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MaximsNews
Contributor
Jeffrey Laurenti
Jeffrey
Laurenti is a senior fellow in
international affairs at The
Century Foundation. He is an
expert in international security,
international law and multilateral
institutions and a Contributor to MaximsNews
Network.
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2006:
BEST & WORST by JEFFREY LAURENTI
(MaximsNews.com,
U.N.) |
UNITED NATIONS - / www.MaximsNews.com,
UN/ - 11 January 2007 --
Picking the top news stories of
greatest long-term significance, for better or
worse, from the many around the world is
inevitably idiosyncratic and highly arbitrary
– which is what makes the exercise
interesting.
“Long-term significance” can also
prove highly transitory, as a comparison with
the prior year’s picks
may embarrassingly demonstrate. For 2006:
The Best:
- Consolidation of Latin American
democracy. With the inauguration of
Chile’s first woman president, socialist
Michele Bachelet; the improbable comebacks
of long discredited 1980s leaders, Alan García
in Peru and Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua; the
re-elections of the left’s “Lula” da
Silva in Brazil and the right’s Álvaro
Uribe in Colombia; and the bitterly
contested election of the conservative
Felipe Calderón in Mexico and leftist
Rafael Correa in Ecuador, the “year of
presidential elections” in Latin America
demonstrated that democratic institutions
are setting deep roots in the region – and
that all politics are local: The sulfurous
embrace of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez seemed
nowhere an asset (though he himself won
re-election by a 61% margin).
- Revolt of the Republican realists. The
Republican party’s realist wing – last
in power during the first President Bush’s
administration – came out in open
opposition to the Bush-Cheney regime’s
uncompromising Middle East policies with the
release of the Iraq Study Group report;
though scorned by the White House and its
hard-line allies, the report’s
recommendations seemed likely to be the
basis for Democratic and realist Republican
convergence in the new Congress.
- Flight of the Vulcans. The abrupt
departures of Donald Rumsfeld as secretary
of Defense and the unconfirmable John Bolton
as U.S. representative to the United Nations
removed two of the administration’s most
prominent advocates of its ill-fated
policies of belligerent confrontation; the
right’s last redoubt will be the White
House itself, where scarred veterans of the
1980s Iran-contra debacle now worry about
multiplying congressional restrictions to
tie their hands on overt and covert armed
interventions.
- Ahmadinejad set back. Iran’s own
fantasist hardliners, epitomized by the
truculent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
suffered a dual setback when Iranian voters
soundly rejected his slates of candidates in
elections for the “Assembly of Experts”
and control of local governments -- and the
U.N. Security Council imposed targeted
sanctions on Iran’s nuclear program (with
the door open to further tightening),
provoking growing debate inside Iran about
the need for a deal.
- International Criminal Court gains
momentum. With 104 countries now parties to
the ICC, cases pending for atrocities in
three African countries, and its chief
prosecutor’s announcement of imminent
charges being brought for war crimes in
Darfur (which the New York Times
says has “spooked” Sudanese officials),
the International Criminal Court established
its credibility and confounded Bush
administration bitter-enders; even the
Republican Congress dropped its ban on
military cooperation with ICC countries that
reject a special exemption for American
suspects, and Bush himself waived the
mandated cut-off of aid to them.
- U.N. Human Rights Council established.
The biggest institutional overhaul to emerge
from outgoing Secretary-General Kofi
Annan’s U.N. reform drive was the
upgrading of the policy body overseeing
human rights to a year-round Council,
four-fifths of whose members are bona
fide democracies; the Council’s
nation-specific focus on war-fighting
excesses by Israel and Sudan, however,
offended the West and Islamists
respectively.
- Asian economic surge sustained.
India’s third year of economic growth
rates above 8%, and China’s at 10%,
continued to lift hundreds of millions of
people out of deep poverty; together with a
revival in Japan’s long moribund economy
(real growth over 2%) and the Euro-zone (led
by still-fragile turn-arounds in the German
and Italian economies), the Asian surge
suggests the global economy may weather
incipient weakness in the U.S.
- Africa’s democratization limps
forward. Amid Africa’s staggering
problems, its fragile shoots of democracy
survived: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s
fledgling government in Liberia weathered
the handover of deposed warlord Charles
Taylor to a Hague trial; Nigerians rebuffed
president Olusegun Obasanjo’s bid for a
constitutional change to seek a third term,
setting up the first incumbent-free election
to succeed a retiring elected president in
the history of Africa’s most populous
country; and the sprawling Democratic
Republic of the Congo at last earned its
sobriquet by a U.N.-administered competitive
election, the first in nearly half a
century.
- Islamists lose ground in Somalia.
Mogadishu’s “Islamic courts,” who
crushed the former capital’s CIA-sponsored
warlords in the spring and by late fall were
threatening to overrun the weak transitional
government that U.N. mediators had
precariously nursed into being, dramatically
collapsed in the last week of 2006 in the
face of Ethiopian intervention; but ending
Somalia’s long nightmare depends on
whether the transitional government can wean
itself away from its alien protector and
consolidate its authority with an African
peacekeeping force authorized by the
Security Council in early December.
- Sudan allows U.N. into Darfur —
maybe. The first U.N. uniformed personnel
arrived in Sudan’s Darfur region at
year’s end, a day after Sudan’s
president accepted a three-phase approach to
the deployment of a hybrid United
Nations-African Union force in war-torn
Darfur; but after Khartoum’s stalling
tactics throughout the year--encouraged by
China’s solicitude--it was unclear whether
the agreement Annan painstakingly brokered
in his last weeks would hold up in 2007.
The Worst:
- Iraq unravels. While the largest number
of violent attacks in Iraq continued to be
directed at U.S. forces, casualties were
overwhelmingly Arab civilians as strife
mounted among sectarian militias and their
counterparts in “Iraqi security forces,”
leading even the American media to re-brand
the conflict as civil war; Saddam
Hussein’s rushed execution at year’s
end, before he could be tried on
precedent-setting charges like use of
chemical weapons and launching aggressive
war, will almost certainly have no impact on
slowing the downward spiral.
- Polio resurgent. On the brink of
extinction three years ago, when Nigerian
mullahs denounced vaccinations to eradicate
it as inimical to Islam, polio continued its
grim resurgence in 2006, with over 1400 new
cases diagnosed in 26 countries, the biggest
clusters being in Nigeria and India; in a
rebuke to the obscurantist clerics, Saudi
Arabia imposed a special requirement on
Nigerians seeking to make hajj to
Mecca that they would have to present
evidence of vaccination against polio.
- Koreans shake nuclear control regime.
North Korea staged the world’s first
nuclear weapons test since India and
Pakistan’s contrapuntal testing series in
1998, signaling the failure of both the Bush
administration’s anti-proliferation
strategy and the international community’s
two-tiered nonproliferation regime; the
Korean test did trigger the first Security
Council sanctions against nuclear weapons
proliferation in the U.N.’s history, while
the United States approved a nuclear
technology deal with India.
- Global warming unabated. Despite
climate data documenting the global warming
effects long predicted by climatologist
Cassandras, the rate of annual growth in
emissions of carbon dioxide more than
doubled in just a decade, to over 2% a year
by 2006; negotiations in November on targets
for reducing emissions after the Kyoto
Protocol expires in 2012 made no headway
over Bush administration opposition to
binding reductions, prompting France to
promise proposals for punitive taxes on
imports from non-Kyoto countries—and
incoming Democratic chairmen of relevant
congressional committees to promise policy
changes in U.S. law.
- Middle East paralysis deepened by
Lebanon war. Israel’s failed gamble to
crush Hezbollah in a wide-ranging war after
a July border incident doomed the Kadima-Labor
coalition’s promise of disentanglement
from occupied Palestinian territories, while
fierce opposition from inside the Bush
administration blocked Israeli talks with
Syria (as well as the Baker-Hamilton Iraq
Study Group’s call for U.S. talks with
Damascus), preventing the forward movement
on peace that has typically resulted from
previous inconclusive military
confrontations in the region.
- Roadmap undercut by new settlement
plans. The Israeli defense ministry’s
year-end approval of the first new Israeli
settlement on the occupied West Bank since
1992, at Maskiot, at a tense moment in
political maneuvering among Palestinian
factions and Israel, dismayed Israeli peace
advocates and put in doubt the viability of
the long-stalled international Quartet’s
“road map” to a permanent
Israeli-Palestinian peace.
- Arab democratization stalls. The
measurable progress by democracy advocates
in the Arab world in 2005 was reversed in
2006; the months-long bickering to produce
an Iraqi government after Shiite clerical
parties won last year’s parliamentary
elections, and the intransigently sectarian
government that emerged, dismayed
democratizers and religious minorities
throughout the region, while the hostile
Western reaction to Palestinians’ election
of a Hamas-led legislature placed the burden
of obduracy on the West rather than Hamas,
sowing cynicism in the region about the
West’s real commitment to democracy.
- Democracy overturned in Thailand. The
coup d’état launched by Thai military
officers with the apparent connivance of the
royal palace while prime minister Thaksin
Shinawatra was at the U.N. should have
shocked global democracy advocates out of
complacency about democracy’s progress,
which in southeast Asia had seemed steady
and on track; the coup aborted parliamentary
elections scheduled for October
(Thailand’s constitutional court having
invalidated fraud-tainted elections in
April), and the coup plotters hedged their
promise to restore democratic government in
late 2007 with a warning they would
constitute themselves as a permanent
“council of national security.”
- Afghanistan engulfed by Taliban
resurgence. The effort to sustain a
relatively moderate and stable government in
Afghanistan as a bulwark against Qaeda-style
jihadism faltered badly in 2006, as Western
troops under NATO command battled resurgent
Taliban fighters infiltrating from
sanctuaries in Pakistan; compromised by its
political alliances with corrupt warlords,
disdained for its meager progress on
Afghanistan’s desperate development needs,
and paralyzed over how to control the
exploding opium trade, the Kabul government
of Hamid Karzai looked increasingly to
Afghans like a weakling dependent on its
foreign sponsors.
- Civilizational dialogue jolted by papal
lecture. In a year when Afghan authorities
sentenced a man to death for converting to
Christianity, even as mosques were built in
Rome, Pope Benedict XVI’s effort to press
the Muslim world to “reciprocate”
Christian tolerance for Islam in the West
with parallel tolerance in Muslim lands like
Saudi Arabia might have met resistance in
any event; but the Pope’s theology lecture
at his old university of Regensburg, quoting
a late Byzantine emperor’s critique of
Muhammad’s “inhuman” call to spread
Islam by the sword, incited Muslim outrage
at supposed Christian hostility and
hypocrisy and exposed the fragility of
inter-religious and U.N.-nurtured efforts to
reduce conflict through a “dialogue of
civilizations.”
~~~~~~
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