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

Seven summers ago, in a crowded conference room of a Washington hotel, an Iranian exile leader gave the first detailed public account of Iran’s until-then secret nuclear projects at the cities of Natanz and Arak. It greatly turned up the volume of a seemingly endless international controversy over Iran’s nuclear intentions.

The disclosures, on August 14, 2002, did little to earn the group that made them, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), merit points from the U.S. government. A year later, the Washington office of the NCRI, the political offshoot of Iran’s Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MEK) resistance movement, was shut. The State Department placed the group on its list of terrorist organizations. (The MEK, also known as the People’s Mujahideen Organization of Iran, had been given that designation in 1997).

Now, another five summers later, two dozen MEK supporters are on hunger strike across from the White House to exhort the U.S. government to stick to promises to protect some 3,500 members of the organization in a camp north of Baghdad. Iraqi forces stormed Camp Ashraf in late July and the MEK says nine residents were killed in the initial assault. Two have since died of their injuries.

Hunger strikes in solidarity with the residents of Camp Ashraf were also taking place in Berlin, London, Brussels and Ottawa and at the camp itself. They draw attention to an arrangement that was both unique and bizarre - an enclave of people labeled terrorists by Washington but protected by U.S. military forces - and speak volumes about erratic U.S. policies on a group hated by Iran’s theocracy.

Those at Camp Ashraf, including around 1,000 women, have become, in effect, bargaining chips in the complicated relationship between the United States, Iraq and Iran. The raid on the camp coincided with a visit to Iraq by U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. What better way for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to demonstrate  that the Iraqis, not the Americans, are in charge now that Iraqi troops have assumed control under the Status of Forces Agreement signed last year?

What better way, too for Maliki, once derided as an American puppet, to show Iran’s hard-liners and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that Iraq’s Shi’ite-dominated government wants to tighten relations with Tehran? The raid on Camp Ashraf drew applause from Iranian officials, including Ali Larijani, the hard-line speaker of parliament. “Praiseworthy,” he said, “even though it is rather late.”

The MEK was founded in 1965 by leftist students and intellectuals opposed to the Shah of Iran, and it played a part in the Islamic revolution that toppled his rule in 1979. But it soon fell out with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and was banned in 1981, when it began a campaign of bombings and assassinations of government officials.

WARNINGS OF HUMANITARIAN DISASTER

In 1986, under an agreement with Saddam Hussein, it established bases in Iraq from where it launched cross-border raids into Iran.

Since 2003, when U.S. forces disarmed MEK guerrillas in Camp Ashraf and took over its protection, the government in Iran has repeatedly demanded that they be turned over to Iran. Their prospects there would be bleak, more so at a time when the Iranian government is staging mass trials of people who demonstrated against Ahmadinejad’s disputed re-election in June.

In an open letter to President Barack Obama, in the form of a full-page advertisement in the Washington Times, MEK supporters this week warned of a humanitarian disaster unless U.S. forces reassumed control, at least temporarily. “The long-term solution to the problem is the presence in Ashraf of United Nations forces or at least a U.N. monitoring mission.”

This is not the first time that the MEK has served as a bargaining chip in Middle Eastern politics. The group was placed on the U.S. list of terrorist organizations in 1997 at a time when the Clinton administration hoped the move would facilitate opening a dialogue with Iran and its newly elected president, Mohammad Khatami, who was seen as a moderate.

The European Union put the MEK on its terrorist blacklist five years later. Critics of the decision saw it as kowtowing to Iranian demands to avoid harming important trade relations. After years of legal wrangling, the EU took the MEK off its list of banned terrorist organizations on Jan. 26, a decision that infuriated Tehran.

Somewhat ironically for a country described as the world’s “most active state sponsor of terrorism” by the U.S. State Department, Iran said the EU’s decision meant Europe had “distanced itself from the path of the international community in fighting terror.”

The Obama administration has shown no sign of even considering taking the MEK off the terrorist list and thus further complicate its already complicated relations with Iran. Is abandoning the people at Camp Ashraf to an uncertain fate an option?

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

New York’s billionaire mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is stepping in where President Barack Obama fears to tread — confronting America’s powerful gun lobby. In the country that holds a commanding global lead in civilian gun ownership, it promises to be a hard fight.

No matter how it goes, America’s position at the top of the list of gun-owning nations looks secure. Up to 280 million guns are estimated to be in private hands and the arsenal is growing year by year. On a guns-per-capita basis, the United States (90 guns per 100 residents) is way ahead of second-ranked Yemen (61 per 100), according to the authoritative Small Arms Survey issued by the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva.

Obama has been a sore disappointment for advocates of tighter gun controls, and a boon to gun manufacturers and dealers. Predictions that his administration would swiftly work towards greater restrictions helped spark a huge run on firearms after his election. The National Rifle Association (NRA), the country’s biggest gun lobby, said its members reported widespread shortages of ammunition.

Supply and demand are back in balance and those who rushed to stock up need not have feared an Obama assault on gun ownership. The president has shown no eagerness for stepping into the political minefield of gun legislation. On the contrary. Obama rowed back in haste after his attorney general, Eric Holder, prompted alarm among gun lovers by saying he wanted to reinstate a ban on assault weapons that was allowed to lapse under the Bush administration.

There are no signs either that Obama intends to fulfil campaign pledges on other hot-button gun legislation issues such as closing the so-called gun show loophole that allows private citizen-to-citizen sales without background checks, or the Tiahrt amendment, which limits disclosing information on the sale of guns used in crimes.

Josh Sugarmann, head of the Washington-based Violence Policy Center, a group advocating tighter controls, describes Obama’s attitude so far as “deeply disheartening” and says the president broke campaign promises on gun legislation.

Why? History provides an explanation: the last time the United States had a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress, the party aggressively pushed gun control legislation and suffered crushing defeats at the polls, in part thanks to opposition stirred by the NRA. The Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 and held it until 2006.

Enter mayor Michael Bloomberg in New York, a city where he is popular and guns are not. In 2006, Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino formed Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG), a group that wants to make it more difficult for criminals to get their hands on guns. MAIG’s growth has been explosive: from 15 in 2006 to 250 in 2007 to 451 now.

BATTLE OF GIANTS

That makes, as a headline in the Washington Post put it, for “a battle of goliaths” pitting Bloomberg and his group against the NRA, whose four million members tend to see restrictions such as unregulated sales from private citizens (through the gun show loophole) as an assault on the U.S. constitution’s second amendment.

It says: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Exactly what that means (arms for militia members? for individuals?) was one of the most passionately disputed legal questions in the United States for decades until the Supreme Court last year ruled that it gave individual Americans the right to bear arms. The court also allowed for some restrictions on gun ownership.

In July, the U.S. Senate defeated a measure, introduced by a Republican Senator, John Thune, that would have allowed licensed gun owners to carry hidden, loaded weapons from states with weak gun laws to states with tough ones. The proposal failed largely because of energetic lobbying by Bloomberg’s mayors. It was a rare setback for the NRA and Bloomberg made clear he would remain on the offensive.

“If you want to beat the NRA,” he said on a television show this week, “you have to go out and get your message out. And it costs money to do that … You know, the NRA doesn’t spend that much money. If you look at what the real numbers are, I think that we can pull together here and raise enough money.”

Bloomberg has spent almost $3 million of his own money (Forbes estimates his personal fortune at $16 billion) on the mayor’s group. The NRA’s annual budget is around $200 million.

For Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s Executive Vice President and CEO, talk about money is beside the point. “Bloomberg is clearly out of step with the majority of Americans,” he said in an interview. “Our membership has been increasing by 40,000 to 50,000 a month since the middle of last year. We hope to reach five million before too long.”

LaPierre is confident that the NRA will prevail in future legislative wrangling, not least because “there has been a sea change in the center of the Democratic Party.” Ironically, the vote that defeated the Thune amendment gives backing to that view. The bill required 60 votes to pass. It fell short by two. Of the 58 votes in favor, 20 were from Democrats. (Editing by Kieran Murray)

– Bernd Debusmann is a Reuters columnist. The views expressed are his own. –
Nobody ever landed on the moon, the televised images are a hoax. John F. Kennedy was murdered in a complex plot involving the Mafia and the CIA. Elvis Presley lives. Barack Obama was born outside the United States and therefore is ineligible to be president.

All these claims stem from conspiracy theories and myths born in the U.S. and they throw a question mark over the long-held view of experts that such ideas flourish most in societies where news is controlled, access to information difficult and barriers to independent inquiry difficult to overcome.

This kind of restrictive environment  applies to many Third World countries - conspiracy theories are particularly abundant in the Middle East and Africa — but not to the technologically and economically advanced United States. Yet there is a parallel universe inhabited by millions and millions of Americans immune to facts, logic and common sense.

Some of the myths are harmless, such as the notion that rock-and-roll king Elvis Presley did not die in 1977 and instead went into hiding. (The reasons vary depending on who tells the tale).

There have been thousands of supposed Elvis sightings and a 2005 book says there’s DNA evidence that he is still alive. While the Elvis-in-hiding theory appears to fading (though it is far from dead), the hoaxed moon landing continues to run long enough to prompt a Newsweek magazine article that debunked the story on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo mission to the moon in July. Perhaps not surprisingly, early skepticism about the moon landing came from the Flat Earth Society, based in California.

The Flat Earthers have their own website, unlike the latest addition to America’s wide variety of conspiracy cults, the “birthers.”

They insist that President Barrack Obama was born in Kenya and that the certificate attesting to his birth in Hawaii is a forgery. Unlike the Flat Earthers, the birthers managed to find Congressional sponsors, all Republicans, to introduce a bill meant to block non-eligible Americans from becoming president in future.

H.R. 1503, introduced by Florida Republican Bill Posey, wants to “To amend the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 to require the principal campaign committee of a candidate for election to the office of President to include with the committee’s statement of organization a copy of the candidate’s birth certificate, together with such other documentation as may be necessary to establish that the candidate meets the qualifications for eligibility to the Office of President under the Constitution.”

TALK RADIO BOOSTS BIRTHERS

Weighty language for a weighty cause. First voiced during the presidential election campaign (when Obama opponents also aired suspicions that he is a Muslim), the birther conspiracy gained currency when a right-wing talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh, expounded on it and entertained his audience with the following line: “What do Obama and God have in common? Neither has a birth certificate. How do they differ? God does not think he’s Obama. And there’s another difference between God and Obama, and that is that liberals love Obama.”

This from a man with a reputation as the loudest and perhaps most influential conservative voice in American politics. Asked a few weeks ago whom he would chose as a political leader if the choice were between Limbaugh and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, former Vice President Dick Cheney opted for Limbaugh.

A conservative cable TV show host, Lou Dobbs of CNN, also boosted the birth certificate tale, inviting proponents of the theory on his program and raising questions over the authenticity of the certificate Obama’s campaign team produced before the elections.

Air time for the birthers, whose natural habitat is the Internet, clearly helped spread their claims. There are no reliable statistics on the number of American Flat Earthers, Moon Walk deniers or Elvis spotters but a poll in late July showed considerable Republican support for the birthers’ assertions and their conclusion that Obama is an illegitimate president.

According to the survey, by the polling institute Research 2000, there is a huge gap between Republicans and Democrats on the issue: 93 percent of Democrats believed that Obama was born in the U.S. while only 42 percent of Republicans thought so. Of the rest, 28 percent thought he wasn’t born in the U.S. and 30 percent were not sure.

“Far from being an isolated, on the edge movement, the birthers have planted deep a paranoid conspiracy seed about Obama’s legitimate right to sit in the White House among a wide body of Americans,” lamented Earl Ofari Hutchinson, a political analyst.

The debate, he says, has bestowed a kind of perverse legitimacy on the birthers. “They won’t quietly go away.”

Probably not. Conspiracy theories come in many forms but they have one thing in common: they survive against overwhelming factual evidence.

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

Barack Obama’s star may be fading slightly at home but it is still so bright in Europe that  he outshines the leaders of Germany and France in their own  countries, according to a poll that shows a remarkable global  shift in attitudes towards the U.S. since he took office.

The question is: does it matter?

First, the statistics. The latest Pew Global Attitudes  Project, a widely-respected survey that has tracked  anti-Americanism around the world since 2002, polled 26,397  people in 25 nations in May and June and found that the image of  the United States had improved in all but one (Israel),  reflecting, it said, “global confidence in Barack Obama.”

The most dramatic before-and-after-Obama change, from 2008 to 2009, was noted in Britain, France, Germany and Spain. In Germany, 93 percent of those polled expressed confidence in the U.S. president’s leadership compared with 75 percent for German  chancellor Angela Merkel. In France, the score was 91 percent  for Obama and 53 percent for Nicolas Sarkozy.

In 2008, just 31 percent of Germans saw the U.S. in a favourable light. This year: 64 percent. In France, the favourability rating jumped from 42 percent to 75 percent, in Britain from 53 percent to 69 percent and in Spain from 33 percent to 58 percent. In short, “old Europe,” as former defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld used to call it, is head-over-heels in love with Obama.

The reason for this, and the general improvement in the American image, depends on who does the explaining. For former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who co-chairs the board of the Pew project, it is a mixture of “admiration for Obama and  respect for the country that elected him.” Albright is a Democrat.

Former Senator John Danforth, the other co-chairman of the project, says Obama love stems from “telling people what they want to hear” and apologizing for past American actions. In his view neither Obama’s popularity abroad nor a better U.S. image have resulted in concrete actions. Danforth is a Republican.

He and others making that argument underrate the importance of public opinion in international relations but they do have a point: Take Obama’s call on NATO nations to provide more troops  for Afghanistan, for example. 63 percent of the Germans polled are opposed to that, along with 62 percent of French, 51 percent of Britons, and 50 percent of Spaniards.

Similarly, Europeans showered praise on Obama’s decision to close the Guantanamo prison but while the European Union has agreed in principle to meet American requests to take some of  the prisoners, there has been no rush to do so.

CAN NICE GUYS WIN?

So, is this a lesson that nice guys don’t win on the foreign policy front? The gap between Obama’s ratings and those of George W. Bush could hardly be bigger. A median of 71 percent in the 2009 survey expressed confidence that Obama will do the right thing in world affairs. Bush last year drew a paltry 17 percent.

Obama has only been in office for six months and he has achieved more in polishing America’s image than a succession of public diplomacy czars who for years attempted to sell Bush’s foreign policies in a more attractive package, much like trying to market the same corn flakes in a new box. Or shining a car to  a high polish and trying to sell it - without an engine.

It didn’t work and failed to stop a relentless slide in America’s international standing from the high of almost universal sympathy for the country immediately after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.  (Memorable post-attack headline in the French daily Le Monde:  “We are all Americans”)

Now there’s a new honeymoon but concrete results of what some call Obamamania may remain elusive in Europe, where it runs strongest, and even more in places where his charisma, brilliant  speeches and brilliant smile have made less of an impression. In Turkey and Pakistan, both countries of key importance for U.S.  foreign policy, negative views of America did not change with  the election of Obama.

If history can serve as a guide, a president’s popularity abroad has limited effect.

The French celebrated John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie  like rock stars when they visited Paris in 1961 but that did  nothing to make President Charles de Gaulle less inclined to act  as a rival to his American counterpart.

Returning to the question of how much a better image matters, Andrew Kohut, the president of the Pew Research Center,  has part of the answer: “The views of the U.S. are being driven much more by personal confidence in Obama than by opinions about  his specific policies.”

One of these policies, his decision to step up the war in  Afghanistan, which could eventually play as big a role in the  Obama presidency as the Iraq war played in Bush’s, is viewed  with disapproval in most of the countries in the survey.

In the end, it will be the policies that count, not affection for a charismatic leader with a compelling only-in-America life story. Or, as a 19th century European politician, Britain’s Lord Palmerston, put it: nations don’t have eternal friends, they just have interests.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

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

Tough marijuana laws are driving millions of Americans to a more dangerous mood-altering substance, alcohol. The unintended consequence: violence and thousands of unnecessary deaths. It’s time, therefore, for a serious public debate of the case for marijuana versus alcohol.

That’s the message groups advocating the legalization of marijuana are beginning to press, against a background of shifting attitudes which have already prompted 13 states to relax draconian laws dating back to the 1930s, when the government ended alcohol prohibition and began a determined but futile effort to stamp out marijuana.

How dismally that effort has failed is not in doubt. Marijuana is so easily available that around 100 million Americans have tried it at least once and some 15 million use it regularly, according to government estimates. The U.S. marijuana industry, in terms of annual retail sales, has been estimated to be almost as big as the alcohol industry — $113 billion and $130 billion respectively. On a global scale, marijuana is the world’s most widely used illicit drug.

Since the United States, and much of the rest of the world, plunged into a recession last year, the most frequently used argument in favour of legalizing marijuana has been economic: if it were taxed, the revenue would help stimulate economic recovery just as a gusher of dollars in fresh tax revenue from alcohol helped the United States pull out of the Great Depression after the 1933 repeal of prohibition.

That idea enrages some leading drug warriors, including the head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa. In the preface to the U.N.’s 2009 World Drug Report, he asks whether proponents of legalization and taxation also favour legalizing and taxing human trafficking and modern-day slavery “to rescue failed banks.”

Never mind that drug abusers hurt themselves and human traffickers hurt others. It’s the kind of topsy-turvy logic which has made sober discussion of national and international drug policies (largely driven by the United States) so difficult for so long.

The case for adding a compare-and-contrast dimension to the debate is laid out in a statistics-laden book to be published next month entitled “Marijuana is Safer, So why are we driving people to drink?” The authors are prominent legalization advocates - Steve Fox of the Marijuana Policy Project, Paul Armentano of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and Mason Tvert, co-founder of SAFER (Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation).

“The plain and simple truth is that alcohol fuels violent behaviour and marijuana does not,” Norm Stamper, a former Seattle police chief, writes in the foreword of the book. “Alcohol … contributes to literally millions of acts of violence in the United States each year. It is a major contributing factor to crimes like domestic violence, sexual assault and homicide. Marijuana use … is absent in that regard from both crime reports and the scientific literature. There is simply no causal link to be found.”

LACK OF COMMON SENSE

Violence committed by belligerent drunks apart, there is the question of which drug — marijuana or alcohol — is more harmful to your health. The authors cite government statistics and a long string of academic studies that show marijuana is less harmful.

According to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, around 35,000 Americans die of alcohol-related diseases every year. That’s almost 100 a day. Add to this another 16,000 people killed in road accidents involving drunk drivers. There are no equivalent statistics for deaths linked to marijuana use.

Yet alcohol is legal, marijuana is not. The monumental lack of common sense in the attitudes of successive U.S. administrations towards marijuana is one of the explanations for a steady shift in public attitudes as reflected by opinion polls. In May, a Zogby poll found 52 percent support for treating marijuana as a legal, taxed and regulated substance.

Opposition to legalization, polls show, has been weakening over the past few years. Before 2005, no national poll showed support for legalization above 36 percent.

But surveys also show that there is a persistent perception that alcohol and marijuana are equally harmful and that legalization would merely add another vice.

“This perception is wrong,” says Tvert, “and it can’t be corrected overnight. What we aim for is legislation that would give adults the choice between alcohol and a less harmful alternative. Current laws steer people towards alcohol because they fear the consequences of being caught using marijuana. But I think we are nearing a tipping point.”

Perhaps. One of the biggest obstacles on the road to policy changes is a sprawling bureaucracy of drug warriors who have an obvious interest in keeping things as they are and have long practice in shrugging aside data and evidence. During the eight years of the Bush administration, they were led by a staunch, ideologically-driven proponent of prohibition at any cost, drug czar John Walters.

The man President Barack Obama chose as his top drug policy official, Gil Kerlikowske, is likely to be more open to rational argument. Kerlikowske succeeded Norm Stamper as Seattle police chief and during his tenure, possession of marijuana by an adult ranked as the city’s lowest law enforcement priority. Lower than running a red light.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com)

(Editing by Kieran Murray)

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

What happened to the Ugly American, the one with the loud shirt and the loud voice, expecting the natives to speak English? Has he been shouldered aside by the Arrogant French?

That’s the conclusion one could draw from a survey this month of 4,500 hotel owners around the world who rated the French the world’s worst tourists, bad at foreign languages, arrogant and tight-fisted. Spaniards, deemed noisy and messy, came second in a field of 27. Americans ranked 9th on the list of the top 10 best.

The survey, commissioned by the online travel agency Expedia, ranked travellers in nine categories, from cleanliness to generosity in tipping, and provided food for thought on a long-running debate on an unresolved question: to what extent do national stereotypes correspond to reality?

One of the most extensive studies of that question ever conducted, led by scientists of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, involved 4,000 people in 48 countries and came to the conclusion, in 2005, that most national stereotypes are inaccurate.

Researchers compared perceived national characteristics with actual character traits and reported some surprising findings. Americans, for example, think the typical American is very assertive. Canadians think the typical Canadian is submissive. But Canadians and Americans had almost identical scores in objective measures of assertiveness.

The enduring nature of stereotypes, scientific studies challenging their veracity notwithstanding, is reflected in an evergreen joke about the nature of heaven and hell: Heaven is the place where the lovers are Italian, the police are English, the mechanics are German, the cooks are French and the place is run by the Swiss.

Hell is where the lovers are Swiss, the cooks are English, the mechanics are French, the police are German and the place is run by the Italians.

In a similar vein: How many American tourists does it take to change a light bulb? Nine. Three to figure out how much the bulb costs in the local currency, three to comment on how funny-looking local light bulbs are and three to hire a local person to change the bulb.

So is there a kernel of truth to the notion of the noisy American, the efficient German, the stiff-upper-lip Briton, the stingy Scot, the rude French, the passionate Latin lover, the drunken Russian, the polite and boring Canadian, the extrovert Australian, the macho Mexican, the egocentric Argentine, the melancholic Swede? It depends on whom you ask.

STEREOTYPES ARE UNIVERSAL

Almost everyone has stereotypical ideas of other nations and other cultures. Shining the light on these notions can be entertaining as well as good business. Take the case of the Xenophobe’s Guides, a series of light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek books on the characteristics of different nations.

Since the guides started in 1995, the publisher sold 2.6 million copies and there are translations into 22 languages, according to Anne Tauté, the creator and editor of the series who lives in London. She says she was prompted to start the books to provide more insight into other cultures.

The guide to Americans observes that they “are friendly because they just can’t help it; they like to be neighbourly and want to be liked. However, a wise traveller realises that a few happy moments with an American do not translate into a permanent commitment of any kind.”

On the French: “French politicians look smart because power itself is chic, attractive, and one should dress to look the part. The French electorate would never allow any government to intervene in their lives if it were shabbily dressed.”

There is a serious side to stereotypes. As history has shown, they can contribute to discrimination and prejudice, often reflected by offensive jokes. As in: What do you get when you cross an Italian with a Mexican? A gangster on welfare. At the extreme end of stereotyping, there have been persecution and mass murder, viz. Nazi Germany or Rwanda.

To get back to the survey of tourists: it confirmed some widely-held stereotypes and raised questions over others. Why do people from France and Spain, the world’s top two tourist destinations (The U.S. is third) behave in ways they would criticise in visitors to their own countries?

As to the Americans: they were rated the loudest, least tidy and worst complainers. They owe their ranking as the 9th best to generous spending and tipping and to their willingness to try and communicate in the local language. Who ranked first? The Japanese.

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

Spare a thought for Hugo Chavez, the larger-than-life Venezuelan leader who flourished in the role of Latin America’s defender against an evil empire led by a devil who smelt of sulphur and was named George W. Bush.

Those were the easy days for Chavez. Now he has become a dragon-slayer without a dragon, an actor on a stage without the most important prop. It was one thing to rally the Latin masses against the widely-detested Bush, it is another to deal with Barack Obama, “the first (U.S.) president who looks like us,” in the words of Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

“The devil, the devil himself, is right in the house, ” Chavez said, to laughter and applause, in his infamous 2006 anti-Bush speech to the United Nations General Assembly. “And the devil came here yesterday. Yesterday, the devil came here. Right here. And it smells of sulphur still today.”

Chavez’s reaction to the bizarre coup that ousted Honduran president Manuel Zelaya was evidence that the Venezuelan knows the rules of the game he played for years no longer apply. In his weekly television show, he said he did not think Obama was behind the plot.

Claiming otherwise would have been difficult even for a president given to surreal conspiracy theories. Within hours of the coup against Zelaya, a Chavez ally, Obama condemned the action, as did the Organization of American States and the European Union, which promptly withdrew its ambassadors from Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital.

Contrast Washington’s reaction to the way it greeted a short-lived coup against Chavez and you might well come to the conclusion that he owes a debt of gratitude to the Bush administration.

On April 12, 2002, the White House greeted with barely concealed glee news that a coup had ousted Chavez, an elected president. He had created the conditions that led to his ouster, according to then White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. In other words, he only had to blame himself.

Washington looked forward, Fleischer said, to working with Venezuelan democratic forces (a euphemism for the plotters) to “restore the essential elements of democracy.” As it turned out, that wasn’t necessary. Chavez was back in power within 48 hours and has portrayed himself as a victim and a target of CIA plots ever since.

The role of victim will be more difficult to play in future, barring big missteps on the Latin American scene by the Obama team. So far, there have been none. Commenting on the Honduras coup during a visit to Moscow, Obama said policy differences were no reason to abandon democratic principles. During the abortive coup against Chavez, the Bush team seemed eager to do just that.

U.S. ANTAGONISM BOOSTED CHAVEZ

Chavez’s political fortunes have been boosted considerably by confrontational U.S. moves, and not only during the eight years of George W. Bush. In 1998, when Chavez campaigned for the Venezuelan presidency, the Clinton administration denied him a visa to visit the United States. At the time, polls put his support at between three and five percent.

Those numbers shot up when Chavez incorporated the visa denial into his campaign. Holding aloft a visa credit card, he would tell cheering crowds that “this is the only visa I need,” not the visa the U.S. denied him. He won the election.

Since then, Chavez has emerged as a role model for Latin American leaders who want to perpetuate themselves in power by way of changing their countries’ constitutions. After narrowly losing a referendum on term limits in 2007, he tried again this year and won. He now can run for re-election as often as he wants.The opposition saw it as a move towards a lifetime presidency.

In January, Chavez’s left-wing ally Evo Morales won a referendum that allows him to run for a second five-year term. Last September, another Chavez ally, Ecuador’s Rafael Correa, won a referendum on a new constitution that vastly expanded his powers and allowed him to hold office for two additional four-year terms.

Another leftist, Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega, has begun pushing for changes to let him stay on after his present term expires in 2011. (The urge to perpetuate themselves in power is not restricted to Chavez’s leftist allies: In Colombia, President Alvaro Uribe is mulling ways to run for a third time, after having the constitution changed to give him a second term).

In Honduras, Zelaya tried and failed to follow the Chavez script. Soldiers stormed into his residence and bundled him onto an Air Force plane, still in his pyjamas, bound for Costa Rica, after days of tension over his attempt to gauge public support for a referendum on term limits.

And for once, Chavez does not have an American president to blame.

Poor Hugo.

(You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com.)

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

“There is a great deal about Iran that we do not know…The United States lacks critical information needed for analysts to make many of their judgments with confidence about Iran.”

That was the verdict of a Congressional committee on U.S. intelligence policy two years ago. How valid it still is was highlighted by Iran’s June elections and their turbulent aftermath.

By most accounts, the huge margin of President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s victory, the equally huge demonstrations of Iranians crying fraud, and their brutal repression all came as surprises to U.S. intelligence and foreign policy experts.

The reasons for America’s problems of coming to grips with Iran are manifold: a 30-year absence of diplomats on the ground, an opaque political system difficult to penetrate, wishful thinking, a perennial temptation to “mirror-image,” that is to expect others to think and behave like yourself. Last but not
least: an acute shortage of Farsi-speaking analysts and agents.

The number of people in the sprawling U.S. intelligence community, 16 separate agencies with more than 100,000 employees, who speak Iran’s language is classified, as is the number of fluent Arabic and Pashto speakers. (The State Department says it has 22 foreign service officers out of 6,500 who are fluent in Farsi.)

The problem is not new and it contributed to the notorious misjudgments of the situation in Iran by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1978, a few months before the Islamic revolution that sent the Shah fleeing into exile.

Said the CIA: “Iran is not a revolutionary state or even pre-revolutionary state.” Echoed the DIA: The Shah “is expected to remain actively involved in power over the next 10 years.”

There have been no CIA or DIA predictions of how long Ahmedinejad will stay in power but there have been public pledges to address the language deficit.

Its overall scale was thrown into sharp focus by the government’s disclosure, long after the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, that it had a 123,000-hour backlog of taped message traffic in Middle Eastern languages.

America’s intelligence czar, Dennis Blair, says that a “lack of language-qualified personnel has been a perennial problem for the Intelligence Community.”

Leon Panetta, President Barack Obama’s choice as CIA chief, has repeatedly spoken of the need for officers who “read, speak and understand foreign languages.”

President George W. Bush two years ago announced a National Security Language Initiative to “dramatically increase” the number of Americans learning, speaking, and teaching “critical need” foreign languages. That was followed by a five-year Strategic Human Capital Plan that pinpointed part of what is one of the biggest problems: “non-U.S. citizens who cannot meet our security requirements.”

DIFFICULT SECURITY CLEARANCE

That phrase leaves out the huge pool of American citizens who are native speakers of Farsi, Arabic and other languages deemed critical for gaining a better understanding of  opaque countries like Iran or penetrating al Qaeda and its affiliates.

The vetting process for a security clearance is almost as high a barrier for them as for non-citizens. For decades, dual citizenship and having close non-citizen family members were grounds for automatic disqualification from jobs that required a security clearance.

That changed last October with a new directive that allows exceptions to be granted on a case-by-case basis when there is a “compelling need that is based upon specific national security
considerations.”

That requirement  is hard to meet for first-generation Americans who have close relatives living in Middle Eastern countries. The government fears they could be subject to blackmail or family pressure.

Added to this, there is “an underlying mistrust of Muslim Americans or Arab Americans in the national security area,” according to Frederick P. Hitz, a former inspector general of the CIA. In a recent book (Why Spy? Espionage in an Age of Uncertainty), Hitz termed this mistrust “short-sighted and a return to the attitude that enabled the United States to intern Japanese Americans during World War II.”

While the intelligence agencies, in the words of  Dennis Blair,  “continue to wrestle with clearing people who are native speakers of critical languages,”  the vetting process can take a year or more, somewhat of a disincentive even for potential recruits brimming with patriotic spirit.

The language deficit is so serious that some in the intelligence community think addressing it requires an effort as sweeping as the programs that were put into place after the Russians launched the first earth-orbiting satellite, Sputnik, in 1957 and the U.S. realized how far behind it was in space technology.

Sputnik spurred a major push to get young Americans to study mathematics, physics and Russian.

This is not likely to happen.

Given the time it takes to learn difficult languages, senior intelligence officials say the immediate emphasis is on drawing recruits from first-generation citizens.

It’s a work in progress and progress is slow. Which begs the question whether America’s intelligence services are as omniscient and omnipotent as Washington’s adversaries make them out to be.

Iran’s government saw the hand of the CIA behind the street protests and violence that followed Ahmedinejad’s June 12 elections. Perhaps it was. But a deep study of the Iran by one of America’s most respected think tanks makes one wonder.

Commissioned by the U.S. Air Force and released by the RAND Corporation a few weeks before the elections, the 230-page study said America’s understanding of Iran’s complex political landscape was so limited that attempts to foment internal unrest were likely to be unsuccessful.

You can contact the author at Debusmann@Reuters.com

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

It’s time to kill the international community. The phrase, that is.

Usually shorthand for the governments of “the West,” the phrase is over-used (a Google search produces 447 million hits) and under-thought. It is often misleading and sometimes plain wrong. As in President Barack Obama’s news conference remarks this week on Iran’s post-election crackdown on protest:

“The United States and the international community have been appalled and outraged by the threats, beatings and imprisonments of the last few days.”

Which international community? Certainly not one that includes the world’s most populous country, China, where there were no signs of outrage. Instead, the Foreign Ministry endorsed the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the choice of the Iranian people and expressed hopes for stability.

Stability in this context means an uninterrupted flow of oil: a month before the Iranian elections and the ensuing turmoil, Iran overtook Saudi Arabia as China’s top supplier of crude. Traders said it might be a one-month blip but the figures highlighted energy-hungry China’s dependence on Iranian oil.

The Chinese government enforced stability at home 20 years ago by gunning down hundreds of anti-government street protesters and sending in tanks to clear Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. To prevent public commemorations of the massacre’s June 4 anniversary, the government blocked Internet sites in a massive censorship operation.

Russia, the only country Ahmadinejad has visited since the disputed elections, showed no signs of being appalled or outraged. Does that mean that China and Russia do not belong to “the international community”? For purposes of international finance, they do — both belong to the G20, the group of finance ministers and central bank governors of the world’s most important economies.

“The Iranian people have a universal right to assembly and free speech,” Obama said. “If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect those rights and heed the will of its own people.”

Again, which international community? Invoking the term is easier than defining it. If it means governments with an unblemished human rights record, most of the world does not qualify for community membership. If it means democracies, considerably fewer than half the globe’s nation states belong. If it means countries that value democracy more than stability, the community shrinks even further.

If it means, as it usually does, the United States and Europe, the community accounts for less than a fifth of the world’s population. If it means countries that actually take action to stop human disasters, the genocidal slaughter in Rwanda, for example, the record is appalling.

DANGEROUS REFERENCE POINT FOR THE NAIVE

Ruth Westwood, a Yale law professor, has described “international community” as “a dangerous reference point for the naive” because, she says, its connotation of commitment invites unwise reliance on others by those who must ultimately fend for themselves.

By logic, the term should belong to the United Nations, whose founding charter, drawn up in San Francisco a month after the end of World War Two, spelt out a shared vision for a better world and pledged to prevent wars, observe fundamental human rights, respect international treaties and promote better standards of life.

But the label “international community” is almost never applied to the United Nations, whose 192 member states include the world’s worst violators of human rights and international law. Think Zimbabwe. Think Sudan. Think Myanmar. If the United Nations represented the collective will of the world, that will often runs counter to the United States, which sees itself as the engine of the “international community.”

In General Assembly votes on contentious issues such as the U.S. embargo on Cuba or Israeli settlements on the West Bank, the United States tends to stand virtually alone.

The “international community” usually erupts into outrage after people in the developed world see shocking images of man’s inhumanity to man on their television or computer screens. In China, it was the image of a lone protester in a white shirt standing in front of a column of tanks. In Iran, it was a short amateur video clip of a young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, bleeding to death in a Tehran street after being shot by a sniper.

So perhaps the term international community rightly belongs not to the United States and Europe, nor to an institution with an address on Manhattan’s East River, but to the global network of Internet-savvy citizens (and reporters) who circumvent government censorship at great risk to provide the information that sparks the outrage.

So, how to get rid of the phrase in its standard amorphous usage? To start with, media organizations could discourage it (some already do). As to politicians: there’s always the option to ask for clarification. Yes, there’s outrage, Mr. President, but exactly who is the international community?

You can contact the author at Debusmann@reuters.com.

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

Americans need to be afraid, very afraid. If President Barack Obama has his way, the country will soon be at serious risk of terrorist attacks coordinated by Muslim men held in maximum security prisons from where no-one has ever escaped.

These inmates possess superhuman strength and cunning. Even in solitary confinement, they might recruit fellow inmates to the cause of al Qaeda and incite riots. They might succeed where the worst of the worst American criminals failed - break out and disappear, seamlessly blending into the community. Next thing you know — a mushroom cloud.

Such scenarios come to mind when one follows the debate over Obama’s plan to close the infamous detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the U.S. naval base on the eastern tip of Cuba, and move some of the inmates to prisons in the United States.

This has prompted expressions of dismay both from the political right and from Obama’s fellow Democrats in Congress, and the language used in the debate has taken on a surreal quality. Phrases like “releasing dangerous terrorists into our neighborhoods” and “relocating terrorists to American communities” convey the impression that Guantanamo detainees will wander the streets, shopping for sandals and guns.

“To … bring the worst of the worst terrorists inside the United States would be the cause for great danger and regret in the years to come,” according to former Vice President Dick Cheney. “We have to make sure that streets and neighborhoods don’t think that they’re going to be the repository of Guantanamo prisoners,” warned Barbara Mikulski, a Democratic Senator.

A group of Republican congressmen drafted a “Keep terrorists out of America Act” early in May. America, for the purposes of the act, means American prisons.

It is ironic that politicians in the U.S., which holds more people behind bars than any other country, profess to have so little faith in a system that costs billions to run and includes high-security “supermax” institutions where dangerous inmates spend all but four hours a week in their cell.

If these fears are more than just political theater, are they justified or are they the security equivalent of other mass psychoses, say the irrational belief that house prices would go up forever? “In terms of escaping, U.S. prisons are extremely secure,” says Alan Elsner, a Reuters correspondent and author of Gates of Injustice, a book on the American prison system. “The fears being voiced now are driven entirely by emotion.”

OBAMA TRIPPED UP

And lack of rational reflection. Not to mention a generous dose of NIMBY (not in my back yard) politics and a bad case of mishandling a delicate issue on the part of Obama, who left it too late to explain where the 240 detainees held in Guantanamo would go once the prison there is closed as planned, by next January.

His fellow Democrats in the Senate joined Republicans in a 90-6 vote to block $80 million in funds to pay for the closure.

Barely noticed in the hubbub: the federal high security prisons in Colorado and Indiana where Guantanamo inmates would probably move already hold convicted terrorists linked to al Qaeda, including Zacarias Moussaoui, found guilty of helping to plot the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the twin towers in Manhattan and the Pentagon, and Ramzi Yousef, who led the first attack on the World Trade Center.

How many of the detainees still held in Guantanamo qualify for the “worst of the worst” label is anyone’s guess. After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the military rounded up 779 suspected “enemy combatants” and shipped them to Guantanamo. More than 500 were released without being charged.

There have been only three prosecutions under a much-criticized military tribunal system authorized by President George W. Bush to try foreign terrorist suspects outside regular civilian or military courts. One defendant pleaded guilty, one was convicted in a contested trial and one after putting up no defense.

Where and when the rest of the detainees will be tried is not clear. What is clear is that Obama will try hard to fulfil his pledge, made on his first day in office, to close Guantanamo, whose existence, he says, “created more terrorists around the world than it ever detained.”

Stalwarts of the Republican party, an organization in deep disarray and looking for an issue that could draw from a bi-partisan well of fear and xenophobia, did not quite see it that way.

“In my view, what is driving this issue is a quest for popularity in Europe, more than continuing policies that have demonstrably made America safe since 9/11,” said Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Republican minority in Congress. Cheney echoed that thought in a speech harshly critical of Obama: “The administration has found that it’s easy to receive applause in Europe for closing Guantanamo.

“But it’s tricky to come up with an alternative that will serve the interests of justice and America’s national security.”

Ah, yes, it’s all for those Europeans Obama wants to court. Echoes of the days when Bush and Cheney were riding high and French fries turned into Freedom fries.