Re: Rep. Lantos, American Politics, and Aid to Lebanon
- From: "Zein" <zein@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 31 Aug 2006 13:00:45 -0700
Tom LAntos always fought for Lebanon's Independance from Syria, what was
the reason for blocking the bill?
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"BASIL K" <maysaloun@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1157001581.825750.320170@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Well, it kind of tells me that America
favors White Christians and Jews, and they are not really serious about
cultivating good relations with people of the Middle East or actually
reaching out to their own minorities. Hopefully, the next
administarion will be more serious about that.
BM a écrit :
http://blog.psaonline.org/2006/08/28/rep-lantos-american-politics-and-aid-to-lebanon/
Rep. Lantos, American Politics, and Aid to Lebanon
by Eugene Gholz | August 28th, 2006
I've blogged before about my skepticism about the effectiveness of
foreign aid, especially to conflict-ridden countries: sending money
often breeds conflict over who gets it, and parties to the conflict can
use the money to fight harder. And in my last post, I questioned
whether post-conflict reconstruction is a good strategy for building
friendships, because the local politics of infrastructure investment are
complex, fraught with over-promising and under-performance, and
impossible for foreigners to understand and manipulate.
So one might infer that I would be pleased to hear that Representative
Tom Lantos (D-CA) has placed a hold on the bill that would give $236
million in aid to Lebanon (for the story from Beirut, see the Daily
Star; for the counterpart story from Jerusalem, see the Jerusalem Post).
But there are big problems with what Lantos has done. M. J. Rosenberg
at the TPM Cafe says he's "speechless" in response, but I have a few
comments to offer.
First, at the same time Lantos blocked the aid to Lebanon, he also
promised to introduce a bill to bump up U.S. aid to Israel. His
comments suggested that other countries were giving aid to Lebanon and
that the U.S. should make sure that Israel gets reconstruction help,
too. While Israel indeed suffered during the war, and someone is going
to have to pay for rebuilding there, too, Lantos' statement comparing
destruction was surely inflammatory. It won't take many people long to
compare the scale of damage and the indigenous resources available to
repair the damage from the war, and Israel comes off looking as if it
doesn't need aid nearly as badly as Lebanon. And besides, the U.S.
sends vast sums to Israel every year; we should not be in the business
of comparing aid, dollar-for-dollar, to Israel and Lebanon. All Lantos'
aid promise does is once again signal to the whole world how deeply
Israel has the U.S. in its pocket (or would a better line be that Israel
is reaching into our pocket to get our money?).
Israel is our ally, Hezbollah escalated their conflict with Israel
first, and the U.S. rightly treats Hezbollah, a terrorist group,
differently from how we treat recognized nation-states like Israel. But
now is not a good time to remind the world how far from "fair and
balanced" American policy really is.
Second, the short-term effect of Lantos' hold is to give another
political victory to Hezbollah: Hezbollah immediately issued a statement
- a quite believable one - that they wouldn't have accepted American aid
anyway. We're playing into their agenda again. If we're in the aid
game, we should be making sure that the Lebanese government has some
resources independent of the Hezbollah-Iran nexus.
Third, Lantos' argument that his hold on the aid will give the U.S.
leverage in Lebanon is wrong. He claims that he will release the aid
when the Lebanese agree to let international peacekeepers patrol the
Lebanese-Syrian border, thereby denying Hezbollah a resupply route for
their weaponry. So Lantos thinks that he's giving Lebanon an incentive
to do what we want them to. And his goal is even a good one: preventing
Hezbollah from rearming is a legitimate goal of American policy towards
Lebanon. However, aid conditionality is a remarkably ineffective means
to achieve such "high politics" ends - much as economic sanctions tend
to be ineffective.
Especially when only $236 million is at stake. Lebanon has billions of
dollars in damage to repair, and they are receiving large sums of money
from other sources. Our $236 million is not "make-or-break" for their
reconstruction plan. Denying the money will certainly hurt the U.S.
symbolically, but Lebanese Prime Minister Siniora is not going to take
on a major domestic political battle for $236 million of money from a
"tainted" source.
The most important point, though, is not about Lebanon at all. It is
about the American political process. We need an open debate about the
appropriate role for the United States in the Middle East broadly and
specifically in the aftermath of the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon.
Representative Lantos' unilateral action violates all sorts of normal
principles of American government: the executive branch has a certain
leadership role in foreign policy, although of course the Congress (and
especially the House) have an important role, too, when it comes to
spending money. But the House operates through debates and voting.
If Lantos wants to stop aid to Lebanon, he should convince a majority of
the House by the weight of his arguments. The American Congress has a
strong enough pro-Israel leaning that his arguments might even carry the
day. But I would like my Congressional representative to have a say in
the process - along with the executive branch's public statements in
support of their position. I didn't vote for Representative Lantos - I
never even had the chance to, since I don't live in his district - and I
don't trust him (or anyone else) to make unilateral decisions about
American foreign policy.
The United States has an open policy process, because that process most
of the time leads to the best decisions. That process can get nasty and
partisan, but even when it does, at least we're using the process. I
hope that Representative Lantos will let the Lebanon aid bill come up
for discussion and a vote.
In the end, I probably hope that both the aid for Lebanon and the aid
for Israel will be defeated. But I'm not holding my breath for that
outcome.
One last thing - an additional reference on my post last week about how
hard post-conflict reconstruction can be. The New Yorker has run a
great series of articles about post-Katrina rebuilding over the past
year. Tomorrow is the anniversary of the hurricane, and many people are
lamenting the lack of progress fixing New Orleans. Dan Baum's article
in the current New Yorker, though, is exceptionally good, and it makes
clear a lot of the problems with buck-passing, distrust, and
finger-pointing that make infrastructure projects next-to-impossible.
I don't really have a sense for how the damage in Lebanon compares to
the damage in New Orleans. Katrina affected a wider area, and it was
less selective than the Israeli bombs in what it hit. But Lebanon, like
New Orleans, is an ethnically (religiously) mixed area with
long-seething resentments about bad public investment decisions, a long
history of ineffectual government, and an atmosphere ripe for political
grandstanding rather than real public policy decision-making.
Reconstruction advocates should learn from the difficulties that we face
in the U.S., and American policy-makers should, with humility about
their likely effectiveness, focus their attention on fixing the big
problems that we face here at home.
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