Crawling from the Wreckage (50 page)

There is already a world administration of sorts, in the form of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and so on, but it is all in the hands of governments—and some governments are much more equal than others, so none of the
global institutions ever acts against the will of the powerful. (Occasionally they refuse to approve some lawless deed of the powerful, as the United Nations did briefly over the American invasion of Iraq, but that is all.) And nowhere in all the layers of bureaucrats and diplomats is there any direct representation of ordinary people.

And so, only sixty-two years after the foundation of the
UN
, the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly (
UNPA
) launches this week in five continents. It has the signatures of 377 members of national parliaments from seventy countries, six former foreign ministers/secretaries, and various other international luminaries like Václav Havel, Günter Grass and former
UN
secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali. But it also has a few little problems.

One is a distinct lack of Americans: only nine of the signatories are from the U.S. The well-known American allergy to international institutions that might infringe on the absolute sovereignty of the United States extends, in this case, to a body that could have no such impact because it would have no legislative or executive power. And that is precisely the problem: what is the point of this hypothetical world parliament, given that it would have no power over the
UN
Security Council, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, or any of the other real decision-making centres?

The Campaign, whose headquarters is in Germany, explains that the
UNPA
“is envisaged as a first practical step towards the long-term goal of a world parliament,” but it would not even be elected in the first phase of its existence. Members from various national parliaments would be chosen, by whatever means each country saw fit, to sit together at the
UN
for a few weeks a year. It is the feeblest of symbolic gestures, and you wonder why they even bother.

European enthusiasts point out that, when the European Parliament was first set up in 1958, its members were chosen by the national parliaments of member states, and it had little control over the decisions of the European Union. As at the
UN
, decisions remained in the hands of national governments and of the international institutions that they directly controlled. But in 1979, they started electing members of the European Parliament directly, which gave it real democratic legitimacy and, little by little, it has gained some degree of control over what happens in Brussels.

It would take a very long time indeed for the same sort of evolution to occur at the
UN
level, where even the number of members each country gets would be the subject of fierce disputes. Would China really have as many members as the hundred smallest countries combined, which is what its population entitles it to? Would the United States settle for one-third as many members as India (assuming it agreed to be represented at all)? Obviously not, but what would be the right numbers?

At best, the supporters of the
UNPA
would have to work their way through all those problems and accept that, for the next twenty or fifty years, what they have created will be a debating chamber and nothing more. Is it worth all the effort for that damp squib of a result?

Yes, certainly. It would be open to individual countries to start electing their own members of the
UNPA
from the start, so that it had more democratic legitimacy. And although real power might take generations to arrive, from the very start a parliament of this sort would provide a very different perspective on the world—and a more realistic one—than the pious debates of the
UN
General Assembly and the hard-ball great-power politics of the
UN
Security Council. It would be very interesting at least, and maybe quite instructive.

So, tell Lord Tennyson to come back in another hundred years, and maybe we’ll have something to show him.

My hope that we may be escaping from the miserable decade just past rests, to a worrisome extent, on the slim shoulders of Barack Obama. If he can change the way the United States behaves in the world, a great deal else will change for the better as well. So I wrote about him quite a lot during his first year in office, trying to figure out whether he was up to the challenges he faced. But I was well aware that he had already given one big hostage to fortune
.

You aren’t really the U.S. president until you’ve ordered an air strike on somebody, so Barack Obama is certainly president now: two air strikes on Afghanistan in his first week in office. But now that he has been
blooded, can we talk a little about this expanded war he’s planning to fight in Afghanistan?

Does that sound harsh? Well, so is killing people, and all the more so because Obama must know that these remote-controlled Predator strikes usually kill not just the “bad guy,” whoever he is, but also the entire family he has taken shelter with. They also annoy Pakistan, whose territory the United States violated in order to carry out the killings.

It’s not a question of whether the intelligence on which the attacks were based was accurate (although sometimes it isn’t). The question is: do these killings actually serve any useful purpose? And the same question applies to the entire U.S. war in Afghanistan.

President Obama may be planning to shut Guantanamo, but the broader concept of a “war on terror” is still alive and well in Washington. Most of the people he has appointed to run his defence and foreign policies believe in it, and there is no sign that he himself questions it. And yet, even fifteen years ago, the notion would have been treated with contempt in every military staff college in the country.

That generation of American officers learned two things from their miserable experience in Vietnam. One was that going halfway around the world to fight a conventional military campaign against an ideology (Communism then, Islamism now) was a truly stupid idea. The other was that no matter how strenuously the other side insists that it is motivated by a world-spanning ideology, its real motives are mostly political and quite local (Vietnamese nationalism then, Iraqi and Afghan nationalism now).

Alas, that generation of officers has now retired, and the new generation of strategists, civilian as well as military, has to learn these lessons all over again. They are proving to be slow students, and if Obama follows their advice Afghanistan may well prove to be his Vietnam.

The parallel with Vietnam is not all that far-fetched. Modest numbers of American troops have now been in Afghanistan for seven years, mostly in training roles quite similar to those of the U.S. military “advisers,” whom Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy sent to South Vietnam between 1956 and 1963. The political job of creating a pro-Western, anti-Communist state was entrusted to America’s man in Saigon, Ngo Dinh Diem, and the South Vietnamese army had the job of fighting the Communist rebels, the Viet Cong.

Unfortunately, neither Diem nor the South Vietnamese army had much success, and by the early 1960s, the Viet Cong were clearly on the road to victory. So, Kennedy authorized a group of South Vietnamese generals to overthrow Diem (although he seemed shocked when they killed him). And Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy soon afterwards, authorized a rapid expansion of the American troop commitment in Vietnam, first to two hundred thousand by the end of 1965, ultimately to half a million by 1968. The United States took over the war. And then it lost it.

If all this sounds eerily familiar, it’s because we are now at a similar juncture in America’s war in Afghanistan. Washington’s man in Kabul, President Hamid Karzai, and the Afghan army he theoretically commands, have failed to quell the insurrection, and are visibly losing ground.

So, the talk in Washington now is all of replacing Karzai (although it will probably be done via elections, which are easily manipulated in Afghanistan), and the American troop commitment in the country is going up to sixty thousand. Various American allies also have troops in Afghanistan, just as they did in Vietnam, but it is the United States that is taking over the war.

We already know how this story ends. There is not a lot in common between President John F. Kennedy and President George W. Bush, but they were both ideological crusaders who got the United States mired in foreign wars it could not win
and did not need to win
. They then bequeathed those wars to presidents who had ambitious reform agendas in domestic politics and little interest or experience in foreign affairs.

That bequest destroyed Lyndon Johnson, who took the rotten advice of the military and civilian advisers he inherited from Kennedy because there wasn’t much else on offer in Washington at the time. He still had time to get Medicare and Medicaid, the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act, federal aid to schools, and Head Start and food stamps through Congress before Vietnam brought him down, but he could have accomplished much more if he had not been brought down by the stupid war.

Obama is drifting into the same dangerous waters, and the rotten advice he is getting from strategists who believe in the war on terror could destroy him, too. He has figured out that Iraq was a foolish and unnecessary war, but he has not yet applied the same analysis to Afghanistan.

There are two questions he needs to ask himself. First, did Osama bin Laden want the U.S. to invade Afghanistan in response to 9/11? The
answer to that one is: yes, of course he did. Second: of the tens of thousands of people whom the United States has killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, would a single one of them have turned up in America to do harm if left unkilled? Answer: probably not.
Other
people might have turned up in the U.S. with evil intent, but not those guys.

So, turning Afghanistan into a second Vietnam is probably the wrong strategy, isn’t it?

I had particularly high hopes of Obama on the climate front, and the appointments he made to the key science and energy jobs in his administration confirmed my feeling. I never actually drew up a short list of the ideal five people to put in those posts, but he chose exactly the people I would have put there. I know what those people think because I have interviewed most of them. If he chose them, then he presumably agreed with them. So he really does get it
.

But if he gets it, why hasn’t he acted on it?

It is taking much longer than the Obama administration thought to get legislation on climate change through Congress. Even if the health-care legislation finally passes in a form that more or less fulfills Obama’s hopes for it, that will mean that he only got two major pieces of new legislation out of the Congress in 2009. (The other was the $787 billion stimulus package to fight the recession.)

Congress will not pass legislation imposing cuts on greenhouse-gas emissions in the United States this year, so Obama goes to Beijing empty-handed. The Chinese will not deliver on their part of the deal until they are sure that Obama can deliver on his part. So the world’s two largest emitters will arrive in Copen hagen next month without having made any official commitment to curb their emissions.

With no bilateral U.S.-Chinese deal to serve as a framework for a wider agreement, the Copenhagen conference is very unlikely to succeed. How upset should we be about that?

If failure this December means permanent failure, then we should
be very upset indeed, but the problem is one of scheduling, not of bad intentions. Given another six months or so, Obama will probably succeed in getting Congress to agree to significant cuts in U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions.

The cuts will not be as deep as he wants: only a 4 percent reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 compared to the 1990 baseline used in the Kyoto treaty. They are certainly not as much as the other developed nations are willing to make: the European Union countries are committed to 20 percent cuts in emissions by 2020, and the Japanese to even more. But everybody understands that Obama is dealing with an electorate largely still in denial about global warming, and that as a matter of practical politics he simply cannot make the same kind of commitments others have made. They will be glad if he can just sign the U.S. up to the principle of cutting its emissions.

In particular, the Chinese will be very grateful if he does that, because they are very frightened about the probable impacts of climate change on their own country. They badly want a global deal that keeps warming under control, but it is politically impossible for them to make any kind of firm commitment so long as the United States had made none.

The best thing to do now, therefore, would be to postpone the Copenhagen meeting for a year, but it has become a diplomatic juggernaut that cannot be stopped. The next-best thing is to ensure that it fails now, leaving the way open for a follow-on conference that revisits the issue in twelve or eighteen months’ time with a much better chance of success.

The best is often the enemy of the good, but patching together an inadequate climate treaty at Copenhagen just to avoid the stigma of failure would repeat the mistake of 1997, when the botched Kyoto accord locked the world into an unambitious climate policy for fifteen years. If the problem lies mainly in the political timetable in the United States—and it does—then just change the international schedule to deal with that reality.

In the end, Obama’s health-care bill didn’t make it through Congress until March 2010, and it’s still unclear when or even if his (very unambitious) climate change bill will be passed
.

But I begin to hope that he might actually be learning about Afghanistan
.