Bush readies to play hardball By Shyam Bhatia, Deccan Herald, March 7, 2006
http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/mar72006/panorama1472200636.asp Now that President Bush is back in Washington after his whirlwind tour of India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, the real work is due to start to implement the nuclear deal agreed in Delhi. But before reactor spare parts and enriched uranium fuel start arriving at Indian ports, the American authorities need to change existing legislation in favour of India. Whether the Atomic Energy Act and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Act will each be amended to include rather than exclude India is part of the dialogue that has started in Washington. One idea that some administration officials favour is to enact a completely separate piece of India-specific legislation that would override and overcome any existing legal obstacles to cementing the new US-India relationship. The political arithmetic to make the required changes whether in the form of amended legislation or a brand new Act goes something like this. In the House of Representatives, Bush-leaning Republicans have a comfortable majority. Even if there are some hold-outs, the Bush camp supported by pro-India Democrats can be expected to approve the deal. Significantly, it is the House of Representatives that has so far yielded by far the greatest support for the deal. Men like Republican Joe Wilson and Democrats Joe Crawley, Frank Pallone and Gary Ackerman have come out publicly to say they support what Bush has negotiated with India. The Senate, the US Upper House, is an entirely different cup of tea. Here the Republicans have a wafer thin majority, but, beyond that, key Republican Senators such as Richard Lugar, head of the key foreign relations committee, have expressed their doubts over the Bush administration's strategy of ending India nuclear isolation. In Lugar's case, the senator has listed 80 questions over the nuclear deal and these will have to be answered before he decides to endorse the Delhi agreement. He and other doubters from both parts of Congress will inevitably become the focus of the No-lobby, supported by Pakistan, which says India should not be rewarded for defying the international nuclear non-proliferation regime by going ahead with its own nuclear weapons programme. This is the kind of reasoning that has been deployed by the gang of nuclear ayatollahs who staff the think tanks dotted around Washington. Since Bush's return from Delhi, another argument rearing its head in numerous talk shows is that the deal agreed with India will make it much harder for Washington to counter arguments from countries like North Korea and Iran that they too should be permitted to develop nuclear arguments. No one on the talk shows has pointed out thus far that India has a liberal democracy with inbuilt checks and balances and merits inclusion within a completely different category of nation states, separate from the authoritarian regimes in Iran and North Korea. Bush himself has argued that India has been a de facto nuclear weapons power for more than 30 years and it makes more sense to bring Delhi into the system, rather than continue to isolate it. He has also pointed out that by assisting India to build more nuclear power plants, Washington will be reducing competition for the world's increasingly scarce oil resources. None of these arguments has won over the critics. So, taking a leaf from American parlance, the Bush administration is now preparing to play hardball. Helped in the background by paid India lobbyists, the White House can be expected to emphasise two vital points. One is that India is a rising economic power and a natural trading partner for the US. Any political or strategic deal with Delhi should be seen in the context of India as an ever bigger market for US exports. So far only six per cent of US exports go to India, but if the $11 billion Boeing deal is anything to go by, that figure could double in the next three years. The other point that has been hinted at, but never fully discussed in public is the value of India as a strategic counter balance to China. How that act of counter balancing could be exercised has never been fleshed out. But there is no doubt that the Americans are genuinely worried about China's emergence as the world's newest superpower. In Washington last week one Congressional aide openly expressed his fears that the next decade will see hundreds of Chinese-built nuclear missiles patrolling the globe every few minutes. Such concerns will help Bush to sell the nuclear deal with India. How the White House balances the economic arguments with the strategic ones will amount to a voyage of discovery in the weeks and months ahead. -- This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! 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