Kissing Up to India

It looks like Nixon White House counselor John Dean is now seeing a cancer growing on the Bush presidency. At the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing yesterday on President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping, the Watergate icon suggested, “Hopefully the Senate will not sit by while even more serious abuses unfold before it.” Ouch!

While Bush is certainly unlike Nixon on domestic policy, they do seem to have some similarities on the foreign policy front and I am not talking about the Vietnam-Iraq comparisons that have been made almost from the start of the Iraq war. It’s their shared obsession with Pakistani dictators that confounds me.

Some political pundits have compared Bush’s recent trip to India with Nixon’s groundbreaking visit to China in 1972. However, back then Nixon wanted to befriend China as a counter to the Soviet Union, which happened to be cozying up to India. Nixon thus also chose Pakistan over India and, as the BBC reported last June, “developed a ‘special relationship’ with Pakistan's then military dictator, General Yahya Khan.”

Official documents released last year from that era also reveal a strong personal distaste that both, Nixon and Kissinger had for Indians in general. Here is another snippet from that same BBC News story:

One key conversation transcript comes from the meeting between President Nixon and Mr. Kissinger in the White House on 5 November 1971, shortly after a meeting with the visiting Indira Gandhi.

“We really slobbered over the old witch,” says President Nixon.

“The Indians are bastards anyway,” says Mr. Kissinger.

Ouch! As a first generation Indian-American that revelation stung me. Kissinger is revered like a foreign policy god, but I remember him being flummoxed by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s diplomatic panache and political skills during the Bangladesh crisis. The same “old witch” ran circles around Kissinger back then as he desperately tried to save Pakistan from humiliation and inhibit the creation of Bangladesh.

Nevertheless, Nixon did make a stark choice – he clearly preferred Pakistan’s military dictatorship to India’s then fledgling democracy. In contrast, President Bush appears to be hedging his bets on the subcontinent – opting for a new strategic relationship with India while continuing to coddle yet another Pakistani military dictator, General Musharraf. This wily leader manages to simultaneously “talk the talk” about Pakistan’s assistance to the United States in its “war on terror”, while he continues to hedge his bets on the future of the Taliban. One can’t imagine that Bush and Condi Rice are naïve enough not to recognize this transparent behavior. I can almost visualize a post-9/11 White House conversation transcript being released in 2025 that reads as follows:

“We really slobbered over that two-timing armchair general,” President Bush remarks.

“The Pakistanis are idiots anyway,” Condi Rice adds.

Ouch! In any event, after 9/11 President Bush probably recognized that it would be impossible for the western world to contain, what Jimmy Carter recently referred to as, a “Pandora’s box of nuclear proliferation” already in progress. Bush found out that this box had been blown open by Pakistan several years prior to 9/11, when their top nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan, began selling nuclear technology to Iran, Libya, and North Korea. In fact, this Pandora’s Box had actually begun a slow leak after the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War.

By negotiating what President Carter called in the same Post article a “dangerous deal with India”, President Bush is strategically trying to rope in a growing economic and nuclear power on to the Judeo-Christian side of what is quite clearly becoming a political divide along religious lines. Also, it is highly unpredictable as to which side of this religious fault line the old “evil empire” and the remnants of the communist world will come out in the long term. I would therefore counter that not consummating Bush’s nuclear deal with India would be dangerous to the lasting interests of the United States.

Not surprisingly then Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, co-chairman and chief executive of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, also believes that Bush’s nuclear deal with India would harm the “United States' vital interest” in preventing nuclear proliferation. Surely Senator Nunn must recognize that India has lived without US civilian nuclear technology for over thirty years. There is no reason, aside from its burgeoning energy needs, that India would have a need for US nuclear power reactors. Irrespective of the outcome of this deal, India will continue to honor the principle of nuclear non-proliferation without being an actual signatory to the NPT.

The United States has a lot more to lose from a business and global security standpoint than India, if this deal were not consummated. I would much rather see my native country dependent on the US, than either Iran or Russia, for its long term energy needs. Besides, with the US economy increasingly reliant on communist China, a diversification in our strategic relationships portfolio is long overdue. The new US-India relationship could well turn out to be the only significant foreign policy achievement of the Bush presidency.

So while prominent Democrats are trying to put the kibosh on President Bush’s nuclear deal with India, some renowned Republicans are supporting it. After Dr. Henry A. Kissinger’s old anti-Indian sentiments were exposed last year, he quickly apologized for branding all Indians with a broad brush in such harsh terms. His bona fides were further established recently in an article entitled, "Anatomy of a partnership” that appeared in the International Herald Tribune on March 10, 2006. In a strong endorsement of President Bush’s India policy, the man who once doubted the legitimacy of my birth concluded:

In a period preoccupied with concerns over terrorism and the potential clash of civilizations, the emerging cooperation between the two great democracies, India and the United States, introduces a positive and hopeful perspective.

As the old saying goes “from your lips to God’s ears” – kissing up never felt sweeter – Amen!

Return of the King – an Exit from Iraq

In his March 2nd column in The Washington Post, George Will quoted President Bush as having said, “Our strategy in Iraq is that the Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down.” Therein lies the problem because the President is confusing strategy with objective. Training Iraqi security forces has often been mentioned as a strategy to meet the President’s objective of getting Iraqis to “stand up”. But then our tactics to execute that strategy have not been very effective either, as we learned recently that the number of “combat-ready Iraqi brigades” had dropped from one to zero.

Mr. Will also quoted Winston Churchill’s dire warning to Britons in 1940 that “Wars are not won by evacuations.” There is no way anyone, Americans or Iraqis, can win in Iraq by the evacuation of coalition forces at this point in time. Nonetheless, one hopes that we don’t have to witness “déjà vu all over again” – a helicopter airlift of Ambassador Khalilzad from the roof of our embassy in Baghdad in the near future. It’s more likely that a reminder of that infamous 1975 video from Saigon could force the Bush Administration away from what Mr. Will calls their “rhetoric of unreality”.

With the incessant media chatter about the likelihood of an impending civil war in Iraq, I was not the least surprised to read in yesterday’s New York Times about “The Conservative Epiphany”. In his column, Paul Krugman writes:

“Born-again Bush-bashers like Mr. Bartlett and Mr. Sullivan, however churlish, are intellectually and morally superior to the Bushist dead-enders who still insist that Saddam was allied with Al Qaeda, and will soon be claiming that we lost the war in Iraq because the liberal media stabbed the troops in the back. And reporters understandably consider it newsworthy that some conservative voices are now echoing longstanding liberal critiques of the Bush administration.”

Mr. Krugman concludes his liberal broadside with this incredulous question, “It's still fair, however, to ask people like Mr. Bartlett the obvious question: What took you so long?”

I would imagine the answer to that question is rather superfluous, since Mr. Bartlett is in the midst of peddling his new book, “Impostor: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy”. It didn’t take me any time at all because I have been critiquing Bush Administration policies in real time throughout the President’s first term. In fact, I was constantly haranguing the media for not doing its oversight job, a role which a supine Republican Congress pretty much abdicated after 9/11. You can read all about my lonely crusade in “The Bush Diaries: A Citizens Review of the First Term” published by iUniverse in July 2005.

Also in yesterday’s New York Times, Thomas Friedman ("Mr. Nasty, Brutish and Short-Tempered") came up with a great idea for resolving the impasse in Iraq. However, instead of Ambassador Khalilzad and Vice President Cheney playing a good cop-bad cop routine at what Mr. Friedman calls “a national reconciliation conference”, I think that the U.S. delegation should actually pull off a “bad cop-badder cop” number. Such a meeting would surely produce desired results if Dick “Darth Vader” Cheney brought Saddam “Lord Voldemort” Hussein along to the party. All Iraqi factions, including the Sunnis, would quickly get in line – if they realized that an imminent U.S. withdrawal could herald the return of the king?

In the past few months, Don Imus (host of “Imus in the Morning” radio program) and Chris Matthews (host of “The Chris Matthews Show” and “Hardball”) have been rather facetiously touting the return of Saddam Hussein as our exit strategy from Iraq. Well, I had promoted a similar idea, quite seriously, in a letter to the Post on April 25, 2004. This letter, in response to an article by Robin Wright entitled, “U.S. Moves to Rehire Some From Baath Party, Military” appears in my book, “The Bush Diaries” (pg. 162) and is reproduced below:

“After reading Robin Wright's report, one wonders if the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, might extend his “re-Baathification” strategy to include a “humbled” Saddam Hussein at some point of time in the near future. Outrageous and heretical as this suggestion might seem, we might recall that during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, the Reagan Administration not only supported Saddam Hussein but also supplied him with some of the raw materials for his chemical and biological programs. With the current situation in Iraq spiraling out of control, Mr. Bremer could conceivably seek the assistance of a “de-programmed” Saddam Hussein to restore law and order in the country? The Bush Administration could justify this action on several grounds:

• Without WMD, Saddam Hussein is no longer a threat to the United States or his neighbors
• Saddam Hussein is the only one who can prevent Iraq from breaking up into parts ala Yugoslavia
• Saddam Hussein is our best containment-cum-insurance policy against a virulent Iran
• Saddam Hussein was never aligned with Al Qaeda, which is our real enemy
• Re-Baathification, with Saddam Hussein back in the saddle, provides us the quickest, cleanest, and most inexpensive exit strategy out of Iraq

If one thinks this is a far-fetched scenario, which patriotic American would have believed even six months ago that we would resume business dealings with Libya's Moammar Gaddafi!”

This letter was written almost two years ago! The bitter truth is that it contains a strategy that might still work and is probably a more effective one than Thomas Friedman’s proposed shot gun approach with Dick Cheney.

Shot Gun Approach

In his Post column “Quell Quailgate” dated February 17, 2006 Charles Krauthammer writes, “Something happened involving the vice president that was interesting and unusual but of no great significance beyond that.” I wish the rest of us could be as sanguine about this infamous shooting incident. Mr. Krauthammer concludes wistfully that “Cheney got a judgment call wrong” and that’s all there was to it.

However, Mr. Krauthammer must recall that this is the same vice president, who assured us three days prior to the start of the war that “we will be greeted as liberators” in Iraq. Over two years later, despite a still-raging insurgency in Iraq, Vice President Cheney famously declared it was “in the last throes”. One wonders how many more such Cheney judgment calls it will take, before other conservatives “get religion” as Peggy Noonan did a couple of days ago. Ms Noonan concluded in her Wall Street Journal op-ed column that

“Mr. Bush may feel in time that he has reason to want to put in a new vice president”.

Meanwhile on the liberal side of town Eugene Robinson erred only slightly, when he wrote in his Post column on Tuesday that “out-of-control is the way this whole administration operates: Ready, fire, aim.” I believe that it’s actually been more like: Fire, aim, not ready! We can’t forget that the Bush Administration took a shot gun approach into Iraq as well – in the misguided belief that their “shock and awe” strategy did not require a need to “aim”. Three years later, the Bush Administration has discovered that the American public is “not ready” for what they are now calling a “long war” in Iraq.

In fact, this friendly fire, shot gun approach has proven to be a metaphor for the Bush Administration’s handling of major domestic crises as well. Senior citizens have been peppered by a confusing array of options with the Administration’s new prescription drug plan – it’s apparent now that no one was ready for it. The hodge-podge of the Administration’s post-Katrina efforts included cash payments, hotel stays, extensions, evictions, vacant trailer lots, etc. – yet, almost six months later, New Orleans is still a mess and the new hurricane season is barely four months away.

Finally, a word about the vice president’s judgment in selecting Fox News to tell his side of the shooting story – Mr. Cheney was responsible for sending our soldiers into a war where they were hardly greeted as liberators, Mr. Cheney even shot a dear friend in the face, yet Mr. Cheney lacks the chutzpah to host a more open national press conference? With their record of warrantless surveillance, a Pravda-like reliance on Fox News, and a never-ending “war on terror” deteriorating into a modern day crusade – I am tempted to conclude with a Woodwardian warning “be afraid, be very afraid”. But instead, I can only hope that this “friendly fire” incident is a wake-up call to the larger American public. We can no longer be duped by this Administration’s trump card – crying wolf on "national security" whenever it’s convenient to mask its larger failings – that shot gun approach is only for the birds!

The Other Side of US Economic Policy

The Bush Administration keeps touting the strength of the US economy, which in 2005 saw annual GDP growth of 3.5% and a 15% hike in federal revenues over 2004 to a record $2.15 trillion. In today’s Washington Post, Paul Blustein’s “Trade Gap Hits Record For 4th Year In a Row” tells only a part of the other side of this story – at what cost has this “economic success” been achieved?

The US trade deficit almost doubled from $370 billion in 2000 to $725 billion in 2005, while the national debt increased 44% from $5.7 trillion to $8.2 trillion during the same period. The US personal savings rate was -0.5% in 2005, which means that Americans spent more than they earned after taxes – this is the first time that this has happened since the Great Depression. According to the Chicago Tribune, “The savings rate has been negative for an entire year only twice before, in 1932 and 1933.” So not only is our government living beyond its means, now “we the people” are doing so too!

Meanwhile China continues to eat our lunch on the economic front. Recently the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported, “China's economy grew by a red-hot 9.9 per cent in 2005, the Chinese government announced Wednesday – enough to overtake Britain as the fourth biggest economy in the world, after the U.S., Japan, and Germany.” However, as the CBC noted, “Exports surged 28.4 per cent to $878 billion and helped to lead China to record a trade surplus of almost $118 billion.” To make matters worse, Mr. Blustein points out in today’s Post article, “the mounting U.S. deficit with China, which rose 24.5 percent to $201.6 billion last year, the biggest gap the United States has ever posted with a single country.”

If only that were all we had to worry about – Peter S. Goodman of The Washington Post had warned last month that China’s “foreign currency reserves swelled by more than one-third last year to a record $819 billion”. Mr. Goodman also notes that “Traditionally, China has sunk three-fourths of its reserves into U.S.-dollar-denominated investments, such as U.S. Treasury bills.” Is there any doubt as to how easy it has become for China to adversely impact US monetary policy? Never mind, how increasingly difficult it has become for the US to convince China to allow its currency to float!

Finally, we have all heard of the saying, “Like father, like son”. In the geopolitical context, this can be interpreted to mean, “Like nation, like people”. The day after Mr. Goodman’s story appeared in the Post, the Chinese Embassy in the US put out a news release stating “The country had a record 14 trillion yuan (US$1.7 trillion) in personal savings by the end of 2005”.

Candidate Bush had campaigned in 2000 that he would treat China as a “strategic competitor” and not as a “strategic partner” – which is the way he claimed then that President Clinton had dealt with China throughout his presidency. Ironically, President Bush’s own economic policy has now pretty much tied up his hands and severely limited his options in effecting any dramatic change in the overall nature of our relationship with China. It’s the other side of US economic policy that the Bush Administration never talks about!