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U.S. Congress members negotiate with countries
scorned by Bush
(Taken from the 01/01/07 Boston Globe
article, “Lawmakers defend foreign policy efforts”)
By Susan Milligan and Rick Klein,
Globe Staff
WASHINGTON -- Frustrated with the
Bush administration, members of Congress are
traveling to countries with poor diplomatic
relations with the United States to conduct their
own negotiations with leaders the president has
refused to meet. In recent weeks, representatives
and senators -- including three from Massachusetts
-- have gone to places including Syria, which the
United States has denounced for its interference in
Lebanon and Iraq, and Cuba, where travel by US
citizens is severely restricted. Representative
William D. Delahunt, a Quincy Democrat who has met
several times with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez,
is mulling another visit to discuss US-Venezuela
relations with the leader who called President Bush
"the devil" at a UN session in September. Meanwhile,
Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts,
has expressed an interest in going to Iran, which
the Bush administration refuses to negotiate with
until it stops its nuclear program. Nevada Democrat
Harry Reid, incoming Senate majority leader, is now
leading a six-member delegation to Latin America,
and has already met with Bolivian president Evo
Morales, a leftist friendly with Chávez and Cuban
dictator Fidel Castro. The members of Congress –
mostly Democrats, but including some Republicans as
well -- defend their trips, saying they are
asserting the legislative branch's role in
monitoring foreign policy and maintaining a dialogue
with countries whose policies have enormous
implications for the United States. But critics say
the meetings undermine American strategy and play
into the hands of foreign leaders seeking to weaken
the Bush administration's resolve. "It's nearly
always counter-productive," said Ian Cuthbertson, a
counter-terrorism specialist with the World Policy
Institute. "They've given encouragement to these
regimes." White House spokesman Tony Snow slammed
three Democratic Senators, including Kerry, who
traveled to Syria in December, saying the visit was
"not helpful" and "not appropriate" given the fact
that the United States has not had high-level
diplomatic relations with the Middle Eastern nation
since late 2004. "Even lending a further specter of
legitimacy to that government undermines the cause
of democracy in the region," Snow said.
Representative James McGovern, a
Worcester Democrat active in Latin American affairs,
said the administration was very clear in private
communications that it did not want him to go on a
recent trip to Cuba.
McGovern went anyway, along with
the largest delegation to visit Cuba since the
revolution, and lawmakers said the bipartisan group
gleaned information about the medical condition of
Castro that might not otherwise have been learned.
The United States has an office in Cuba, but does
not have an embassy or ambassador there. Members of
Congress have gone on foreign trips for many years,
but analysts and lawmakers said Democrats in
particular have been eager to travel to hot spots
recently because they are unhappy with the Bush
administration's foreign policy. Several specialists
said they could not remember a time when lawmakers
were making so many trips to places where the United
States has such delicate or poor relations with the
nations' leaders. Further, the current
administration has been more likely than others to
avoid dialogue with certain regimes as punishment
for bad behavior, according to foreign policy
analysts. Ronald Reagan called the former Soviet
Union an "evil empire," but "he still talked to
them," and Richard Nixon went to communist China,
noted Lawrence Korb , a senior Reagan administration
Defense Department official who is now with the
liberal Center for American Progress. But "this
administration seems to think that if you talk to
someone, it legitimizes them," Korb said. "That's
why you see a lot of members of Congress worried
about that and taking matters into their own hands."
Michael Hudson , professor of Arab studies at
Georgetown University, said the White House's
disdain over congressional involvement in foreign
relations "is an institutional bias that goes back a
long way. Presidents, no matter who they are, get
really irritated when the guys from the other end of
Pennsylvania Avenue start mucking around" in
international affairs, although the visits can
produce helpful insights, Hudson said. While the
administration may not approve of lawmakers meeting
with troublesome regimes, the president can benefit
from intelligence the representatives gather there,
said Robert Keeley, a former career diplomat who
served as ambassador to Greece, Zimbabwe, and
Mauritius. "My own opinion is, the more contact, the
better, and if our own administration is unwilling
to talk to these people, and if our accredited
diplomats can't talk to them, [members of Congress]
can at least pick up information," Keeley said.
McGovern, who has been visiting Cuba since 1979,
said he has noticed a substantial change in the
island nation since that time, including what he
described as a greater openness to religious
practice. But the Bush administration "is not
interested in fact-finding. They're not interested
in the truth of the situation. They're only
interested in the status quo," McGovern said. The
administration — along with many Cuban-Americans —
assert that isolating Cuba from the rest of the
world is the best way to promote opposition to
Castro's regime. Kerry, who met with Syrian
President Bashar Assad in December, said "having the
conversation – a fact-finding conversation, which is
not a negotiation -- takes nothing away from the
administration." He said that Assad made specific
commitments of help in Iraq, offers Kerry said he
will relay to government officials in Washington.
Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat
who made the Syria trip with Kerry, called it
"offensive and foolish" for the administration to
plainly reject talks with Syria, particularly in
light of the Iraq Study Group's recommendation that
the Bush administration enlist the help of Syria and
Iran in quelling violence in Iraq. The State
Department has helped lawmakers arrange the trips,
setting up meetings and providing military planes to
Cuba, where US commercial planes are not permitted
to go. But "it doesn't mean that we support the fact
that they are there or having these discussions,"
State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said.
However, the State Department included Kerry and
Dodd's trip as a "highlight" in its weekly progress
report on increasing international support for the
US-led mission in Iraq, indicating that the
administration sees some value in the unsanctioned
visits. Delahunt said he was asked to brief
administration officials about a trip he made to
Venezuela after the unsuccessful coup attempt
against Chávez in 2002, but otherwise he has relayed
intelligence to US diplomatic officials on an
informal basis. And while in the countries he tries
to make it clear that he isn't speaking for the
president.
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