If there is any precedent for such an "Explanation of Vote," the precedents must be few. The only difference between Obama's position and the U.N. resolution was that the resolution would have backed such words by enforceable action. "Set honor in one eye," says Brutus in Julius Caesar, "and death i' th'other, and I will look on both indifferently." The embarrassment of the U.N. vote was that Obama set justice in one eye, and a presidential campaign in the other, and the world was in a position to see which way he turned.
Diplomacy and Counterterrorism
Raymond Davis is the American operative in Pakistan, officially described at first as a "technical adviser," who on January 25th interrupted a drive in the city of Lahore to shoot and kill two Pakistanis. Davis took care to photograph the corpses and called in a back-up jeep for help, which, in its rush, knocked over and killed a third Pakistani. Before he could get back to the U.S. consulate, Davis was arrested by the local police.
On February 20th, the Guardian journalist Declan Walsh confirmed the suspicion which the strange incident had immediately spurred that Davis was a CIA agent. The Pakistani government was aware of his identity, Walsh reported, and that was why it had resisted an Obama administration demand that Davis be accorded diplomatic immunity. The following day, the New York Times revealed that it had known who Davis's employer was for some time, but -- at the request of the White House and the State Department -- had refrained from publishing an accurate account of the shooting and its aftermath.
Obama's cup of embarrassment in February was close to running over, but at least he now had a newspaper to share his embarrassment. Why did the Times suppress the truth about Raymond Davis? For reasons of empire. After all, the facts were known all over Pakistan and had been published in the Pakistani press.
In obeying a White House request to keep them out of the American press, the Times (along with the Washington Post and Associated Press) was protecting not Davis himself but a government definition of "tact," while fostering the ignorance of American citizens about the actions of our own government. The protocol of the press under imperial rules -- as the British discovered in the Boer War and Americans have come to know in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan -- is simple and endlessly repeatable: power comes before truth except in cases where the truth is conspicuous.
Journalists are now learning what historians have known for many years -- an agent like Davis is an instrument of a policy that was wrong from the start. For Pakistan has always existed in a state of deep and partly justified paranoia regarding India. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, Pakistani leaders came to consider it a requirement of "strategic depth" that Afghanistan be a reasonably stable neighbor with a compliant government. From the moment in late 2001 when, to spare an investment of ground forces, the Bush administration threw in its lot with the warlords of the Northern Alliance in its invasion of Afghanistan, that policy was sent awry. From then on, Pakistan's leadership would regard the American presence as essentially unstable and counter it in every way consistent with simulated friendship.
Practical wisdom about these matters has never been hard to come by. It shows in the secret dispatches of the foreign service, which we can now read, thanks to another embarrassment: the release of secret diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks. In a cable from Islamabad, dated September 23, 2009, for example, the U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson sent the following piece of sound advice to the Obama administration:
"In response to queries posed by the National Security Council, Embassy Islamabad believes that it is not possible to counter al-Qaeda in Pakistan absent a comprehensive strategy that 1) addresses the interlinked Taliban threat in Afghanistan and Pakistan, 2) brings about stable, civilian government in Afghanistan, and 3) reexamines the broader role of India in the region. As the queries presuppose, the ending of Pakistani establishment support to terrorist and extremist groups, some Afghan-focused and some India-focused, is a key element for success. There is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance levels in any field as sufficient compensation for abandoning support to these groups, which it sees as an important part of its national security apparatus against India. The only way to achieve a cessation of such support is to change the Pakistan government's own perception of its security requirements."
Among the most remarkable features of Ambassador Patterson's warning were her repeated mention of India and her allusion to the conflict over Kashmir: scarcely mentioned in official American descriptions of what the U.S. is doing in Pakistan. And here a further embarrassment appears in the background to lengthen the shadow of the Davis incident. The cables show that the Obama administration either is not using, or is not sharing with the American people, the most elementary knowledge of the complexity of a commitment it inherited from its predecessor and now has greatly broadened. These cables suggest that a rhetorical policy, not just of simplification but of conscious distortion, has guided Obama's frequent iterations that "the enemy" in Pakistan is al-Qaeda. It would be as fair to say that the American enemy in Pakistan is Pakistan, and Pakistan's relationship to India, and our own relationship to both.
Embarrassments Are Sacrosanct
Even in the depths of mortification, a lower depth still threatens Washington, thanks to our double image of ourselves. As the sole superpower, we want to be everywhere (and everywhere in charge); but as the best hope of democracy, we must be seen to be nowhere (and nowhere in charge). You might suppose that the greatest threat to such a double image lies in the possibility of the endless documentary on American foreign policy and America's wars being offered by WikiLeaks. In fact, the government's reactions to WikiLeaks have posed a far greater danger -- not to America the superpower, but to the constitutional America in whose name it acts.
The deeper embarrassments of officialdom can easily assume the shape of patriotic outrage. Newt Gingrich, for example, has said that Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, should be treated as an "enemy combatant"; Sarah Palin has claimed he should be pursued just as we pursue the leaders of al-Qaeda and the Taliban; Peter King has recommended that WikiLeaks be classified as a terrorist organization. These statements were predictable, considering from whom they came.
It was not to be expected that an American secretary of state would skirt the edge of the same vigilante sentiments. Yet Hillary Clinton did just that when, embarrassed at the exposure of the slack security of the foreign service and the peculiar frankness of its portraits, she said that WikiLeaks had launched "an attack on the international community." The community of the people of the world, or the community of secret governments and secret armies? To be an enemy of the latter would make Assange an honest journalist. To be an enemy of the former would make him a terrorist.
Attorney General Eric Holder, confronted by the same ferocious descriptions of Assange, and himself embarrassed -- since people were looking to his department to prosecute, even though it was not clear Assange had broken a law -- resolved to discover a law that could be attached to a penalty whose appropriateness he appeared to have decided in advance. "There's a real basis," said Holder vaguely, "there's a predicate for us to believe that crimes have been committed here."
Was the vice president, too, embarrassed when he spoke of Assange as "a high-tech terrorist"? He should have been. If there is a weapon of high-tech terror that is feared in the world today, it is the drones that -- as part of the CIA's covert war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands -- now regularly fire missiles into houses to kill presumed enemies of the U.S., along with anyone standing nearby. And if there is a world leader known for his advocacy of drone warfare, it is Vice President Biden.
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