A Losing Latin Policy

By Jackson Diehl (THE WASHINGTON POST, 10/03/06):

In the past year Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has quietly corrected several of the Bush administration's most self-defeating first-term foreign policies -- such as its insistence on obstructing European diplomacy on the Iranian nuclear program rather than focusing pressure on the Iranians themselves. But a couple of shoot-yourself-in-the-foot practices linger from the days when a high-riding Bush team felt it could afford to champion unilateralism and narrow U.S. interests even if it meant damaging relations with important allies.

Nowhere is that more true than in Latin America, a region where political instability and anti-American feeling are steadily mounting, where Fidel Castro suddenly finds he has more friends than at any time in his four-plus decades in power -- and where the United States is seemingly going out of its way to punish the region's largest democracies, such as Mexico, Brazil and Chile.

This weekend Rice will visit Chile for the inauguration of a new president, Michelle Bachelet, a very 21st-century woman and, as a moderate socialist, the antithesis of Castro and the anti-democratic leftist populists emerging around the region. As defense minister, Bachelet oversaw Chile's participation in U.S. naval exercises, its quick deployment of peacekeepers to Haiti after the latest intervention by U.S. Marines and Chile's ongoing acquisition of F-16 aircraft. Yet she faces the prospect that U.S. military aid to her government will be terminated in the coming months and that Chile will have to pay sharply increased fees to the Pentagon to obtain training for its new F-16 pilots.

Why the harsh treatment? Because Chile's National Congress will soon ratify the treaty creating the International Criminal Court -- and it will not approve a side agreement demanded by the Bush administration that would exempt Americans in Chile from the court's jurisdiction. Though the court only recently began work, and the prospect that it would indict an American for a war crime is entirely theoretical, the administration's policy has been to insist that every nation receiving U.S. military aid sign an exemption agreement or face an aid cutoff, regardless of the political consequences. Destroying the court has been a pet cause for conservative ideologues in the Bush State Department, such as U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, who in the first term insisted that his crusade take priority even over military relations with allies that dispatched troops to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some of those countries eventually obtained presidential exemptions provided for by a law that mandates the sanctions. At the moment, however, 12 of 21 nations in Latin America have been suspended from U.S. military training and aid programs because of the ICC rule, including Brazil, Peru, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Bolivia and Uruguay.

The latest to be punished: Mexico, which agreed last year to accept military assistance from the United States for the first time since 1960 -- only to have the program voided because, in theory, a U.S. citizen might one day be arrested there and extradited to The Hague for trial. U.S.-Mexican military cooperation on communications, counterterrorism and counternarcotics operations all stand to be affected.

Remarkably, the Defense Department -- nominally the chief beneficiary of this policy -- has had enough. The Pentagon's new Quadrennial Defense Review calls for unlinking military training programs from the International Criminal Court. "One has to weigh the hypothetical benefits of this policy in the future against the very real damage it is inflicting on our important relationships in the region," says Roger Pardo-Maurer, the deputy assistant defense secretary for Western Hemisphere affairs. "In the case of Mexico, which is one of our most important relationships, there's no question this is a setback. Suddenly we find we are in this glass box where we can't reach out to them."

Chile is next: Sanctions there would echo those of the 1970s, when military sales to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet were banned. Only Chile is now the region's most prosperous and successful democracy. And its leader is Bachelet, who has advocated a strategic partnership between Chile and the United States. Given the anti-American axis forming around Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, that hardly seems like a stance that can be taken for granted -- or spurned.

Yet stiff opposition to common sense remains rooted in Rice's own department. The political-military bureau, once overseen by Bolton, has for years fought efforts to grant aid to U.S. allies that support the ICC. When a senior interagency meeting was convened last year to consider the issue, Bolton returned from New York to argue forcefully -- and successfully -- against any change of policy.

Administration officials say the issue is up for consideration again, and presidential waivers could be forthcoming for countries in Latin America and elsewhere that participate in the Pentagon's training programs. Will the decision come soon enough to rescue relations with Mexico, or with Chile's new president? It could be close.