Pandora’s Box

This week the Iraqi parliament unceremoniously showed the US the door, and set a timeline for American troop withdrawal. It would seem that Iraq’s Prime Minister, Nuri al-Maliki, for all of his flaws, is no American stooge, having hammered this deal out over the course of a year in the teeth of the Bush administration. The passage of the timetable has been another punch in the gut for President Bush. An odd kind of despondency has overtaken George Bush in the last couple of weeks – already dubbed “the lamest of lame ducks” by the media and congressional Democrats, he has been firmly shunted to one side by first the financial crisis and then the incoming Obama administration. Moreover, Americans are desperate to get George Bush out the door. Some commentators have found themselves wondering out loud why he and Dick Cheney do not resign and leave Nancy Pelosi (Speaker of the House and therefore third in the line of succession) to lead a caretaker administration. The news from Iraq, then, is either the last nail in the coffin of Bush’s legacy or, perhaps, the single glint of hope in an otherwise catastrophically bad administration.

I cannot pretend to read George Bush’s mind and I do not know how he is reacting to the timetable for withdrawal (which stipulates a phased withdrawal of American troops from population centers and, finally, the whole country by 2011). But there is reason for him to have hope. Bush has always qualified his opposition to a timetable by saying that withdrawal should first and foremost be predicated on results on the ground, and there is a good deal of evidence that things in Iraq are getting better. Violence is significantly down (thought not down enough), sectarian tensions have been reduced (though thanks largely to displacement and ethnic cleansing resulting in fewer ethnically mixed areas), and finally, the political settlement that Democrats have been harping on about for years finally looks like something more than a distant glimmer on the horizon.

You’ll have to forgive me for being skeptical. The idea that the Maliki government will lead Iraq into a golden age of peace and democracy is silly; Maliki may not be an American stooge, but he’s not much of a progressive democrat, either, and corruption runs rife in the Iraqi government. In addition, the continued political alienation of the Sunni minority coupled with the belligerence of Shia activists like Muqtada al-Sadr (who rallied more than 10,000 people in Baghdad two weeks ago to protest American troops staying as long as 2011) means that Iraq is still a toxic mix of violently opposed interest groups with no history of democracy or compromise-making. On top of this, the Iraqi army and police are still essentially inadequate, and as American troops withdraw from the cities (a process which must be complete as soon as June), there is a very real risk that they will leave a power vacuum behind that can be filled only by ad-hoc sectarian militias. This was the experience of the disastrous British withdrawal from Basra, which left the city in the hands of a patchwork of armed groups somewhere between the mujahideen and the mob. The greater likelihood, perhaps, is that the vacuum will be filled by Muqtada al-Sadr and his Iranian backers – no more palatable a situation.

Let us not forget that the risk of Iraq descending into chaos is still very real. No deal on the distribution of oil wealth has been struck, nor has the status of Kirkuk been settled, both major obstacles to any political progress. That the Sunnis have, thus far, been engaged in the political process has been perhaps the greatest step towards stability – if the Sunnis for any reason decide that their cooperation with the government has got them nothing and they bolt, the situation could deteriorate drastically. If the Kurds don’t get a settlement they like on Kirkuk, or if the situation in the rest of the country deteriorates, an independent Kurdistan could become a real possibility – leading to Turkish military intervention and a region-wide war.

The specter of the protracted and bloody disintegration of another welded-together, pseudo-federal state – the former Yugoslavia – is haunting Iraq. It took a decade of violence, genocide and foreign intervention to get the various constituent nationalities of Yugoslavia to stop killing each other, and the process is not yet finished – Kosovo’s independence is still disputed, and Bosnia is on the verge of breaking apart. The dismemberment of Iraq, should it happen, has the potential to be no better.

If sectarian conflicts around the world have taught us anything, it’s that as long as security is not ensured, a political solution is entirely impossible: so long as people are dying, no one is willing to sit down and talk. For the moment, the security situation in Iraq is at the best that it’s been in years. But America, whose troops are the only force keeping order in lieu of a functioning Iraqi army and police force, is overtired and underequipped. Given that no one else could conceivably step up to the plate (with the possible and terrifying exception of Iran), the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq could be not the victory that the Bush administration hopes for, but rather the next step in the unraveling of Iraq.

The Fall and Rise (and Fall and Rise and Fall and Rise) of Hillary Clinton

As the rumors of what role, if any, Hillary Clinton will play in the Obama administration trickled out into the mainstream media, culminating in The Guardian's scoop, subsequently confirmed, that Clinton had been offered, and had accepted, the role of Secretary of State, the commentariat rejoiced in the knowledge that, once again, the Clintons would be center-stage in public life once again - meaning, presumably, a never-ending mine of drama and scandal to be exploited by all. Veteran Hillary-Haters have been gleefully harping on the discrepancy between the Clintons’ notoriously self-centered and attention-grabbing political style and the two-word phrase that has been the mantra of the Obama team from the very beginning: No Drama. Obama’s fiercest partisans, especially those on the far left and in the blogosphere, who rejoiced at Clinton’s primary defeat, have raised an incredulous chorus not of “Yes, We Can,” but rather “No, I Can’t Believe He Just Did.”

In the meantime, Hillary-lovers have been on Cloud Nine. Having long since grown accustomed to the emotional roller-coaster that is Senator Clinton’s political career, we are reveling in what would appear to be yet another dramatic reversal of fortune. The wails of anguish from the anti-Hillary tribes on both sides of the political spectrum fills us not so much with angst as an acute case of Schadenfreude – any true Clinton supporter knows that two-thirds of the fun is watching people on all ends of the political spectrum squirm with discomfort – and, yes, jealousy – at the knowledge that, once again, Hillary has come out on top.

Finally, and most satisfyingly, the installation of Senator Clinton in what is effectively the number-three slot in the Obama administration represents an enormous triumph for those of us who supported her from the very beginning. For us it is the moment that we have been waiting for since Obama’s primary victory last summer – the moment when Obama would finally recognize the enormous talent and tenacity of his erstwhile rival, and offer her the kind of meaningful power that we know she so richly deserves. For a lot of Clinton supporters Obama’s decision not to seriously consider her for the Vice Presidency was a hard blow. Appointing her to Secretary of State will go a long, long way towards healing that wound. But, fervent Hillarista that I am, I have always tried to look at the Secretary-in-Waiting with an objective and critical eye, and to my mind it is inescapable truth that the greatest failures of Hillary Clinton’s career – most clearly healthcare reform and her run for the presidency – represent fundamental flaws in her way of working that, to me, made her unacceptable as vice-president and potentially worrying as Secretary of State.

It is essentially a commonplace in political discourse today that the reason for the failure of President Clinton’s healthcare reform initiative in 1993 was that the project was badly mishandled by his wife. Bill Clinton, breaking with all precedent governing the role of the First Lady, put Hillary in charge of his project to introduce universal healthcare to the United States. Hillary’s proposals were drafted in utmost secrecy, and she personally evinced a politically tone-deaf stubbornness that resulted in a hugely complex, unworkable and unsatisfying compromise that was simultaneously too ambitious and far too cowardly. The bill was dead on arrival, and “Hillarycare” made universal healthcare politically untouchable in the United States for fifteen years.

I am too young to remember the failure of the Clinton healthcare initiative, but Senator Clinton’s recent defeat in the primaries I had the privilege of following like a hawk for the better part of two years. In my analysis Clinton’s bid fell victim to organizational incompetence, poor planning, and rigidity of thinking on the part of her campaign staff. The irony of the fact that Clinton was running on a platform of experience and managerial know-how is telling: the fact of the matter is that Clinton’s remarkable knowledge and penetrating intellect do not necessarily translate into the ability to run an organization well, and many of the flaws of her campaign – constant damaging leaks, valuing loyalty over competence, stubbornness and inflexibility – are flaws that were evident at the time of the healthcare debacle and that could very well be brought to the fore when Clinton is put in charge of one of the most powerful bureaucracies in the United States government.

Being a Clinton supporter often means getting used to disappointment. That Hillary Clinton will bring new insight to American foreign policy I have no doubt. That I am glad she will have a high-profile role in the Obama administration goes without saying. But that aside, I do worry. Hillary Clinton’s political life has been characterized by extreme peaks and troughs. This appointment is a peak. But if history is any guide, that peak will not last long.

Republican Rebranding

Some would have it that we are witnessing the collapse of the conservative movement in the United States. Bloggers and pundits are talking about a predicament akin to the one faced by the British Conservative Party after Labor’s 1997 landslide – reduction of the party to a radical right-wing rump, resulting a decade or more in the wilderness. It would certainly seem that the Republicans are in trouble – they got hammered in 2006 and 2008, and 2010 probably isn’t going to go so well for them either. President Bush has left no obvious successor, and the financial crisis has made nonsense of the Reagan revolution. To make things worse, America is finally, finally, tilting to the left, or so we are led to believe.

The suggestion, though, that the Republicans of 2008 are in the same boat as the Tories of 1997 rests on shaky ground. For one thing, Barack Obama beat John McCain only by about 7% – a far cry from the 13% lead that Labor won over the Conservatives in ’97. The Conservatives lost about half of their seats in the House of Commons, in the end amounting to a little more than 25% of MPs. By comparison, Republicans will hold about 40% of the seats in both houses of the 111th Congress, and denied Democrats a much-craved 60-seat majority in the Senate. A defeat it was, but 2008 was not a rout.

Needless to say, if the Republicans have not yet been reduced to a rump of right-wing old White men, they are certainly a party at risk. The demographic groups that voted for McCain include: Whites, over-60s, the most-religious, and rural voters. Those demographics don’t look good. To top it off, the Iraq War could well have cost Republicans an entire generation of voters.

Again, many people have been looking to the Tories for a model of how the Republican Party can beat the demographics and make itself electable again. Under leader David Cameron, the young, charismatic former PR exec who has been running the party since 2005, the party has supposedly reinvented itself, tackling environmental issues and climate change head-on, dropping opposition to gay rights and civil partnerships, and generally promoting what Cameron, channeling George Bush, refers to as “compassionate conservatism.” The result has been a thumping lead over Labor in opinion polls for quite some time. While the credit crunch has reduced the trend to some degree, the Conservatives are still polling about 9% ahead of Labor, enough to give Cameron the air of a Prime Minister-in-waiting.

The problem, though, with the Tory model is that it would be ill-suited to today’s Republican Party. The Republicans have long been much further to the right than their Conservative cousins across the Atlantic, and are cemented to their Evangelical Christian base, for whom a moderate position on issues like gay rights and abortion is quite literally heresy. To abandon this base would be electoral suicide. A little-known fact is that overall turnout in 2008 was almost the same as it was in 2004. This is because the enormous numbers of enthusiastic, new Democratic voters were canceled out by all of the disappointed Republicans who decided to stay home. Compare this to ’04, where George Bush won almost entirely on the basis of his get-out-the-vote effort among the most conservative Republicans, and you’ll see the problem the Republicans face.

The page the Republicans should take out of the Tory playbook, however, is their populist fiscal policy. One of Cameron’s first promises as opposition leader was that any Conservative government would match Labor’s spending plans – meaning no cuts to popular social services like the National Health Service. Bush’s big-government failure can mostly be chalked up to the creation of the behemoth that is the Department of Homeland Security; the unpopularity of his fiscal policy is traceable more to his attempt to privatize Social Security and dismantle Medicare. A socially conservative, fiscally populist Republican Party will be friendlier to minorities and the urban poor, and can appeal not just to Whites and conservative Christians, but also to Hispanics and even, conceivably, Blacks. This, indeed, was the coalition that defeated Prop 8 in California (a state Obama won by 24 points). 2008 changed America, but it didn’t change it that much. Perhaps social issues like abortion and gay marriage will hold less water in future than they have in the past, but a general social conservatism has long characterized the United States, and offers the Republicans the broadest appeal across all demographics.

Sure enough, conservatives are now seeing their greatest chance of reinvigorating the party to be the wrangling over President-elect Obama’s future Supreme Court nominees. Moreover, it is much safer for the Republicans to jettison their fiscally conservative wing than their socially conservative wing – in point of fact, it has practically happened already. Once that’s over and done with, all the Republicans may need is a little bit of rebranding.

Election Night Special

It’s been a good couple of weeks for the press to take umbrage. First there was Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’ prank calls to actor Andrew Sachs: a scandal positively stinking of synthetic outrage spewed forth by people who had never listened to Brand’s program in their lives, and who after this will certainly never listen to it again. This week the window of potential scandal was truncated by the American elections, but the chattering classes still managed to strike gold with not one but two race rows in the same week.

The first was Jeremy Paxman’s truly surreal interview with rapper Dizzee Rascal on a spectacularly vapid special election edition of Newsnight that aired on Wednesday. During the interview, Paxman, inexplicably addressing his guest as “Mr. Rascal,” asked the rapper at one point if he felt British. The very fact that such a question was posed to a Black Briton was latched onto as racist and patronizing. Forget the fact that the subject had been broached by Paxman’s co-interviewee, Baroness Amos, not incidentally Britain’s most successful Black politician. Never mind too that she was actually making a relevant point about the exclusion of ethnic minorities from any British sense of national identity and the potential for problems this can cause.

The second race row of the week was chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission Trevor Phillips’ comment that in Britain, a politician like Barack Obama would face “institutional resistance” and “systemic bias” that might inhibit his chances of success. Phillips was promptly misquoted in the press as having referred to “institutional racism” and as a consequence was rhetorically hanged, drawn and quartered in a Labor Party press statement. Again, no attention was paid to the fact that he was making what is actually quite a relevant point, that the more centralized nature of the British constitution means that it is harder for an outsider like Obama to advance to a position of leadership, for reasons of politics as well as of race.

To my mind, the media's reaction to both of these incidents is a shame because they represent a missed opportunity. For two years now the media in the UK have been slavishly following every aspect of the American elections with at least as much enthusiasm as the American press itself, the underlying assumption being, presumably, that whatever happens in America is by its very nature interesting and relevant in Britain today. I don’t think I’m the only one who thinks that this is slightly silly.

As an American I have long found the fixation on my country evinced by the British press to be both bizarre and slightly discomforting. But this failure to find a British angle on the American election is a particularly unfortunate oversight when, as Amos and Phillips have pointed out, Obama's election raises interesting, relevant and even troubling questions about Britain today (even beyond the question, frequently posed, of why British politics is so comparatively boring). Yes, America has made a huge leap forward this week. But not only is it okay to ask whether something like that could happen in Britain – it is absolutely essential.

The press’ fixation on America and its problems, especially as regards race issues, often serves to gloss over problems of race relations here in the UK. American journalist and long-time foreign correspondent Keith Richburg writes in The Observer today that Europe’s concentration on America’s race problems allows Europeans to pretend that their own race problems do not exist. We do not have America’s race problems, the argument essentially goes, therefore we do not have race problems. This is galling not only because it is finger-wagging and hypocritical, but because Europe’s race problems so desperately need addressing.

A much more worthwhile use of Jeremy Paxman’s hour-long Newsnight special might have been a look at the question that, I think, is at the back of many people’s minds on this side of the pond – in today’s hyper-diverse, multicultural, progressive Britain, why hasn’t what happened in the United States on Tuesday happened yet here? And, perhaps much more importantly, why do we have the odd, nagging feeling that it won’t happen here for a very long time?