Our face to the world

I was struck today by how invisible the post of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations has become.

I couldn't even remember who the current ambassador is; ah, yes, Zalmay Khalilzad, of course--you'd think the highest-ranking Muslim in the Bush administration would have a higher media profile, but then again, how many people can name the two Muslims who won Nobel prizes this year?

It really is odd that the Bushies aren't putting Khalilzad out there more, given the amount of discussion of Islam and the level of ignorance and bigotry regularly paraded by politicians, pundits and officials. You'd think the one-eyed man would be king in the land of the blind.

And he does have some interesting thoughts; George Packer posted on his New Yorker blog some excerpts from an interview he did with Khalilzad:

Khalilzad sees the Iranian regime as ambitious, insecure, and, above all, divided among “multiple players.” But there are two basic points on which Iran’s leaders agree:

"One is that Iraq should not return to be a rival in the balance of power in the Gulf, that it shouldn’t play that role. A Shia preëminence in Iraq, or a Shia dominance with a not-so-centralized government, gives Iran that. Iraq will be more internally preoccupied, more friendly, so it helps your regionally preëminent role. This is something the Iranians, regardless of whether you’re a monarch or a religious fellow, share: the belief that Iran is a great civilization.
Second is the Iranians’ great fear of us, but they see an opportunity at the same time. Great fear because if we have it easy in Iraq they could be next, and sometimes the rhetoric from some people here gives them that impression. There is no substance to it, but the rhetoric gives that impression. That concern would lead them to make it difficult for us, and get us out ultimately. The other part is the opportunity: that they would get a broader understanding with us, a kind of recognition of Iran, of the preëminence of Iran. Iran’s role in the region would be accepted by us and legitimated. It’s Iran and the U.S. that decide what happens in the region, which reinforces the impression of preëminence. Iran and the U.S. are sitting and discussing Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon. On the one hand, Iran is very self-assured, but on the other it’s very insecure. That’s a Shia psychology, unfortunately.

They don’t believe that we will leave. Maybe they are beginning to. But they do mirror-imaging rather than reading our politics correctly. What they think is: Would we want to leave an oil-rich country? My god, Baghdad, this is one of the seats of one of the great world empires, right in the middle of the Gulf."

I don't agree with all of Khalilzad's thoughts on Iran--as an ethnic Pashtun he's likely prone to an (understandable) inferiority complex when it comes to Persians--but I do agree that the Iranians see our invasion of Iraq as driven by a desire to control oil, and threaten Iran (and help Israel).

Thus they filter our actions there as the timeless acts of an imperial power, which they have thousands of years of experience dealing with and acting as.

My general view when foreigners or myopic liberals decry the American empire is that we are nothing like an empire--otherwise, where are the tributes, the taxes, the fawning, the begging, from our subject states?

Wikipedia has rankings of world empires by various measures that includes America--it's interesting to see how highly we rank historically, without even trying. I think that's what drives Europeans, in particular, crazy about us--their ancestors scrapped, fought and cheated to get their hands on as much land and wealth as possible. I'm not sure they understand a people who are inherently so powerful that we feel no need to do the same.

But in the vein of our invisible UN ambassador, the Bush administration does seem to have adopted the mindset of an empire, without accruing to us any of its 'benefits'.

Whereas once the post of UN ambassador was the province of lions of American thought and politics like Henry Cabot Lodge, Adlai Stevenson, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Andrew Young, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and even Madeleine Albright, under Bush et al it's become a revolving door of misfits.

So far, Bush Jr., whose own father represented the U.S. at the UN, has had as many ambassadors as years he's been in office:

-James B. Cunningham (acting)
-John D. Negroponte
-John Danforth
-Anne W. Patterson (acting)
-John R. Bolton
-Alejandro Daniel Wolff (acting)
-Zalmay Khalilzad

Given that the U.S. has had a total of 26 ambassadors since the UN was founded in San Francisco in 1945, more than 25% of them have served under GWB!

It's an astonishing stat; and is a pretty strong indicator of how little the present administration values the views of the rest of the world, even as our percentage of the world's economy continues to drop (from an inconceivable 46% after WWII to a still amazing 25-30% now).

We're going to pay a price for this. Simple statistics tell you that when the U.S. makes up just 5% of the world population, everything else being equal we're likely to not know everything. And things are becoming more equal even as we veer more unilateral.

The UN may not necessarily be the best forum for the U.S. to interface with the rest of the world--NATO and APEC have some pretty significant advantages in efficiency and efficacy.

But the idea of the UN is unique; given our founding role in a post-war world where nations willingly negotiate away congenital advantages in exchange for systemic stability, it'd be a tragedy if through arrogance and xenophobia we found ourselves midwives of a world where norms and predictability are replaced by the force of ideology and individuals.

That, after all, is what Al-Qaeda seeks.

Uncredited photo of Khalilzad and Bush from the U.S. State Department.