About Johanna Mendelson Forman
Johanna Mendelson Forman is a senior associate in the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC
Articles by Johanna Mendelson Forman
The Baghdad bomb, the United Nations, and America
The sixth anniversary since a bomb of August silenced the United Nations voice in Baghdad is a moment for commemoration of and tribute to the twenty-two people who lost their lives, and the approximately 150 who were wounded. It is also more: for the horrific truck-bomb attack of 19 August 2003 on the Canal Hotel which served as the UN headquarters in Iraq is now a key moment in history.
Johanna Mendelson Forman is a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, DC, in both the Americas Program and the William E Simon Chair of Political Economy. Among her publications is Investing in a New Unilateralism: A Smart Power Approach to the United Nations (CSIS, January 2009)
Also by Johanna Mendelson Forman in openDemocracy:
"Things Kofi Annan can do now" (17 April 2003)
"We cannot afford to fail" (23 July 2003) - with colleagues from the Iraq Reconstruction Assessment Mission
"From the ashes: a multilateral mission?" (22 August 2003)
"The UN in 2003: a year of living dangerously" (18 December 2003)
"The nation-building trap: Haiti after Aristide" (11 March 2004)
"A 21st century mission? The UN high-level panel report" (25 November 2004) - with D Austin Hare
"In Larger Freedom: Kofi Annan's challenge" (23 March 2005)
"President Bush discovers the world is flat" (19 September 2005)
"Open veins, closed minds " (7 May 2009) - with Peter DeShazo Inside the United Nations headquarters, the event is considered the organisation's equivalent of 11 September 2001. For the UN, the terrorist bombing - four months after the United States-led military coalition had after a three-week campaign toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein - marked a turning-point in its ability to work as an agent of collective security in a changing world. It led to a re-examination of the UN's role, embodied in the then secretary-general Kofi Annan's document In Larger Freedom; this ultimately resulted in a new manifesto for the institution, presented in the general assembly's sixtieth-anniversary summit on 14-16 September 2005. It also contributed to a new awareness of the vulnerability of humanitarian workers in conflict-zones, symbolised by the inauguration on 19 August 2009 of a World Humanitarian Day.
The Iraqi vortex
The Baghdad attack robbed the United Nations of fifteen fine and potential-rich servants, as well as taking the lives of others tragically caught by it; they include two NGO representatives, a diplomat, a translator, a contract worker, and the human-rights lawyer Arthur C Helton (also a co-writer of an openDemocracy column into refugee and displacement issues with his close colleague Gil Loescher, who was badly wounded in the blast).
Also among those who died was one of the greatest humanitarian civil servants, Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was courageously leading the UN effort in Iraq. His death represented the loss of a vital interlocutor between the US-led coalition and the international community at a critical moment in relationships between the US, the UN, and the rest of the world. Indeed, his very international stature - including his role in helping to oversee the independence of East Timor from Indonesian rule, explicitly cited by al-Qaida as part of the twisted logic that justified his murder - had arguably made the UN in Iraq an even more visible and vulnerable target for terrorists.
In his brief period in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello had pleaded for greater understanding of the Iraqi street and its voices amid the chaos of post-war administration. These were ignored, and the silencing of this voice of reason marked the beginning of a bitter insurgency and civil war that raged in Iraq until 2005-06. It took a long time before much-needed shifts in Washington's military policy and thinking filtered through to better policy on the ground; even after six years, the security situation remains unsettled and the establishment of working relationships with Iraqi leaders have proved tough. How much of a difference Sergio Vieira de Mello would have made here is one of the many unanswered questions of this violent period (see Samantha Powell, Chasing the Flame: One Man's Fight to Save the World [Penguin, 2008]).
The destruction of the Canal Hotel also marked the nadir of multilateralism, and an awful symbol of how the George W Bush administration's foreign-policy "exceptionalism" had destroyed the promise of international cooperation. The leading officials of the administration in effect relegated the UN to the trash-heap of global institutions, opting instead for an approach to international relations that in the end served no interest but to wreak more death and destruction on the "liberated" citizens of Iraq. This posture had started to shift by the time the Bush administration neared its end in 2008-09, but the damage wrought by the events in Iraq was enduring.
The American military forces in Iraq - amounting to 130,000 troops - have as of 30 June 2009 officially withdrawn from major urban centres, as part of the process scheduled to lead to a final exit of troops by December 2011. The situation on the ground is now the responsibility of the Iraqi government's security forces, which have assumed the role of a state-security sector. There are signs of progress, including the existence of an elected government (and the prospect of another round of parliamentary elections in January 2010); progress in advancing the sovereignty of the Iraqi state, and in judicial and other institutions; the development of the Iraqi economy; and greater participation of its citizens in governance.
But violent attacks continue, as in Baghdad itself on the 19 August anniversary; the potential for further outbreaks persists (in contested cities such as Kirkuk, and elsewhere); and many Iraqis who fled abroad during the nightmare years are reluctant to return. It has been a longer and much more painful road than might have been travelled if wiser policies had been followed.
Out of the rubble
The perspective of six years also highlights the importance of the improved relationship between the United States and the United Nations that are the result of the election of Barack Obama in November 2008. The new US president has outlined "a new era of engagement" in US foreign policy of which multilateralism is a cornerstone. It is a change that has profound implications for the UN, and is worth considering on this anniversary.
Some remarks by the US's permanent representative to the UN, Susan Rice, are in this respect a revealing indicator of the future direction of US diplomacy:
"When the United States joins others to confront these challenges, it's not charity. It's not even barter. In today's world, more than ever, America's interests and our values converge. What is good for others is often good for us. When we manifest our commitment to tackling the threats that menace so many other nations; when we invest in protecting the lives of others; and when we recognise that national security is no longer a zero-sum game, then we increase other countries' will to cooperate on the issues most vital to us...We build will by pursuing pragmatic, principled policies and explain them with intelligence and candour. And in the broadest sense, we build will when others can see their future as aligned with ours...All of this helps explain why so many of America's security interests come together today at the United Nations."
The UN general assembly will convene for its sixty-fourth session on 15 September 2009. President Obama's address will be an opportunity to reaffirm both the US's renewed support for multilateralism and the continued vitality of the ideals of 1945: commitment to a strong international legal order, and to the universality of UN membership as the key source of legitimacy of the whole organisation's decision-making power. These commitments are both right in themselves and in America's own best interests, a combination that reflects secretary of state Hillary Clinton's emphasis on the need for the US to pursue a "smart power" approach.
Indeed, US and UN interests are set to align in the 2009-12 period on a host of issues: among them threats to peace and security, climate change, global health concerns and managing humanitarian operations. That alignment will be reinforced if the US takes a leadership role in promoting reform of the UN where it is most needed, including in improving the secretariat and its agencies.
A principled and effective multilateral policy by the Barack Obama administration is crucial to United States's rebuilding of its reputation in the community of nations, at a time of great fluidity and complexity in international relations. A strong US-UN relationship will be a vital part of this effort. As both institutions seek to match the needs of this challenging new era, the best of the tragically brief first UN mission in Iraq - the willingness to listen and as well as the need to be heard, the emphasis on cooperation, the instinct to engage - can be an inspiration.
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Also in openDemocracy on the Baghdad bomb of 19 August 2003 and its aftermath: Caspar Henderson & David Hayes, "Arthur Helton: a tribute" (21 August 2003) Guy S Goodwin-Gill, "Arthur Helton: agent for the dispossessed" (22 August 2003) Sergio Vieira de Mello, "A world of dignity" (24 August 2003) Anita Sharma, "The UN Baghdad bombing: one month on" (17 September 2003) Gil Loescher, '"I was not going to die in the rubble'" (4 December 2003) Gil Loescher, "Living after tragedy: the UN Baghdad bomb, one year on" (19 August 2004) Arthur C Helton & Gil Loescher's fourteen openDemocracy columns can be found here |
Open veins, closed minds
Peter DeShazo is director of the Americas Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
It is rare that a book makes headlines at an intergovernmental meeting - far less that it is propelled to the top of the bestseller lists as a result. The fact that the highest-profile politicians in the Americas - the presidents of Venezuela and the United States respectively - were involved may have had something to do with it. In any event, Hugo Chávez's gift to Barack Obama of Eduardo Galeano's work Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad & Tobago on 17-19 April 2009 has done more than inject a dose of adrenaline into the Uruguayan author's classic anti-yanqui essay of 1971. It also raises the question of whether the book, and the intellectual outlook that it represents, offer a convincing or realistic guide to what Latin America needs and how its relationship with the United States should develop.
Johanna
Mendelson Forman is senior associate with the Americas Program
at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Among her publications is Investing in a New Unilateralism: A Smart Power Approach to the
United Nations(CSIS, January 2009)
Also by Johanna Mendelson Forman in openDemocracy:
"From the ashes: a
multilateral mission?" (22 August 2003)
"The UN in 2003: a year of
living dangerously" (18 December 2003)
"The nation-building trap:
Haiti after Aristide" (11 March 2004)
"A 21st century mission? The UN
high-level panel report" (25 November 2004) - with D Austin Hare
"In Larger Freedom: Kofi
Annan's challenge" (23 March 2005)
"President Bush discovers
the world is flat" (19 September 2005)
Hugo Chávez is fond of the flamboyant and media-friendly gesture, but it may still puzzle new generations why he chose this book and not (say) a Venezuelan novel or a good biography of Simón Bolívar to give to his US counterpart.
The answer lies in the way that the Venezuelan leader's own current political outlook here finds its symbol in a polemical variant of "dependency theory" - the enormously influential school of thought that explained Latin America's economic problems in terms of "uneven development" and (in its more radical versions) the systematic exploiting of the continent by capitalism and "imperialism". In the cold-war era, the political implication often drawn was the need for a communist revolution a la cubana across Latin America as a whole.
As graduate students back in the 1970s, we too were weaned on "dependency theory" and other such formulas for resolving "underdevelopment". In that context it was easier, say, to attribute economic collapse and hyper-inflation in Salvador Allende's Chile to gringo machinations than to disastrous policy-making by the Chilean government itself. It was simpler too (as well as more romantic) to call for more Ché Guevara-style leaders to topple the bourgeois order than to take on the tedious work of constructing better societies in the Americas through democratic change, sustained economic growth, institutional reform, improved education, and well-calibrated social spending.
A generation's lesson
These three decades have taught many lessons. A rereading of Open Veins.... in light of the subsequent experience of Latin America suggests two in particular.
The first is the value of democracy, consolidated since the later 1980s in every country of the region save Cuba. Military dictatorships that dotted the landscape in the 1970s and 1980s are long gone, with meagre chance of return - in part because of vastly improved civil-military relations in the Americas. Alongside this development, the Marxist schemas that prescribed inevitable authoritarian control by the state and revolution as the only way ahead have been confounded. Instead, there has been great progress (in respect for human rights, for example) made by peaceful means and through the advance of civil society.
True, there are wide variations and continuing problems. The institutions of democracy are fragile in many countries of the region, with legislative and judicial branches in several cases powerless in the face of a dominant executive. But this is still a far cry from the dictatorships of the era when Eduardo Galeano's book was published, when military intervention was used to crush dissent and manage social and economic problems.
The second lesson is the power of good-quality macroeconomic policy in promoting development and reducing poverty. Chile, where the centre-left coalition that defeated Augusto Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite has held power continuously since then, is the best example in the region. Many former supporters of Allende who were at the core of the coalition embraced market-friendly approaches whose effect has been to cut poverty by more than half and propel Chile closer to OECD status. The macroeconomic policies of the "Washington consensus" are now much maligned, but in many countries of the region (including the largest economies) they helped contribute to high-growth, low-debt and low-inflation outcomes that brought real benefits to the region's people.
A closer look
The fact that Chávez and his friends in the Alternativa Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (Alba) take the Galeano formula seriously is a sad commentary on the backward thinking of leaders who seek enemies to cover up domestic failures of governance and accountability, at a time when serious economic and social policy-making is needed to overcome the region's glaring inequality. It would be better for these Latin American governments to look to east Asia, where major investments in education, technology, research and development and infrastructure have transformed societies in the region.
Chavez's gift of Open Veins to Obama may have catapulted the book to bestseller status; but the act reveals a political mindset that in past years had begun to fade around the Americas. The instinct to blame the gringos for domestic shortcomings had largely evolved into a tool of last resort - and not a very effective one. That Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua have taken it up again says more about their own closed minds than about the United States and its role in Latin America. In the end, "anti-imperialism" won't produce the natural gas that Bolivia needs for its development nor will a rerun of dependency theory bring clean elections and sustained economic growth to Nicaragua.
Barack Obama should reciprocate the summit gift by providing copies of his own book, The Audacity of Hope, to Chávez and his Alba partners. The US president wrote there: "Let me suggest at least one area where we can act unilaterally to improve our standing in the world - by perfecting our own democracy and leading by example." If relations between the United States and Latin America are going to improve, the Alba leaders need to take a fresh look at the United States, its democracy and its society.
-------------------------------------
Among recent articles in openDemocracy on Latin American politics:
- Celia Szusterman, "Argentina: celebrating democracy" (19 December 2008)
- Sergio Aguayo Quezada, "Mexico: a state of failure" (17 February 2009)
- Adam Isacson, "Colombia's imperilled democracy" (6 March 2009)
- Victor Valle, "El Salvador's long march" (20 March 2009)
- Juan Gabriel Tokatlian, "Barack Obama's drug policy: time for change" (15 April 2009)
- Ivan Briscoe, "The Americas and Washington: moving on" (17 April 2009)
- Antoni Kapcia, "Raúl Castro and Cuba: reading the changes" (22 April 2009)
- Guy Hedgecoe, "Rafael Correa: an Ecuadorian journey" (29 April 2009)
- Enrique Krauze, "Hugo Chávez and Venezuela: a leader's destiny" (1 May 2009)
President Bush discovers the world is flat
The United Nations world summit suggests that the Bush administration is starting to understand its need for allies, says Johanna Mendelson Forman of the UN Foundation.
In Larger Freedom: Kofi Annan's challenge
Also in openDemocracy on UN reform for the 21st century:
Johanna Mendelson Forman, “Things Kofi Annan can do now” ( April 2003 )
Simona Milio & Francesco Grillo, “The mother of all questions: how to reform global governance” (May 2003)
Kofi Annan, “America, the United Nations, and the world: a triple challenge” (June 2004)
Paul Kingsnorth (with responses from Frances Stewart, James Putzel, and Johanna Mendelson Forman), “How to save the world: poverty, security, and nation–building” June 2004)
Phyllis Bennis, “Reform or die: the United Nations as second superpower” ( November 2004
If you find our work on this issue valuable, please consider supporting openDemocracy - and joining the debate in our forums
The report of United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan, In Larger Freedom: towards development, security and human rights for all, eloquently catalogues the global challenges of the international community in the 21st century. This ambitious document both builds on the work of the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change that reported its findings on threats to collective security in November 2004, and crystallises the discussion of the UN’s need to reconfigure in order to address a world where nation-states are either unprepared or incapable of meeting new, transnational threats.
Media stories after the report’s release on 21 March 2005 have paid far too much attention to recommendations about expanding the Security Council’s permanent membership. But there are many other more immediate issues that the UN must consider if it is to remain true to its founding ideals - the expansion of freedom and the protection of human rights - and relevant to the issues that will dominate its next sixty years. Poverty, conflict, infectious diseases, environmental degradation and weapons proliferation – all contribute to human insecurity in 2005, and all represent threats that have emerged since the charter framers created the UN in 1945.
The global character of these new issues, and the way they combine security, rights and development concerns, explain why the UN has reached a point where it must reinvent itself for the future. Whether the concern is fighting terrorism, managing an HIV/Aids crisis, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), or environmental threats, the scale of the problems makes it impossible for nation-states to cope on their own. The UN is the only forum where the international community can come together to discuss and agree action at the level and with the authority required. In this respect, the report’s presentation to the New York summit in September, designed to measure progress towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals, will be a crucial test.
The report’s central message is that security and development are deeply linked: without one, the other is imperiled. Why emphasise this now? Because increasing rhetoric about the need for a “security first” approach since the 1990s has not been matched in reality. A decade of civil wars and emergencies, alongside the mixed experience of UN peacekeeping operations (in Rwanda, Somalia, Cambodia, East Timor, Haiti and Congo, for example) have made the international community aware that armed interventions alone are inadequate to restore security, the economy or justice to post-war, post-dictatorship or simply “failed” states.
As a result, the international community has come to understand that seeking to ensure security without engaging with a wider human development agenda will fail. Iraq is the most visible recent model where security faltered and thus development was postponed; it also shows that the “developmentalisation” of security, using armies instead of civilian experts to rebuild states – and without the central involvement of the United Nations – ultimately results in failure.
If this is the argument of Kofi Annan’s report, what are its politics? Some observers have seen its focus on threats to global security that reflect United States policy priorities – counter-terrorism, infectious diseases, the spread of WMD, and corruption – as pandering to the interests of the lone superpower. Moreover, the replacement of the Commission on Human Rights by a smaller body elected by two-thirds of the general assembly will certainly make some Washington bureaucrats smile. But again, media comment can ignore deeper realities – in this case, that the report’s recommendations can only be implemented if the UN’s member-states muster the requisite will. Here, the politics of the report may be more challenging to current United States policy than it might appear.
There are several imponderables: whether the report can help ultimately forge a new relationship with the US, whether its proposed reforms will actually be implemented by the 191 member-states, and whether a fight over the composition of an expanded Security Council will block the process. But what the report has already achieved is to elevate Kofi Annan above the fray of US partisan politics by sounding an alarm to the world’s nation-states about urgent global crises that demand a coordinated response in which the UN plays a critical role.
The logic is plain. A world where the United States remains isolated from the international community is a world that will also suffer from a lack of capacity to resolve the most acute challenges we face. Kofi Annan’s presentation of In Larger Freedom: towards development, security and human rights for all to the world may be a gift not only to the survival of the United Nations, but also to the future of international law and human rights.
A 21st century mission? The UN high-level panel report
How to ensure human security in an age of terrorism and pre-emptive war? As a United Nations think-tank publishes its proposals, two specialists map the international diplomatic minefield on which the UN, its friends and its enemies chart their course.
The nation-building trap: Haiti after Aristide
The departure from Haiti of its president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, marks the opening of a new chapter in the history of that unlucky country. It is also the end of an era of nation-building that demonstrates that the United States, and the international community in general, are unwilling to demonstrate full commitment in a place where winning the peace might have been possible.
This article was written in cooperation with Rick Barton, co-director of the post-conflict reconstruction project at the Center for Strategic & International Studies in Washington D.C.
The crucial period in their failure was after 1994, when Aristide was restored to the presidency by force of US arms after a three-year exile. Then, the fitful largesse of the international donor community meant that Haiti’s greatest resource – its own citizens – were not given a chance to reclaim their own country.
The UN in 2003: a year of living dangerously
The crisis over Iraq has brought the United Nations to a crossroads. At the end of a year when diplomacy was felled by force, the institution can regain its influence only by rethinking its core security mandate.
From the ashes: a multilateral mission?
Johanna Mendelson Forman, recently returned from Iraq, knew well many of those killed and injured in the bombing of the United Nations mission in Baghdad. In mourning her colleagues, she reflects on the meaning and implications of this event for the UN’s future role in the country.
We cannot afford to fail
The Iraq Reconstruction Assessment Mission, an independent team of experts commissioned by the Pentagon, recently published a report of their ten-day Iraqi tour. After presenting evidence to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the authors draw on their report to challenge the Coalition’s masters of war to a gargantuan effort of peacemaking and society-building.
Things Kofi Annan can do now
The UN, centre stage in the prelude to the Iraq war, has been sidelined since its outbreak. But the organisation does not need to take its marching orders from sovereign governments. Its Secretary General, Kofi Annan, can seize the diplomatic initiative with five immediate, practical steps.
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