Category Archives: Arsenal Pulse

Brief thoughts and mini-analyses on stories in the news.

The call that changed it all

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Kingsley Moghalu, former Deputy Governor of Nigeria’s central bank, on the significance of Nigeria’s election outcome:

No sitting Nigerian president and his government have ever been removed from office through the ballot box. This is a rarity in Africa as a whole. There has been only a handful of opposition electoral victories, including in Cote d’Ivoire, Kenya, Malawi, Senegal and Zambia.

Perhaps just as important is incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan’s phone call to Buhari conceding defeat before final poll results were announced. This sets the tone for a peaceful transition devoid of the violence that characterized previous elections.

 
As it happened:

Jonathan apparently conceded in a telephone call to Buhari at 5:15 pm even before the final results were declared, earning him praise from politicians of all stripes.

 
The inside story of the call, from Mansur Liman, editor of BBC Hausa, who broke the news:

He told me that Gen Buhari had just received a phone call from his rival, in which the president conceded and congratulated him.

I did not doubt that this was true as I trusted my source, but given what has happened before in Nigeria, this kind of concession was up to that point unimaginable.
[…]
There were, of course, people who were very concerned about what could happen if the result was contested.

And I have since discovered that members of the National Peace Committee, which is headed by former President Abdulsalami Abubakar, visited President Jonathan as the results were being announced.

I understand they were the ones who persuaded the president to do something to avoid any trouble, and shortly after the visit he made the call.
[…]
By making that call the president saved Nigeria a great deal of pain. If the PDP had insisted that they had won the election, and the APC had said the same, the country would have been in chaos.

Lives would have been lost and property would have been destroyed. That call showed that in Nigeria, people can put the country first.

I have heard from PDP supporters that the president took the decision to make the call without consulting anyone. They told me that if he had talked to some of his advisers, they would have objected.

 
The President continues to enforce his will to concede, over the objections of the diehards, thanks to the positive affirmation he received from around the world:

“The President has prevailed on PDP to drop plans to go to tribunal against Buhari. He said he wants his word to be his bond, having been applauded by the international community,” a source told The Nation.

“At a point, Jonathan said ‘I don’t believe in post-election petition at tribunal because it distracts the incoming administration’. He also said Nigeria must emulate other nations where once the presidential poll is lost and won, the new government must not be distracted with election petitions. He told party leaders that he was not interested in going to the tribunal. It is now left for PDP leaders to heed his advice,” the source added.

 
Now, the APC’s President-elect Muhammadu Buhari must begin the difficult work of reviving Nigeria’s economy and extricating it from a mishandled and brutal northern rebellion.

Logo of the All Progressives Congress opposition coalition. (Credit: Auwal Ingawa)

Logo of the All Progressives Congress opposition coalition. (Credit: Auwal Ingawa)

Things Bill predicted correctly 21 months earlier

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Bill Humphrey (yours truly) for The Globalist magazine, June 20, 2013, just after the surprise election of Hassan Rouhani as President of Iran: “Rohani’s Presidential Pulpit” —

The Iranian people and the hard-line theocrats alike support nuclear development as a matter of sovereignty and independence from Western interference. But they also recognize that belligerency on the issue has brought only misery and the constant risk of attack. Now would be a good time for a conciliatory approach and a fresh start in nuclear talks with the West.

Hassan Rohani seems to be the man for the job of resetting Iran’s foreign image and stance. He can thread the high-stakes needle of being diplomatic and open to compromise while also standing firmly (but not aggressively) behind a civilian nuclear development program.
[…]
If Rohani wants to have a big impact as Iran’s president, his best bet is to use the power of rhetoric to re-shape Iran’s global and regional posture. In doing so, he could ease the pressure of sanctions and spare Iran from war. That’s where he can make a big difference.

If a disempowered fanatical blowhard can, with the power of his speeches alone, make Iran appear to be an imminent horseman of the nuclear apocalypse, then a disempowered reformist who wants reconciliation with the West can use friendlier rhetoric to climb Iran back down off the ledge.

 
There were a lot of naysayers at the time who were saying that President-elec Rouhani couldn’t possibly change things, either in Iran or with how the P5+1 countries were reacting to Iran. Obviously he’s not solely responsible for the shift; a lot of the internal credit for that goes to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself. And the negotiations hinged on the skill of Javad Zarif, appointed by Rouhani to be Foreign Minister, reinforcing Rouhani’s other positive role (assembling a negotiating team that didn’t constantly blow up the talks like the previous teams).

Hassan-RohaniBut my analysis centered more narrowly on the role that calmer and reframed rhetoric could play in tamping down tensions and climbing “Iran back down off the ledge” that Rouhani’s predecessor Ahmadinejad had helped put it on. Careful and precise political communication, as I suggested then that it could, was indeed able to transcend some of the official political landscape (at home and abroad) and bring the powers and Iran close enough together to find a way toward a deal.

As much as I’m a procedural analyst — something which also helps me see impending developments many other U.S. commentators miss — I think that kind of intangible and procedure-overriding adroitness tends to be overlooked as well.

And now another shameless plug for my 2012 book on the presidential nomination acceptance speeches at the Democratic and Republican national conventions, which is also about the redefining power of leader rhetoric. It’s available for download from Amazon for just $2.99!

On to the remainder of the negotiations, to secure a final deal by the end of June. I wish the Iranian people all the best, so that they can live in peace and prosperity — and eventually re-take their rightful place among the great and enlightened nations of the world.

من یک عشق بزرگ برای مردم ایران است

Tunisia’s Rachid Ghannouchi addresses social issues

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Rachid Ghannouchi, the leader of the Islamist democratic party Ennahda and one of the leading practical theorists of Islamic democracy outside Turkey, continues to make the rounds with European interviewers (see previous link for more). This time he gave interviews to French journalist Olivier Ravanello for a book called “On the Subject of Islam.”

While past interviews have often focused on political or economic theory questions, the book’s pull quotes on social issues have made more waves this time (at least in the relevant, Francophone circles).

Unfortunately, because the interviews were published in French and Ghannouchi’s not an extremely high-profile person if you don’t follow this topic regularly like I do, I’m guessing it’s not getting much play yet in English-language media. The quotes are collected in the French-language Tunisian edition of Huffington Post.

He states perhaps a problematic view on some issues like blasphemy laws or inheritance rights, but made interestingly pragmatic comments on abortion & homosexuality for a relatively conservative region (though Tunisia is more liberal than the region in general). I did the translations below myself and converted idiomatic phrasing where appropriate, so these are not 1:1 translations.

Quotes on homosexuality, in principle and from a legal perspective:

“We don’t approve of it. But Islam doesn’t spy on people. It preserves privacy. Everyone lives his life as he wants to, and everyone is responsible before his creator… The law does not follow people into their private lives. … What happens in your house concerns nobody. It is your choice, and nobody has the right to enter and ban you from doing this or that.”

 
This would be an improvement over existing laws in Tunisia, which the Huffington Post article says criminalized homosexuality and can result in a three-year prison sentence. Unfortunately, Mr. Ghannouchi’s own party refused to change the law when it controlled the Human Rights and Justice Ministry during the national transition.

On the former, he endorses contraception as legitimate for women to prevent pregnancy; abortion in the first 4 (maybe 5) months, i.e. “before the development of the fetus” is possibly morally permissible. After that he opposes it on principle as an “aggression against life.” According to the Huffington Post article, this is consistent with the Tunisian law allowing abortion in the first 3 months for any reason — and for physical or mental health reasons thereafter.

Essentially, Ghannouchi’s view on abortion is approximately in line with the U.S. Supreme Court’s view in Planned Parenthood v. Casey in 1992, wherein viability was estimated to be as early as 22 weeks and states could potentially ban or severely restrict it after that… But his contraception view is a lot more pragmatic than that of many U.S. Republicans.

In UK, everything now rests on the final campaign

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The campaign for the May 2015 general elections is officially under way now in the United Kingdom. And barring a huge swing between now and the election, the results are going to be chaos.

Below are the March 30th projections from The Guardian’s election center (updated daily at the link)

https://twitter.com/GdnPolitics/status/582452523950321664

Labour are campaigning hard against the SNP (to try to regain marginally SNP-leaning constituencies in Scotland), but that will make it harder to work together after the election. Which is an important consideration, seeing as they’re basically the only two parties that will collectively have anywhere near a majority.

And the Lib Dems seem pretty averse to working with Labour and the SNP, but they can’t easily go back to the Conservatives either.

The Conservatives may well finish first but (under current polling) have basically no shot of leading a government anyway, even with UKIP and the Lib Dems and the DUP. I mean…unless they’re planning to go into coalition with Labour or the SNP, which is beyond unlikely.

So that means…a big swing in favor of either Labour or the Conservatives is probably the only thing now that can prevent a totally bananas outcome or an irredeemably hung parliament.

The Benghazi “scandal” witchhunt made the world less stable

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In a piece yesterday in The Globalist, David Apgar argues that the Republican obsession with drumming up a scandal over Benghazi has forced the United States to disengage further with the world at a dangerous crossroads in history.

Partly as a result of the hearings, the United States has withdrawn its last 100 military personnel from Yemen, a special-forces group that has been productive in disrupting terror plots if not in stabilizing the poorest country in the region.
[…]
What explains the withdrawal is the veiled threat that Congress will hobble the State and Defense Departments with investigations as arbitrary, burdensome and costly as the Benghazi hearings every time someone sets fire to a U.S. base or captured U.S. personnel appear in garish jump suits kneeling on video in front of knife-wielding psychopaths.
[…]
Neither the Obama Administration nor future U.S. governments can afford the distraction promised for adverse outcomes of useful risks — risks like contributing to the MNF in 1983 and maintaining a presence in Benghazi, the heart of a nascent Libyan polity, in 2012.

 
Our retreat from Libya very likely reduced our (already very restricted) ability to keep a lid on the tense national situation and to be aware of rapidly developing situations on the ground. The transition fell apart into chaos. Likewise, while I don’t support most of what the United States has been doing in Yemen for years now, I think it was probably preferable that we maintain a physical and diplomatic presence as long as possible during its sputtering transition.

Every president has been skittish about embassy attacks since the Iranian hostage crisis lasted over a year and helped undermine Jimmy Carter politically as he headed into his unsuccessful re-election bid. But that was a pretty huge crises in its own right, without anyone manufacturing one beyond that. In this case, an already tragic event — the death of four Americans including a veteran diplomat — became such a political battleground, despite the facts and despite the lack of a coverup, that the Obama Administration had to be wary of any elevation of risk at any embassy anywhere in the entire Middle East North Africa region.

And so it is that the people accusing Democrats of “running scared” in the world and not “leading” — or whatever nonsense they’re blowing hard about due to their lack of nuanced understanding of world affairs — are the very same people raising the political risk of doing anything in the world so high that retreat is the only option.

Greece’s defense ministry ratchets up rhetoric

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Panos-Kammenos-greeceAs part of the anti-austerity coalition deal between the leftist, pro-european reformers of Syriza and the right-wing, euroskeptic Independent Greeks, the latter were given the country’s National Defense portfolio in the government. Unlike Syriza, which at least officially favors cooperation with Europe, the Independent Greeks party under Defense Minister Panos Kammenos (pictured) is openly antagonizing other European Union governments and being far less diplomatic — either as a rogue effort or as the role of “bad cop” outside the negotiations.

The latest ramp-up in “bad cop” talk was Minister Kammenos’s suggestion that the eurozone would disintegrate in the aftermath of a Greek economic implosion or exit, with Italy, Spain, and possibly even Germany being forced to go back on to their own currencies too. (The latter seems pretty unlikely.)

He also recently threatened to release all Middle Eastern refugees in holding in Greece into the rest of the Union with papers to enter Germany — in the midst of a political crisis there over refugees — if Germany fails to ease up on its demands upon Greece, and he reiterated counter-demands that Germany repay Nazi war debts that Greece forgave under Allied pressure in 1953 along with damages from the brutal Nazi occupation and counterinsurgency of Greece during the war. (Justice Minister Nikos Paraskevopoulos, a former academic who is not a member of either party in the governing coalition, also suggested that failure to repay the debts and damages could open German companies in Greece to asset seizure.)

But the most specific and perhaps unexpected demand to emanate from the defense ministry was actually related to defense! The ministry — along, actually, with some German journalists — alleges that its predecessors wasted billions in public funds on buying weapons systems and arms it didn’t need from EU firms that bribed Greek officials to make the purchases, and they want compensation. Reuters reports: Read more

O’Malley, in Iowa, echoes Bernie Sanders

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Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley is in Iowa today exploring a run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. After his old donor base froze him out in favor of Hillary Clinton, he seems to be running harder now on a platform similar to that of Bernie Sanders — emphasizing income inequality, Wall Street malfeasance, the importance of investing in education, and the need to strengthen infrastructure. Cedar Rapids Gazette:

[…] he lamented income inequality and the reckless disregard for the nation’s economy exhibited by big Wall Street banks.
[…]
Americans can change the direction of the economy and country by making better choices. As governor of Maryland, O’Malley said, he chose to invest in the state and its people rather than “join the ranks of right-wing ideologues in some other states who tried to cut their way to prosperity.”

“Instead we did more to educate our children” by increasing school funding and not raising college tuition for four years. “We made our public schools the best in country “not by doing less, but buy doing more” and invested in infrastructure — “not only water and wastewater, but in roads and transit, school construction.”
[…]
O’Malley called for raising the minimum wage, expanding Social Security and collective bargaining rights. Making it easier for people to vote and doing more to educate future generations.

“It means we should invest more in our country so our country can give more back more to us and to our children and to our grandchildren,” he said. “And yes, it means we should stand up to powerful wealth special interests who nearly wrecked out country in the Great Recession and will wreck it again if we don’t put in place the rules, the regulations and the enforcement that will keep other people from gambling with our children’s future, with our nation’s economy and with our money.”

 
This rhetoric also puts him in direct contrast on almost every issue with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who has been traversing Iowa regularly in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Whether or not O’Malley actually commits to running or gets anywhere, it’s important to have a vocal and respected Democrat in the field in Iowa pushing back on the Scott Walkers of the world. Otherwise, they just get months and months of unchallenged opportunity to build and cement policy narratives.