Stateside With Rosalea: Off-Hill Vehicles

Although the US Capitol building dominates the landscape at one end of the National Mall, the activity up on the Hill is miniscule compared to what goes on at the many interest group organizations that bloat the commercial landscape of The District. Foundations, Councils, Coalitions, Institutions, Centers, call them what you will, some of their events attract big hitters and break important news. Last week, I checked a few of them out.

::Center for New American Security::

Established just this year, CNAS is a private non-private institution whose mission is “to develop strong, pragmatic, and principled national security and defense policies that promote and protect American interests and values.” It further makes the claim that its “research is nonpartisan and nonproprietary and CNAS does not take specific policy positions.” www.cnas.org

On Monday, CNAS launched its National Security Leaders Forum speaker series in the Grand Ballroom at the Willard Hotel, a venue so up-market that it has monogrammed linen-quality disposable towels in the ladies room. President and co-founder of CNAS, Michele Flournoy, who served at the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense level on Strategy and Threat Reduction in the Clinton Administration, introduced the speaker, General James T. Conway, Commandant of the US Marine Corps.

Commandant Conway spoke on the topic Beyond Iraq: Lessons Learned and Future Challenges, and at the end the floor was opened for questions. In his address Conway said that “we are truly in a long war, of which Iraq and Afghanistan are the first battles.” He also noted that regional problems at any time and place in the world are “almost invariably settled from within by the moderates of the region” and that in Iraq the transformation is taking place to a more secure situation. “Economics and politics have not stayed abreast of that,” he said, “but there are people working on it.”

As to the future, the Commandant referred to a report by a “vision group” which has been looking at what the situation might be between 2020 and 2025, the years where today’s planning can first take effect. Among other things, the group concluded that water will be as important as oil; there’ll be less state-on-state and more regional conflicts with non-state actors; and U.S. diplomatic, military, and business power won’t be nearly so strong as it is today. Moreover, most people will live in urban areas within 35 miles of a coast and there will be high unemployment among young males.

The USMC, Conway said, will still need to be a “two-fisted fighter” and he expressed some concern that the Marines are becoming a land army because of the dependence they now have on heavily-armored—and exceedingly heavy—vehicles such as the MRAP to protect them from IEDs. The Marines now also use a new Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle—“it looks like a bass boat”—to get them ashore as the Navy no longer goes any closer than within 25 miles of a beach.

A reporter later asked if it was true the Commandant was pushing for the Marines to be responsible for Afghanistan and the Army for Iraq, and his response was that it was “premature to talk about it in a public context.” Later in the week, at a Defense Department briefing at the Pentagon, Secretary Gates was asked for his “gut feeling” on such an arrangement. He said he had “pretty much literally” heard only one sentence about it, and that “if it happens, it will be only after I am Secretary of Defense.”

::Republican Jewish Coalition::

On Tuesday, the Republican Jewish Coalition opened their Presidential Candidates Forum to the press, and also streamed it live on their website for those who signed up online to watch. The Coalition “seeks to foster and enhance ties between American Jewish community and Republican decision makers,” and to “articulate and advocate Republican ideas and policies within the Jewish community.”

The forum was held in the Independence Ballroom of the Grand Hyatt Hotel and the candidates were scheduled in alphabetical order and separate from each other. The candidates who appeared were Brownback, Giuliani, McCain, Romney, and Thompson. I arrived too late to hear Sam Brownback. He withdrew his candidacy later in the week.

I also missed the beginning of Rudy Giuliani’s speech, arriving just as he was riffing about how “Islamic terrorist countries or countries that support Islamic terrorists” wouldn’t have women’s breakfasts at which political candidates would speak—as had almost been the case that morning with the RJC, when the candidates’ wives were invited to a women’s breakfast. “Imagine if they showed up at it. They’d be stoned,” said Giuliani to an audience that tittered with embarrassment at his lame effort to get a cheap laugh by making a schoolyard generalization about an exceedingly complex topic.

Witless wit notwithstanding, anybody who talked tough about Iran got a lot of applause, and the candidates’ thoughts on that topic is the aspect that got most of the national press coverage. The Jewish online daily Forward, emphasized a different matter: the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. Its online story about the Candidates Forum quoted an RJC board member, Walter Stern, praising candidates for distancing themselves from the peace process and upcoming conference. Stern also reportedly said that “It has taken a bad turn with Condi Rice. Bush is study, but the administration delegated [the peace process] to the State Department. I hope this is only a temporary delegation.”

www.forward.com/articles/11848

::Council on Foreign Relations::

The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher that prides itself on being a well-respected resource enabling people to “better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries.”

On Tuesday evening, it held an on-the-record discussion about The Nexus of Religion and Foreign Policy: Toward an Alliance of Civilizations. Chris Seiple, president of the Institute for Global Engagement, presided. The speaker was Jorge Sampaio, High Representative, UN Alliance of Civilizations, and former president of Portugal (1996-2006). Amongst the list of participants were representatives from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the White House, Treasury, State, Commerce, and Homeland Security, along with folks from various NGOs, law firms, and the embassies of Portugal and Jordan.

Impelled by the 2005 terrorist attacks in their two countries, the Heads of Government of Spain and Turkey are co-sponsors of the Alliance of Civilizations, and Sampaio’s task as its High Representative is to provide the vision and leadership required to promote the Alliance as “a credible and viable attempt to diminish the dangerous tensions between diverse societies and their threat to international stability.”

Representative Sampaio spoke of “a new human security agenda”, pointing out that “borders are no longer isolation walls” and saying that he wants commitments and he wants answers from the nations that will participate in the Alliance. His hope is to take the initiatives that have already been found to work within individual nations and make them available through a worldwide clearinghouse. By taking what has already worked to create or strengthen national structures for cross-cultural dialogue, the task will progress much more quickly.

To read a transcript of the event, go to www.cfr.org and search “sampaio transcript”. The Alliance of Civilizations website is at www.unaoc.org and its Secretariat is currently seeking a Director: www.unaoc.org/repository/director.pdf While two Group of Friends meetings have already taken place, the first AoC Annual Forum is set to take place in Madrid in January, 2008.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

-- PEACE --

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