I was once being interviewed by a local newspaper that asked me to estimate the local size of Eritrean-Americans.  Using the referendum vote participation as a baseline, I tried to extrapolate and having no clue, I asked a local PFDJ official who asked me to apply the unique PFDJ science of impatience: “dikone endo bela” [tell her anything!]  Dikone was 20,000 which I have recently learned from my local American TV coverage of the Eritrean festival in San Jose to be the new orthodoxy.  Inflating the numbers—for demonstrations, for organizational membership—is done all the time here in the US as a way to intimidate politicians that you have the numbers to sway elections.  My guess is that this is how the number of Eritrean- Americans has magically reached 100,000 [updated below].  But now the unintended consequences of state department accounting: if there are 100,000 Eritreans, and their average income is 40,000 per year and they all pay 2% of their income, why that is 8 million dollars a year going to the PFDJ!  What was that thing about truth and railroads again?  And what was that proverb before we had railroads in Eritrea, anyway?

Listening to President Isaias Afwerki’s interview regarding the US-Eritrean relationship took me back to the PLO days.  I can’t prove it, but I’ve always maintained that the PLO would have advanced its case in the United States years ago if only it had spokespersons that were telegenic and spoke American.  Whenever the Palestinian issue flared up and some media outlet would book guests, it was always predictable:  on one side would be the stereotypical Arab—loud, angry and speaking in broken English. (“The Balestinian beeble….” ) On the other side, an Israeli--polished, soft-spoken and serenading in fluent English.  Well, sure, the Israeli had his own words to overcome (“The State of Isrrrael cannot tolerrrate terrrorrrism…”) It was the missing P vs the rolling R debate.  But the Israeli was always saved by the magic words: we are an island of democracy in a sea of totalitarianism. 

Israel is a strategic ally of the United States and the Arab/Palestinian voice would always be at a huge disadvantage.  The question is: all those years, were they chipping away at the disadvantage or adding to it?  And, what can we Eritreans learn from that experience?

Judging from President Isaias’s interview, we have not learned much. Some play the cards they are dealt and some spend eternity complaining about the cards they have been dealt.  There were the same conspiracies; the same complaints of double standards; the same grievances about UN resolutions; the same misplaced grief over the fate of marginalized Americans; the same assumption that the US government does not represent the American people and most shockingly the same ignorance about how policy is formulated and executed in the United States.   

And how is US foreign policy formulated anyway?  We have a rare peek: as a result of the debacle in Iraq, there is an interesting debate going on right now between the US foreign policy establishment and the outsiders (mostly bloggers) who are its critics. 
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US Foreign Policy 101 

The foreign policy establishment views itself as a clericy like other specialist who are pretty much immune from public opinion.  When our car is broken down, we don’t vote on how to fix it; we take it to a mechanic; when we disagree on what the law says, we don’t vote on it: the lawyers and judges fight it out.  Much the way that specialist in military affairs, the law, religion, economics, sports are left alone to do their job without much intrusion from the mob, the foreign policy establishment also wants to be respected as specialists to whom democracy defers.

The critics, Salon.com’s Glen Greenwald being their most articulate, argue as follows:

"The Foreign Policy Community -- a term which excludes those in primarily academic positions -- is not some apolitical pool of dispassionate experts examining objective evidence and engaging in academic debates. Rather, it is a highly ideological and politicized establishment, and its dominant bipartisan ideology is defined by extreme hawkishness, the casual use of military force as a foreign policy tool, the belief that war is justified not only in self-defense but for any "good result," and most of all, the view that the U.S. is inherently good and therefore ought to rule the world through superior military force."

The critics are not questioning that expertise is required to formulate US foreign policy; they just want the guys who got Iraq wrong to be booted out and their guys to be invited to the club of what Greenwald calls Very Serious People.  Whether this happens or not, how US foreign policy is set will follow the same process it always had—and it will be largely immune to the passion of the mob.  A highly simplified version of the process is as follows:

1. Specialists (journalists, NGOs, social scientists) write an article, a column or a book on a subject,

2. What is written is peer-reviewed and, if respectable or unique, the specialists are invited to the think tanks to give an address or write for their journals

3. What appears at the journals of the think tanks is read by opinion shapers (editorial writers, talk show hosts and, increasingly, blogs),

4. The politicians hire the experts to be their advisors,

5. The advisors write the politician’s policy statement,

6. The policy is vetted and peer-reviewed

7. The policy is ping-ponged, debated, lobbied (by special interest groups) and one reflecting the general outlook of the politician (the president) is adopted and becomes US policy

8. The policy is advanced or sabotaged by intra on inter-departmental feuds.

Unless the PFDJ has forgotten it already, this is exactly how the EPLF’s reputation (good, uncorrupt, hard working democrats) was established in the US. It was no accident that the ELF was always presented as “tribal” and “Muslim dominated” whereas the EPLF was progressive and secular. EPLF members and EPLF-sympathetic folks had a huge impact in academia, think tanks and journalists; the ELF had no such contact. There is a direct, if long, link between the “George Washington of Eritrea” and the favorable books on Isaias and the EPLF by the specialists (like Dan Connell) and the Clinton policy that referred to Isaias as part of a “new generation of African renaissance.”  When the PFDJ alienated all the people that had spent a lifetime polishing its reputation, it should not be surprised that its reputation is suffering. 

Exhausting The Models

From my observation, there are several ways to be America’s friend.  I do not claim that this is an exhaustive list, and I invited readers to add to it:

Model 1: You can subscribe to all its ideals and try to live up to them;
Model 2: You can ignore and flout all its ideals—as long as you have something unique to offer.  Oil, military base, participation in some US-led threat containment strategy.
Model 3: You can be large and on the verge of breakdown.

The Eritrean government has unsuccessfully tried to sell model 1 and model 2.  Now it is trying model 3. 

Model 1: Idealism

In the 1990s, the US thought that Eritrea was taking the necessary steps to become a liberal democracy.  The government sang all the right songs and cursed all the right scoundrels.  It advanced globalist views—of nation states without borders, free zones, duty-free ports, a liberal macro-economic policy, a constitution. It joined all the right clubs and bad-mouthed all the right adversaries.  This lasted for 7 years.

Model 1-2 Transition

Then, in 2000, following the conclusion of the Eritrea-Ethiopia wars, Isaias went completely Middle Eastern on the US: he accused the State Department and the CIA of attempting a coup to overthrow him.  Shaebia.org and Shabait.com were born on the ashes of the closed private press and the gates of the jailed journalists, politicians and ordinary citizens.  The government adopted the Middle Eastern media approach to news: “His Excellency, Isaias Afwerki, Custodian of the holy cities of Asmara and Massawa, today received His Highness so-and-so in His office.  Later, he sent a congratulatory letter to so-and-so on the occasion of his nephew’s birthday…”

That was in the “national news.”  The editorials were straight from Syrian Times of the 1970s: ten adjectives per sentence: “the capitulationist, neo-colonialists, defeatist refuse of history…”  Then, it accused Anthony Lake, an American diplomat of colluding with the capitulationists and refuse of history.  And it accused the CIA of plotting to overthrow Isaias Afwerki.  

One of the most telling statements in Jendaye Frazer's briefing is what an unnamed journalist said, "The other thing I noticed on my favorite website Shabeh [Shabait]...."  When it comes to foreign affairs journalists (who are members of the foreign policy establishment) the PFDJ has managed to become a punchline to a joke. 

Model 2: Offer An Asset

This went on until 2001.  September, that is.  This was a God-sent opportunity for His Excellency to switch to Model 2.  Don’t talk to me about democracy and human rights: I can give you military bases.  He spent money he didn’t have to beef up Massawa Airport because, as he explained to The Atlantic’s Robert Kaplan “I share the strategic view of the Americans in the region. French forces in Djibouti have been a stabilizing factor, and U.S. troops will add to that. You need outside powers to keep order here. It sounds colonialist, but I am only being realistic.”  And, “Afewerki reportedly told Rumsfeld, ‘The runway can handle anything the U.S. Air Force wants to land on it.’"  In a joint press conference with Rumsfeld, President Isaias Afwerki was asked if his help to the US would include inviting US forces to Eritrea.  Isaias replied, “That's the least we can offer.”

 

Isaias certainly had every reason to believe that the US would take up the offer.  I mean, what is the competition? Landlocked Ethiopia? Yemen which, according to Isaias, is a “tribal jungle”?  But it didn’t happen because, as Kaplan explains in the interview mentioned above, “He [Isaias] analyzes brilliantly what he knows, but he gives in to paranoia about what he doesn't know. He did not seem to understand that U.S. foreign policy is often a synthesis of what the State and Defense Departments are comfortable with, and that therefore Foggy Bottom alone cannot be blamed for Eritrea's image problems in the United States.”

But Isaias still naively believed that his problems were Foggy Bottom (State Department) and Langley (CIA).  Now if only he could speak directly to Centcom and if only the Pentagon could stage a coup and run things in America, they would understand him.  Of course, by all accounts, the Assistant Secretary for African Affairs, Jendayi Frazer, is very close to the Secretary of State, Condi Rice.  Ms Rice in turn is considered very close to not only George Bush, but the George Bush family.  And the Defense Department is now back to being run by a pragmatist who, like  Condi Rice, is a member of the Bush family’s inner circle.)

So where is the crack that Isaias is looking for? And if there is one, would it not require diplomatic finesse—one far sophisticated than the enda medeber (Quah! Quah!) diplomacy of Isaias Afwerki?  Exactly.  

Which takes us to January 2009 and the end of the Bush era.  There is a calculus that the end of George Bush era will usher in a new foreign policy in the United States, a European-like accommodating foreign policy.  This is another naïve anticipation.  If my description of how the forign policy sausage factory works in the US is correct, whether the democrats or republicans win, US foreign policy will not change dramatically when it comes to Africa even if the Democrats win. As the Economist put it recently:  

America, even if it shifts to the left, will still be a conservative force on the international stage. Mrs Clinton might be portrayed as a communist on talk radio in Kansas, but set her alongside France's Nicolas Sarkozy, Germany's Angela Merkel, Britain's David Cameron or any other supposed European conservative, and on virtually every significant issue Mrs Clinton is the more right-wing.

The US has a defense budget that is, I think, larger than the entire world combined.  And, every candidate for president, democrat and republican, is arguing that it should be even bigger.  So what change is coming? In any event, if Eritrea is placed on the state-sponsor of terror list, it is not the kind of thing that can be reversed by the next administration.  The five nations on the list now were placed there by Democratic and Republican administrations and each president has honored the judgment of his predecessor.  So, it was time to switch to Model 3.

Model 3: Threatening Instability

Having refused Model 1 and having been denied Model 2, now Isaias is left only with Model 3.  And this is how he hopes that will work:

Some countries are considered so big or so strategic that they are not allowed to fail—no matter how hard they try to do so.  The US will come to their rescue—financially or militarily. What Isaias has done is to scan three countries—Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia—then to identify organic political movements that are in a position to challenge the tenuous hold of the countries’ central governments, and then to nurture them.   In Sudan, he successfully nurtured the SPLA and the Eastern Front and he is working on the Darfur rebels. In Ethiopia, he is working on the Ogaden movement, the Sidamo movement, the Oromo movement and the Patriotic Front.  And in Somalia, he has the Islamic Court. Individually, these movements may not amount to much but collectively they give him the potential authority to decide matters of peace and war on a land mass of 1.7 million square miles and a population of nearly 127 million.  The part of the horn that he wants influence on would be, population-wise, the 11^th largest in the world.  The foreign policy of President Isaias Afwerki now is: Aggragate and agitate. When you catapult yourself to a position where you can have peace and war decisions on the lives of 127 million people, well, well, you will draw attention. 

There are two reactions: the European model, and the American model.

The European approach to challenges like the one presented by Isaias Afwerki is accommodation and the American approach is confrontation.  I know I am generalizing and I welcome challenges to my characterization.  It is not a coincidence that it was the European Comission’s Louis Michel who was not just honored, not just very honored, but “very, very honoured” by Isaias Afwerki’s visit to Brussels on May 2, 2007  despite the fact that Isaias Afwerki had kicked out the EU ambassador to Eritrea, Antonio Bandini; violated the Cotonou Agreement; has disappeared Eritrean-Europeans and harassed every Europe-based NGO. 

Europe is Europe and America is America.   To escape US isolation, Isaias had devised a strategy of Go East: reactivate relationship with Arab states, court China and Iran and court Europe.  But what will he do if Eritrea is placed on the “state sponsor of terror” list and the Arab states and the Europeans are ordered by the US to have no dealings with him?

I hope the 100,000 (*snicker*) Eritrean-Americans will prevail upon him to do the right thing.  I hope they do but I fear they won’t: simply because they venerate him so much, they are likely to think that he has thought everything through and he knows exactly what he is doing and he has some magic plan. Plus, the mere fact that I am suggesting it (writing at an "enemy website" as Sophia Tesfamariam called us; as a certified member of those who are challenging the "perserverance of Eritrea" and waging "psychological terror) may make my comments suspect.  So why doesn't the PFDJ use a new approach: instead of asking its members and sympathizers to pass resolutions and condemnations, why doesn't it give them secret ballots and a choice of what the PFDJ should do.  I am betting the vote will be 9 to 1 in favor of PFDJ avoiding the collission course it is on.  Ok, maybe 7 to 3.

What is it to you anyway, you ask?  Well, first, one of the weaknesses of nation-states is that they are identified for good or ill by the actions of their governments and a label like "state sponsor of terror" will stay with all Eritreans, past, present and future, opposition or pro-government.  Secondly, thanks to the PFDJ total mismanagement of Eritrea's economy, remittances to Eritrea are not "exta spending cash", they are the difference between eating and going hungry.   So, PFDJ members, as Isaias himself said, “when a friend is making a mistake, you are not doing him any favors by applauding him—instead, you have an obligation to speak out.” Speak out. We all have an interest in sparing Eritrea the label--in the meantime, we will struggle to bring about the collapse of the unjust system, and you work to strengthen it.  Deal?  

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Update: I stand corrected.  There are actually (wink, wink; nudge, nudge) 200,000 Eritrean Americans living in the US, according to the VOA. Anybody guess 250,000? 225? Going once, going twice, ok, it is settled: it is 200,000.