Dissidents and the State Department
JINSA occasionally provides a venue for unhappy people to talk about their aspirations for freedom and liberty. Sudanese Christians, Kabyls, Azeris, Iranians, Syrian and Lebanese dissidents, occasional Kurds, Palestinians and Baluchis have crossed our threshold–we’re pleased to say that Ahmed Chalabi was here in 1996. It is sometimes hard to know who really represents the potential for liberalization and freedom, and who is a charlatan, but we try to listen respectfully because they don’t have the opportunity to air their platforms in front of voters in a free, fair and open election.
JINSA occasionally provides a venue for unhappy people to talk about their aspirations for freedom and liberty. Sudanese Christians, Kabyls, Azeris, Iranians, Syrian and Lebanese dissidents, occasional Kurds, Palestinians and Baluchis have crossed our threshold–we’re pleased to say that Ahmed Chalabi was here in 1996. It is sometimes hard to know who really represents the potential for liberalization and freedom, and who is a charlatan, but we try to listen respectfully because they don’t have the opportunity to air their platforms in front of voters in a free, fair and open election.
So when Secretary of State Powell said of Yossi Beilin and his Geneva Accord, “I have to listen to any individual who has something to say…” we were almost sympathetic. Almost.
He was not listening to unheard dissidents or freedom fighters. He was not listening to peoples oppressed by an unelected leadership. He wasn’t even listening to an elected parliamentary opposition — who received a mandate but not control. He was listening to a guy who went before the voters and was eviscerated! Few politicians have been so thoroughly repudiated by so sophisticated an electorate in so fair an election.
And now Beilin is taking money from the Swiss Government to finance the negotiation of an international treaty in opposition to his elected government’s platform.
How would that work if Beilin were an American? And what would Mr. Powell say?
What if Al Gore went to the UN and negotiated a UN entry into Iraq? What if the French government paid for journalists to come to New York to cover Mr. Gore’s announcement of the terms of the treaty? What if Mr. Gore claimed a lot of Americans agreed with his position and believed their government was doing the wrong thing?
American law says the negotiation of international agreements is the purview of the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. No one else has the power, and if Kofi Annan or Jacques Chirac tried to bestow it on Mr. Gore, it would be an outrage. We hope Mr. Powell would be outraged.
What do he and Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz think they are doing with their public support for the extralegal machinations of the dis-elected Beilin? We won’t presume to guess what they think, but they clearly are undermining President Bush’s determination to make democracy a normative condition in the Arab world.
If the U.S. can “diss” Israeli voters and Israeli democracy, what is the incentive for any democrat-in-waiting in the Arab world to poke his head above the foxhole? The implications for the spread of democracy are momentous and they are bad.