Commemorating the end of one conflict

HOW on earth do you celebrate a civil war? This is no idle question because in Beirut, the Lebanese — with remarkable candour but not a little trepidation — are in the process of remembering that most terrible of conflicts in their lives, one which killed 150,000 and whose commemoration was originally in the hands of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri — who was himself assassinated on February 14.

Is this something which should be contemplated? Is this the moment — when all Lebanon waits for a Syrian military withdrawal and when the Hezbollah militia, itself a creature of that war, is being ordered to disarm by the United Nations — to remember the tide of blood which drowned so many innocents between 1975 and 1990?

On reflection, I think it probably is. The Lebanese have spent the past 15 years in a political coma, refusing to acknowledge their violent past lest the ghosts arise from their mass graves and return to stir the embers of sectarianism and mutual suffering. “Whatever you do, don’t mention the war” had a special place in a country whose people stubbornly refused to learn the lessons of their fratricidal slaughter.

For almost 10 years, my own book on the civil war was banned by Lebanon’s censors. Even Hariri himself told me he was powerless to put it back into the shops — ironically, it was a pro-Syrian security official whose resignation the Lebanese opposition is now demanding who lifted the ban last year — and none of Lebanon’s television stations would touch the war. It remained the unspoken cancer in Lebanese society, the malaise which all feared might return to poison their lives.

There clearly was a need to understand how the conflict destroyed the old Lebanon. When al-Jazeera broadcast from Qatar a 12-part documentary about the war, the seaside Corniche outside my home in Beirut would be empty of strollers every Thursday night; restaurants would close their doors. Everyone wanted to watch their own torment. So, I suppose, did I.

Everyone I knew lost friends in those awful 15 years — I lost some very dear friends of my own. One was blown up in the US embassy on his first day of work in 1983; another was murdered with an ice-pick. One, a young woman, was killed by a shell in a shopping street. The brother of a colleague — a young man who helped to maintain my telex lines during the 1982 Israeli siege of Beirut — was shot in the head when he accidentally drove past a gun battle. He died a few days later.

And so, on April, 13, the centre of Beirut is to be filled with tens of thousands of Lebanese for a day of “unity and memory”. There will be art exhibitions, concerts, photo exhibitions, a running and cycling marathon. Hariri’s sister Bahia will be staging the events which her murdered brother had planned. Nora Jumblatt, the glorious wife of the Druze leader Walid Jumblatt — one of the warlords of those ghastly days — will be organizing the musical concerts.

The original April 13, in 1975 marked the day when Phalangist gunmen ambushed a busload of Palestinians in Beirut. The bus still exists, the bullet holes still punctured through its rusting skin, but it will be left to rot in the field outside Nabatea where it lies to this day. The only bullet holes visible to the crowds next week will be the ones deliberately preserved in the statue of Lebanon’s 1915 independence leaders, who were hanged in Martyrs Square, where a “garden of forgiveness” connects a church and a mosque and where Hariri’s body now rests, along with his murdered bodyguards. The square itself was the front line for the entire war. Who knows how many ghosts still haunt its hundreds of square metres?

Not far to the east is the infamous “Ring” highway where Muslim and Christian gunmen stopped all traffic in 1975 and walked down the rows of stalled cars with knives, calmly slitting the throats of families of the wrong religion. Eight Christians had been found murdered outside the electricity headquarters and Bashir Gemayel directed that 80 Muslims must pay with their lives. The militias kept on multiplying the figures. When you are in a war, you feel it will never end. I felt like that, gradually coming to believe — like the Lebanese — that war was somehow a natural state of affairs.

And, like all wars, it acquired a kind of momentum de la folie. The Israelis invaded, twice; the American Marines came and were suicide-bombed in their base at the airport. So were the French. The United Nations arrived in 1978 with Dutch soldiers and more French soldiers and Irish soldiers and Norwegian soldiers and Fijians and Nepalese and Ghanaians and Finns. Everyone, it seemed, washed up in Lebanon to be bombed and sniped at. The Palestinians were slowly drawn into the war and suffered massacre after massacre at the hands of their enemies (who often turned out to be just about everybody).

That the conflict was really between Christian Maronites and the rest somehow disappeared from the narrative. It was everyone else’s fault. Not the Lebanese. Never the Lebanese. For years, they called the war hawadess, the “events”. The conflict was then called the “War of the Other” — of the foreigners, not of the Lebanese who were actually doing the killing. A taxi driver who gave me a lift several years ago turned to me as we were driving through the streets and said: “Mr Robert, you are very lucky.” And he meant that I — like him — had survived the war. I remember the last day. The Syrians had bombed General Michel Aoun out of his palace at Baabda — in those days, the Americans were keen on Syrian domination of Lebanon because they wanted the soldiers of Damascus to face off Saddam’s army of occupation in Kuwait — and I was walking behind tanks towards the Christian hills.

Shells came crashing down around us and my companion shouted that we were going to die. And I shouted back to her that we mustn’t die, that this was the last day of the war, that it would really now end. And when we got to Baabda, there were corpses and many people lying with terrible wounds, many in tears. And I remember how we, too, broke down and cried with the immense relief of living through the day and knowing that we would live tomorrow and the day after that and next week and next year.

But the silences remained, the constant fear that it could all reignite. No one would open the mass graves in case more blood was poured into them. It was in this sombre, ruined land that Hariri started to rebuild Beirut. It will be his new Beirut which is hoting the brave festivities, its smart shops and stores and restaurants and bars — despite Hariri’s murder and the continuing crisis and the dark bombers who are still trying to re-provoke the civil war.

That Lebanon’s war did not restart with Hariri’s murder is a sign of the people’s maturity and of their wisdom, especially the vast sea of young Lebanese who were educated abroad during the conflict and who do not — and, I suspect, will not — tolerate another civil war. And so I think the Lebanese are right to confront their demons. Let them celebrate. To hell with the ghosts.

— (c) The Independent

Focus on immigration

IN his first major speech since the formal opening of the election campaign, Michael Howard chose on Sunday to devote almost his entire speech to asylum and immigration. It is, of course, the only issue out of 10 where Conservatives are way ahead of Labour.

He asserted that it is not racist to talk about immigration (true), not racist to criticize the system (true), not racist to want to limit numbers (true). As we have argued before, politicians have a duty to address people’s fears, but they also have a responsibility to avoid inflaming ill-informed prejudices.

How well did he perform on the second half of that proposition? Remember that the drip, drip, drip of distorted tabloid reporting has bemused the British public into believing that we take in 24% of the world’s refugees, when the whole of Europe only absorbs 3%.

His first innuendo was that “for too many years immigration has been a no-go area for political debate”. He must know this is an absurd assertion. Last year’s asylum and immigration bill was the fifth in a decade to be debated at length in parliament. Few areas of social policy have received more debate. He went on to speak about the “chaos” in the present systems.

There are many ways in which they could be improved, but compared to the system when he was in charge as home secretary (1992-97), asylum is transformed. Average asylum applications now take two months to complete instead of 20 months. The tens of thousands of applicants left in limbo by Mr Howard in his period prompted the UN high commissioner for refugees to describe the UK system as the worst in Europe.

Mr Howard’s third charge was Mr Blair’s failure to get a grip on asylum and “pussyfoot around” on immigration. This completely ignores the coercive controls that Labour has introduced, cutting asylum applications by two-thirds since October 2002, with 1,000 cases a day being denied entry by 2003.

Just two days before Mr Howard spoke, the UNHCR’s representative in Britain, Anne Dawson-Shepherd, spoke of her agency’s concern over “the crisis rhetoric” being used in the UK election “often fuelled by thinly disguised xenophobia and political opportunism”. She went on: “The number of people claiming asylum in the UK has dropped 61% over the last two years, back to levels not seen since the early 1990s.”

—The Guardian, London

Expatriates’ investment

THIS is the fourth of a series of articles in this space in which I have looked at the various aspects of Pakistani expatriate communities in various parts of the world. I paid particular attention to the community of Pakistanis in the United States, dividing it into five clusters across the country. That was done to distinguish between the economic and social characteristics of these groups.

I did this in order to suggest that if the government were to somehow get involved in interesting the members of these communities in using their ample income and wealth to aid the development of their homeland, Islamabad must develop a better understanding of the motivations of these various groups of its citizens living in different parts of the world. For instance, what would motivate the “techies” living on America’s West Coast may be different from what would interest the doctors practising on the East Coast.

For purposes of public policy it also makes great sense to treat remittances not as one homogeneous flow but as a stream made up of several different components. In the article last week, I identified four different types of flows that constitute the stream of remittances from the United States to Pakistan. The first of these are what are perhaps best labelled as “family aid”, money sent to near and dear ones to provide regular financial help or give them support during periods of financial distress. Charitable contributions constitute the second stream. These are given mostly in visits to the country or in response to various religious beliefs or causes. Sending money home for “sadqas” is one example of this type of remittance.

The third type of flow is composed of financial contributions for promoting social development in the homeland. As the word has gone around, spread by institutions such as the United Nations Development Fund in their annual Human Development Report, non- resident Pakistanis are becoming painfully aware of the fact that their country is fast losing the race to get better integrated into the global economy. This could only happen if the quality of the human resource could be dramatically improved. This would require a massive effort which is beyond the competence of the public sector and considerably greater than the government’s financial capacity. This awareness has resulted in the establishment of a number of non-government organizations that enjoy a special tax status in the United States. When contributing to these organizations the donors can write off their giving against their incomes. In a way, therefore, these contributions are leveraged with money from the United States treasury. This type of giving has also begun to attract reputable and well-established Pakistan-based organizations that are able to take advantage of tax relief available to potential donors to raise funds from the expatriate community.

The fourth flow as a constituent of the stream of remittances is of relatively recent origin. This pertains to investments in various forms of assets that hold promise for the financially savvy members of the community. For the moment much of this is going into real estate and some of it is now also finding its way into the stock market. This move towards sending money for investment in physical and financial assets is typical of a maturing diasporas. It also signals an increase in confidence in the economic prospects of the home country.

All new human settlements, including the establishment of diasporas, go through a distinct life cycle. They are founded by the young and adventurous — people prepared to take risk and expend a great deal of energy to improve their economic prospects. The large Pakistani expatriate communities in North America are about three to four decades old when thousands of well-trained professionals left their home country to look for opportunities abroad. They went either to Britain or came to the United States. Once they found jobs, they settled down and brought in their partners mostly from Pakistan. Once they had started families, they bought homes near the place of work.

Some of them took advantage of the provision in the US immigration law of that time to sponsor close members of the family to migrate as well. The word about the economic success of this first wave of migrants spread in the homeland and more people, mostly from a similar social and economic background, also took the plunge. They generally went to the places where their friends or relatives had taken up residence. This is the reason why expatriate communities even in a country as large as the United States exist in the form of highly concentrated clusters.

Some 30 to 40 years after the arrival of the first migrants, a large number of the founders of these communities have reached the age of retirement. Where would they like to spend the rest of their lives? Will they remain in the United States or relocate themselves in Pakistan? Is America the right place to live out life or would Pakistan, with help easily available and support of the larger family also at hand, be a better place to be in? These questions are being asked in Pakistani communities abroad as they mature. They have also become significant for two other reasons: changes in the American approach towards allowing new migrants from places such as Pakistan and the on-going process of globalization which continues to knit the world together ever more closely.

With the cost of communication coming down every day, relocation no longer means a permanent change in the place of residence. It has now become possible for people with means to divide their time between the homeland and whichever place they have spent the productive years of their lives. It is in this context that decisions about investment in real estate are being increasingly made by the older members of the Pakistani communities in the United States. Other factors also weigh, in particular the impression that the country may have begun to turn the economic corner.

It was first by word of mouth that these communities learned that conditions at home were improving; that Pakistan may not, after all, be an unsafe place to go back to; that the returns on investment in land and houses were considerably higher than those available in the United States. Those who had gone for holidays to Pakistan returned with stories about the boom in the real estate market in several large cities, in particular in Islamabad, Lahore, and Karachi. But it wasn’t only the word of mouth that was spreading the good news about the home country. Respected newspapers had also began to write about the economic boom in the country.

On March 23, The New York Times published a story about the economic boom in Pakistan in an important place in the newspaper — page three which carries the main foreign story of the day. The account appeared under the banner “Pakistan is booming since 9/11, at least for the well-off”, and was written by Somni Sengupta, a writer based in New Delhi. In Sengupta’s story, the newspaper presented a fairly rosy picture of the Pakistani economy.

The account started with a story about a Pakistani entrepreneur “British-born, New York-trained and married to a woman from New Jersey, who had long dreamed of running his own restaurant. London was too expensive, New York was too risky. Karachi seemed just right”. This was news not only for the Americans who associated Karachi with sectarian violence, Islamic radicalism, and the kidnapping and gruesome murder of Daniel Pearl, the correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. It was also a pleasant break for the Pakistanis, accustomed as they were, about reading negative stories about their homeland.

“I’m getting a lot of corporate heads, a lot of nouveau riche, people who come from abroad who are not necessarily wealthy but are educated about cuisine”, said Mr Sheikh, the son of Pakistani immigrants to Britain. “People want high end products” and Sheikh was prepared to provide them. The stage was now set for the return and flow of expatriate capital into Pakistan’s real estate market.

If the experience of other such communities abroad is anything to learn from, investments into Pakistan by the more well-to-do members of the communities in the United States will proceed through four phases. First will come investment in real estate, motivated mostly by the desire to establish an alternative place of residence by the older members of the group. This has already begun to happen and is probably behind the boom in real estate and housing prices in several major cities of the country. There are tens of thousands of expatriates looking to invest in the Pakistani housing market in the next few years. This will fuel the market and prices will go up unless new areas are opened up for housing in the major cities. There are signs that this may be happening in several cities of the country.

The return of the non-resident Pakistanis to their home country, even for part time living, will bring in other developments. The move to construct new golf courses in places such as Lahore, Rawalpindi and Karachi may be in anticipation of this new demand. Other developments will also come such as new retail outlets that can cater to the needs of this class of consumers, health care, restaurants and entertainment.

The second phase of this remittance is normally directed at the capital markets. Once again the enormous increase in the prices of the scrips quoted in the Karachi stock market in the first 10 weeks of 2005 may have been caused in part by the arrival of portfolio investment by the members of the expatriate community. This group has been active as investors in the world’s capital markets and they looked at the Karachi market as opportunity for making handsome returns. Only time will tell whether the recent serious downturn in the market will dull this enthusiasm.

The third flow will take the form of investment in small businesses such as restaurants, retail outlets, fashion houses, medical practices, educational services. As already noted with reference to the article in The New York Times this has already begun to happen. There is a considerable amount of anecdotal evidence to suggest that second and third generation Pakistanis living in Britain and the United States have begun to look at the homeland of their ancestors as a place where lucrative investments can be made.

The fourth flow will involve large scale investment in either green-field operations or the acquisition of established enterprises. Much of this activity will happen in association with foreign firms. This is one way that foreign direct investment will begin to flow in. This is the pattern followed by the expatriate communities of China and India. For Pakistan, this last flow will be the most important one and will help to bring the Pakistani economy into the global mainstream.

Failure has high rewards

US intelligence was ‘dead wrong’ in its prewar beliefs about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, according to a US presidential commission’s findings, issued on March 31. And the US government is just as wrong about other charges levelled at Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, said the study.

This column also used ‘dead wrong’ over the past decade when it attacked all the lies being manufactured about Iraq. Interestingly, the many western journalists and pundits who heaped abuse on my head and accused me of treason for daring to challenge the pro-war propaganda they so greedily lapped up, have fallen strangely silent as the truth about Iraq emerges.

Still, let’s recall that the prime mission of presidential and parliamentary commissions is never fact-finding but sweeping scandal under the rug, and deflecting blame from politicians.

The Washington commission, appointed by President Bush, and staffed by his hard-line supporters, found that no official or officials were really guilty of the Iraq intelligence fiasco that there was no White House political pressure on the intelligence community to justify the war.

And so the mighty river of lies flows on. The report made no mention of President Bush’s claims about Iraq’s ‘drones of death’ that were poised to shower sleeping America with hideous germs.

No mention of Vice President Dick Cheney’s incessant pressure on CIA to declare Iraq a nuclear menace. Nothing about Condoleezza Rice’s terrorizing Americans with talk of nuclear mushrooms clouds over their cities.

The commission ignored evidence from senior Bush aides Paul O’Neill and Richard Clarke that the president obsessively pushed for war with Iraq soon after taking office and dismissed all intelligence proving Iraq had neither weapons of mass destruction nor links to Al-Qaeda. There was no reference to the fact that the Bush administration has convinced nearly 80 per cent of all Americans that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks.

There was no mention of Doug Feith’s office of special plans, a covert Pentagon intelligence shop set up to funnel fake claims about Iraq to the White House and US media produced by a cabal of pro-Israel neoconservatives working in conjunction with a special Israeli disinformation unit.

No mention of patriotic CIA officers fired or demoted for refusing to join this giant fraud. No mention of how US national security was gravely corrupted, manipulated and distorted for partisan political gain.

The report called Iraq ‘...one of the most damaging intelligence failures in recent American history.’ But, amazingly, the whitewash committee found no one responsible for this disaster. Victory has a hundred fathers; defeat is an orphan. Iraq just happened. Bad karma. A no-fault war.

This is the third preposterous whitewash foisted on credulous Americans.

Whitewash One was the investigation of the 9/11 attacks. That commission found no one responsible for allowing the worst attack on the US since Pearl Harbour, though Bush and Ms Rice were bombarded with warnings an assault was imminent.

The awkward fact that America’s grand inquisitor, then attorney-general John Ashcroft, actually cut spending on terrorism right before 9/11 was conveniently ignored.

Whitewash Two: torture scandals at Abu Ghraib and other camps in the US secret gulag. Seven senior military investigations found only a few cases of ‘minor misconduct’ and ‘isolated abuse’ by low-ranking personnel.

The tortures by electricity, freezing, drowning, sleep and sensory deprivation, beatings, dog attacks, and sexual humiliation of Muslims were, claimed the Pentagon, all the fault of a handful of sadists, like Pvt. Lyndie England and her boyfriend, though the chain of responsibility for these war crimes clearly ran right up to the secretary of defence.

So three cover-ups later we are assured by official Washington that no one was guilty of anything. In fact, many Bush administration officials involved in monumental blundering, dual loyalties to a foreign power, or even possible criminal acts, have been richly rewarded for their bungling and misdeeds.

Rumsfeld, violator of the Geneva conventions, was renamed Pentagon chief. National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, asleep on guard duty at 9/11, became secretary of state, and her inept chief aide named to her former job. Iraq war architect, neocon Paul Wolfowitz, was forced on the World Bank as its new chief. Neocon buffoon John Bolton was nominated UN ambassador. Faithful aparatchick John Negroponte, former viceroy in occupied Baghdad, made intelligence czar. Only CIA’s Obsequious chief, George Tenet, lost his job, though he was granted the medal of freedom.

White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, who wrote briefs justifying torture, was named attorney-general instead of being disbarred. Poor, bumbling Colin Powell went into to deserved obscurity.

George W. Bush, commander-in-chief of the whole Iraq fiasco, the Abu Ghraib horrors, and the outrageous dereliction of duty on 9/11, was triumphantly re-elected by a grateful American people, proving that nothing succeeds like failure provided you wave the flag hard enough and keep the cover-ups coming.

—Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2005

New US strategy in South Asia

THE decision to sell the F-16 to Pakistan and India, defines the US policy for South Asia and the region as a whole, and is linked with the “policy of forward engagement.”

This, in essence, means retaining a military presence in the region as the pre-requisite for “pre-eminence in Eurasia — and America’s global primacy, (which) is directly dependent on how long and how effectively its preponderance on the Eurasian continent is sustained.”

The US has a massive military presence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, while Nato is seeking a greater role in Asia. Mr Hoop Scheffer, secretary-general of Nato, says, “Nato is doing its part in this global coalition against terror, against proliferation, against fragile and failed states. Nato is transforming fundamentally, militarily, politically, building new partnerships, new alliances.

It is important that, I touch base on behalf of Nato on what’s happening in this region, which is geographically far away but, nevertheless, given the challenges, are very relevant to Nato.” Meanwhile, a nuclear-capable Pakistan, having a meaningful conventional military capability, is expected to act as a balancing force from the Oxus in the north to the river Beas in the south.

The scenario is both enticing and ominous. Does it indicate “the logic of think tank strategist or a defence contractor”, as the Indian journalist M.J. akbar questions, or is it based on flawed intelligence of the CIA? In either case, it entails security problems, which need be analysed a bit dispassionately.

Ukraine’s orange revolution gave a new turn to events. Russia warned, “If India will not fully honour our interests, then there is no need to attach strings, conditions and demands from Russia not to trade (in arms) with Pakistan. Currently, at the request of India, Moscow is not cooperating with Islamabad in the defence sector. Defence ties with India could come to a halt if India sought to mix its technologies with proposed purchases from the United States.”

Within days, president Putin arrived in New Delhi and signed a long term deal for the purchase of high-tech weapons and equipment. India also agreed to build the pipeline from Iran. the US was perturbed that its strategic partner India was going much too far and had to be restrained. The sale of the F-16s and F-18s to Pakistan and India respectively, therefore, was hurriedly approved, as quid pro quo for abandoning the pipeline project with Iran, as the first step.

How far India will oblige the United States is to be viewed from the angle of that the strategic partnership with the US as much too alluring to be dispensed with for the sake of Russia, which demands a different role and level of friendship: “The Russian Federation and the Republic of India are convinced that their bilateral cooperation in all forms, and their strategic partnership, contributes to the strengthening of the regional and global goodwill and cooperation.” Putin stated the immediate need for: “a strategic alliance between Russia, China and India a the foundation of a multipolar world — a worldwide alliance that would curb the American superpower.”

India, no doubt, is in an envious position, with coveting demands both from the east and the west, exerting a strategic pull. India’s decision will be vital as it would either take us back into the cold war paradigm of confrontation and conflict or into a new era of peace and harmony, in South Asia in particular.

Pakistan is happy that its nuclear capability has been enhanced with the sale of the F-16s. Militarily and politically, it gives a boost to the present government. The military uniform and democracy are considered compatible, under a queer logic, which is expected to last until October 2007. The third generation F-16s would partially cover the technological gap with India, but the search for the fourth generation high-tech, air superiority aircraft will continue.

In any case, the hybrid JF-17 Thunder, will soon replace the F-16. Politically, the message is loud and clear: “don’t rock the boat.” A divided MMA is agitating while the PPPP and the PML-N stand on the sidelines, waiting for better times, or a more clear signal.

Pakistan has to make a difficult choice, either to view the F-16 offer as a military need, or take recourse to a dynamic and pragmatic diplomacy, compatible with the demands of the emerging world order, which offers several options. Unipolarity is giving way to multipolarity, as new centres of geoeconomic power are emerging, as expressed by Putin: “The transformation in the global environment in the recent past, stresses the need for a new international architecture based on a multipolar world.”

The future, therefore, provides a much more level playing field for diplomacy to operate, because, for Pakistan, the United States is important as much as, Pakistan is important for the United States. Pakistan’s pivotal position, at the crossroads of Asia is most significant and its strategic importance will be judged, not only, by relating itself to Washington or Moscow, but its ability to harmonize with the shifting centre of gravity. Kissinger identifies: “Tectonic international upheavals mark our period. The centre of gravity of world affairs is moving to the Pacific and almost all major actors on the international stage are defining new roles for themselves. That transformation is about concept as much as about power.”

Pakistan has the choice to serve as the “American fortress, guarding the eastern wall of the Middle East region”, as M.J. Akbar thinks, or enter into a new era — a new diplomatic paradigm of cooperation with its neighbour and the global contending centres of power: This strategic choice will correct the strategic error of the past and determine the future of Pakistan and the regional ethos.

The writer is a former Chief of Army Staff.

The Bolton nomination

WHEN she announced his nomination as ambassador to the United Nations, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice argued that John R. Bolton would be effective because, like former ambassadors Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, he was one of “the strongest voices” in defence of American interests.

There is something to that: The United States sometimes needs to stand up to rogue political appointees or gangs of autocrats at the United Nations, and the reforms the institution badly needs are unlikely to go forward without some unceremonious pushing from the U.S. ambassador.

But the United Nations is more than a debating club or a bureaucratic agency. At least since the end of the Cold War, it also has been a potential instrument of global security, one the United States has used effectively at times. At those moments Washington is best represented by a skilled diplomat, one more effective at working with allies and cutting the deals needed to pass resolutions than in battling political adversaries. It is in this respect that the nomination of Mr Bolton raises questions.

He is, to be sure, an experienced public servant who helped to conduct the largely successful diplomacy of the first Bush presidency at the United Nations. His defenders describe him as a pragmatist willing to employ the Security Council and other multilateral instruments when they serve U.S. interests. Yet much of Mr Bolton’s record during the past four years, when he was an undersecretary of state, suggests otherwise.

Mr Bolton has been an outspoken opponent of the International Criminal Court and other international covenants he regards as improper infringements on U.S. sovereignty, especially arms control treaties. We share some of his views, especially about the ICC, but his fervour in pursuing his principles has more than once placed him at odds with pragmatic policymaking.

For example, Mr Bolton’s determination to induce countries around the world to sign bilateral agreements exempting U.S. citizens from the international court strained relations with key allies in Latin America and Central Europe at a time when some were materially supporting the United States in Iraq. Under his supervision a key programme to dispose of surplus Russian plutonium foundered because of a technical issue about legal liability.

Officials inside the administration accuse him of seeking to undermine multiparty negotiations with North Korea about its nuclear programme and of obstructing agreement between the Bush administration and European governments on a common approach to Iran. Ms. Rice reached such an accord with Britain, France and Germany within weeks of Mr Bolton’s departure from the State Department.

For much of its first term the Bush administration was hamstrung on Iran and North Korea by infighting in which Mr Bolton appears to have been a key protagonist. Would Mr Bolton effectively execute administration policies with which he disagreed? The administration recently won support for a new Security Council resolution on Darfur only by accepting European demands that war criminals from that Sudanese province be prosecuted by the international court. Would that deal have been struck with Mr Bolton as ambassador?

Senators have the obligation to weigh such questions and to ask how Mr Bolton’s record squares with the president’s stated intention to work cooperatively with the United Nations in his second term. Yet, ultimately they must bear in mind that the best arbiter of an ambassador’s effectiveness is the president he is charged with representing. Mr Bush has chosen Mr Bolton perhaps to satisfy conservatives in his party but also no doubt for the reason cited by Ms. Rice. Mr Bolton certainly possesses the intellectual standing. So far, there is no compelling case for denying Mr Bush his choice.

— The Washington Post