Protests and errors in Georgia

Exactly one year after riot police and tear gas broke up peaceful protests, thousands of Georgians returned to the streets of Tbilisi to demonstrate against President Mikhail Saakashvili. Like last year protestors spoke out against corruption and authoritarian tendencies within Saakashvili's government, though this year they also complained about Georgia's disastrous war in South Ossetia this past August.

The after effects of the war though were a reason that the protests were smaller than organizers hoped. Two of Georgia's main opposition parties steered clear of the demonstrations, fearing that they might be used by Russia in an attempt to undermine Saakashvili's rule. Those who did turn out though called for government reforms and early elections next spring, when they hope to vote Saakashvili out of office. While he is held up as a model of democracy by Western governments, critics in Georgia accuse Saakashvili of being the same type of autocrat that they marched against in the pro-democracy "Rose Revolution" in 2003 that brought Saakashvili to power in the first place. A report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) in September slammed Saakashvili for widespread irregularities during elections last May.

Meanwhile, for the first time today the US State Department called Georgia's attack against South Ossetia in August "a mistake", but added that it still did not justify Russia's actions. It is a big shift in the United States' position about the conflict, which so far as portrayed it as an outright act of Russian aggression against their smaller, democratic neighbor.

The State Department comments come on the heels of a lengthy report in Friday's New York Times that undercuts much of Georgia's version of the South Ossetian conflict. According to Georgia, they only launched their military operation in South Ossetia in response to a massive attack by Russian forces, and that widespread damage to the South Ossetian capital Tskhinvali (a city of 40,000, nearly half the population of S. Ossetia) was unintentionally caused by fighting between Georgian and Russian forces.

But the Times report - based on accounts by multi-national OSCE officials in the city at the time of the attack and other local eyewitnesses - did not find any compelling evidence of a Russian attack. Instead the report suggests that much of the damage to Tskhinvali was deliberately caused by large-scale artillery and rocket bombardment by "inexperienced" Georgian forces. The Times report matches up with a BBC report last week that also had eyewitness accounts of Georgian troops deliberately attacking civilian areas of the city (including an account of a Georgian tank methodically shelling each floor of an apartment building), suggesting that the Georgian actions could be investigated as war crimes.

It is a very different view of a war that had often been described by Western media and politicians as the first shot in a new Cold War by an overly aggressive Russia.

Zimbabwe: violence rising, hope fading

Nearly two months after signing a landmark power-sharing agreement, the rival political forces in Zimbabwe have failed to form a government, and it looks like any hope of getting the two sides together may be finished.

That’s the word coming from the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party, who on Thursday accused President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party of resorting to their old tactic of assaulting political opponents. The MDC claims 25 of their members were beaten by state security forces last week, five of them badly enough to be hospitalized; others were arrested this week. In recent years, state security forces have been becoming more brutal as they attempt to keep Mugabe in power.

After two contested elections this year, the second one effectively ending when the MDC's Morgan Tsvangirai dropped out because of widespread attacks against MDC members, a power-sharing agreement was finally reached with the ZANU-PF and Mugabe. Under the deal the two parties were to split the government ministries between them, but Mugabe quickly moved to stock the most powerful ministries (like Defense and Home Affairs, which controls the national police force) with ZANU-PF members, leaving the less important ones to the MDC. The MDC has refused since the deal was to split the ministries not only in number, but by power as well. They have been holding out for control of Home Affairs, which has effectively kept Mugabe in power for the past few years.

Meanwhile, the country once called the breadbasket of southern Africa now is plagued by epidemic levels of hunger and is suffering from hyperinflation (some estimates put it at a billion percent annually). Leaders of Zimbabwe's neighbors are set to meet this Sunday to discuss the situation amid reports that they worry the situation in Zimbabwe could destabilize all of southern Africa.

Berlusconi on Obama: handsome, young and suntanned

Italy's Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi did it again...

Berlusconi, who has made a number of embarrassing gaffs in the past, called President-Elect Barack Obama "handsome, young and suntanned" during a press conference on Thursday.

"Right on time, here comes the first sensational gaffe," was the opinion of La Repubblica, one of the Italy's major newspapers. Other opposition politicians in Italy called on Berlusconi to apologize.

The gaff overshadowed Berlusconi's press conference with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Russian/Italian relations, which are growing closer. The two leaders agreed that a new framework is needed for international finance after September's Wall Street meltdown and that August's conflict with Georgia shouldn't derail cooperation between the European Union and Russia. Berlusconi also called for "the truth" about South Ossetia to come out.

As part of the meeting Russian and Italian companies signed a series of agreements, including one to allow Italian helicopters to be built and sold in Russia.

Berlusconi's comments on Obama came as he said that he thought Obama would be good for US/Russian relations.

Kim Jong Il: fake photo or miracle recovery?

Instead of stifling rumors about North Korean leader Kim Jong Il a new picture is only raising more questions about his health.

North Korea has been trying to quiet talk that Kim is sick, or dead, by releasing pictures of the "Dear Leader", but the photos so far have shown Kim in isolated settings, giving no indication of where or when they really were taken. So North Korea tried putting out a new photo of Kim, this time standing with a large group of military officers dressed in seasonally appropriate winter garb.

But keen-eyed observers noticed something odd - while the rest of the people in the picture cast long shadows, Kim cast barely any shadow at all, leading many to believe that he had been digitally inserted into the photo (North Korea so far hasn't tried the explanation that Kim is such a force of nature he casts his own shadows).

Kim hasn't verifiably appeared in public since mid-August. Most Korea observers now think that he suffered a stroke and has been receiving care from a team of foreign doctors. While ill, Kim is still thought to be in control of he government and military.

The notoriously secretive North Korean government though hasn't helped to squash the rumors, and this likely-faked new photo won't help. Both South Korea and China are concerned that North Korea could descend into chaos if Kim dies and there is a fight to replace him. China is especially worried about a crush of refugees if the North Korean state collapses.

Obama's first foreign policy challenge

Well this didn't take long...They were still sweeping up the confetti from Barack Obama's victory rally in Chicago last night when Russia's Dmitry Medvedev issued the first foreign policy challenge of his presidency.

During his annual address to the Russian parliament Medvedev announced that in response to the United States' plans to base a ballistic missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia would base their "Iskander" medium-range missiles in the Kaliningrad region on the Baltic Sea. Russia has long opposed the American missile shield, but placing missiles in Kaliningrad (which borders Poland) is the first time they have officially announced steps to counter it. And Medvedev didn't stop there, he also said Russia would electronically jam the missile system's radar, potentially rendering it useless.

Medvedev blamed the recent global economic crisis firmly on the United States, saying that the US created the credit bubble to pump up its domestic economy then did not pay attention to warnings from the global community about the impending crash. The Russian stock market has taken a pounding in the past few months, in large part because of the global economic crunch. He also gave the United States some of the blame for Russia's conflict this summer with Georgia - Russia does not believe that Georgia would have attempted to take action in the region of South Ossetia without first getting approval from the United States.

It was a surprising broadsides from Medvedev, who in recent weeks has repeatedly talked hopefully about improved US-Russian relations under a new American president. It is useful to keep in mind though that his speech was aimed at a domestic rather than international audience, which could be a reason for his more belligerent tone.

We could get a good idea what the Medvedev/Obama relationship will look like two weeks from now. Medvedev is scheduled to travel to Washington DC on November 14 for a meeting of the G20 (a group of the world's twenty largest economies) and has said he would like to meet with President-Elect Obama.

I hope that if Obama decides to take the meeting with Medvedev he studies the Kennedy/Khrushchev meeting in Vienna first. Kennedy went into the meeting under-prepared and was bullied by the bombastic Soviet leader. Khrushchev in turn thought Kennedy was weak, so he was willing to risk putting nuclear missiles on a little island called Cuba and a year later the world would go to the brink of nuclear war.

Medvedev is no Khrushchev, but he is the leader of a Russia that wants to reclaim a place as a great power on the world stage and he shares Vladimir Putin's belief that Russia's overtures towards the United States in the past few years have been met with aggression. Obama certainly shouldn't shy away from the meeting, but he should have a firm grasp of the global situation and Russia's view of the world.

The final word from the Global Electoral College

If you haven't been following The Economist's Global Electoral College project, it's definitely worth a few minutes to check it out.

The basic idea is that The Economist has taken the idea of the Electoral College and expanded it to a global scale, giving countries a number of electors relative to their population. People from around the world can then log in to the Vote2008 site and cast their vote, with the winner in each country getting that nation's global electoral college votes.

As of Monday evening the world chooses Barack Obama in a landslide. Actually "landslide" is probably an understatement...

Of the countries where The Economist received enough votes to register a preference, Obama won them all except for Algeria, Iraq and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Myanmar is still a toss-up. Early leads McCain had in Georgia and Macedonia (the two countries where he was winning) have evaporated.

We'll see tomorrow how the vote goes for the real Electoral College.

Steps towards peace in Nagorno-Karabakh

While tensions remain high in South Ossetia, another corner of the Caucasus region is slowly moving towards peace.

On Sunday the presidents of Armenia and Azerbaijan signed an agreement to work towards a peaceful resolution of the conflict over the Nagorno-Karabakh region. The two countries fought over the region (which is a largely Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan) in the early 1990's and there have been clashes between the Azeri and Armenians off and on in the years since. Nagorno-Karabakh is one of the "frozen conflicts" scattered throughout the old Soviet Union - conflicts that flared up as the Soviet Union dissolved where the active fighting has largely stopped, but no lasting peace has been achieved (South Ossetia and Abkhazia were also frozen conflicts at least until this past summer).

It was the conflict in Georgia that helped prompt the two presidents to return to the negotiating table, in talks hosted by Russia. President Dmitry Medvedev of Russia is eager to get a peaceful resolution to the situation as a way of boosting Russia's influence in the region.

Most of the residents of Nagorno-Karabakh voted for independence from Azerbaijan in 2006, though like similar votes in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the international community did not recognize the results. Future talks the status of Nagorno-Karabakh will be coordinated by Russia and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), but a final agreement could be tricky since Bako Sahakyan, president of Nagorno-Karabakh has repeatedly said that he wants full independence, something Azerbaijan isn't likely to go along with.

Advice to the next president

I suspect there will be a whole pile of articles written in the coming weeks about the foreign policy challenges faced by the new president. I also suspect that most of them will focus heavily on Iraq and Afghanistan (and maybe by extension Pakistan), and I fear little else. And that’s been a problem with the current administration, while they made the War on Terror their main priority; the rest of the world went rolling along, and with America absent, our influence diminished in the process. So in an attempt to stem that tide and go about rebuilding our standing, I humbly offer the following suggestions:

Never use the term “the world’s only superpower” again. It’s a concept that has been coloring America’s foreign policy since the Soviet Union folded in 1991, mostly for the worse. Why? Because it’s given us an outsized view of our place in the world where we don’t view other countries as partners to be respected, but either as adversaries to be tamed or clients to be taught. Besides, the past eight years have shown being a superpower isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Being a superpower didn’t stop the terrorist attacks on 9/11, it didn’t make Afghanistan or Iraq bend to our will, it didn’t allow us to form true and lasting multi-national coalitions for action in either of those two countries. This summer should have let the last of the air out of the superpower balloon when Georgia apparently acted under the mistaken assumption that being our new best friend in the region would be enough to keep Russia from retaliating against them over actions in South Ossetia (it didn’t).

Since the superpower thing isn’t winning us friends or scaring our adversaries, why not drop it? While the US still has the largest economy and most powerful military in the world, the world is catching up. Cooperation is going to be the key term for the next four years, coalitions of countries will need to form up to address problems ranging from terrorism to global warming, and unlike the Cold War era there won’t be two well-defined camps. It will be possible to be allies on one issue while being rivals on another (since countries ultimately do tend to act in their own best interests). Ditching the superpower talk will be a powerful signal to the rest of the world that America wants to work with them, not lecture to them.

Rethink how we spread democracy. I have to give President Bush credit for making the spread of democracy around the world one of the goals of his administration. Unfortunately we have been taking a top-down approach to a bottom-up process.

In a functioning democracy the power ultimately lies with the people since they are the ones who choose the leaders. In our recent attempts at starting democracies though (see Iraq and Afghanistan) we have looked for someone we think will make a decent leader (or at least one we think we can work with), then we lay out some ground rules, hold an election, which our chosen candidate invariably wins, and then we celebrate the birth of a new democracy.

The problem is that were doing this in places with little or no experience with the democratic process, we set the election up as a means to an end (putting our guy in power “legitimately”) but ignore the real work of getting the citizens involved in the democratic process. They’re not engaged with democracy (for example the Shiite voters in Iraq who simply voted the way the mullahs told them to). The leaders in the new democracy tend to come from whatever elite existed before our involvement; they don’t come from the masses (for lack of a better term) like you would hope for in a functioning democracy.

The result is like the situation you now have in Afghanistan, where the democratically elected Hamid Karzai (his qualifications for office were that he was formerly an executive for a Western oil company) presides over a weak, ineffective, and corrupt regime. There are no successors from the Afghan heartland waiting in the wings to run in the next elections to lead a new, more effective Afghani government. Or you get a situation like you have in Ukraine where four years after the democratic (and Western-supported) Orange Revolution the president (Yushchenko) and prime minister (Tymoshenko) are locked in a fight for power that will likely continue until at least the next presidential election in 2010 - while the country’s economy is faltering and the public is becoming apathetic. Where, you have to ask, are the next generation of leaders?

By all means Mr. President keep spreading democracy, but don’t forget that the roots of a good democracy run deep, so put in programs that work to establish town councils and other grassroots institutions and bring young people to America to study political science and other civic programs so that they can bring those lessons back to their homeland. Remember, a country’s second democratically elected leader is perhaps more important than its first.

End the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Okay, you’re probably hearing this one from a lot of people, for a lot of reasons, so let me try a new one. Let’s end the wars because neither country wants our troops there anymore. Even with a host of concessions, the Iraqi government still doesn’t want to sign a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) to keep US troops there through 2011, while Karzai in Afghanistan has been growing more and more critical of the presence of foreign troops in his country.

So, let’s end our large-scale military involvement in both places. Are the two countries up to the task of maintaining stability on their own? Probably not, but the point of our involvement in both places was to establish democratic, independent governments. They need to be free to make their own choices, even if they make bad ones – otherwise they’re not really independent governments now are they? Yes, there’s a good chance that the Iraqi government will tear itself apart along Sunni-Shia-Kurdish lines, but that will be just about as likely two years from now as it is today, if all sides know they just need to maintain the appearance of working together for two more years, they will.

The point is that while the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan face great challenges, they are challenges for the Iraqis and Afghanis themselves to solve.

China and Russia. Both countries are rising powers, and both are relationships we’ve mismanaged for the past eight (and honestly longer) years, so the start of your term will be a great chance to relaunch both.

One of the first calls I would make as President would be to China’s President Hu Jintao. I would congratulate Hu on China’s rise to the status today as one of the world’s great powers. Then I would remind him that with great power, comes great responsibility – so it’s time that China starts showing more leadership in a host of areas. I’d start with their support for some of the worst regimes in Africa: Sudan and Robert Mugabe’s government in Zimbabwe, neither of which would likely continue if not for China’s support. I’d also ask Hu for a pledge to take a leading role in the fight against climate change, since China by most accounts has now become the world’s leading polluter. If China wants to be regarded as a leading nation in the world, then simply, it has to lead.

As for Russia, yes we haven’t been happy with some of their actions recently and yes the relationship between our governments has sunk to a post-Soviet low, but becoming more adversarial (the tack the Bush administration has been taking) isn’t going to improve things.

I remember a panel discussion I helped organize while I was in grad school with Jack Matlock, the United States’ last ambassador to the Soviet Union. Amb. Matlock said that some people were amazed with the critiques would give to the Soviets on some of their actions, and were more amazed that the Soviets would listen. He explained it was because he had a genuine respect and affection for Russian culture and the Russians knew it, so they regarded him as a friend. They were much more willing to listen to criticism from someone they thought of as a friend rather than a lecture from someone they regarded as an enemy.

We need to keep in mind that Russia views our relationship differently than we do. Vladimir Putin feels that he extended a great hand of friendship to the United States after 9/11 – he was the first world leader to call George Bush after the attacks and Russia offered important technical assistance for US forces trying to establish a beachhead in Afghanistan in late 2001. In response though the United States has pushed NATO membership to Russia’s doorstep and tried to install a missile defense system that Russia is bitterly opposed to in their former satellites Poland and the Czech Republic, all actions Putin has viewed as overtly hostile.

That has colored our relationship these past few years. So since being adversaries hasn’t worked why not try a more friendly relationship if we really want to affect some change in Russia’s actions? More belligerent talk certainly won’t help things.

I won’t say that’s all Mr. President, far from it. You will face a number of challenges in a world that is more dynamic than ever. Keep that in mind and remember something that President Bush forgot in his pursuit of the War on Terror – the world doesn’t stop just because the United States is busy with something else.

Missile defense may be grounded (again)

The ballistic missile defense shield the United States wants to install in Europe may have hit another roadblock.

The shield is meant to protect the US and Europe against missile attack by "rogue states" and consists of up to ten interceptor missiles based in Poland and an advanced radar site in the Czech Republic. In theory the Czech radar would track any inbound rogue missiles, which would then be shot town by the rockets from Poland. So far the biggest challenge the system has faced has been getting approval from the two host countries.

After initially agreeing to host the interceptors, the Polish government balked at going through with the plan earlier this year until the US offered more cooperation with the Polish military, including an agreement to base Patriot missiles in Poland after a Russian general threatened to target the missile base itself on the ground that it was a threat to Russian security (the Russian have long opposed the missile shield, thinking that it is aimed at countering Russia’s vast nuclear missile arsenal, not some hypothetical rocket shot by a rogue state). Now it's the Czech's turn.

The Czech parliament has to give final approval to the radar site, but the ruling center-right coalition government in the Czech Republic is already on shaky ground and is facing stiff opposition. The radar base idea is not popular with the Czech public (largely because they fear it will sour relations with Russia, and because they question why they need anti-missile missiles in Europe in the first place). Though the opposition doesn't have the votes to block the plan, it's not clear that the government has the votes to approve the radar site either.

The final vote should take place sometime in early December. If the Czechs vote no then the whole system will have to go back to the drawing board, since the advanced X-Band radar is necessary to guide the interceptors to their targets.

US elections? Latin America indifferent

That's the word from a new poll of people across Latin America on next Tuesday's elections, where two-thirds of those surveyed say they don't care which candidate wins since it will not have a great affect US-Latin American relations.

It's a surprising result considering how tuned into the US elections the rest of the world seems to be. But the poll conducted in 18 countries across the region by Chile-based Latinobarometro found that 29% didn't think either candidate was a good choice, while 31% said they didn't know enough about either Barack Obama or John McCain to offer an opinion. Among the rest Obama was a clear choice beating McCain 29% to 8%.

According to Latinobarometro's Director Marta Lagos the apathy expressed in the poll was a reflection of the United States fading influence in a region once considered its backyard. "They believe that the U.S. election will not produce any change in Latin America," Lagos said. "The most important finding, I think, is that the United States is losing power in Latin America."

Obama had his strongest support in the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica, while McCain did best in Columbia and El Salvador.