingly thorny these days.  President-elect Obama says he wants to give far more weight to diplomacy than his predecessor did—which is a truly welcome development—but diplomacy is just a word when the US has nothing to trade. Welcoming correspondence and “interests sections” might grease the wheels (which need plenty of greasing), but at the end of the day, we want something from them, and they want something from us.  There is no honor system among enemies, so President-elect Obama will be unable to leverage the withdrawal from Iraq after the US departure.

Admittedly, for a number of reasons, it is vital to US national security that American forces withdraw from Iraq, but it would prove shortsighted if that withdrawal is conducted unilaterally or even bilaterally between Washington and Baghdad.  If Washington fails to trade influence in Iraq for a verifiable end to Iran’s weapons program—even if it was terminated 5 years ago—then the real meat and substance for an unprecedented rapprochement between the US and Iran will evaporate.  And when it does, if evidence surfaces that Iran is still pursuing a nuclear weapon, then an American air strike will become inevitable.

There are, however, two unlikely possibilities that would preclude the bombing.  First, if a renewed sectarian conflagration plunges Iraq into such misery that the SOFA and President-elect Obama’s withdrawal pledge must be reconsidered, then he will have the space and time to renegotiate the withdrawal on terms that include Iran’s nuclear transparency.   (The SOFA allows either side to dissolve their obligations with one year’s notice.)

Second, there is a chance that the very deal outlined above is already in the pipeline.  After all, it remains unclear exactly how the US was recently able to persuade Iran to tighten its leash on a number of Shia militias that were fueling Iraq’s civil war.  This Iranian concession could have been part of a far grander trade.

Yet pursuing such talks in the year leading up to pivotal presidential elections in both countries (Iran’s will be in June) would have been inherently risky for any government hoping to reach a sustainable agreement. If this deal is under way, however, then Obama is well situated to take the reigns and give the process new life with his reconciliatory streak.

After five years of negotiating from a position of dire weakness, it might not be too late to take advantage of the gains made in Iraq by cutting a deal with Tehran when Washington is strongest and ready to withdraw from Iraq anyway.

[View this Article at Al Jazeera]

[The following is a cultural exploration of the real reasons we Westerners despise terrorism; how our morality and history of victory shaped our perceptions; and how these perceptions have restricted our foreign policy and commandeered our expectations when it comes to the identity and ideology of the people at the other end of the negotiating table.]

There is a robust dialogue in the west concerning just causes for declaring war (such as preemption, self-defense, etc.), but very little discussion about the methods of warfare that we (and other westernized countries) have come to regard as either justifiable or unconscionable.  Americans, in particular, have developed a keen sense of what constitutes fair and unfair behavior in conflict and war, but much like members of any culture, westerners seldom question (or even ponder) their unequivocal abhorrence for certain behavior, such as terrorism and hostage-taking.  It is important to recognize the difference between why we emotionally hate terrorism, and why we are politically adverse to it.  The justifications are intertwined, just as they are in the rest of our moral-centric policies; but their differences should be addressed.

Ultimately, if we do not understand why we despise terrorism so much, then we cannot define terrorism.  If we cannot define terrorism, we cannot define victory.  If we cannot define victory, we cannot achieve it.  And finally, if we cannot achieve victory in an ideological war, then what good are our cultural values, anyway? Admittedly, this last question is rather circular, but this is precisely the point, as the following should indicate.  Americans have great difficulty framing foreign policy (and most objectives, generally) outside the scope of values and morals.  In the case of terrorism, it is with a rather bizarre twist of rhetoric that we have endorsed a war whose bounds are frighteningly limitless in every possible way.

*        *        *        *        *

The Boilerplate

Why is terrorism regarded with such disdain in the West?  Beyond a first glance, the answer to this question is starkly different from its broader counterpart, “Why is violence regarded with such disdain in the West?”  Whatever connotations violence might carry in western (and especially American) culture, widespread disdain is not one of them.  America is a very violent culture, for countless reasons and through infinite outlets.  But the drastic differences between America’s regard for terrorism and for violence point to one cultural certainty: while violence might be the ultimate source of America’s enjoyment in competitive sports and Hollywood adventure films, the glorification of terrorism (especially the suicidal variety) is a serious infraction against the collective body of American cultural values.  Young boys do not team up and play “FBI and al-Qaeda” the way they might play “Cops and Robbers” or “Cowboys and Indians.”

Without question, al-Qaeda’s attacks on September 11, 2001 solidified the taboo of depicting terrorists in anything but an evil light, but terror was hardly tolerated or exceptional before 9/11.  In New York, Lebanon, Iran, Kenya, Kuwait, Germany, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia; on the USS Cole in the Persian Gulf and in the skies above Scotland—these are just some of the places Americans have been targeted by terrorists, and all of these attacks have struck a chord in the American psyche.  The reasons for this are complicated, if only because Americans seem to hate terrorism for any and every reason they can think of—cherry picking various principles and fusing them with others.

Granted, we have our notions of what constitutes a worthy agenda (freedom, tolerance), but for Americans, we believe the war on terror’s necessity is founded on the methods, not the agendas, of our enemies.  To start, by accusing terrorists of cowardice, Americans reinforce their own perception that bravery and subterfuge (e.g., “sneak attacks”) are mutually exclusive.

“They’re cowards”
One grievance Americans have returned to again and again is the bravery factor.  As most cross-cultural analyses have indicated, Americans are known for being bold and blunt.  We stand up for ourselves. We refuse to be bullied, and we are fervent believers in practicing what we preach and preaching what we practice.  One patriotic slogan regarding the Iraq war, for instance, says of the US flag: “These colors don’t run.”  We like to think that we will not shy away from a fight, that we do not make idle threats or promises, and more broadly, that we are honest—perhaps even to a fault.  Like most cultures, we take great pride in the bravery of our armed forces, but when this pride is fused with our honesty, bravery becomes inextricably tied to a refusal to run or hide.  For better or worse, our policies do not always reflect these principles, but few Americans view any such inconsistency as a basis for abandoning the principles themselves.

As a result, we find terrorism detestable because only a coward would target “innocent civilians” instead of soldiers, or hide among civilian populations for protection, forcing us to bomb those populations despite our heartache from doing so. The pejorative tones in such an accusation are seldom questioned as anything less than self-evident. Anyone can kill civilians, the reasoning seems to go.  “You’re only going after civilians because it’s like stealing candy from a baby.”  When pressed further, many Americans grow uncomfortable when they take this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion: namely, we despise terrorism, in part, because there is simply no sport in killing civilians. “Only a coward who is afraid of a real fight would hurt defenseless civilians.”  That is, in order for a fight to be ‘real,’ its means must fair and ‘legitimate.’

For a militant Shia group to summarily execute defenseless Sunnis as they approach a makeshift roadblock in Baghdad is completely risk free for the militants.  And, in the eyes of Americans, precisely because such a massacre is risk free—precisely because the fight is so obviously unbalanced in favor of those with weapons—Americans are disgusted by the idea of such a slaughter.  If, on the other hand, Sunnis and Shiites were evenly matched and fortified in desert trenches—away from the ‘civilian’ population, and dying in roughly comparable numbers and at comparable rates—then American tolerance for such bloodshed far surpasses any similar threshold in the western world.

Upon realizing this bizarre discrepancy, most Americans warily approach the first rhetorical road block in their assault on terror: how to reconcile our humorless attitude toward war with our sportsmanlike, even cavalier, sense of fairness that pervades all American competitions, including warfare.  It would seem that unless we face an opponent who can pose a serious challenge to our agenda, it would be immoral for us to declare war on them, as the result would be little more than an unsportsmanlike massacre.  In theory, at least, we feel that we should give the other side a chance.  There must be some kind of adventure in the struggle for power and dominance.  The assumption here is that we only declare war on enemies that pose a threat to us, and therefore, any enemy who poses a threat will mount a substantial defense, and thus preclude a slaughter.

Yet few Americans embrace such a litmus test, if only because we resent the suggestion that we risk our soldiers’ lives to make war more dramatic.  Specifically, those familiar with US foreign policy would insist that Operation Desert Storm was both worthwhile and unbalanced: everyone knew that we would decimate the Iraqi army, and this did not reduce American support for the war.  In fact, since the end of the Cold War, even the most cautious Americans encouraged President Clinton to intervene only in those conflicts where our victory was nearly guaranteed. This seems to point to a double standard—that slaughters are coincidentally tolerable to Americans only when Americans do the slaughtering.  We seem to believe that a fight leaves the realm of a ‘slaughter’ as soon as the enemy picks up a weapon, but only when that enemy is our enemy.   When we speak of two distant warring parties, the fact that both sides have weapons does not prevent us from denouncing the more powerful party for its immoral tactics.  Remarkably, when American troops have routed its enemies, the explanation is often that ‘we were just superior soldiers.’  So, does our distaste for unfair matches only point to textbook hypocrisy—that Americans only insist on fair fights when their own soldiers are not on the line?

It is tempting and logical to dismiss much of American public discourse as hypocritical, but the truth is often substantially more complicated, and this case is no different.  To Americans, a “fair fight” is not a reflection of some power differential; it is a reflection of methods.  After all, it is one thing to be an underdog defending yourself (and dying in battle), while it is another matter entirely to be slaughtered without ever picking up a weapon.  Yet this can only leave us wondering about our focus on the sport/competition factor: we define a “fair” fight as one where both sides have weapons, and both have chosen to engage in battle.  This gets particularly complicated when the question of free will—if self-defense constitutes a choice—is introduced, but either way, what is clear is that the means/methods of warfare matter greatly to Americans.

“They have no honor”
Undoubtedly, any explicit mention of a “sportsmanlike war” is bound to offend American sensibilities, as we are accustomed to hearing moral justifications for nearly every culturally acceptable behavior.  No one wants to think their enjoyment of Schwarzenegger movies has anything to do with their concept of just warfare.  And given the amount of courage it takes to die for one’s cause, it is rhetorically difficult for us to dismiss suicide terrorists solely as cowards. Another moral basis for demonizing them is needed—though still within the framework of targeting civilians—which also strengthens our case against non-suicidal terror.  With suicide bombers, in particular, our moral accusations shift from a lack of courage to a lack of honor.  Terrorists, we insist, absurdly attack civilians who have done nothing to their attackers or their respective causes.  A lack of honor implies an inability to discipline oneself to abide by certain rules and reject ‘senseless violence’.  Accordingly, we have no qualms going to war with an enemy whose aggression ‘makes sense’ to us—that is, aggression directed toward those its perpetrator views as responsible for its grievances.  But we are simply lost when trying to understand the concept of (what we could only call) unrestricted warfare, to say nothing of its application.

Our love of rules governing the chaos of warfare are both a cause and an effect of a particular psychological process.  Specifically, one of the most effective means of reconciling our love of violence with our love of morality is that—rather creatively—we moralize our violence, especially in war.  We insist that warring parties should kill each other in certain ways and avoid other ways that are dishonorable, cowardly, and ultimately, downright senseless.  To Americans, the act of targeting civilians seems like the saddest case of misplaced rage.  We often wonder: “What possible reason could a person have for taking out their grievances on an undeserving target in a calculated ritual, again and again?  They must enjoy it, or they must not be interested in justice, myopic or otherwise.  Whatever their differences, surely any two warring parties can agree that innocent bystanders should be spared if possible, right?”

In the end, because we cannot conceive of any basis for targeting civilians, we frame such methods in moral terms: ‘Why don’t you pick on someone your own size?’—that is, someone who has a chance of fighting back.  Otherwise, we believe, the fight leaves the realm of warfare, poisons the concept of freedom-fighting, and embraces nearly indiscriminate mayhem.  Even if terrorism is an effective strategy—which merits a separate analysis of its own—we resent that effectiveness because we regard it as cheating a noble system of warfare. We are repulsed by the implications of what terrorists demand of us, especially how their tactic of hiding among civilians forces us to inflict (against our more humane wishes) significant collateral damage.

It is very painful for us to watch as terrorists use our own humanity against us: we are vulnerable to terror because we are moral and thus accept whatever costs might accompany abiding by the rules that terrorists dishonorably exploit.  If it were not for our morality, we say, an endless civilian death toll would be the last thing to stop us.

Refusing to Negotiate “with a gun to our heads”
Given our resentment of terrorism for its methods, it should be no surprise that we regard any attempt to negotiate with terrorists as the single worst course of action available to any aggrieved party.  “It would only encourage more terrorism,” the reasoning goes, with all of its various spin-offs and modifications: “that would embolden the enemy”, “they would learn that terror works”, etc.  And while these tactical considerations often suffice as a basis for making policy recommendations, there is, nevertheless, something rhetorical and emotional at work here, as well.  Something must take us from the impartial suggestion that “negotiation would be unwise” to a recommendation loaded with emotional content like, “negotiation with terrorism is no different than unconditional surrender.”

Specifically regarding Americans, the idea of negotiating with terrorists or hostage-takers is abhorrent due to the dreaded connotations of being forced into a corner that has only one, very uncomfortable exit.  As poster-children of a nation usually obsessed with negotiation, Americans are firm believers in contracts as a “meeting of the minds,” and insist that any subsequent agreement should be signed out of affirmative yearning to obtain something desirable, but unnecessary.  Americans do not want to feel as though they “have to” negotiate; they would much prefer to enter negotiations because they “want to” do so.  In other words, no sense of coercion, and no sense of impending doom if an agreement is not signed—these should be the conditions for a fair and honorable negotiation.  Otherwise, we view the process leading to the agreement not as negotiation, but instead as simple extortion.

Whether dealing with legitimate nation-states like Iran (and its nuclear ambitions) or non-state actors/terrorists like Hezbollah, America and much of the West cannot tolerate being put in a situation where the only rational choice is to give in to the demands of its enemies, who are essentially holding “a gun to our heads” while they pretend to be reasonable.

*        *        *        *        *

Pressure-Washing the Boilerplate

Without question, there are a number of holes in the American rhetoric condemning terrorism, even beyond the standard (and accurate) claim that America has supported and continues to support terrorists all over the world for their own strategic purposes—from the contras in Nicaragua to the peshmerga in Iraqi Kurdistan, and countless others.  But even within the American cultural and linguistic framework that condemns terrorism, there exists a number of problems that together point to an unsurprising but compelling conclusion: Americans hate terrorism because they are vulnerable to it, nothing more.

In the early 1980s, a nascent group of Shia militants in Lebanon began a suicide bombing campaign against Israeli forces and American/French peacekeepers—all of whom occupied Lebanon at the time.  On October 23, 1983, two Hezbollah suicide bombers simultaneously killed 241 American and 58 French soldiers as they slept in their military barracks in Beirut.  US President Reagan called it a “despicable act,” and urged Americans to resist “the bestial nature of those who would assume power.”  US Vice President George H.W. Bush toured the collapsed US marine barracks and insisted that the US “would not be cowed by terrorists.”  Pope John Paul II and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir both called the attack a “despicable crime.”  French President Francois Mitterrand called it a “despicable attack.”  Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau said, “These brutal and criminal actions cannot be excused.”  Every western leader (and most Middle East tyrants) publicly condemned the attack.

Headlines about the attack dominated the news for weeks.  Americans were devastated, and our leaders echoed these emotions with their mourning and their fury.  But imagine how Americans might have reacted the next day if President Reagan, VP Bush, or Secretary of State George Schultz had said, “Today, we mourn the loss of many good men to a cunning enemy, but we must remain steadfast in our mission, and grateful that our enemy did not target civilians.”  Without question, we would have been outraged that our leader was asking us to look on the bright side of tallying America’s greatest one-day loss of marines since the Battle of Iwo Jima.  We did not want to be grateful to our enemy for obeying the rules of war; we wanted blood.  It did not matter that Hezbollah targeted our military infrastructure—not that day, nor on any other day when American military targets were attacked in Lebanon.

On November 13, 1995, an al-Qaeda-affiliated militant remote-detonated a car bomb outside the US-operated National Guard Training facility in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, killing five Americans.  President Clinton called the bombing “an outrage,” and he insisted that the US and Saudi Arabia would work together to identify “those responsible for this cowardly act.”  Raymond E. Mabus, Jr., the American ambassador to Saudi Arabia at the time, described the bombing as “a desperate act, a horrible act, the work of cowards.”

On June 26, 1996, a truck bomb killed nineteen Americans at a US Air Force complex at the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.  Osama bin Laden and Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have been linked to the attack, which US President Clinton said, at the time, “appears to be the work of terrorists.”  He went on to say that if the explosion was the work of terrorists, “I am outraged by it…. The cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished…. Anyone who attacks one American attacks every American, and we protect and defend our own.”

On October 12, 2000, seventeen American soldiers were killed by a suicide boat-bomb attack on the USS Cole as it refueled in a Yemeni port.  Again, President Clinton said that “if, as it now appears, this was an act of terrorism, it was a despicable and cowardly act.”  Likewise, Admiral Vern Clark, the US Chief of Naval Operations, noted that “I have no reason to think that this was anything but a senseless act of terrorism.”  Secretary of Defense William Cohen called the attack a “vicious and cowardly act.”

Again, consider how offensive it would have been (in the aftermath of each of these three attacks) for President Clinton to commend the bombers for not targeting civilians.  In fact, it would have even been offensive for Clinton to describe this bombing as anything but a terrorist attack.  This should be more than enough evidence that, in the end—regardless of whatever principled moral arguments we might make in a classroom—our disgust with terrorism actually has nothing to do with targeting choices.

It is crucial to note that the appropriate conclusion from this evidence is not that, deep down, we actually love when our military is attacked.  Far from it, we should recognize that—contrary to our talking points about honor—we actually value our soldiers’ lives just as much as we value our citizens’ lives.  It hurts when we lose civilians, and it hurts when we lose soldiers. The fact that American civilians did not die in these four attacks does not detract from the devastation wrought on the victims’ families, nor does it mitigate our nation’s sense of loss.  In our eyes—and those are the eyes under scrutiny here—were our fallen soldiers in Beirut any more or less “innocent” than the American civilians who died in the twin towers?  Strangely, our first tendency is to say ‘yes’, even though the Beirut, Riyadh, Dhahran and USS Cole attacks fall well outside the oft-cited civilian argument condemning terrorism: no civilians died, only soldiers; it was an attack on our military, and it stung because Americans were killed, not because the attack was “cowardly” or “senseless.”

Granted, we had not declared war with any parties in Lebanon or Saudi Arabia, but our soldiers were present on foreign soil and—regardless of the accuracy of the local assessment—many Lebanese and Saudis saw no distinction between peacekeeping and occupying.  In fact, a crucial factor explaining why we viewed these two attacks as terrorism is that the idea of “going to war” with the whole of Lebanon or Saudi Arabia was absurd.  So the soldiers and their patrons in America did not view their presence in Saudi Arabia and Lebanon as an “occupation,” and certainly not as domination.  After all, “we were asked” to help Lebanon and Saudi Arabia by their own governments, Americans always insist.  Unfortunately, this comment also reflects the American cultural assumption that a government has the support of its people, but most nations in the Middle East are plagued by painfully clear fault lines that are seldom straddled by their governments.  And regardless of an obvious inter-cultural clash about what constitutes terrorism, even within our American culture, if terrorists are repulsive to us, then it is not because they target civilians.

The fact that we are still shocked when our soldiers die in inhospitable environments is a frightening testament to our ease with warfare and to our belief that war need not (and should not) burden Americans with any costs.  War has become so normal and mundane to us that we call these attacks terrorism because we do not feel like we are at war, and so we naturally believe that the attack “came out of nowhere.” Under such conditions, we could never be prepared to make sacrifices in the name of a war we do not even know about.  In an interview with the Hebrew daily Ma’ariv, Salah Arouri, the founder of Hamas in the West Bank recently argued that Israelis—whose resentment of terrorism bears significant resemblance to our own—tout equally inconsistent rules of war:

The entire Israeli nation asks how [a captured Israeli soldier] feels, how he lives, what his problems are.  [They] ask how we can hold him. [But] he is a soldier. He was taken from a tank. He was not a tourist. He sat in the tank with his gun aimed at Gaza. So what’s all the excitement about?

*        *        *        *        *

Contextualizing the Boilerplate

There are several reasons why many terrorists might insist that what they are doing is actually brave, honorable, and deserving of negotiation, but their reasons are less important to this analysis.  Nevertheless, the differences between the divergent cultural approaches as to what constitutes fair warfare illuminate how the American approach developed and continues to solidify today, especially within the context of the wider “war on terror.”

Like many other cultural traits, the American outlook on fair methods of warfare is both a cause and effect of America’s ascendance to the top of the geopolitical food chain.  Even before 9/11, Americans had a very precise resentment of terror methods, and the current “war on terror” only cemented that resentment in a historical framework.  Since the end of the Second World War, the only perceived and genuine threat to American national security has been the Soviet Union.  It became impossible to talk about strategic defense without also talking about space-based missile defenses, intricate spy networks within the Kremlin, and covert operations to keep Soviet expansion at bay.

To defeat the communist giant, we employed our inherent virtues of freedom and hope, which we honed so well during our moral triumph over Nazi Germany, when we saved the world from a thousand years of misery.  After four decades of adding nuclear deterrence and proxy wars to our moral and ideological momentum, our resilience finally paid off in 1991.  High from our victory, not only did we start to believe that we could defeat anything, but far more worrisome, we believed that we could do so with conventional means.  Why continue tweaking a method that worked well enough to defeat our only strategic threat?

Few of these observations are original, but among many smaller factors, our vast experience facing a truly overwhelming threat molded our perception of what warfare is supposed to look like, and what it does look like.  More importantly, we excelled at this global game of chess.  We adapted to threats, and like most victors in war, we prided ourselves on the skills that we acquired in order to defeat the enemy.  Granted, most of the elements in American (and western) culture regarding warfare predate the Cold War, which helped shape—and was also shaped by—these cultural attitudes.  And rather harmoniously, our modern concepts of courage and honor echo their ideological ancestors, embodied, for instance, in the fearsome warriors of Sparta, the chivalrous knights of Europe, and American generals literally leading their men on the front lines of our Civil War.  It was our bravery and honor—we seem to believe—that have brought us to where we are today, against all odds and enemies.

Yet these disparate influences on our concept of warfare have now culminated in a period of our cultural history that does not fit particularly well with our geopolitical fortune.  Most cultures view their forebears as underdogs who miraculously prevailed because of a long list of virtues.  But when that underdog finds itself alone at the top of the junkyard heap, narratives often change considerably.  And we were no different.  Not only are we having trouble reconciling our own dominance with our underdog rhetoric (from a theoretical point of view), but we are therefore jumping even greater hurdles in our attempts to apply this contradictory outlook to our national interests throughout the world.  One way, for instance, that we reconcile our power with our morality can be seen in the change in our narrative (throughout the last century) from being the underdog to defending the underdogs across the globe who cannot defend themselves against the oppression of tyranny.

As the world’s “lonely superpower,” America’s strategic threats during the 1990s were so minimal that we could afford to examine frightening (though hardly existential) threats, like terrorism, which (ironically) is far more difficult to prevent than a mighty Soviet invasion.  The events of 9/11 were a stark awakening to a nation whose concept of power had been left behind in the dust: after nearly a half-century of staving off a nuclear holocaust at the hands of an enigmatic and sophisticated enemy, how could our unchallenged grasp of global power—and our very sanity—be leveled to its foundations by a motley crew of cave-dwellers from some god-forsaken land in central Asia?

Only adding to this overwhelming sense of impotence, the absence of any centralized retaliation target left us drooling for blood, only to be told that our skies were falling because of an enemy that was paradoxically nowhere and everywhere at the same time.  And so began the “war on terror,” which has since targeted a particular method of warfare because there has been no credible strategic enemy for the US to oppose.

Even if al-Qaeda destroyed Manhattan with a dirty or sophisticated nuclear weapon, our civilization would continue.  Undoubtedly, such an event would be disastrous and terrifying; it would traumatize much of the country for decades, and we should do everything in our power to prevent it from happening.  But this is nothing compared to the threat of nuclear holocaust (with the Soviets) or even a focused holocaust like that of World War II.

Absent the threat of such an endgame, the only rhetorical basis for a war would be the perpetrators’ means of attack, namely terrorism.  For perspective, consider how bizarre it would have been for the French in 1940 to beg the invading Nazi army to humanely refrain from attacking at night, as the French children were having trouble sleeping.  If Charles De Gaulle had proposed that idea to the other members of the French Resistance, they would have probably reminded him that they have significantly larger problems to worry about than peaceful sleep, like survival.  No one cared how Germany invaded; that they invaded at all was terrifying enough.  As traumatic and devastating as 9/11 was, it did not come close to threatening the very survival of our civilization.  Because the endgame was not a worry in 2001, it was reasonable for us to focus on the means our enemies employed.  But even still, we do not recognize that we are warring against a form of war itself, not some credible threat to our existence.

Without question, however, 9/11 stoked a legitimate fire in us all, and it continues to blaze.  But without an enemy who rivaled our power—and with all that rage boiling over—we had to attack something, and to fill the void, that something needed to be broad and ambitious.  The invasion of Afghanistan only weeks later sated our thirst for retribution, but it hardly alleviated the incessant sense of doom and vulnerability from another 9/11-style attack, which had been so low-maintenance that it passed under the radar screen.  The unsophisticated nature of our enemy’s methods on 9/11 was another source of humiliation and frustration for Americans.  We hated the idea that our enemies could take advantage of our technological prowess, and then use it against us.  We were so far ahead of the enemy’s curve that we could not anticipate its primitive nature, for whatever reasons.  Al-Qaeda mocked us with its reliance on a technology that we had invented, and nearly a century ago, no less.

While Americans shared a precise concept of terrorism long before 9/11, there was a distinct shift in the paradigm: until that day, terrorism was dismissed as a “despicable” means of achieving political goals, but one that would never pose a threat to our psychological state of mind—one that was supposed to plague distant war zones, not America’s skylines.  Now, however, despite the absence of a credible threat (and no follow-up attacks on our homeland), terrorism is still perceived as the primary threat to our way of life.

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Power and Application

With a broader perspective, even if our sense of strategic vulnerability has shifted focus from a Soviet escalation (or even expansion) to Islamist infiltration and terrorism, neither our attitudes nor our tactics have caught up to the perceived threats, and without a balance between the two, the “war on terror” will continue to fail. We will always be vulnerable as long as we fool ourselves into thinking that we hate—and have declared war on—terrorism for its methods.  Put bluntly, we hate terrorism because we are exceptionally vulnerable to it, and (naturally) this prospect is rather terrifying to a nation that considers itself both invulnerable and morally deserving of invulnerability.

If this argument seems more like a critique of neoconservativism than of American political ideology as a whole, this is only the case because, for whatever reasons, since the end of World War II, no US Administration has indulged American idealism to the degree—and with the recklessness—that President George W. Bush has.  Previous presidents were better able to balance our raw idealism with our realist objectives, even though they often spoke the language of morality to the American people—telling us that we were the planet’s moral beacon—while quietly ensuring that our impulses be checked by a cold dose of caution and realism.  For better or worse, it was inevitable that our own idealism (or more cynically, self-righteousness) would lead us to overreach.

Ascribing moral content to our policies is hardly new, but this has become particularly difficult as America has risen to super-power status and pursued its strategic interests like any other super-power.  While most burgeoning hegemonies abandon morality when they become powerful, we have merely integrated our morality with textbook super-power behavior.  By insisting that doing “what’s right” is the basis for our most important decisions, we become particularly vulnerable to self-delusion in a rough world.

For the same reason, these enemies find our demands perplexing: given their agenda, should we expect terrorists to fight us with methods that will ensure their defeat?  Our response, naturally, would be, ‘if you cannot fight fairly, then you should not fight at all’, while the terrorists insist that ‘if we cannot fight fairly, then we will fight unfairly, as our cause is too important to be hindered by talk of methods.’  And could we expect anything less from our enemies?  Is this not why they are our enemies, because they see the world through a lens that is incomprehensible to us?   Consider, for example, that our insistence that our enemies ‘come out and fight like men’ is really only a ploy to get our enemies to play by rules under which we are sure to obliterate them.  In the end, insisting on the moral high ground has tremendous strategic benefits for the more powerful party wedded to the status quo.

No super-power can resist the temptation to take advantage of its advantages, nor would any reasonable beneficiary of that super-power argue in favor of resisting such a temptation.  It is important to note, however, that as a nation entrenched in the Judeo-Christian moral tradition, America can and often does capitalize on this power to do wonderful and uncontroversial work all over the world.  Like American security and prosperity, our morality and strategic interests are not mutually exclusive; we merely have a tendency to frame those strategic interests in the language of morality, for various reasons.

American leaders, for instance, almost always speak the language of morality—sometimes manipulating their constituencies for political purposes, and other times because they genuinely believe in a particular moral imperative.  Debate over the American intervention in the first Gulf War, for instance, was framed in (almost exclusively) moral terms, but many believed—with reasonable grounds—that our government’s decision to intervene was founded on the need to protect our interest in the region’s crude oil, and that President Bush (41) only spoke of “liberating the Kuwaitis” to garner support that would have disappeared had the explicit agenda been protecting our oil supplies.

Either way, despite being at the top of the geopolitical food chain, we continue to use morality to identify ourselves as the eternal underdog who sticks to its principles, while simultaneously (and bizarrely) we believe that if we are on top, it is only because we are morally superior and deserve to be there.  The ascendance of American power—according to this line of logic—is not merely the result, but also the reward, for our moral integrity.

So, it should come as no surprise that we view terrorism through a similar moralistic lens. Yet this hardly mitigates its detrimental effect: if we believe terrorism is terrible for its methods, we cannot recognize that terrorism is just another form of leverage—one that we (correctly) regard as frightening and dangerous, but hardly monolithic.  To understand this dynamic better, it is helpful to consider how other nations regard terrorism and hostage-taking—specifically, as a normal form of exerting leverage in negotiations or even high-context “engagement” (diplomatic signaling).  Neither approach is “better” or “worse” than the other, but such a comparison is important if only to illustrate that we can exert greater control over our visceral reactions than we might think.  We have greater control over undesirable outcomes than we might think.  Armed with such an understanding, we can build a more nuanced approach to the “war on terror,” one that acknowledges that victory, in any conventional sense, is utterly impossible in this case.

The two typically moral, American arguments (dissected earlier) against negotiating with and/or engaging terrorists are often met with perplexity in non-western cultures.  The first argument is that terrorism (including hostage-taking) is morally wrong because it is an evasive, cowardly form of aggression, and thus not worthy of our engagement.  The second American argument is that negotiating with terrorists (sometimes over hostages) is even more offensive because such a negotiation corrupts the integrity of an honorable contractual process.  ‘Bartering in human lives’ or ‘negotiating with a gun to their heads’ is the best way to infuriate an American in a negotiation, or even in an argument about the prospect of negotiation. In fact, bartering under duress is so repugnant to Americans that their most common reaction is some form of moral boycott.

Yet while we boycott negotiations with terrorists in the name of morality, the rest of the world negotiates under duress every day.  Again, for Americans, a “fair” negotiation is one that is desirable but not necessary, as both parties want to improve their lots in some way; whereas people in other (often developing) countries, who are accustomed to disappointment, settle for merely preventing a worse outcome—having recognized that in times of duress, avoiding disaster is more than enough incentive to negotiate.  In fact, many less powerful nations/cultures/parties would say that times of duress are the only times in which negotiating compromises is absolutely imperative.  After all, if you are not ‘over a barrel’, then you have excellent reason to avoid the negotiating table.

Without a doubt, a party that is accustomed to disappointment in negotiations will often view moral boycotts as luxuries they cannot afford—and that any American refusal to negotiate with certain players is a direct and enviable testament to its unsurpassed power and expectations.  In other words, the more powerful party to a conflict is often faced with the question: why should I bother negotiating when I can just take what I want?  Ultimately, Americans are just as likely to take (as is the nature of power), for better or worse.  Yet the tense dissonance in this dynamic lies not in the hypocrisy of double standards when fighting terrorism, but rather in our inability to see past the moral rhetoric to even determine if terrorist groups like al-Qaeda actually pose enough of a threat to warrant negotiations, or if they are just a severe nuisance that that found good fortune on 9/11.

For Americans, the mere act of “going to war” on anything or with anyone is interpreted as an unequivocal sign that we must be facing a serious threat, and when that paradigm is thrown into upheaval, we simply cannot function.  That the presence of a threat is—to most nations—a basis for both negotiation and war (depending on the situation) only confuses Americans even more.  We seem to ask, how can negotiation exist on the same behavior continuum as war and peace?  That is, if aggression is the name of the game, then to us, war is the only rational choice—a view, again, reflecting our reliance on (and expectation of) hegemony.

Ultimately, our cultural lens clouds our judgment and prevents us from seeing the more nuanced (and ostensibly contradictory) reality—that terrorists have frightening, earth-shaking power but nevertheless pose no strategic threat to us.  Put differently, because of this cultural lens (which fuses our morality with our foreign policy to ensure our supremacy), it is hard for us to distinguish between an enemy’s power to make us afraid, and the same enemy’s power to actually bring about our destruction.  In the post-Cold War era, the two types of power are no longer synonymous, and it is hard for us to imagine our fears are anything but the result of a dire and very real threat.

Until 9/11, the Cold War was the last time we had felt genuinely terrified about the security of our existence.  Yet in our standoff with the Soviet Union, the threat of a nuclear holocaust was infinitely more credible than any threat that al-Qaeda could ever muster.  We merely saw on 9/11, for the first time, how truly terrifying terrorism can be.  Yet while it might seem depressingly inevitable, our cultural response to terrorism—reaching its apex that September day—was actually the result of factors that can only dictate our fate when we fail to recognize them.

Our culture has often inspired us to bring freedom and justice to millions across the globe, but if we cannot recognize when the seeds of our cultural blessings sprout hemlock, our wars will give us a sense of retribution, but little strategic advantage or humanitarian appeal.  Defining the world in black-and-white terms, we will only become more vulnerable, perhaps enough even to bring an end to America’s supremacy, though still not enough to threaten our culture and civilization.  Nevertheless, the fact that we ignore our culture’s inconsistencies (and behave accordingly) means that we see our vulnerability as a fluke.  The idea of being vulnerable on a consistent basis is as foreign to us as viewing ourselves as immoral.

In light of our passion and particular breed of morality, our staggering margins of supremacy over our competitors will prevent us from considering that we might need to conserve our power—militarily, politically and culturally—as part of a long-term strategy to ensure that very supremacy.  Nothing brings seemingly omnipotent empires to a grinding halt as quickly or dramatically as overreach. At this rate, our cultural expectations will lead us into more battlefields than it will lead us out of.  We were shocked by 9/11 and we will be shocked by its sequel, as well.  Having already declared a “war on terror,” when we endure another terrifying disaster, we will all expect the war on terror to be escalated, no matter who leads our government.

But when we turn to our arsenal of weapons and morale—even if successfully adapted for asymmetric warfare—we will find our resources either nursing civil wars abroad or licking their wounds at home, almost certainly humiliated by the same can-do attitude that inspired their deployment.  Sadly for us, our vulnerability is no coincidence of the moment.  It is no fluke.  We face a dire threat, but not from terrorism.  We are our own threat, and not because of overreaction as much as ‘misreaction.’  Ultimately, in a world where the brushfire of hatred is no passing fad, our wisest course of action would be to acknowledge our vulnerability and hedge our bets accordingly.  This means that we have to radically alter our negotiation paradigm and the acceptable identities of the parties on the other side of the table.

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Negotiating Honesty

As many are quick to note, negotiating under duress does encourage our enemies to put us under duress more often, and this is certainly an important consideration.  Yet despite endless insistence by our government that we do not and should not legitimize and reward terrorism through negotiations, President Bush (like any leader) nevertheless implicitly negotiates and often capitulates with terrorists on a nearly consistent basis.

Every day in Iraq and Afghanistan, our armed forces, defense contractors and our civilian allies in President Karzai’s government and Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki’s coalition all negotiate with people who our President calls “terrorists,” “extremists,” “islamo-fascists,” etc.  We also negotiate with countries that—whether by lack of desire or capacity—enable militant groups to attack soft and hard targets of the United States and its allies abroad.  We negotiate and are explicitly allied with Pakistan’s dictator Pervez Musharraf, who consistently strikes deals with Pashtun militants (some Taliban, some not) promising them free reign to smuggle copious amounts of opium out of Afghanistan and attack NATO forces there; and in exchange, Musharraf solicits empty assurances that his own regime will not be the target of their aggression.  These assurances have proven useless to a crippled Musharraf, but regardless, these assurances were and are, in fact, negotiated.  More importantly, in the weeks after 9/11, because we zeroed in on bin Laden and his sponsoring Taliban regime in Afghanistan, we had no choice but to buy Musharraf’s cooperation—as limited as it certainly has been.

Likewise, we negotiate oil prices with Near East tyrants because we are “addicted to oil,” as President Bush has said, even though the greatest beneficiaries to these deals often dedicate their wealth to terrorizing Americans and our allies in the region.  Now, after nearly five years of stubborn self-delusion, we have decided to initiate the early stages of a very quiet and important negotiation with the Islamic regime in Iran over the stability of Iraq and Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

In fact, even if our government did not negotiate with terrorists and their respective sponsors on a regular basis, the American government negotiates under countless other types of severe duress, which we strangely regard as benign “diplomacy.”  We negotiate with China about import/export tariffs that cost Americans hundreds of thousands of jobs because we believe that this benefits our nation in the long run.  We negotiate with Mexico over illegal immigrants because we are worried about Latino contributions to America’s melting pot.

When the Soviet Union inserted nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles into Cuba, we negotiated with them (though in secret) because, in order for us pose an effective nuclear deterrence, we had to have more warning than the few seconds it would take for those missiles to reach Miami 90 miles away.  Under unfathomable duress, we eagerly negotiated during these 13 incomparable days.

Countless nations would add terrorism and kidnapping to the above list of obviously worrisome but normal forms of “leverage”—exceptionally persuasive leverage, but leverage nonetheless.  In contrast, we see kidnapping and terrorism as extortion, and (ironically) our elected leaders actually feed into this delusion for the same reason that they negotiate with our enemies: they have to.  Grounded in reality, they are compelled by a landscape that offers no other way to keep themselves and America at the head of the table.  Compromise is not a moral imperative, but rather a distinctly political one.  So if we are repulsed by foreign insistence that we negotiate under duress, then this repulsion has nothing to do with morality, but is instead the standard and understandable reaction of any party facing a tactical disadvantage in negotiations.  Employing moral rhetoric enables us to cope with feelings of utter impotence.  Yet even if our resolve was, in fact, based on moral considerations, then we would be fooling ourselves to think we are able to measure up to these standards in a world that is already brimming with compromise at every turn.

Furthermore, the fact that the above negotiations with the Soviet Union, Pakistan, Mexico and Cuba were with ‘legitimate’ governments is (though true) entirely irrelevant.  It is not the statelessness of terrorists that repulses us, if only because there are countless transnational entities that have our endless admiration, like Amnesty International and the Red Cross.  Instead, it is our vulnerability to their methods that terrifies us—a fear, no less, that is magnified by our inability to conquer our enemies or even overcome the fears they inspire.  Yet rather than come to terms with our fears, we continue lusting for assurances that our moral virtue compels us not to negotiate with terrorists, and simultaneously, that these very virtues also make our wholesale victory inevitable.  Like every other person on the planet, Americans prefer not to negotiate under duress, and we are right to dread it; the world can be exceedingly erratic and unstable.

Yet even if it was the illegitimacy or statelessness of terrorists that bothered us, and even if we really managed to boycott every negotiation with every party that has ever expressed contempt for the United States, then every other country in the world would continue to negotiate with their respective enemies, much as they do now, because they recognize that a country can have no power if it boycotts any negotiation where it is at more of a disadvantage than it would prefer to be.  Granted, if we are the only ones who suddenly refuse to negotiate with terrorists—assuming we can pull off such a feat—then the terrorists that America is determined to punish for their behavior will certainly learn that terrorizing Americans does not work.  But because everyone else would still negotiate with them, America could only sustain such a boycott as long as it maintained a completely isolationist policy.

If we are the only ones not negotiating, terrorists will not be cut off; we will be cut off.  And to put it gently, like any super-power would be, we Americans succeed at minding our own business only when we generously define everyone else’s home as “our business.”  Regardless, cutting ourselves off would be far worse than capitulating to terrorism, but thankfully, those are not the only two choices, as the nations accustomed to negotiated disappointments can attest.  Again, the point here is not simply that we should negotiate with terrorists, but rather, that we already do, and rightly so.

Accusations of American inconsistency and double standards notwithstanding, an equally consequential dissonance among the American people brews unscrutnized. That is, more important than how the US government treats other nations is how that government relates to us, its constituency.  Our government openly negotiates with our enemies but then tells us that we Americans refuse to “bow down to terrorism” because we are just and moral people.  And naturally, we love hearing this.  Both as westerners and as members of the most powerful nation in history, how could we not enjoy hearing this?

Yet regardless of whether we are righteous or not, insisting that we are makes it impossible for our government to tell us what we must hear: sometimes, despite our unprecedented power, we still have to make uncomfortable sacrifices to get what we want; and even worse, sometimes we will not be able to get what we want, no matter the sacrifices we might be willing to make.  If we are not prepared to admit this, then surely our elected leaders will never do so, because they know that Americans do not like being reminded that it takes a lot more work to remain the most powerful nation than it does to become the most powerful nation.

Consider, for instance, the American public’s bitter reaction to Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech, when he told Americans, “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns.”  And contrast this speech and its backfire with the glee we felt when President Bush insisted after 9/11 that the best thing we could do for our country would be to go shopping.

If we were powerful enough not to have to negotiate with our enemies while under duress, then rest assured, we would never would.  In fact, if we were that powerful (by nearly any definition of power) then we would never negotiate at all.  We would just take.  But we are not that powerful, and we need the willing assistance of millions across the globe to ensure our safety and prosperity.  We hate weakness, and we hate dependence.  But we also hate expensive gasoline, and we hate watching a genocide unfold on CNN.

Unaccustomed to fear and vulnerability, we have been unable to recognize that all of us, all over the world, have always been and will forever be more vulnerable than we would like.  Absent this self-awareness, we could only paint the “war on terror” as all-or-nothing—as unequivocally brave or cowardly.  And as a result, we cannot end this war touting anything less than the unconditional surrender of our enemy—an obviously misguided goal in asymmetrical warfare, especially if our enemies are so diffuse that they could never agree on anything, and certainly not their terms for surrender.  Hoping to avoid the eternal scorn of history books, President Bush will stay at war indefinitely, and long after his successor withdraws our troops, when we feel another ‘flukish’ sense of vulnerability in the future, our leaders will have exactly the same response, and the cycle will repeat itself.

But there is simply no need to view this war on terror as an all-or-nothing battle.  In fact, the only thing worse than not winning the war on terror (however that might look) would be not losing the war on terror, either.  Like the wars on poverty and drugs, the best we can hope for is a vain fizzle for this war, far from the spotlight.

We have to make compromises, we have to negotiate with our enemies—because they captured our soldier, and we want their oil; or because they killed our soldier, and they burned our oil.  On 9/11, our culture framed the familiar debate around morality so that any US president in George W. Bush’s position would have been incapable of considering his choices outside the Manichean dynamic of cowardice (doing nothing, tolerating evil) and unleashing hell (doing everything, over and again).  Without a middle ground, we will return to this battle, as though our sanity depended on it, again and again.

Whatever else we might need to win the war on terror, what we need most is humility—and not because we are moral people who should care about how we treat others, although that is true, as well.  No, we need humility for the simple reason that we cannot defeat terrorism by any definition of ‘defeat’ and any definition of ‘terrorism’.  We cannot defeat terrorism any more than we can defeat hatred or vulgarity.  It is simply out of our league, out of anyone’s league.  And the longer we tell ourselves that we are that powerful—that we are essentially invulnerable because we morally deserve to be invulnerable—the longer we will find ourselves hopelessly watching replays of our crumbling foundations, staring at the face of an enemy we don’t understand, and worse, locked in a battle with our own reflection, which we understand even less.

Voice of America
28 January 2008

After refusing to endorse the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations in December to negotiate with Iran and Syria about the fate of Iraq, Secretary Rice’s recent policy reversal was as startling as it was predictable. Only weeks ago, it had been staunch US policy not to submit to Iranian “extortion,” but, like it or not, there is simply no other way now to secure Iraq. If only it were that simple.

This is the moment Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been waiting for: US foreign policy will soon reflect the fact that the war in Iraq cannot be won with force, and that we will have to make concessions of some kind to salvage this failed mission. But at whose expense?

In the buildup to the US invasion of Iraq, the Israeli government quietly gave its blessing to the Bush administration, hoping, in return, that the US would extend the same courtesy to Israel when the time came to address the blossoming Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Naturally, any such implicit exchange depended entirely on the successful reconstruction of Iraq – by even the flimsiest definition of success. As many on the right and left predicted, the failure to replace the toppled Saddam Hussein with a leadership able to contain Tehran’s regional ambitions has hurt Israel far more than forgoing the invasion would have done.

Like Israel, the US had hoped invading Iraq would also intimidate Iran, in much the same way Libya was frightened. But the US military is utterly paralyzed in Iraq and, thus, unable to scratch Israel’s back with a sustained air campaign to delay, or destroy, Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Unable to protect both interests, the Bush administration has caved, and Condoleezza Rice will now have to plead with Israel not to antagonize Iran, fearing more Iranian pressure on US forces in Iraq. But with fears of a new Holocaust gaining momentum in Israel, the Jewish nation will be unable to make nice.

Worse still, not only does an exhausted and scattered US military currently preclude Washington from confronting Tehran, but now that President Bush intends to publicly engage Iran in talks about Iraq, the US will very soon be forced to make a burdensome choice: protect tangible, current US interests in Iraq, or address the far more worrisome, but later-to-be-fulfilled threat of an Iranian nuclear arsenal?

It is simply impossible for President Bush to address both concerns – it will be difficult enough to deal with either. Regardless, Tehran is eagerly waiting to cash in its chips, fantasizing about control over Iraq, or a nuclear deterrent. Either outcome would hurt US security interests, but both of them terrify our allies in the Middle East.

Of all the countries, it is particularly worrisome for Israel to be put in this position, given the common – and understandable – Israeli belief that the Jewish nation cannot rely on anyone but itself. And if history is any indication, whenever Israelis taste the bitterness of realpolitik, war inevitably follows.

To stave off such a disaster, a number of US legislators and presidential hopefuls have begun a campaign of damage control to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It is crucial to encourage American leadership to address these concerns in a very public, but also very precise, manner.

For example, employing deliberate and tactful rhetoric, Senator Hillary Clinton recently emphasized dialogue with Iran and Syria, but not for explicitly dovish reasons: “If we have to pursue potential action against Iran, then I want to know more about the adversary that we face. I want to understand better what the leverage we can bring to bear on them will actually produce.”

Likewise, Senator John McCain insisted that we recruit other nations to impose additional multilateral sanctions on Iran, outside the UN framework.

Unfortunately, neither tactic will achieve the desired goal, but such declarations still serve an important purpose: by emphasizing sanctions and Clinton-style reconnaissance, Western leaders, and especially US legislators, are giving President Bush the necessary time and political cover to quietly reach an informal arrangement with Iran. Secretary Rice’s latest initiative is only the latest installment in this process – inevitable in every way.

Specifically, Tehran would get more influence in Iraq, and the West would get verifiable termination of Iran’s nuclear weapons program. At this point, even if Washington were willing to allow an Iranian nuclear program in order to ensure a peaceful Iraq, it is doubtful Tehran would accept such an offer. Regional influence has been paramount to Tehran for generations, and, regrettably, the Bush administration played right into it from the beginning.

It is equally tempting to hope that the recent rumors of division within the Iranian leadership will prevent us from even needing to negotiate a deal, but any foreign policy should be tethered to more than merely blind hope.

Rest assured, cutting a deal now will not feel good. We are Americans. We hate deals. It would have been better to negotiate with Tehran immediately after ripping down Saddam’s statue from its foundations. But adults cannot always get their first choice. We overreached, and it’s now consolation time.

[View this Op-Ed at Middle East Times]

Israel’s conflict in the north with Hizbullah, Syria and (by extension) Iran is becoming increasingly ripe for a long-term resolution or containment, for the following reasons.

Why would Israel want to talk to any of its northern neighbors?

Hizbullah’s summer attack and continued ransom of two Israeli soldiers has led many Israelis to realize that the status quo is no longer automatically preferable to a settlement. And Israel’s inability to humiliate Hizbullah – as nothing less could be considered a victory – only reinforces the need to do something different.

How can Israel neutralize the northern threat?

Shiite and Hizbullah ministers in Lebanon are actively trying to force a collapse of the current anti-Syrian government by resigning in bulk, and possibly by killing popular anti-Syrian ministers. It is unclear if Prime Minister Fouad Siniora can weather this storm, but regardless, his government could never survive a political or military confrontation with Hizbullah.

Syria, on the other hand, is in the powerful position of being the only country (other than Israel) that shares a border with Lebanon. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has the wherewithal and lack of ideological constraints necessary to physically isolate Hizbullah in Lebanon. He merely lacks the motivation.

What would motivate Syria to cut off Hizbullah?

At its core, Syria is opportunistic. While Hizbullah is the ideological offspring of Iran, Syria merely serves as a channel between Iran and Hizbullah in the interest of money and power, not ideology and certainly not religion.

To ensure the operational capabilities of Hizbullah, Iran needs unimpeded access and supply lines through Syria and into southern Lebanon, which President Assad offers in order to get a free ride on Iran’s shoulders, as the popularity of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad only increases. And as always, Syria longs for a return of the Golan Heights, and the vast majority of Syrians are prepared to make sacrifices to get it back.

Neither the Israelis or Syrians are willing to put their big chips on the table (land and peace, respectively) until they have reason to believe they will not regret trusting each other. To this end, Assad’s diverse insecurities would give Israel the pretext to negotiate without immediately discussing the Golan Heights.

For instance, Damascus is facing a severe water shortage and needs billions of dollars of investment in infrastructure to transport water to Damascus, either from the Mediterranean Sea or the Euphrates River.

What’s more, Assad needs money (and a surge in international commerce) to strengthen his hold on power. Widespread resentment of his Alawite regime for its perceived corruption and ineptitude comes easily to a population that is nearly 75 percent Sunni and on the border with war-torn Iraq.

For various reasons, Arab nations have withdrawn their financial and political support for Syria, forcing Assad to become increasingly dependent on Iran—militarily, politically, and financially. This trend is not irreversible, but Assad has to embrace these trends or face a coup.

Or, the United States could step in.

Why would the United States engage Syria?

Constrained by a number of factors, President Bush could only engage Syria if it would benefit the US position in Iraq or limit the reach of Iran. Syria’s porous eastern border with Iraq is likely the easiest – and most used – method for Sunni fighters to enter Iraq and join the insurgency. The border is too long for the US forces to monitor, but Assad has the power to guard it, were he so inclined.

Furthermore, leading Syria away from Iran’s periphery would strike a blow to Tehran’s overall strides toward regional dominance. In fact, such a policy would be celebrated (and potentially rewarded) by the nervous Sunnis in Saudi Arabia.

By comparison, luring Syria should seem no more difficult than President Bush’s successful engagement with Libya and its leader, Moammar Qaddafi, who for decades was isolated for sponsoring terrorism.

Why would Israel negotiate with Syria?

Without a substantive mandate to disarm Hizbullah, the UN’s peacekeeping mission in southern Lebanon will only delay an inevitable reprise, spurned by whatever new and deadly weapons Hizbullah acquires in the meantime.

No country would be more threatened by a nuclear Iran than Israel, especially if Syria continues to act as a liaison between Iran and Hizbullah. But if handicapped by Syria, Iran could only pose a strategic nuclear threat to Israel with conventional nuclear missiles. Though far from ideal – especially in Israel – limiting Hizbullah’s technological reach is preferable to nothing at all.

Short of a nightmarish US invasion of Iran, the best Israel can hope for is to neutralize and starve Hizbullah’s supply lines and ideology out of existence. The same could be said for Hamas’ operation in Damascus – a chip that Assad would gladly hand over if it meant internal stability.

Besides, even skeptics of engagement recognize that Israel has a substantial strategic interest in preventing the overthrow of Syria’s ruling family, as their replacement or (more likely) his usurper would almost certainly do far worse than arming Hizbullah.

Admittedly, the scenario painted by this analysis is exceedingly rosy. It glosses over the nearly unthinkable Israeli decision to give up the Golan and asks for dramatic changes in policy from both Syria and the United States.

But Syria is vulnerable. Assad is allying with Iran’s fiery leader out of necessity, and he knows that Tehran will discard him as soon as he outlives his usefulness. That moment is approaching, and direct engagement with Syria is necessary to ensure Israel’s long-term security and to protect American interests in the Middle East.

[View this Op-Ed at Ynet]

While Georgia and Russia focus their efforts on addressing the potential for renewed conflict in South Ossetia, a series of provocative events and statements coming from Abkhazia should not be overlooked.  In fact, a number of mixed messages from Abkhazia are ripening the region’s political environment for advances toward peace.  Unfortunately, Tbilisi might be too preoccupied or temperamental to take notice.

For more than a decade, Abkhazia has been siphoning resources and support from Russia for no other reason than because Russia continues to offer them.  Ethnic Abkhazians have no more allegiance to Russia than they do to Georgia; after all, Abkhazia was also subject to the iron fist of Soviet rule.  Yet after breaking off from the rest of Georgia, Abkhazia desperately needed a pillar to rest on, and Russia provided that—again, not out of loyalty to Abkhazians, but merely to maintain its influence in the rapidly westernizing south Caucasus and Black Sea region.

Since then, officials in Sokhumi, the Abkhaz capital, have been juggling various agendas and realities by filtering them through a unique public relations paradigm.  In the long term, by nearly every calculation, it is very much in Abkhazia’s interest to reintegrate with Georgia, rather than reintegrate with Russia or become independent.  With Russia straying further from democratic norms, the colossus would only swallow and assimilate Abkhazia, much like it did to a number of Russian states just north of Abkhazia.  Georgia, on the other hand, is on a direct (albeit slow) path toward westernization, with all the economic and political benefits that accompany such a transition.

Sokhumi knows this, and in particular Sergei Bagapsh, the unrecognized Abkhazian president, sees that a healthy revival of his nation’s economy is tied to its reintegration with Georgia.  As a result, Bagapsh wants to be courted by eager Georgian officials to get as much as he can for his constituency.  Specifically, Bagapsh knows he has no bargaining power (in Tbilisi) without Russian backing, but Moscow would never support a regime intent on abandoning it for negotiations in Tbilisi.  As a result, Abkhazian officials have to express loyalty to both Russia and Georgia, but each in a different way.

Consider that in various interviews, Sergei Bagapsh threatened that Abkhazians would defend South Ossetia (Georgia’s other separatist region) if the nation was provoked.  He has also said that some of Georgia’s recent behavior amounts to “pure terrorism”, and warned that Abkhazia would defend its own borders if its Russian peacekeepers ever withdrew.  As if to prepare for such a scenario, it was quickly announced that more than 4000 Abkhazian reservists are to be called up by Sokhumi for a three-day training exercise on March 21—joined by two motor-rifle brigades, the air force, artillery and other special units.

Yet in other recent interviews, Bagapsh indicated that Tbilisi could lure Abkhazia back to the republic with Georgia’s “economy and wisdom, [not its] rattling swords.”  And unlike nearly all of his official Russian and Ossetian counterparts, Bagapsh even said he was confident that the conflicts in Georgia would not escalate.

Amidst these same developments, Abkhazia is making significant improvements to its infrastructure.  Free public transportation now connects the Gali region (on the Abkhaz side) with Zugdidi (on the Georgian side); after 13 years of darkness, four regions of Abkhazia are now powered by the recently renovated Adzyubzha substation; and an agreement was just reached on the rebuilding of the railway systems linking Russia with the Caucasus, through Abkhazia.  At the power plant’s reopening, Bagapsh said he was certain other Abkhaz assets would be renovated and that “more labor resources should be involved in the energy sector.”

One of Russia’s greatest assets in the region has been Abkhazia’s function as a mostly depopulated, undeveloped and isolated buffer between Russia and the south Caucasus.  So any substantive economic development in Abkhazia threatens Russia’s regional control.  Moscow, however, can tolerate these improvements, provided that Abkhazia continues to provide Russia with the most important kind of loyalty in Moscow’s lexicon: loud threats of violence against Georgia.  As a result, Abkhazian officials are quietly improving their state’s economy and infrastructure, hoping later to have enough bargaining power on its own that it will not need Russia to survive, or even thrive.  Only then would Sokhumi consider reintegrating with Georgia; but in the meantime, Abkhaz officials are barking at Georgia as loud as they can.

Quite remarkably, this strategy is working.  Bagapsh’s military threats against Tbilisi made great headlines throughout the Georgian and Russian media, while improvements in Abkhazia were hardly noticed.  In other words, Bagapsh’s military threats reassure Moscow, and his talk of the Georgian economy reassures Tbilisi.  Except Georgian officials are not getting this message; they only hear the threats.

The fact that Sokhumi is even mentioning a potential reintegration with Georgia is quite significant, if only because, in contrast, South Ossetian officials are explicitly demanding reintegration with Russia.  What’s more, Abkhazia is Moscow’s love-child—a tropical paradise and geopolitical asset to Russia’s regional influence.  And yet Bagapsh is still receiving Russian praise and official summons to visit the Kremlin, despite his subtle hints—through word and gesture—to Georgia.

In comparison, Moscow views South Ossetia as merely a useful thorn in Tbilisi’s side, something to keep Georgian officials busy and hamper their strides toward NATO and eventually EU membership.  Unlike Sokhumi’s balanced messages, South Ossetian officials are not showing any kind of loyalty to Georgia or its ideals.  More importantly, Abkhazia’s improving infrastructure—coupled with Bagapsh’s simultaneous statements about Georgia’s own potential for economic development—illustrate an opportunity (perhaps even an invitation) for Tbilisi to harness Abkhazia’s progressive momentum.

Tbilisi’s ability to entice Sokhumi (as Bagapsh indicated) is dependent on Georgia’s overall influence in Abkhazia, which becomes both cheap and easy as Abkhazia returns from its decade-long, incommunicado blackout.  Yet Georgian officials for years have continued an economic blockade on the Abkhaz border with Georgia, as a superficial expression of Georgia’s anger at the unruly breakaway province.  In the information age, however, blockading Abkhazia becomes less valuable and more detrimental to Georgia’s goals with every passing week.

With more electricity and transportation, Abkhazians could watch more televisions, listen to more radios, buy more western products and embrace more tenets of western culture.  For many societies this is not the case, but unlike Fidel Castro’s Cuba, for instance, Abkhazia is already showing a preference for western values and development—and without ever having been pummeled with liberal propaganda.  Compared to Russia, Georgia is in a much better position to encourage both Abkhazian development and culture simultaneously; they merely need to discover this for themselves.

If Georgia provides the television and radio programs, and minimizes the difficulties for Georgia-Abkhaz commercial ventures, Georgia can imprint on the Abkhaz consciousness a direct association between prosperity and western values.  But the longer Georgia waits, the weaker this association will be; and by the time Tbilisi finally opens the border, Abkhazia will have already developed its palate for the practice of independence, and not just its principles.