Tom Malinowski had his confirmation hearing yesterday in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in a session chaired by Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and where Mark Rubio (R-FL) and John McCain (R-AR) asked questions.
As suspected, no one asked him the one question I wanted to hear asked of him: his views on Edward Snowden. Given that the organization he represented for many years as Advocacy Director in Washington, DC decided that Snowden represents "a human rights activist" and a "whistleblower," how would he represent the Administration's perspective that he is not a human rights activist or a hero and is a wanted felon who has defected to Russia?
In his written testimony, Malinowski deployed the technique of shamelessly flattering Boxer and McCain (it really gushes way beyond even the usual level of Washington flattery) and then asking rhetorical questions to sort of punch the ticket on issues, but not really articulate a view or recommend a policy -- and of course confirmation hearings are not where people do those things so they can be sure to pass.
I discussed the trouble with Malinowski here and his critiqued his past writings here. He's been careful to scrub any Internet presence and refrain from saying anything about anything, even being Advocacy Director, just to get through this process. He had McCain and Cardin's endorsement going in, so there was never going to be a problem, except for possibly someone like Rubio, but Rubio didn't go deep enough to understand the more subtle problems with HRW's key voice and presence in DC, and just went with pushing his own issue of religious freedom for Christians in oppressive countries -- not a subject HRW cares much about, but which it has done just enough about to avoid criticism.
To win over Republicans that he perhaps stereotyped as Captive Nations types, Tomasz played his own ethnic card in describing America's civil rights history:
That’s the America I grew up admiring, as an immigrant from Poland who’d seen how powerless people behind the Iron Curtain drew strength from having the world’s most powerful country on their side.
But unlike outspoke Poles in Solidarity or conservative figures like Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski, Malinowski wasn't critical of Russia and merely made bland statements about problems there instead of answering the specific questions put to him about "what is to be done".
This sort of touching of certain markers that people might be looking for without really coming down hard on how he'd take action on them is the sort of limpness for which the human rights office at State is known under Obama -- who very much sets the tone.
In Washington, Obama is known for having very strong views and very strong policy directives for how to be weak on human rights abroad -- dialogue is all. Malinowski worked hard to get this position and is not going to colour outside the lines.
Malinowski earnestly assured the members that Russia would be "one of my main priorities" and that the organization he worked in for years -- HRW -- had an office in Moscow where "we have it easier than Russian activists who face the potential of prison" -- but he never indicated he might do anything different than his past passive predecessors in this job and in Moscow who didn't even protest the expulsion of the USAID and have done little even to rhetorically resist the crackdown on the NGOs. (No doubt they even have a strategic theory to go with this, that they don't want to aggrandize or worsen the backlash -- which is silly because it's bad enough and the Russians are emboldened when they see there is no pushback.)
You would think the emotional issue of the Russian adoptees stranded now and unable to go to the American families who had started the process might have come up at this hearing, but the old issues of freedom of movement and family reiunification, staples in the Cold War era, just don't seem to play anymore and few care about them on the Hill in the same way -- and when they do (one congresswoman aptly called Pavel Astakhov, the pro-Putin provocateur and child ombudsman, "an ass") -- this only got reprimands for being out of date.
Malinowski intoned that the "eyes of the world will be on Sochi" and that implied issues of gay athletes and intolerance might come into play, but he had no proposal to make and wasn't handed a good question to give him an opportunity to endorse something even short of a boycott -- like not having heads of states or even foreign secretaries grace this overpriced and overhyped event accompanied by many actual human rights abuses, and instead sending -- well, the Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights, for example, to "send a message".
All Malinowski could say was that he was for "consistently publicly and privately" raising issues like LGBT rights and other issues with Russia. So I guess we can expect the same limp response to further Russian outrages with quiet dialogue, punctuated by buried terse statements hidden in the back pages of state.gov.
To be sure, Malinowski said that he was "a strong supporter of Magnitsky Act, which targets those responsible for worse abuses". Then -- in one of his really bad geopolitical notions that rivulate all his writing mistaking perestroika liberals for real reforms -- he claims that support of Magnitsky "aligns us with the Russian people in their concern about the nexus between corruption and abuse of power."
Well, actually, no. It doesn't. Because most of the Russian people do not really align with the American idea of the rule of law, and precedent-setting law (and in a common-law system there are obvious limitations to these notions). They want to get rid of corruption, but some of them don't want to do that if it means also losing their own power or their own way of cutting corners. Most Russians don't know what Magnitsky is, and if they thought it was only about one case and didn't really target visible wealthy kingpins they'd like to take-down, but obscure bureaucrats, they wouldn't see the point.
You don't pin your argumentation for the Magnitsky case on such rickety notions of pretending the Russian people are already liberal democrats appreciating the value of impact litigation style public interest cases, which is essentially what Magnitsky is. You do it because it's in keeping with universal human rights principles and even Russia's own ostensible claim to crack down on corruption.
But we know the official line -- Magnitsky is guilty, not the Magnitsky Listers. And that's what most Putin supporters would go with, and pretending we have a secret giant lobby for these notions in Russia is part of the whole flawed and misguided picture Malinowski has of this country -- and in this, he actually reflects the second of two schools of thought in Eastern Europe for coping with the bad tsar. One is to attack the bad tsar directly, to spark uprisings, to rebel, or to go into the underground and fight as best as one can. The second is to accommodate the bad tsar, find some sort of deal with him by which one's own community will be allowed to survive, and then stay out of his way. The first method doesn't see the tsar as someone you reason with. The second does -- and even imagines that if only there weren't that bad tsar, or maybe his bad advisors, people would be free and things would be better.
There's a third way long tried by Soviet zakonniki (legal defenders) - to force the bad tsar at least to abide by his own better decrees by publicly shaming him -- but this way always runs the risk of sliding into accommodation, and does in the Putin era in particular.
On Syria, those who are looking for any port in the storm of the Administration's contradictory and weak and even dangerous policy vacillations will see Malinowski's statement in this hearing as "a good thing" -- although as I noted before, nothing about Syria will be decided in this office.
Malinowski stated that if a resolution is passed in the UN Security Council for Syria to turn over its chemical weapons, this would be a "step forward" as it would "take them off the table" and be a "good thing for people" although it "would not solve the vast majority of our problems".
It wouldn't stop the killing by bombs or ease any suffering or the burden on neighbouring states of 2 million refugees and growing, and there would still be an opportunity of Al Qaeda "to exploit this horrible, cruel situation," he added.
Malinowski conceded there is a "lot more we have to do" beyond this putative resolution stopping chemical weapons and this would be to provide support to "the moderate opposition -- virtually at war with Al Qaeda".
Here he is most definitely taking off his HRW hat, as HRW doesn't give out advice about arming rebels, but he's also playing up to Administration notions of the array of forces of rebels and implying that the moderates are holding down their fort better than they are. He spoke of interdicting the flow of arms to the regime -- but hey, that means not just regional players but Russia, the real arms dealer to Damascus. What's his plan for *that*?
Interestingly -- and this will endear him to some -- Malinowski says that the only reason that the Syrians pursued a negotiated settlement was because Obama maintained "the credible threat" of force."
"That's the only reason we got the chemical weapons accord. It does need to remain on the table with I hope the support of the US Congress."
So basically, Malinowski here is consistent with his neo-liberal "responsibility to protect" notion of "humanitarian intervention" -- using force for good in the way Clinton did in the former Yugoslavia -- or one could add, in the way Blair believed he did in Iraq.
But I don't think Malinowski would concede that the threat of the use of force was primarily effective on Russia -- when Russia saw Obama really was at least feigning to go outside of the Security Council and act unilaterally, precisely because Russia kept blocking action and pretending "international consensus" means permission from Moscow. That's because I think essentially, Malinowski does not believe that the only thing Russia understands is force -- or at least forceful positions. He was four-square for the reset and backed Obama all the way in the dialogue approach to the worsening state of human rights caused by Putin for the last four years.
Malinowski could do something very important in this job, as important as Jimmy Carter did in 1980 in boycotting the Moscow Olympics over the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
He could urge Obama not to go to Sochi because it is beneath the dignity of office to engage in such a Potemkin Village covering so many abuses, starting with mass murder in Syria -- and because it's not safe. This is the idea of Russian opposition figure Boris Nemtsov -- he knows that most people won't get behind an outright boycott because athletes would be disappointed and many people are under Putin's "diplomacy" spell.
But just as some stayed away from the Durban World Conference on Racism when it degenerated into antisemitism and anti-Israel hatred and some countries walked out, so Obama could stay home from Sochi.
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