Americas

An American involves in A somalia Bombing

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 04:58:00 GMT

By JOSH KRONMOGADISHU, Somalia — The voice in the recording sounds unmistakably familiar — the tenor, the colloquialisms — a boy who grew up in America.

The recording was a suicide message, posted online on Sunday by an Islamist militia aligned with Al Qaeda. The voice was said to be that of Abdisalan Hussein Ali, 22, who was born in Somalia but spent his formative years in Minneapolis.

His life appeared to have come full circle here on Saturday, when he is said to have blown himself up in an attack on African Union troops in Mogadishu. He would be the third American known to become a suicide bomber for Somalia’s Shabab rebels.

The Shabab said that Mr. Ali was one of two suicide bombers in the attack, which the militant group said killed scores of peacekeepers. The African Union has confirmed that it suffered casualties, but has not disclosed the number.

But as the Shabab have lost power and support in Somalia in recent months, the battle has turned into a war of words as much as weapons, and the claim of an American suicide bomber packs a powerful punch.

Omar Jamal, a Somali diplomat at the United Nations, said that Mr. Ali was one of the bombers. Mr. Ali’s friends and family listened to the recording, Mr. Jamal said, “and they all say that it is him.”

A spokesman for the American Embassy in Nairobi said the United States had “seen reports” that one of the bombers was an American citizen, and was investigating them.

Mr. Ali was known by the F.B.I. to be one of an estimated 30 Americans who have joined the Shabab, at least 20 of whom came from the Somali community in Minneapolis.

He had been an ambitious pre-med student at the University of Minnesota, hoping for an internship at the Mayo Clinic, before he disappeared in 2008. The audio recording, in which the speaker exhorts Westerners to join the fight, appears to reflect those qualities.

“Don’t just sit around, you know, and be, you know, a couch potato and just like, just chill all day,” the voice on the recording says. “Today jihad is what is most important. It’s not important that you become a doctor, or some sort of engineer.”

For Mr. Ali, life began in war and seems to have ended that way. He was only a few months old when his family fled the strife in Somalia in a makeshift boat, landing first at a Kenyan refugee camp, his mother told The New York Times in a 2009 interview. The family, with 12 children, arrived in Seattle in 2000 and then moved to Minneapolis.

Minneapolis has embraced generations of refugees from around the world, and Mr. Ali’s high school, Thomas Alva Edison High in northeast Minneapolis, calls itself an “International World School,” offering open houses to prospective students in Spanish; Hmong, which is spoken in Southeast Asia; and Somali.

During high school, he sold sneakers out of his locker to make money to help support his family. He lifted weights, and his friends called him “Bullethead.” He was elected president of the school’s Somali Student Association, and he later became a caseworker at a prestigious law firm. At the University of Minnesota, he majored in chemistry and held a part-time job as a security guard at the management school there.

“He was a highly motivated kid,” said a fellow student, an upperclassman who became his mentor. “He wanted to change lives.”

Why and when he turned to Islamic militancy is unclear.

A friend of Mr. Ali’s, who attended middle school and then college with him, said they were part of a tight-knit group of Somali-Americans who grew up together and would talk about Somalia and debate politics.

“There was a desire in all of us, that our parents always talk about, the great Somalia,” the friend said, who did not want to be identified for fear of being questioned by the F.B.I. Mr. Ali was not her first Somali friend to join the Shabab, she said, nor the first to die as a member of the group.

She described Mr. Ali as “very outgoing.”

“We used to call him a womanizer,” she said. “He was always in with the ladies. But then all that changed.”

In Arabic class, he started sitting in the back, not talking to anyone. “But then again, you’re not going to look at him and say his personality changed, he’s going to get radical and leave the country,” she said. “In college that’s when you find out who you are, so I didn’t think much of it then.”

One night in 2008, he was wrongly accused of robbing a Subway sandwich shop on campus. Friends said the experience left a mark on him long after the charges were dropped.

In November 2008, he disappeared, along with two other Somali-Americans. “For an unknown reason the family thinks that” Mr. Ali “may have got on a plane and went somewhere,” a Minneapolis Police Department missing persons report says.

The Shabab, which controlled most of southern Somalia by the end of last year but have since lost ground, have posted videos on YouTube aimed at encouraging young Somali-Americans to come here. Many have heeded the call.

In October 2008, Shirwa Ahmed, also from Minneapolis, blew himself up in one of a string of Shabab attacks in northern Somalia. In May of this year, Farah Mohamed Beledi, 27, of St. Paul, tried to attack a government checkpoint in Mogadishu but was killed by African Union troops before he could detonate his explosives.

Another American, from Washington State, was reported to have been part of a suicide squad that attacked an African Union base in Mogadishu in 2009, killing more than 15 peacekeepers, but his identity has not been confirmed. And this month, two Somali-American women from Minnesota were convicted of aiding the Shabab.

However, many Somali-Americans have returned, not to fight, but to help rebuild the country, including the current prime minister and his predecessor.

Speaking of Saturday’s suicide attack, the weak American-backed transitional government expressed sorrow over what it said was not just a loss of life, but of a vital human resource.

“It’s tragic, because we were hoping for this young man to come back and take part in the rebuilding of the country,” said Suldan A. Farahsed, a government spokesman. “We needed young people like that.”

Mr. Ali kept in touch with his old life back in the United States by telephone and Facebook. His Facebook page shows him wearing a skullcap and wielding a baseball bat.

The friend says that Mr. Ali and a mutual friend last exchanged Facebook messages three weeks ago, but that the mutual friend stopped contacting Mr. Ali because “he said things that made her uncomfortable.”

Two years ago, he told a friend in Minneapolis that he would never attack the United States.

“Why would I do that?” the friend recalled Mr. Ali saying. “My mom could be walking down the street.”

Andrea Elliott contributed reporting from New York.

China's Rise Isn't Our Demise

Thu, 08 Sep 2011 02:38:00 GMT

China’s Rise Isn’t Our Demise

By JOSEPH R. BIDEN Jr.

WASHINGTON

I FIRST visited China in 1979, a few months after our countries normalized relations. China was just beginning to remake its economy, and I was in the first Senate delegation to witness this evolution. Traveling through the country last month, I could see how much China had changed in 32 years — and yet the debate about its remarkable rise remains familiar.

Then, as now, there were concerns about what a growing China meant to America and the world. Some here and in the region see China’s growth as a threat, entertaining visions of a cold-war-style rivalry or great-power confrontation. Some Chinese worry that our aim in the Asia-Pacific is to contain China’s rise.

I reject these views. We are clear-eyed about concerns like China’s growing military abilities and intentions; that is why we are engaging with the Chinese military to understand and shape their thinking. It is why the president has directed the United States, with our allies, to keep a strong presence in the region. As I told China’s leaders and people, America is a Pacific power and will remain one.

But, I remain convinced that a successful China can make our country more prosperous, not less.

As trade and investment bind us together, we have a stake in each other’s success. On issues from global security to global economic growth, we share common challenges and responsibilities — and we have incentives to work together. That is why our administration has worked to put our relationship on a stable footing. I am convinced, from nearly a dozen hours spent with Vice President Xi Jinping, that China’s leadership agrees.

We often focus on Chinese exports to America, but last year American companies exported more than $100 billion worth of goods and services to China, supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs here. In fact, our exports to China have been growing much faster than our exports to the rest of the world.

The Chinese leaders I met with know their country must shift from an economy driven by exports, investment and heavy industry to one driven more by consumption and services. This includes continued steps to revalue their currency and to provide fair access to their markets. As Americans save more and Chinese buy more, this transition will accelerate, opening opportunities for us.

Even as the United States and China cooperate, we also compete. I strongly believe that the United States can and will flourish from this competition.

First, we need to keep China’s rising economic power in perspective. According to the International Monetary Fund, America’s gross domestic product, almost $15 trillion, is still more than twice as large as China’s; our per-capita G.D.P., above $47,000, is 11 times China’s.

And while there is a lot of talk about China’s “owning” America’s debt, the truth is that Americans own America’s debt. China holds just 8 percent of outstanding Treasury securities. By comparison, Americans hold nearly 70 percent. Our unshakable commitment to honoring our financial obligations is for the sake of Americans, as well as for those overseas. It is why the United States has never defaulted on its obligations and never will.

Maybe more important, the nature of 21st-century competition favors the United States. In the 20th century, we measured a nation’s wealth primarily by its natural resources, its land mass, its population and its army. In the 21st century, the true wealth of a nation is found in the creative minds of its people and their ability to innovate.

As I told students in Chengdu, the United States is hard-wired for innovation. Competition is in the very fabric of our society. It has enabled each generation of Americans to give life to world-changing ideas — from the cotton gin to the airplane, the microchip, the Internet.

We owe our strength to our political and economic system and to the way we educate our children — not merely to accept established orthodoxy but to challenge and improve it. We not only tolerate but celebrate free expression and vigorous debate. The rule of law protects private property, lends predictability to investments, and ensures accountability for poor and wealthy alike. Our universities remain the ultimate destination for the world’s students and scholars. And we welcome immigrants with skill, ambition and the desire to better their lives.

America’s strengths are, for now, China’s weaknesses. In China, I argued that for it to make the transition to an innovation economy, it will have to open its system, not least to human rights. Fundamental rights are universal, and China’s people aspire to them. Liberty unlocks a people’s full potential, while its absence breeds unrest. Open and free societies are best at promoting long-term growth, stability, prosperity and innovation.

We have our own work to do. We need to ensure that any American willing to work can find a good job. We need to keep attracting the world’s top talent. We must continue to invest in the fundamental sources of our strength: education, infrastructure and innovation. But our future is in our own hands. If we take bold steps, there is no reason America won’t emerge stronger than ever.

As vice president, I’ve traveled half a million miles around the world. I always come home feeling the same confidence in our future. Some may warn of America’s demise, but I’m not among them. And let me reassure you: based on my time in China, neither are the Chinese.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. is the vice president of the United States.

Quieter Approach to Spreading Democracy Abroad

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 06:00:00 GMT

By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — Fresh from orchestrating a historic victory, President Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe, headed to the remote seaside town of Baku for a lucrative speech. For Mr. Plouffe, it was a chance to pocket an easy $50,000. But for the authoritarian government of Azerbaijan, it was a chance to burnish the reputation of a harsh system headed by the son of a K.G.B. general.

An outcry forced Mr. Plouffe to donate the cash to pro-democracy groups in the former Soviet Union, but to some policy experts it spotlighted a shift in American attitudes toward advancing the cause of democracy abroad. Mr. Plouffe did not intend to give succor to a despot, friends said, but evidently did not think to determine whether the supposed civic group forking over the money had ties to an anti-democratic regime.

Four years after President George W. Bush declared it the mission of America to spread democracy with the goal of “ending tyranny in our world,” his successor’s team has not picked up the mantle. Since taking office, neither Mr. Obama nor his advisers have made much mention of democracy-building as a goal. While not directly repudiating Mr. Bush’s grand, even grandiose vision, Mr. Obama appears poised to return to a more traditional American policy of dealing with the world as it is rather than as it might be.

The shift has been met with relief in Washington and much of the world, which never grew comfortable with Mr. Bush’s missionary rhetoric, seeing it as alternately cynical or naïve. But it also underlines a sharp debate in Democratic circles about the future of Mr. Bush’s vision. Idealists, for lack of a better word, agree that democracy-building should be a core American value but pursued with more modesty, less volume and better understanding of the societies in question. The realists, on the other hand, are skeptical of assumptions that what works in America should necessarily be exported elsewhere, or that it should eclipse other American interests.

The essential tension for the Obama team is whether to let Mr. Bush’s strong association discredit the very idea of spreading democracy. “It’s sadly ironic that an administration that put democracy promotion at the forefront of its foreign policy has created such controversy about what has been a bipartisan ambition,” said Kenneth Wollack, president of the National Democratic Institute, a government-financed group, affiliated with the Democratic Party, that promotes democracy abroad.

Mr. Wollack noted that presidents of both parties embraced the idea of nurturing democracy overseas for decades before Mr. Bush came along, even if he made it more central to his mission statement. “Now the debate is where it ought to be on that agenda,” Mr. Wollack said.

To many Democrats, it ought to be lower on the agenda. America should not lecture others, if only because quiet diplomacy may work better, they argue. In this view, the whole focus on elections, particularly, is misplaced when so much of the world is suffering from poverty, hunger and disease. Mr. Obama seems to side with that point. During an interview with The Washington Post before his inauguration, he said he wanted to consider the promotion of democracy “through a lens that is actually delivering a better life for people on the ground and less obsessed with form, more concerned with substance.”

His Inaugural Address a few days later was a sharp contrast from Mr. Bush’s four years ago. Where Mr. Bush called the spread of freedom the central goal of American policy, Mr. Obama made just passing reference to those who silence dissent being on “the wrong side of history.” Indeed, his secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, outlined a policy of the “Three D’s” — defense, diplomacy and development. The fourth D, democracy, did not make the list.

And if that were not clear, during her trip to Asia last week, she said that human rights violations by China “can’t interfere” with cooperation between Washington and Beijing on other issues. That may simply be a more honest statement of longstanding reality in the Chinese-American relationship, but it still seemed jarring.

Moreover, Mr. Obama’s National Security Council has not duplicated the high-profile democracy post Mr. Bush had. Instead, Mr. Obama’s top democracy adviser during the campaign, Michael McFaul, was given the Russia portfolio. Coincidentally, this comes as the State Department Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor is being relocated across the street from headquarters, although the assistant secretary in charge will remain on the executive floor. The move, instigated in the last days of the Bush administration, stems from renovation schedules, but proximity is power in government and advocates are worried.

No one has been nominated for that assistant secretary position yet. Many Democrats thought Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch, would be a powerful choice, but he cannot take the job under Mr. Obama’s rules against lobbyists. Mr. Malinowski was registered as a lobbyist to advocate for victims of genocide, torture and oppression, rather than moneyed interests, but that has not earned him a waiver.

“As a Democrat, I am particularly troubled,” said Jennifer Windsor, executive director of Freedom House, a group that promotes democracy and liberty abroad. “To see democracy promotion as particularly Republican or Bush policy is to misunderstand our country’s foreign policy history.”

After all, Democrats in Congress created the democracy and human rights bureau at the State Department in the 1970s, and Jimmy Carter embraced it as he made human rights a central tenet of his foreign policy. Ronald Reagan created the National Endowment for Democracy to encourage reform around the world. Bill Clinton made democracy promotion one of four pillars of the nation’s international development strategy.

Mr. Obama, Ms. Windsor said, should find his own way to advance the cause.

“The challenge for the Obama team is to find words and concepts that enable the administration to distinguish itself from the Bush administration, but not to downgrade support for democracy and civil and political rights,” she said. “So far, I haven’t seen them even try.”

Thomas Carothers, who oversees the democracy and rule of law program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, made the same point in a paper to be published next week. “Caution and moderation on democracy promotion are very much in order, including a careful post-Bush process of repair and recovery,” he wrote. “At the same time, however, President Obama and his foreign policy team should not, either explicitly or implicitly, embrace a broad realist corrective.”

Carl Gershman, president of the National Endowment for Democracy, said Mr. Obama should retool the agenda to make it more of a long-term goal instead of an immediate policy instrument. He argued “for lowering the profile of the issue without abandoning the commitment, especially in the Middle East, which is the toughest region, but where more progress was achieved in the last period than is generally recognized.”

The Middle East, of course, is what led Mr. Bush down this road in the first place. After the invasion of Iraq failed to turn up any weapons of mass destruction, he embraced the goal of building democracy there as an outpost for freedom in a repressive region. By the time his second inauguration came around, he decided to broaden the mandate around the world, seeing it as a more positive philosophical underpinning for the war on terror than simply hunting down evildoers.

It was a heady idea. Mr. Bush and his advisers took inspiration from popular revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Lebanon that toppled entrenched governments. They were encouraged by the first purple-finger elections in Iraq. They were emboldened when Egypt released the imprisoned opposition leader, Ayman Nour, after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, canceled a trip to protest his arrest.

Yet the vision Mr. Bush articulated with passion and clarity was never translated consistently into policy. He launched the Millennium Challenge program to steer foreign aid to countries promoting freedom and developing rule of law. He met with the Dalai Lama, hosted Chinese and North Korean dissidents in the Oval Office and slapped sanctions on Burma. But he tempered criticism of allies and countries he needed for other priorities, like Saudi Arabia, Russia and Kazakhstan.

His “freedom agenda” was undermined after his administration encouraged Palestinian authorities to proceed with elections that were ultimately won by Hamas, which the West considers a terrorist group. And much of the world saw democracy promotion through the lens of Iraq, viewing it not as a principled stance but as code for changing regimes that America did not like, even by force.

“For all the criticism of Bush, I certainly do think he believed his rhetoric and his agenda on freedom,” said David Kramer, who was Mr. Bush’s last assistant secretary of state for democracy. “He can be faulted on the implementation of it, but I don’t think he can be called hypocritical.”

William Inboden, a former strategic adviser at the National Security Council now at the Legatum Institute in London, said the brand suffered. “The word democracy itself is a little radioactive and unfortunately has gotten a bad name,” he said. “But when you talk about its meaning and the concepts behind it, just about everyone would say they want those things.”

Mr. Inboden said Mr. Obama has the chance to rebrand democracy. His own election generated enormous good will around the world, an “incredibly profound and incredibly potent” statement about American democracy, Mr. Inboden said. And so, he said, “There’s real opportunity there.”

Maybe others see it that way, too. Last week, in what some saw as a goodwill gesture toward Mr. Obama, Egypt released Mr. Nour again.

Pride and Compromise

Sun, 15 Feb 2009 06:00:00 GMT

By SHELBY STEELE

To belong to an oppressed group always meant that you could not pursue your self-interest by acting directly on the world. You first had to account for the oppressor who had so much power over you. So you inevitably wore a mask that helped you navigate the oppressor’s bigotries, ignorances and self-absorptions. For the oppressed, the mask was power itself. And the four centuries of oppression we black Americans endured gave us masking as a cultural habit.

The real fights within the black community — our internal culture wars — have been over which face we show white America. The legendary battle of ideas between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois at the dawn of the 20th century was also a battle over masks: should we seem humble and modest or prideful and outraged? This “mask war” was vicious because group masks are mutually exclusive; each nullifies the other. Can’t be humble and outraged at the same time. One mask had to die so that the other might live. So the battle between Washington and Du Bois was winner-take-all. One man emerged the leader of his race; the other became a symbol of Uncle Tomism.

And yet both men had good ideas for black uplift. Washington’s emphasis on self-help was not fundamentally incompatible with Du Bois’s emphasis on protest, and both were necessary. But Washington and his notion of self-help were diminished — especially after the protest-oriented ’60s — to make the face of black protest more singular. Thus a paradox: masking is an inevitable coping mechanism for the oppressed, but it is always oppressive in itself. It sacrifices great ideas and good people for the look of unity.

No black man in American history has been more a victim of this paradox than Washington. And it is hard to think of a historical figure more in need of biographical rescue. Yet Washington is an awkward challenge for the contemporary scholar. He is so thoroughly stigmatized as politically incorrect that rescuing him could seem a political act in itself, and even a balanced book could be dismissed as a polemic. But Robert J. Norrell, in his remarkable new biography, “Up From History,” gets around this problem the old-fashioned way: by scrupulously excavating the facts of his subject’s life and then carefully situating him in his own era.

Norrell, a professor of history at the University of Tennessee, is writing history as well as biography here, and his attention to historical context has the effect of normalizing Washington. We see, for example, that in the post-Reconstruction South of “white nationalism” and lynching, his accommodation of segregation — in return for the latitude to pursue black economic and educational advancement — was really a rather brave and pro-black position. So we are able to view Washington as more Quixote than quisling, a man forever hoping against hope and tirelessly at war with a kind of impossibility. In the cause of his people, he burned himself out to a fine ash — dying in 1915 at 59, from exhaustion, high blood pressure and indifference to his health. He had single-handedly built a black college (Tuskegee Institute), in an Alabama of Ku Klux Klan terrorism, that was bigger than any white university in the state. Yet even today, when there ought to be the repose in black and white America to see him more clearly, the name Booker T. Washington still carries that taint of Uncle Tomism.

This is because he wore the mask of what I have called the “bargainer” — that face by which blacks promise not to protest racism if, in return, their blackness is not held entirely against them, and they are free to pursue at least a part of their self-interest. Norrell’s term for this is “fox,” and he says of the 25-year-old Washington, “He had long since separated the inner Booker, the young man with big ambitions and independent intelligence, from Booker T. Washington, the public person known as a capable mulatto, clearheaded and modest, sensible and polite, a Negro who did not give offense.” Interestingly, more than 100 years later, Barack Obama would write in his first book that, as a teenager, he had realized that people “were relieved” and pleasantly surprised “to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.”

Both men were “foxes” who pursued their quests by bargaining with — rather than challenging — white America. Both wore masks that disarmed white anxiety. But Washington is still the archetypal Uncle Tom because whites in his day were so intractable that his bargaining came to look like sycophancy. Today the brilliance with which he achieved the near impossible is forgotten, while the unfair presumption of his racial capitulation is ubiquitous.

“Up From History” will go far in correcting this. I thought I knew something of Washington’s complexity before reading this book. And I had always been fascinated by Dr. Bledsoe in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” a darkly ironic sendup of Washington as a merciless pragmatist. But here we see the real man at his interminable labors: incessantly fund-raising for Tuskegee in the North, mapping out political strategy with liberal white philanthropists in Boston and New York, fighting with Northern black elites one day and with white nationalist Southerners the next, and then, back at Tuskegee, riding out on horseback in the early morning to micromanage the college’s agricultural operations. And we see a man at odds with his own admonition against protesting racial injustice. He publicly protested “against Jim Crow on railroads, lynching, disfranchisement, disparities in education funding, segregated housing legislation and discrimination by labor unions” — an agenda all but identical to the one taken up by Du Bois, the N.A.A.C.P. and others who had reviled Washington as being too timid.

But finally, he was a man who lived inside a crucible. As Norrell puts it: “Having conditions forced on him, with the threat of destruction clearly the cost of resistance, does not constitute a fair definition of accommodation. It is coercion.” Well said. And Washington understood that his people also dwelled inside a crucible. Norrell’s rich portrait makes clear that Washington never stopped seeing himself as the leader of his people. How to help them live in such circumstances? His informing idea was that responsibility — hard work, education, the moral life — brought a degree of freedom and independence even in oppression. The pursuit of excellence would bring blacks an economic currency in the larger world, and thus, ultimately, respect and equality. With more fearlessness than any ’60s black nationalist, he saw black Americans as a free-standing people and asked them to compete openly with all others.

The challenge for oppressed people is always to sustain good faith. Their world is so flagrantly unfair that it laughs at them. Washington’s genius was to keep his people in good faith even in the depths of persecution. The South of his era was not terribly far from “final solution” thinking. So what we today snidely call “accommodationism” made space for the poorest black sharecropper to keep believing in the power of his will. He could go every year to the Tuskegee Negro Conference and learn about crop rotation, like any other man in charge of his own fate.

Du Bois’s protest strategy for black advancement made this sharecropper’s fate contingent on white moral evolution. It implied that his will would be largely a futility until whites changed. And Du Bois may have been right. But Washington understood that the loss of good faith was the worst of all things, and when black America was at risk of this, he was the shepherd.

“Up From History” gives back to America one of its greatest heroes.

Shelby Steele, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, writes often about race.

UP FROM HISTORY
The Life of Booker T. Washington
By Robert J. Norrell
Illustrated. 508 pp. The Belknap Press/ Harvard University Press. $35

Restore the Senate's Treaty Power

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 06:00:00 GMT

By JOHN R. BOLTON and JOHN YOO

THE Constitution’s Treaty Clause has long been seen, rightly, as a bulwark against presidential inclinations to lock the United States into unwise foreign commitments. The clause will likely be tested by Barack Obama’s administration, as the new president and Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton, led by the legal academics in whose circles they have long traveled, contemplate binding down American power and interests in a dense web of treaties and international bureaucracies.

Like past presidents, Mr. Obama will likely be tempted to avoid the requirement that treaties must be approved by two-thirds of the Senate. The usual methods around this constitutional constraint are executive agreements or a majority vote in the House and Senate to pass a treaty as a simple law (known as a Congressional-executive agreement).

Executive agreements have an acknowledged but limited place in our foreign affairs. Congressional-executive agreements are far more troubling. They have evoked scathing attacks by constitutional experts and have been strongly resisted in the Senate, at least so far.

The framers of the Constitution designed the treaty process with a bias against “entangling alliances,” as Thomas Jefferson described them in his first inaugural address. They designated the Senate as the body responsible to protect the interests of the states from being bargained away by the president in deals with foreign nations. The framers required a supermajority to ensure that treaties would reflect a broad consensus and careful, mature decision-making.

America needs to maintain its sovereignty and autonomy, not to subordinate its policies, foreign or domestic, to international control. On a broad variety of issues — many of which sound more like domestic rather than foreign policy — the re-emergence of the benignly labeled “global governance” movement is well under way in the Obama transition.

Candidate Obama promised to “re-engage” and “work constructively within” the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Will the new president pass a new Kyoto climate accord through Congress by sidestepping the constitutional requirement to persuade two-thirds of the Senate?

Draconian restrictions on energy use would follow. A majority of the Congress would be much easier for Mr. Obama to get than a supermajority of the Senate. A scholar at the Brookings Institution has already proposed that a new president overcome objections to this environmentalists’ holy grail by evading the Treaty Clause.

President George W. Bush resisted many efforts at global governance. But his administration still sometimes fell into the temptation to flout the constitutional requirement of a two-thirds majority in the Senate.

In 2002, the administration considered submitting the Treaty of Moscow, a nuclear arms reduction agreement, for majority approval of Congress. Vice President-elect Joe Biden, who was then the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, privately made clear that he would vigorously oppose such an attempt to evade the Senate’s constitutional prerogatives. The administration agreed to submit the agreement as a treaty, and the Moscow agreement cleared the Senate.

We hope the new vice president will not reverse his commitment to the Senate’s constitutional authority. But an administration determined to tie one hand behind America’s back might use Congressional-executive agreements to push the nation all too easily into quixotic and impractical global governance regimes.

President Bill Clinton signed Kyoto, but the Senate in effect rejected it. He also signed the Rome Treaty of 1998 that established an International Criminal Court, which would subject American soldiers and officials to unaccountable international prosecutors and judges for alleged war crimes (including, potentially, the undefined crime of “aggression”). Mr. Clinton did not even send this agreement to the Senate. Mr. Bush “unsigned” it. Mr. Obama might re-sign it and seek approval by only a majority of both houses of Congress.

Other international regimes might restrict America’s freedom of action to defend itself. In 1999, the Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would have undermined America’s ability to verify the reliability and effectiveness of its nuclear deterrent. Mr. Obama has said he supports ratification. The historical precedents are that major arms control agreements must receive the approval of two-thirds of the Senate.

President Bush, like President Clinton, did not sign a global agreement that would ban antipersonnel land mines, on the grounds that they are a key component of the American defense of South Korea. But his administration has pressed for ratification of the treaty on the law of the sea, which would subject disputes over the free passage of American naval vessels to the jurisdiction of an international maritime court — which the Senate has so far refused to ratify.

If Mr. Obama were to submit either of these agreements for approval by a simple majority of the House and Senate, his actions would pose a serious challenge to American principles of law and democratic governance. Global governance schemes delegate power to independent international organizations to make and enforce laws that would apply domestically, by international bureaucrats who are unaccountable to Congress, the president, American public opinion or the democratic process.

It is true that some multinational economic agreements, like Bretton Woods, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the North American Free Trade Agreement, went into effect after approval by majorities of Congress rather than two-thirds of the Senate. But international agreements that go beyond the rules of international trade and finance — that involve significant national-security commitments, or that purport to delegate lawmaking and enforcement functions to international organizations, or that could fundamentally alter the American constitutional system of individual rights — should receive the intense scrutiny of the treaty process, regardless of their policy merits.

By insisting on the proper constitutional process for treaty-making, Republicans can join Mr. Obama in advancing a bipartisan foreign policy. They can also help strike the proper balance between the legislative and executive branches that so many have called for in recent years.

John R. Bolton, the ambassador to the United Nations from 2005 to 2006, is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of “Surrender Is Not an Option.” John Yoo, a deputy assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003, is a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

Bush Plays Chaperon for Awkward Encounter

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 05:00:00 GMT

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27 — For the past week, the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan have been in the United States, circling one another like wary cats as they lobbed insults across the airwaves from a distance.

On Wednesday night, they stood glumly — more like caged cats — in the Rose Garden with President Bush, who had invited them to the White House for dinner and a little talking-to.

“We’ve got a lot of challenges facing us,” Mr. Bush said, with President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan on his right and President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan a safe distance away on his left. “All of us must protect our countries, but at the same time we all must work to make the world a more hopeful place.”

Having already met separately with the two men — he received General Musharraf on Friday and President Karzai on Tuesday — Mr. Bush used his three-minute speech to proclaim them both “personal friends of mine” and describe the intimate dinner as “a chance for us to strategize together.”

Peter Brookes, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation, put it another way. “They’re looking for marriage counseling,” he said, “and maybe President Bush will provide some of that.”

The strains in their relationship — each blames the other for the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan — are so obvious that Mr. Bush openly joked about the breach in the East Room of the White House on Tuesday, with Mr. Karzai at his side.

“It will be interesting for me to watch the body language of these two leaders to determine how tense things are,” Mr. Bush told reporters then, though he insisted later he was only teasing.

“I’ll be good,” Mr. Karzai responded.

Though Mr. Karzai politely referred to General Musharraf as “my brother,” that has been pretty much the extent of the politesse this week. As General Musharraf toured about, promoting his new autobiography on television programs as varied as “60 Minutes” and “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” he has made clear his disdain for Mr. Karzai, whom he accuses of “turning a blind eye” to his own deteriorating political situation.

“He is like an ostrich with his head buried in the sand,” the general said.

Mr. Karzai was a tad more muted; asked by Wolf Blitzer of CNN on Friday whether he thought General Musharraf was himself “an ostrich,” he did not take the bait. But he has made no bones about the fact that he sees the Pakistani leader as giving the Taliban safe haven across the border.

Complicating matters is a deal General Musharraf recently signed with tribal chiefs along the Afghanistan border; Mr. Karzai views it as a pact to cede control to the Taliban.

“Terrorism has only enemies and knows no boundaries,” Mr. Karzai told the Council on Foreign Relations last week. “The only course is to kill it. You cannot train a snake to bite someone else.”

Whether Mr. Bush can tame the war of words is unclear, but foreign policy experts across the political spectrum give him credit for trying.

“You do have two leaders who want to have a good relationship with the United States and particularly George Bush,” said Ivo H. Daalder, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, “so that does provide Bush an opportunity to say, ‘You guys need to cooperate. We have a common enemy.’ I admire him for doing this. It’s the right thing to do.”

Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said Mr. Bush’s primary challenge was “not only to broker a verbal cease-fire,” but also to get the two men to “deal with the core issue” of their dispute over the Taliban.

“What’s ironic is these two leaders need each other,” he said. “Their personal futures as well as their countries’ futures are very much intertwined, yet there is tremendous mistrust and bad blood.”

That much was evident Wednesday in the Rose Garden body language, which was as interesting as Mr. Bush had predicted. Although the two foreign leaders were handshake-distance apart — and some thought the president might prod them into one — no hands were extended.

Instead, both stood stiff and expressionless as the president spoke, their hands clasped tightly in front of them. When Mr. Bush ended the awkwardness by announcing, “Let’s go eat dinner,” General Musharraf gave a quick salute to the press corps. President Karzai extended his arms, palms up, in an empty embrace of the sky.