Bernd Debusmann

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

For the United States, the world’s leading arms merchant, a controversial deal with the tiny island state of Bahrain is negligible, less than half a percent of America’s total sales.  But it helps explain efforts to regulate the global arms trade more tightly.

The proposed sale in question is worth $53 million, involves 44 armoured Humvees, a variety of missiles, and night vision equipment. The Pentagon announced it in mid-September, just three months after the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Eileen Chamberlain Donahue, in a speech in Geneva, included Bahrain on a list of governments that “repress dissent with impunity.” Along with Syria, Yemen and Libya, the royal rulers of Bahrain responded to the Arab Spring democracy movement by killing and jailing opponents.

In mid-September, the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency told Congress that the deal would “contribute to the foreign policy and national security of the United States by helping to improve the security of a major non-NATO ally that has been, and continues to be, an important force for political stability and economic progress in the Middle East.”  The advocacy group Human Rights Watch said the U.S. appeared to “reward repression with new weapons.”

That would make it hard for people to take seriously American statements about human rights and support for democracy, said Maria McFarland of Human Rights Watch. The deal should be delayed until Bahrain ends abuses against critics, she said on September 22.

Since then, the Bahraini rulers took more action that provided fodder to its critics. On September 29, a court sentenced a protester to death for allegedly killing a policeman and sentenced doctors who had treated wounded protesters to prison terms from five to 15v years.

Bahrain, connected by a causeway to Saudi Arabia, is home to the U.S. Fifth Fleet, there to guard shipping lanes that carry around 40 percent of the world’s tanker-borne oil. The Pentagon’s explanation of the deal echoed decades of U.S. policy that placed a higher value on stability than on democracy.

That kind of thinking was part of the reason why a group of Nobel Peace Prize winners, in 2003, launched an initiative to establish an international Arms Trade Treaty that would close gaps in existing arms control regulations and set legally binding standards for the import, export and transfer of conventional weapons.

After various preparatory meetings, the United Nations General Assembly is scheduled to convene a conference next July to work out a robust Arms Trade Treaty. The enterprise brings to mind an image of well-meaning Don Quijotes tilting at windmills. Why? Since the end of the Cold War, the international arms trade has become more complex, more competitive and more driven by economics rather than ideology.

SHRINKING MARKET, FIERCER COMPETITION

Then, “providing conventional weapons to friendly states was an instrument of foreign policy utilized by the United States and its allies. This was equally true for the Soviet Union and its allies,” writes Richard Grimmett, the author of the latest report on the global arms trade the Congressional Research Service (CRS) provides annually to the U.S. Congress. Now, “the principal motivation for arms sales by key foreign suppliers…may be based as much, if not more, on economic considerations as of those of foreign or national security considerations.”

That holds true, too, for the U.S.(where defense and aerospace companies provide an estimated 800,000 jobs) and it holds especially true at a time of declining world-wide orders for arms because of the global recession. In 2010, according to the CRS report, world-wide arms transfer agreements totaled $40.4 billion, a decline of almost 40 percent compared with 2009.

The U.S., long the world’s top arms supplier, ranked first again in 2010, with arms deliveries (as opposed to agreements) worth $12.2 billion, more than twice as much as second-ranked Russia. Germany came third, evidence of what the CRS report described as weapons-exporting countries looking for new clients in areas where they have not played major established roles.

The German government faced fierce domestic criticism in July after reports on a planned deal to sell 200 top-of-the-line Leopard tanks to Saudi Arabia, which had sent troops and tanks across the causeway to Bahrain to help crush anti-government demonstrations. Unlike the U.S., Germany has no direct security interests at stake in the region. But like the U.S., Germany has a defense industry that needs exports to flourish. Its main arms manufacturers employ around 80,000 people.

All of which casts a dark shadow over prospects of an effective Arms Trade Treaty. As does China, which is opposed to the inclusion of small arms and light weapons in any international treaty. As it happens, China has become a key supplier of such weapons to Africa, where they have caused the vast majority of casualties in conflicts that have killed millions.

You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

So much for charges from conservative contenders for the 2012 U.S. presidential elections that Barack Obama is not pro-Israel enough — the president just won seals of approval from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his far-right foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, and the U.S. lobby that usually reflects their views.

If the elections, as some predict, will include a contest on who loves Israel most, Obama can use their praise to good effect. How much it will contribute to his legacy is another matter.

The plaudits came in response to Obama’s address to the United Nations on Sept. 21, when he rejected the Palestinians’ bid for U.N. membership in what one Israeli journalist, Chemi Shalev of the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, described as “probably the warmest pro-Israel speech ever given at an annual U.N. General Assembly meeting by any U.S. president, bar none.”

Its tone differed sharply from his moving description of the plight of the Palestinians in a speech in Cairo in 2009, five months after taking office. For 60 years, he said, they had endured the pain of dislocation and “the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. Let there be no doubt,” he said, “the situation of the Palestinians is intolerable.”

The Cairo speech raised expectations in the Arab world that here was a president who sympathized with the Palestinians and had the power, global prestige and commitment to succeed where a long line of his predecessors had tried and failed – help create a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel. It didn’t work that way.

Fast forward to Sept. 21, 2011. No word about daily humiliations, dislocation, occupation, intolerable conditions. Instead, the emphasis was on centuries of persecution of Jews, anti-Semitic Arab school books, Israelis killed by Palestinian rockets and suicide bombs. As Rashid Khalidi, director of Columbia University’s Middle East Institute put it, “He recited a litany of suffering of Israelis with nothing about Palestinian hardships in a conflict whose most recent flare-up in 2008-09 left over 1,300 Palestinian victims and 13 Israelis.”

Netanyahu saw it differently. Obama had won a “badge of honor” with his address. Lieberman, a driving force behind the relentless construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, praised Obama for not mentioning that negotiations on a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be based on the 1967 borders.

The American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) issued a statement expressing its appreciation for Obama’s rejection of the Palestinian U.N. bid and his insistence on the return to negotiations. Off and on, they have dragged on for two decades, during which Israel has tripled the number of Jewish settlements on land that is supposed to become a Palestinian state.

POLITICS TRUMP POLICY

What explains Obama’s transition from Cairo 2009 to New York 2011? In Washington, politics trump policy and Israel has been more of a domestic than a foreign policy issue even before the foundation of the Jewish state in 1948. When President Harry Truman and his top advisers discussed plans for the partition of Palestine in 1945, the experts warned against it. Truman is said to have responded: “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism. I don’t have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents.”

Sixty-six years later, that kind of calculation still plays a role but in the case of Obama, there has been an additional element – a battle of will with the Israeli prime minister in which the leader of the world’s remaining superpower backed down repeatedly, on issues from a demand for a settlement freeze to the territorial lines on which negotiations should be based. The score so far: Netanyahu 3, Obama 0.

Which makes it rather bizarre that the two front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination, Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, are portraying Obama as favoring the Palestinians at the expense of Israel. In language that highlighted both ignorance and the toxic nature of American politics, Perry said Obama had pursued a policy of “appeasement” of the Palestinians.

The term dates back to the 1930s when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made concessions to Adolf Hitler to avoid going to war against Nazi Germany. In slightly less over-the-top terms, Romney talked of Obama’s efforts to “throw Israel under the bus.”

Whether Perry, Romney and other prominent Republicans manage to turn support for Israel into a wedge issue in 2012 is open to doubt in a race almost certainly dominated by jobs and the economy. But if it does emerge as a campaign topic, Obama can always wave the “badge of honor” awarded him by Netanyahu, to show that he is no different from a long line of American presidents much closer to Israel than to the Palestinians.

Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

WASHINGTON — In tandem with the $447 billion jobs plan President Barack Obama announced on September 8, his administration is breathing new life into an old program to draw job-creating foreigners to the United States. It’s known as the EB-5 investor program, has a clouded history, and can’t bring much relief to America’s unemployment misery.

But with 27 million people unemployed or underemployed and Obama’s own job depending on whether or not he can bring down the unemployment rate in time for next year’s presidential election, every job-creating opportunity is worth pursuing.

Which is why Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano and Alejandro Mayorkas, the director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), announced “streamlining measures” to America’s complicated immigration laws a few weeks before the president laid out his ideas on how to spur growth, a mix of tax cuts and infrastructure spending.

Unlike the Obama plan, tweaks to existing immigration rules need no approval from Congress so the administration has no-one to blame if the streamlining fails to yield results, such as a rush of foreigners investing $500,000 in a U.S. project that generates at least 10 jobs in areas of economic hardship and high unemployment. The incentive, apart from possible profits: a fast track to a “green card” (permanent residence) and U.S. citizenship for the entrepreneur and his family.

Long an object of desire for millions of would-be immigrants, a green card normally takes years to get. Approval for a conditional EB-5 green card can come through in a matter of weeks and the USCIS has established a Premium Processing Service that “guarantees processing within 15 calendar days for “projects that are fully developed and ready to be implemented.”

The impact of the enhancements announced by Napolitano and Mayorkas remains to be seen. According to projections by the Congressional Budget Office, the agency that provides economic data to Congress, lowering the unemployment rate by 1 percent (it now stands at 9.2 percent) would require 316,000 new jobs per month. That dwarfs the jobs created by the EB-5 program.

Since its inception in 1990, according to USCIS estimates, the program resulted in more than $1.5 billion in capital investments and created at least 34,000 jobs – an average of 1,700 a year. There has not been a single year when the annual quota of 10,000 EB-5 green cards was taken up. A Government Accountability Office report in 2005 blamed, among other things, “an onerous application process and lengthy adjudication periods.”

Those kinks have been ironed out, to hear the government tell it, and the United States is ready “to attract the best and brightest from around the world.”

But foreigners thinking of putting down $500,000 (for projects in depressed regions) or $1 million for other projects would be well-advised to read a Reuters report, the result of two months of investigations, on misleading promotions of the system by some of the specially-designated American businesses (known as regional centers) that are allowed to offer EB-5 visas to foreign investors.

NOTHING EASY, NOTHING CERTAIN

The report comes to the conclusion that the EB-5 program is anything but an easy and certain path for wealthy foreigners to get into the U.S. and stay there. In fact, only 54 percent of the immigrants who start the process of gaining permanent residence through the program actually attain it, according to the report, published in December.

Since the beginning of the year, USCIS has been working on enhancements of the process and its backers see it as a win-win proposition. One of its most vocal champions, Stephen Yale-Loehr, a professor at Cornell University Law School, says it’s a win for U.S. businesses finding it difficult to get bank loans, it’s a win for the foreigner who gets a green card (if the project flourishes) and it’s a win for American workers because jobs are being created.

Hard-core opponents of immigration see a different picture. David North of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, greeted the announcement that the EB-5 process was being streamlined with a blast of criticism headlined Administration Caves to Open-Borders Advocates on Investor Visas.

This is a reflection of a general anti-immigration mood thanks to which new legislation to attract foreigner entrepreneurs to the United States is stuck in Congress. Called the Startup Visa Bill, it was first introduced last year by Senator John Kerry, a Democrat, and Richard Lugar, a Republican, and re-introduced with modifications in the spring. The aim is the same as the EB-5 program but the barriers to entry are lower and the procedure differs.

Under the legislation, a foreign entrepreneur would qualify for a conditional green card if he can raise $100,000 from a U.S. venture capitalist. The green card would become permanent if the new venture created five new American jobs and raised at least $100,000 in annual revenues.

The bill has won fulsome praise from the technology industry, where foreign entrepreneurs have played leading roles, but the prospect of its passage in an election year look as remote as the comprehensive immigration reform Obama promised when he campaigned for the presidency in 2008.

Even less likely to persuade immigration opponents is an unorthodox suggestion from one of the most prominent advocates for an overall reform of an immigration system he has described as completely broken – New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. His idea: offer visas to foreigners who agree to live in blighted cities, such as Detroit, for seven years without claiming any welfare benefits.

In his words: “Overnight you would fill it with new people who would fill it with new jobs.”

There’s good news and bad news on the war on drugs in Mexico and the United States. The good news: cooperation between U.S. and Mexican security forces has rarely been closer. “Unprecedented,” President Barack Obama termed it in a message of sympathy for 52 people killed in an arson attack on a casino in northern Mexico.

The unprecedented cooperation he referred to ranges from the United States providing intelligence drawn from wiretaps and aerial surveillance by U.S. drones to taking part in planning operations to capture drug lords.

American agents, according to accounts from both sides of the border, had a role in hunting down 21 of the 37 men on Mexico’s list of most-wanted organized crime chiefs.

The bad news is that closer cooperation in taking out the CEOs of illicit business enterprises has done little to curb violence in Mexico or throttle the flow of drugs north and the smuggling of guns and cash south. One CEO goes, another one steps in his place. Real change would require an admission by political leaders that conventional drug war strategies have failed and, more importantly, that there’s a need for significant societal changes in both countries.

In the United States, millions of Americans would need to stop snorting, sniffing or injecting the drugs produced in Latin America and smuggled across the 2,000-mile border with Mexico. In Mexico, deeply-rooted traditions resistant to assistance from outside allow crime syndicates to flourish – acceptance of corruption as a way of life and “dreadfully little respect for the law,” in the words of former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda.

In an insightful new book — “Manana Forever – Mexico and the Mexicans” — he writes that “Mexico has no way out of its drug wars … unless it changes its attitudes towards the law. This is not occurring.”

Statistics tell the story of the drug wars’ failure on both sides of the border. In the United States, where President Richard Nixon declared “war on drugs” 40 years ago, they are at least as easily available now as they were then. The laws of supply and demand proved more powerful than progressively harsher enforcement. “The market forces of replacement and adaptation make the drug-dealing industry resilient even in the face of heavy enforcement,” Mark Kleiman, a widely respected drug policy expert, writes in a thoughtful essay in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine.

“The United States sends five times as many drug dealers to prison today as it did 30 years ago, but this has not prevented the 80-90 percent reductions in the prices of cocaine and heroin over that time, which came as a result of falling dealers’ wages and increased efficiency in trafficking.”

Numbers tell a similarly bleak story in Mexico, where President Felipe Calderon formally declared war on his country’s drug traffickers and sent the military into action shortly after taking office in December 2006. That opened the bloodiest chapter in Mexico’s history since the 1910-1920 revolution. By the end of 2007, the body count stood at 4,300. It climbed steadily: 5,400 deaths in 2008, 9,600 in 2009, 15,000 in 2010 and around 7,000 so far this year.

GOVERNMENT SPIN AND COMMON CRIME
The government long insisted that criminals killing other criminals in often gruesome ways (beheadings became commonplace) accounted for around 90 percent of the dead, soldiers five percent and innocent civilians the rest. That account glossed over an enormous wave of common crime, from murder and kidnapping to the protection racket apparently behind the Monterrey casino attack.

The criminal-on-criminal story line died on August 25, when gunmen set fire to Monterrey’s Casino Royale. Of the 52 people who died, 42 were bingo-playing middle-class women, most of them asphyxiated when they found the emergency exits locked. The attack highlighted the scant respect for rules and regulations Castaneda complains about.

The casino had been ordered closed by the Monterrey mayor’s office for various code violations but a local judge reversed the move and ordered the place reopened. Like many of the casinos that sprouted during Calderon’s presidency — from 198 in 2006 to 790 now, according to the magazine Proceso — its functions are said to have included laundering dirty money.

As he has done frequently, Calderon took the casino attack as an opportunity to rebuke the United States for not doing enough to “drastically reduce” Americans’ consumption of drugs and curb the flow of cash and guns from the United States to Mexico. But in a speech on September 2, he also listed what he called the most important challenge facing his government: “Repair the fabric of society torn by lack of opportunity for the young, the disintegration of families and the loss of values.”

That will take time and meanwhile, the drug wars continue, with strategies that have a proven record of failure. Could the wars be waged more effectively? Yes, says Kleiman, in his Foreign Affairs essay headlined Surgical Strikes in the Drug Wars.

In the United States, shrinking the market could be done by reducing the use of hard drugs (i.e. non-cannabis) by what he estimates are around 3 million people. This small minority of drug users, according to Kleiman, accounts for around 80 percent of hard drug use and an even larger share of crime associated to their addiction, with about 75 percent having at least one felony arrest in the course of a typical year.

Kleiman, a professor of public policy at the University of California, Los Angeles, offers an unorthodox idea for Mexico: rather than fight all criminal groups with equal force at the same time, publicly identify the most violent through a scoring system taking into account the overall number of its killings, its targets (dealers, enforcement agents, ordinary citizens, journalists, community leaders etc), and kidnappings.

Then, wipe out that group and start the process again, going after the next group. “The process could continue until none of the remaining groups was notably more violent than the rest. In effect, such a strategy would condition the traffickers’ ability to remain in business on their willingness to conduct their affairs in a relatively nonviolent fashion.”

Wishful thinking? Perhaps. But so is the idea that there is a way to stop people from using drugs.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters)