Avuncular American

We Are Not Appeased

"Never ask publicly for a favor unless you know it will be granted"

Picking up where I left off yesterday on the matter of appeasement, now that Saudi Arabia has sent President Bush packing without his hoped-for oil production increase, I defer to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, not known for its anti-Bush sentiments.  In "Beseeching the Saudis," the WSJ lets the administration have it:

A cardinal rule of presidential diplomacy is never to ask publicly for favors unless you know in advance they will be granted. The same request by Mr. Bush had already been rebuffed by the Saudis during his visit to Riyadh in January. This time around, the Saudi response was particularly blunt and condescending: "If you want more oil, you need to buy it," said Ali al-Naimi, the Saudi oil minister.

Anyone who watched the video clip of the royal audience would have seen a jocular, squirming Bush in the presence of a wooden, unamused King Abdullah.  If ever there was a filmed testament to the sunset of a failed administration, this one will vie with "Mission Accomplished."

The WSJ suggests that the White House fire whoever put Bush up to "this second presidential humiliation" at the hands of his Saudi buddies.  Neither the newspaper nor the President need look very far: Vice President Cheney, whose ties with the oil industry rival the President's own oil credentials, was there on a similar mission in March (see the International Herald Tribune "Bush Hopes Cheney's Mideast Visit Will Rein In Oil Prices").  Oops.

We are reminded by the WSJ of another particularly galling aspect of the Saudi rebuff:

The Administration is defending its decision to sell the House of Saud billions of dollars in advanced weapons, over the increasingly hectic objections of New York Senator Chuck Schumer. The Administration is also proposing to help the Saudis develop civilian nuclear reactors to provide for their energy needs. That may help the Kingdom export more oil by easing its domestic requirements. But we await the explanation for why the world needs another politically unstable Islamic theocracy in possession of radioactive fuel rods.

Need anyone remind the lame ducks on Pennsylvania Avenue that investing billions in arms for unpopular, unstable Gulf monarchies has a way of backfiring on the US?  And, given the "Want more oil? Buy it" response of the Saudis, what have these risky arms deals been "buying" for the US?  Good will?  Try again.

Talking to rivals: squarely in the tradition of American diplomacy

Luckily, there is another type of foreign policy realism being propounded by Senator Barack Obama, whose call for engagement with Cuban, Iranian, or Palestinian leaders has been the target of the "appeasement" slur.  In the wake of the much-criticized Bush remarks, brandishing partisan internal American politics in front of a foreign audience, Senator Obama noted that his approach has been in the mainstream of "the history of U.S. diplomacy until very recently."  "Recently" would be post-January 2001.

When John McCain taunts his Democratic rival about a supposed "endorsement" from Hamas, he is treading on very thin ice.   There's a parallel to the 2004 argument over Osama Bin Laden's supposed preference for Kerry vs. Bush.  In this prophetic piece in London's The Observer of February 15, 2004, Henry Porter notes:

The rather chilling thing is to consider how bin Laden and his al-Qaeda lieutenants view the election. Would they rather have a President Kerry or Edwards, who would make overtures to Islam, embrace the UN and heed world opinion, or would they prefer four more years of a man who had done so much to isolate America from the rest of the world?

Osama needs George, and to a degree George needs the mystical fear that Osama evokes. And it is this fear that will see this second-rate, isolationist, spendthrift President re-elected to the White House.

Fast forward to 2008.  If you were Iranian President Ahmadinajad and you wanted to gain domestic popularity and rally your beleaguered citizenry against a foreign foe, would you prefer a conciliatory Barack Obama whose overtures might threaten opening up your regime to outside influence, or a fire breathing John McCain, singing Bomb, Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran...?  I don't really care who Bin Laden or Ahmadinajad want for president - but I really don't want Americans falling for fear mongering and electing presidents who are their enemies' dreams come true.

When Is It Appeasement?

Is it appeasement (dictionary definition: “1. to bring to a state of calm; pacify: to appease an angry king”) when President George W. Bush flies from Israel to Riyadh to beg King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (source of 79 % of 9/11 kamikazes) to lower the price of his crude oil?

2. “To satisfy; relieve: The fruit appeased his hunger.”  Does sniping at Senator Barack Obama (and then denying that he targeted the Democratic front runner) from the Israeli Knesset satisfy the Republican appetite for Swift-Boating?  Nope, it just whets it – this is an opening salvo in the next phase of a stomach-churning American election campaign.

3. “To yield to the demands of in a conciliatory effort, sometimes at the expense of one’s principles.”  It’s this last definition (courtesy of Random House Webster’s College Dictionary) that Bush presumably had in mind when he warned against “the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

But the root of appeasement is peace, and Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to stave off World War II only gave the word a negative connotation because he failed.  Luckily, this signal failure didn’t give peacemaking a bad name forever, or else we wouldn’t have the Middle East Peace Process as an eternal source of Presidential ambition.

The notion that an American president – a President Obama, for example – would be practicing appeasement if he had an open dialogue with leaders like Iran’s Ahmadinajad and the (elected, as Senator McCain reminds us below) Hamas government in Gaza is very selective, and almost entirely a function of American politics.  President Bush’s favored Palestinian interlocutor, PA President Abbas, hails from the Palestine Liberation Organization, which was for years anathema as a terrorist organization.

Luckily, some elements in the US government have long thought it politic to open up discreet channels of communication.  I once worked for a Republican political appointee ambassador who, in a previous life as a Senate staffer, was a regular interlocutor with Yasir Arafat’s Fatah and the PLO when us diplomats couldn’t even be in the same room as a Palestinian official.  Those back channel contacts eventually led to Oslo and Camp David, and to the modicum of Palestinian self-rule that is allowed to exist.

Bush has been castigated for criticizing (albeit not by name, but he’s kidding no one) the Democratic presumptive candidate while traveling abroad.  From the podium of Israel’s parliament, no less.  But Israel, more than most countries, can claim a “special interest” in the outcome of the US presidential elections.  Often dubbed “the 51st state,” many Israelis hold dual Israeli-US citizenship, and the settlements in the West Bank are especially popular with transplanted American Jewish emigrants.  Bush probably felt sufficiently at home to inject a bit of partisan politics into his address.

But after blasting Obama for supposed “appeasement,” Bush then hops on a plane for Saudi Arabia, where appeasement is happenin’ big time.  You don’t have to be a Michael Moore to note that US consumers help appease Saudi Arabia every day by paying sky-high prices for its oil.  And that of all people, George W. Bush, who owed his pre-presidential oil wealth to his family’s Gulf sheikhdom connections, should now lecture Obama about kowtowing (Webster’s: “1.  To act in an obsequious manner; show servile deference”) to foreign leaders.

And what of Senator John McCain, that “clean” campaigner who touched off the latest firestorm by equating Senator Obama’s openness to discussions with pariah states and organizations with weakness against terrorism?  Today’s Washington Post carries a stinging op-ed by former Clinton Administration official James P. Rubin, who assails McCain’s “guilt by association” attack as hypocrisy of the worst sort.  He recalls a Sky News TV interview with McCain two years ago, after Hamas won freely-contested Palestinian elections, when he asked The Maverick "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"  McCain then:

They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy.  Fatah was not giving them that.

Apparently it wasn’t appeasement then, when the Straight Talk Express was rolling.  Huffington Post has a nice video of the Rubin-McCain interview.  Now, if Michael Moore just had a video of Bush and Abdullah...

(Photo source: "House of Bush, House of Saud," by Craig Unger)

3MA - Three Sons of Africa

(photo source: Contre Jour)

As I write this, my newly-acquired "3MA" CD is playing in the background.  Last night we went to their concert in Brussels, and it was pure joy.  This marriage of oud (by Moroccan Driss El Maloumi), kora (Ballake Sissoko, from Mali), and valiha (Rajery, playing the bamboo zither of Madagascar) is "world music" of a natural classicism.  Played at the Flagey auditorium - the acoustically updated and wonderfully art deco original home of RTBF, francophone Belgium's broadcaster - "3MA" was a surefire crowd-pleaser.  And we have some particularly bright cultural diplomats to thank for introducing them outside of Africa.

Each of the three musicians is a "star" in his own right.   Rajery, the wiry Malgache with a golden voice to boot, is a self-taught musician who was trained as an accountant.  Too bad for the green-eye-shade crowd, but lucky for music lovers, Rajery has devoted himself to the valiha.  He started a 23-member orchestra for the instrument, a national festival in its honor, and has founded a music school for street children.  He's made four albums.  Oh yes - and he has only one hand.

Driss El Maloumi, the oud player, has a following of his own, and has collaborated with Catalan ancient music virtuoso Jordi Saval and Hesperion XXI, as well as other international artists from Francoise Atlan to Iran's Keyvan Chemirani.  Driss is the anchor of the trio, and something of a wit and a poet.  He leads an amusing scat piece the group calls "African Political Speeches," which is equally effective as political satire: "plenty of dissonance, and lots of false notes."

Mali's Ballake Sissoko hails from a musical griot family, and his father co-founded the Ensemble Instrumental du Mali.  Sissoko's evocation of his daughter, Kadiatou, is a perfect vehicle for the versatile kora, essentially a massive gourd with 21 strings.

This joyous amalgam of music from three corners of Africa is the fruit of a somewhat chance encounter at the Timitar Festival in Agadir Morocco in 2006.  Three French cultural center directors - in the respective capitals of the three musicians - helped nurture what would come to be called 3MA: Mali, Madagascar, Maroc.  Belgian producer Michel De Bock, of the label Contre-Jour, worries a little about the MA of Maroc not fitting into "the anglo saxon, where it's Morocco...  But once they hear the album or see a concert, they'll be sure to fall for them."

I certainly hope so, though a quick look at 3MA's tour schedule doesn't show any anglophone countries (though they have already played at several venues in anglophone Africa) in the near future.  And as a former diplomat who sometimes dabbled in cultural diplomacy, hats off to the French Cultural Centers of Bamako, Agadir, and Antananarivo for introducing us to this fusion of African music (the Ford Foundation has assisted through "Art Moves Africa").

Pretend Palestinians at Israel’s Party

First I would like to – seriously – extend my best wishes to the Israel of organizations like Peace Now and B’Tselem, and of Israelis like Meron Benvenisti, Uri Avnery, and Eran Riklis.  Peace Now (photo credit) requires no explanation of its work, but here’s a blurb for the others who represent an Israel that can be a good neighbor:

• B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
• Meron Benvenisti, whose West Bank Data Project documented the metastasizing settlements over decades
• Uri Avnery, formerly of the Irgun, now a peace activist
• Eran Riklis, director of “The Syrian Bride,” a film about the human cost of love across borders.

To these and other Israelis of similar sensibilities, happy 60th anniversary, and may your vision of Israel prevail.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Now let’s play Pretend Palestinian ©, where you get to imagine what it’s like when your neighbor/occupier has a 60th birthday party all this month – but you’re not invited!

To make the “game” work, you have to put yourself in the role of resident of a semi-imaginary Washington DC surrounded by, and in some senses occupied by, a hostile Virginia and a domineering Maryland.  Where Washington’s Northwest quadrant – NW – is dotted with settlements of Virginians and Marylanders, a kind of “Area C” – the Oslo Accords term referring to that 60% of West Bank territory that is outside of Palestine Authority control.  In our “game,” it’s the place where non-Virginians or un-Marylanders are regularly evicted from their homes, to fend for themselves in SE.

You, as a resident of SE or NE Washington, have to use a slow two-lane road with traffic lights every 1,000 feet to visit your relatives in suburban Wheaton Maryland – but must make a detour via Baltimore.  The Beltway ring road, you see, is reserved for Maryland and Virginia citizens only, and allows them to bypass those parts of Washington that are run by the “DC Authority.”  The “DC Authority,” which has issued defiant “No Taxation Without Representation” vehicle registration plates, has no Senatorial representation, so its protests are largely ignored.

On the Fourth of July, picnicking Virginians and Marylanders gaze at fireworks on The Mall, but people in SE can only catch a distant glimpse of the “bombs bursting in air” above the Security Barrier that has been erected just east of Capitol Hill...

Okay, you can only go so far with the analogy, but you get the picture.

Palestine could have been celebrating its 60th anniversary this month along with its Israeli twin, but history got in the way.  To convey a sense of what was lost, BBC World TV has been broadcasting a poignant half hour documentary this week called “Jaffa Stories,” by Adam LeBor, author of “City of Oranges.”  Bittersweet, it shows Jewish and Arab residents of what was – and some hope might become again – a picturesque port city where peaceful coexistence ruled.  Jaffa might have remained a major Palestinian city, had the Arab residents not fled Irgun/Stern terrorism in 1948.  One Israeli Arab Jaffa resident on the BBC program hints that his father made the right decision by staying on when most of the family fled.  But that is a judgment only possible in retrospect.

To stay or to leave – that is again the question confronting Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza in 2008.  Every day, they face humiliation and frustration that would have long ago overcome other less hardy peoples.  2008: Israel’s 60th anniversary, and the 41st anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza (okay, Gaza is no longer “occupied,” it’s just under siege, and East Jerusalem and much surrounding West Bank land have been annexed into Israel).

Somehow, Palestinians struggle on, still striving for a few crumbs of land in the hope of constituting a rump state, a tiny remnant of what their fathers and grandfathers spurned in 1948.  By expanding settlements in the face of international opposition, by appropriating water resources vital to Palestinian existence, and by myriad daily bureaucratic “deaths of a thousand cuts” (and cutting down thousands of ancient olive trees), Israeli treatment of the people in its Occupied Territories is calculated to discourage and demoralize.  So as Israelis quaff their birthday champagne, here’s one for the persevering Palestinians.

Dr. Said Saadi Diagnoses Algeria’s Democratic Malaise

A delegation of Algerian parliamentarians headed by RCD (Rassemblement pour la Culture et la Democratie) chairman Dr. Said Saadi is heading back home after a lobbying effort in North America and Europe.  Here in Brussels for talks with European institutions, Dr. Saadi took time to speak at the Transatlantic Institute about the situation in Algeria.

The RCD is one of two mainly Berber parties, and though it has one deputy from Ilizzi in the geographic center of Algeria, it is mostly active in the northern Kabylie region and in the capital area, where Saadi represents an Algiers voting district.  Saadi, a psychiatrist by training, has been practicing politics for most of his adult life, and after a brief sojourn in the first Bouteflika government, has returned to the opposition.

Perhaps “loyal opposition” is a more apt term, since on the most important existential question facing Algerian democracy since independence – recognition of the 1991 parliamentary victory by the Islamist FIS party – Saadi and the RCD sided with the Army putsch that overthrew then President Chadli Bendjedid and overturned the elections.  That placed the RCD on the side of the “eradicators” who favored removing the Islamists from the political scene.  So while the RCD contests certain aspects of the Algerian regime, it essentially lends it democratic credibility.  Saadi bristles at the suggestion that he is playing the regime’s game, and sued the newspaper “Le Monde” in a French court in 1998 for suggesting it.

Saadi and his delegation have been lobbying European and American officials, according to his April 1 article in the New York Post, to

seek the help of the United States and other democracies to ensure international supervision of the 2009 presidential and parliamentary elections. We also need their support to prevent a constitutional amendment to let the current president seek re-election despite the two-term limit.

Yesterday Saadi derided 2004 EU observers for certifying Algeria’s 2004 presidential elections, when Saadi accused the Army of stuffing ballot boxes.  That and other electoral fraud is the topic of an RCD brochure, which shows an “Ordre de Mission,” an official-looking laissez-passer issued by “candidate Abdelaziz Bouteflika” (who just happened also to be the President of the Republic) importuning “civil and security authorities” to lend “all necessary assistance” to the bearer of the cards.  Rather hard to refuse.  Saadi told EU election observers that if they can’t send a serious delegation in 2009, they shouldn’t send any.

Dr. Saadi’s analysis – or is it psychoanalysis? – of Algeria’s troubles on the socioeconomic front ring truest: desperate young people taking “suicidal” clandestine boat journeys across the Mediterranean; resurgence of diseases which had been eradicated previously; overcrowding in unsafe housing; and importation of Chinese labor when the unemployment rate is over 30%.  “The domination of the state by an old, corrupt and unpopular minority,” wrote Saadi, “has led to much social misery.”  Describing Bouteflika as a product of the old one-party state under the National Liberation Front (the FLN; road signs in Algiers used to point in the direction of “Le Parti”), Saadi says that the President is trying, by seeking a third term, to set himself up as a “president-for-life.”

Where is the Algerian Army in all this?  Here Saadi’s answer is more nuanced, but indicates that the Army attitude is not monolithic, which may prevent it from responding decisively should the situation further deteriorate.  Translation: in the Algeria of competing “clans,” the security forces are divided over the continuation of Bouteflika’s reign.

Steven Cook of the Council on Foreign Relations has recently written on the behind-the-scenes role of the Algerian military in his book “Ruling Not Governing: The Military and Political Development in Egypt, Algeria, and Turkey.”  In his book, Cook describes the military’s use of “a facade of democratic practices and principles” while continuing to control key institutions.  Therein lies a clue to how the Algerian regime’s management of its nominal democracy may evolve: let the RCD and other “democratic” (meaning non-Islamist) parties play the role of loyal opposition, while ensuring that the real power – over Algeria’s increasingly valuable gas and oil reserves – never leaves the hands of the same “clan” that has been in charge since independence: the military and the “nomenklatura,” those few hundred families that form the nucleus of what Algerians still call “le pouvoir.”

In other words, other than the brief period from early 1990, when the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) won freely contested municipal and regional elections, to late 1991, when they again won nationwide parliamentary elections before they were canceled by the military, Algeria has had an authoritarian regime that tolerates a degree of civilian participation.  Whether or not President Bouteflika succeeds in getting his third term, as long as the movement that won the country’s only free elections is banned, “democracy” in Algeria remains a relative term.

The Ineluctable Reality of Borders

Those pesky external border posts - poof! ...they're gone

 One of the occupational hazards of being an avuncular blogger on the Brussels lecture circuit is that I now get a multiplicity of invitations to events.  Many of these are welcome, providing useful fodder for posts.  Some are eminently avoidable, such as a recent invitation to join a demonstration protesting the expulsion of undocumented immigrants ("illegal aliens," as we would say in the US).  I'll give that one a pass, because I don't agree that "Borders = Repression," as the organizers would have it.

Living in a member state - some say the "capital" - of the European Union, and one which is a proud member of the Schengen (unguarded border) Zone, it's easy to forget the function of border controls.  Now that the Euro and Schengen have been a reality for the better part of a decade, crossing from Belgium to France and back through Germany, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands can be accomplished without even showing your passport and without changing your currency.  In multinational border regions, such as the Maastricht-Aachen-Liege triangle or the Luxembourg-Lorraine-Trier-Belgian Ardennes area, commuters of several nationalities can and do live in one country, work in another, and shop in a third, all in the course of a single day.

For this benign corner of Europe, the nasty work of external land border controls has been "outsourced" or at least subcontracted to those Schengen members on the periphery (I stress land borders, since all countries are still responsible for monitoring international arrivals at their air and sea ports, as well as their coastlines).  But here's the rub: despite Schengen (or perhaps because of it), there is still a problem of undocumented immigrants in every EU country, and it presents a challenge to democratically elected governments.  Because there are parties - some of them also democratically elected - on the Flemish separatist extreme right who use the immigration issue as a wedge to gain votes and seats in the very assemblies for which they express contempt.  Which is my very long way of saying that Border Controls ≠ Repression.  They're just part of the landscape.

Uti possidetis and the importance of internal borders - especially in Belgium

According to Wikipedia, we are told that uti possidetis (Latin for "as you possess") is a concept in international law, and that "the term has historically been used to legally formalize territorial conquests."  Thanks to Dr. Christian Behrendt, writing in the Brussels daily Le Soir on April 30, we have an expert opinion (he's a professor of comparative constitutional law at the University of Liege) on why, in the next couple of days, defining internal borders will be of utmost importance as Belgium may face yet another existential confrontation between its "warring" Dutch-speaking and Francophone politicians.  "Warring" is of course figurative, but memories are still fresh of the 1970s, when the confrontations were also physical.

Dr. Behrendt explains why the brouhaha over the proposed splitting of a federal electoral district called "BHV" - currently comprising the officially bilingual but in reality largely francophone capital Brussels, with the officially Dutch-speaking (but often with francophone majorities living in their midst) towns of Halle and Vilvoorde - has to be "gotten right" this time around.  Without going into even more arcane Belgo-Belgian political trivia, suffice it to say that the Dutch-speaking Flemish majority has sufficient votes in the national parliament to push a split through, but that there are constitutional safeguards which allow the French-speaking minority to veto (or at least temporize) such a unilateral diktat.

The future of the recently-formed Leterme government (for those who are gluttons for punishment, my blog category "Brussels" has a series of background posts on the crisis which led - very painfully - to the formation of the current government - you'll have to scroll down a bit) may depend on a negotiated solution to the BHV issue.  And here's where we get to Professor Behrendt's uti possidetis, which he interprets as "you will own what you have owned."  For those in the Francophone capital and its surrounding districts, as well as the French-speaking heartland of Wallonia in the south of the country, the "borders" set by a split of the BHV electoral district could be used - by a future Dutch-speaking Flemish nationalist majority bent on independence for Flanders - to set in concrete a "linguistic border" that would cut off hundreds of thousands of French-speakers from their linguistic cousins.

Borders - they might be imperfect, but they're all you have

For Francophone interests in the - perhaps inevitable - split of BHV, the key is to negotiate a compromise that will give the Flemish parties a face-saving "victory," while extracting important concessions: the expansion of Brussels to include Francophone-majority communes on the periphery; the formal, institutional linkage between Brussels and Wallonia; the permanent safeguarding of linguistic rights in "border" zones?  All problematic, possibly unattainable.  But the stakes are extremely high: as Dr. Behrendt concludes, the solution to BHV could wind up as a key legal element in an eventual national "divorce settlement."  Today's drawing of a voting district boundary could become tomorrow's border between two countries, should the nationalists hold sway.

Anyone who thinks uti possidetis is just for the history books (who remembers "The Treaty of Tordesillas?") should read noted Africa expert Michela Wrong in The New Statesman, about the dangers of tampering with uti possidetis:

Africa as we know it is a recent invention. Quixotic and impractical, its colonial frontiers are poorly charted and easily challenged. Fear of the mayhem that would ensue if member states regarded existing boundaries as being up for debate prompted the Organisation of African Unity, in 1964, to embrace the doctrine of uti possidetis, that colonial borders should remain as they are. The Eritrea-Ethiopia debacle, which will be finalised next month [note: after she wrote this in October 2007, fighting resulted in the February 2008 UN withdrawal from the disputed border, and there have been sporadic clashes since], undermines that principle, weakening future attempts at peaceful arbitration. The message it sends is that "final and binding" frontier rulings are negotiable; and that while minnows must obey international law, large countries with friends abroad can defy it with impunity. There could be few more dangerous signals to send a fragile continent.

"Facts on the ground" are of paramount importance in the Israel-Palestine conflict, as planners of the "separation barrier" know only too well.  Today's line in the sand, though it may not have any footing in law, is still a boundary of control, and becomes a negotiating chip.

BHV is not going to cause a shooting war between rival Belgian parties, but the point is this: it is incumbent on the responsible members of Belgium's main democratic parties, Flemish and Francophone, to get BHV right, so that the lines drawn today will not become an even more intractable bone of contention should separatist nationalism reign in a not-too-distant future.

Prioritization at the Pentagon: A Green Zone Golf Resort?

"Vision without resources is hallucination"

The above-mentioned piece of military wisdom is worth remembering as you ponder what hallucinogenic substance the Pentagon planners were ingesting when they came up with the "Tigris Woods Golf and Country Club" for Baghdad’s Green Zone.  And this one looks like a joint (inter service) plan – so no more jokes please about Air Force blueprints for a typical new air base showing “Phase One: golf greens; Phase Two: runway.”

These hallucinatory visions of Iraq in some future era of golf vacations are outlined in today’s Guardian by Michael Howard in “Luxury Hotels and Golf: Welcome to the Green Zone.  Pentagon airs plan to turn Baghdad military redoubt into a chic urban oasis.”

A $5bn tourism and development scheme for the Green Zone being hatched by the Pentagon and an international investment consortium would give the heavily fortified area on the banks of the Tigris a "dream" makeover that will become a magnet for Iraqis, tourists, business people and investors.  About half of the area is now occupied by coalition forces, the US State Department or private foreign companies.

... according to Navy Captain Thomas Karnowski, the chief US liaison, "When you have $1bn hanging out there and 1,000 employees lying around [ed. note: a reference to the new US embassy compound, under construction], you kind of want to know who your neighbors are. You want to influence what happens in your neighborhood over time."

This is May 6, not April 1, so it can't be an April Fool's prank.  Someone has been given money to play with.

Pots of Money

Resources – without which vision is hallucination – are usually not a problem in the Pentagon.  Except when it comes to prioritizing them, which then becomes intensely political.  Just look at the current flap over a rejuvenated “GI Bill,” which has a bipartisan group of war veteran Senators (joined by Democratic presidential candidates Obama and Clinton) ranged against – you guessed it – President Bush and Senator John McCain, who suddenly want to hoard money.  As if the Defense budget wasn’t already in hock to Chinese purchasers of American debt instruments.

And if $5 billion isn’t excessive for a little R&R on the Tigris, why is it so difficult to provide decent (i.e., without sewage backups) housing for soldiers returning to their barracks Stateside?  It took an outraged father of a soldier back from a combat zone, armed with a digital camera and a YouTube account, to shame the Army into action.

But we’re mixing up different pots of money.  “What color is your money?” an experienced bureaucrat would ask.  Not a reference to the monotone greenback, but to the coloration of the particular agency or appropriation that controls the money.  For the "Tigris Woods Golf and Country Club" we’re obviously talking about an overflowing pot full of the right color of money.  There’s a hint in yesterday’s unveiling of the drawings: “an international investment consortium” smells opportunity in what looks like another “public-private” venture.

I have no crystal ball, and certainly wouldn’t wish a helicopters-off-the-roof outcome for Embassy Baghdad, but if I were a private investor, I would think more than twice about sinking my money into the “Tigris Woods.”  Maybe they’ll pick up some “political violence” risk coverage from the US government’s insurer of last resort, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC, not to be confused with OPEC, the people who are bringing you $4.00 per gallon gasoline.  But I digress.)  Though I’m not an investor, I am a taxpayer, and I would prefer that my tax dollars not be spent on such utterly outrageous frivolities as skateboard parks and country clubs while the country is on fire and sewage flows in the streets.

Meanwhile, in that trailer park on the Tigris

Last year in Vanity Fair, investigative reporter William Langewiesche called it “The Mega-Bunker of Baghdad.”  We’re talking, of course, about the new American Embassy due for completion later this year.  Langewiesche, writing late last year, speculated that

It is reasonable to assume that insurgents will soon sit in the privacy of rooms overlooking the site, and use cell phones or radios to adjust the rocket and mortar fire of their companions. Meanwhile, however, they seem to have held off, lobbing most of their ordnance elsewhere into the Green Zone, as if reluctant to slow the completion of such an enticing target.

Lately, Langewiesche’s prediction has come to pass: here’s Lennox Samuels, writing last week in Newsweek (“Unsafe Haven”)

...rockets and mortars started slamming into the Green Zone on Sunday afternoon and kept coming well into the night, as if the Shiite fighters in Sadr City were making up for the respite.  A heavy dust storm choked Baghdad, adding a sense of claustrophobia while providing the insurgents cover. "They're getting closer and closer," noted veteran security expert Mike Arrighi.  Arrighi, who works and lives in the tightly defended Zone, says that this week's barrage shows the same "consistency, intensity and ferocity" of the initial attacks that began almost a month ago.

Meanwhile, a State Department insider (“The Skeptical Bureaucrat,” a blogger who has worked in the Overseas Building Operations office – OBO, which builds US embassies) notes the policy conundrum:

... the only way left to lower our risk is to reduce the number of people on the site. Any other embassy receiving rocket and mortar fire would be evacuated or put on ordered departure, as U.S. Embassy Sanaa [Yemen] was recently after it was attacked to no effect with only four measly 51mm mortar rounds, but, again, that's not an option in the case of Baghdad.

“Not an option.”  As in “Failure Is Not An Option.”  But since the goalposts for “Success” keep shifting, how will we know when we have failed?  And as Langewiesche notes, “For the most part, however, the new embassy is not about leaving Iraq, but about staying on—for whatever reason, under whatever circumstances, at whatever cost.”

“For whatever reason..."  How about this reason, from the original AP story, for the Disneyfication of the Green Zone:

For Washington, the driving motivation is to create a "zone of influence" around the new $700 million U.S. Embassy to serve as a kind of high-end buffer for the compound, whose total price tag will reach about $1 billion after all the workers and offices are relocated over the next year.

So, there we have it: you plan to spend $5 billion on a “zone of influence” to protect a $1 billion investment.  But then again, what is $5 billion for a country club when you’re spending more than twice that amount every month (sorry, when the Chinese are lending us that amount to spend) on ordnance and PX supplies to keep US troops in Iraq?

More Reading on the Syrian Peace

For further reading on the intriguing possibilities for peace between Israel and Syria, here are some links:

• bitterlemons-internatinonal - weekly bulletin of Israeli and Palestinian analysis; the current issue is devoted to Syria/Israel.  Sample quote, from Dr. Mahdi Abdul Hadi, head of PASSIA, Jerusalem: "For all the posturing of the two sides, the border between Syria and Israel has been a quiet front for the last four decades. This inaction has led the Israeli leadership to believe that in Syria it has found a partner that will be responsive and pliable, one that can be led along slowly in a process of normalization."
• The Carter Center - Jimmy Carter's NYT op-ed on his recent Mideast trip, "Pariah Diplomacy."  Sample quote: "Syria's president, Bashir al-Assad, has expressed eagerness to begin negotiations with Israel to end the impasse on the Golan Heights. He asks only that the United States be involved and that the peace talks be made public." (see below*)
• Whirled View - Cheryl Rofer, who tracks nuclear and strategic issues, speculates on motivation behind Syrian development of a nuclear facility: "A reactor could be used as a bargaining chip in at least two ways: toward the return of the Golan Heights, or toward a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. In fact, in 2003, it was Syria that called for the formation of such a zone. Arab states have been issuing such calls for some long time, no doubt partly to show up Israel's hypocrisy and even scores. The calls are routinely rejected by Israel and the United States."

*It is worth noting that in an entire press conference devoted to "Moving Forward On The Tracks Of The Annapolis Conference" on May 3 en route to Tel Aviv, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice said nothing about the Syrian Peace.

When Presidents Deliver Inconvenient Truths: The Carter Example

For the second time in a week, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times Op-Ed page inspires me to write a meager post in response.  Asking “Who Will Tell the People?” Friedman longs for an American leader who might level with the American people:

We need a president who is tough enough to tell the truth to the American people. Any one of the candidates can answer the Red Phone at 3 a.m. in the White House bedroom. I’m voting for the one who can talk straight to the American people on national TV — at 8 p.m. — from the White House East Room.

Who will tell the people? We are not who we think we are. We are living on borrowed time and borrowed dimes. We still have all the potential for greatness, but only if we get back to work on our country.

Friedman comes close to recognizing the potential for such truth-telling leadership in Barack Obama.  It’s true that Obama has shown a willingness to talk frankly about difficult issues – his speech on race in America was one such example, though it’s still not clear whether the citizenry is ready for his message.

Almost thirty years ago, on July 15 1979, President Jimmy Carter delivered what would come to be known as his “Crisis of Confidence” speech.  PBS, in its documentation for the “American Experience” series, provides the full text of Carter’s speech here.  Carter warned:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.

Andrew Bacevich, in his 2005 classic The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War, devotes several pages of analysis to Carter’s speech, calling it “prescient, but completely misconceived” – in that “his policy prescription reflected a fundamental misreading of his fellow countrymen.”  We know that little more than a year later his Republican rival Ronald Reagan won the Presidency with his upbeat “Morning in America” message.  But as Bacevich shows, Carter was right:

Carter... sensed intuitively that a failure to reverse the nation’s energy dependence was sure to draw the United States ever more deeply into the vortex of Persian Gulf politics...  This is, of course, precisely what has come to pass, with massive and problematic implications for the nation’s security and for U.S. military posture and priorities.

Bacevich goes on to document the downward spiral:

When Carter spoke, the United States was importing approximately 43 percent of its annual requirement for oil...  Some twenty-five years later, energy imports have risen to 56 percent of annual needs.  Today, increasingly, the profile of the American military presence abroad corresponds to the location of large oil and natural gas reserves.

Carter deserves credit for being ahead of his time, but the trick for the 2008 presidential candidates is how to provide the truth (the real thing, not McCain's “Straight Talk Express” variety that is really warmed over Bush) without further depressing an already shell shocked electorate.  This is where Obama comes in.  As Friedman says today:

... the notion that the idealism he has inspired in so many young people doesn’t matter is dead wrong. “Of course, hope alone is not enough,” says Tim Shriver, chairman of Special Olympics, “but it’s not trivial. It’s not trivial to inspire people to want to get up and do something with someone else.”

It is especially not trivial now, because millions of Americans are dying to be enlisted — enlisted to fix education, enlisted to research renewable energy, enlisted to repair our infrastructure, enlisted to help others. Look at the kids lining up to join Teach for America. They want our country to matter again. They want it to be about building wealth and dignity — big profits and big purposes. When we just do one, we are less than the sum of our parts. When we do both, said Shriver, “no one can touch us.”

Let’s try to remember the power of positive thinking – tempered with a dose of Carter’s realism – as we slog through what only promises to be a debilitating finale to an endless 2007-2008 election marathon.  And refuse to play the gotcha game, while ignoring the same fundamental problems that Jimmy Carter identified almost thirty years ago.

The Syrian “Peace” and the Uses of Old News

Reams have already been written about the strange “Senior Administration Official” briefing last week on the alleged Syrian nuclear reactor apparently bombed by Israel in September 2007.  Much of what has been written in the intervening week has been speculation on the motivation to dredge up old news: this is aimed at recalcitrant North Koreans... it’s really to send a message to Iran...  Now, thanks to President Bush, we don’t have to wonder anymore: “Bush Says Syria Nuclear Disclosure Intended to Prod North Korea and Iran.” (NYT, April 30, 2008)

Since the SAO briefing was itself about old news, I feel completely justified in only getting around to blog about it a week later.  Some analysts have looked at the Syrian-Israeli angle, which really should be the place to start.  I do not want to (nor am able to) analyze the orientation of the photos or their pixel (re)arrangement, nor do I want to parse the lengthy transcript of the SAO’s briefing for telltale hints of the motivation.

I will simply look at the timing, via my admittedly selective timeline:

•    September 6, 2007: Israel hits a target in Syria but maintains media silence, ostensibly to allow Syria to save face (if nothing happened, you don’t have to retaliate)
•    November 27, 2007: Annapolis Conference, which Syrian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Fayssal Mekdad attends, and where enthusiasm runs high in certain Israeli circles (especially the army) that peace over the Golan Heights is at hand
•    January 10, 2008: President Bush's Jerusalem speech on the peace process,where he says of Syrian-Israeli peace overtures: precisely nothing
•    March 12, 2008: In The Guardian of London, Jonathan Freedland (see more below) says that Israeli PM Olmert is given intelligence briefing on Syrian rapprochement
•    April 24, 2008: As the sun rises over the Middle East, a flurry of articles appears in the world press over Turkish mediation and possibly imminent Israel-Syria deal on the Golan Heights (statements by President Bashar al-Assad and Israeli MFA confirm; Israeli rejectionists object)
•    April 24, 2008: Same day, a few hours later, Washington time, the SAO briefs a closed Congressional session, then tells the press the same thing an hour later – breathless revelations on the September 2007 incident - seven months after it occurred.

Media manipulation mission accomplished?  Now, if you Google Syria + Israel, you’ll get zillions of articles on “nuclear” “bombing” “intelligence” – while those hopeful articles about the imminent Israeli-Syrian peace deal are submerged.  Don’t know nuthin’ ‘bout no pixels, but I throw in my lot with those probing to find a peace deal saboteur somewhere in the bowels of Washington’s and/or Jerusalem’s anti-Syria camp.

Oh yes, back to that prescient March 12 Jonathan Freedland article in the Guardian, “To Rescue the Two-State Solution, Israel Must Make Peace With Syria.”  After outlining the peace overtures, and the logic that from peace with Syria flows the de-fanging of Lebanon’s Hizbullah and Palestinian Hamas, Freedland warned:

There is one last obstacle in the way of a Syrian-Israel peace. Those in the know say flatly that the Bush administration will not allow Jerusalem to talk to Damascus, which it deems an associate member of the "axis of evil".  Put it down as one more reason why the world waits, ever more impatiently, for January 20 2009 - the day George W Bush will at last be gone.

Rami Khouri in yesterday’s Daily Star (Beirut) notes the American absence from the Middle East peace scene:

The most important diplomatic process these days is the Syrian-Israeli one. Israelis and Syrians alike have made it clear that something serious is taking place behind the scenes.  It is telling of the damage that the US has done to its own role and impact in the Middle East that the potentially most important diplomatic development in the past generation seems to be taking place without any significant American role.

Was the SAO “Syria briefing” (though we are told that its target was North Korea, etc.) a not-so-back door way of killing (for reasons best known to the people who brought you “the way to Jerusalem is via Baghdad” and other wonderful hallucinations about the Middle East) the Syrian Peace?  As Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery says in Counterpunch: “War with Syria? Peace with Syria?...

... A big military operation against Hamas in the Gaza strip? A cease-fire with Hamas?  Our media discuss these questions dispassionately, as if they were equivalent options. Like a person in a showroom making a choice between two cars. This one is good, and so is the other one. So which should one buy?

Beware of the used car salesman who, five years ago today, tried to sell us “Mission Accomplished.”

Mr. Eco-Security - Thomas Friedman Returns

Endless Energy, Limitless Wealth

Op-ed writer of the New York Times Thomas Friedman has spent the last several months on book leave, but returns today with a zinger of a piece, "Dumb As We Wanna Be."  Yes, the topic is a familiar one:

Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

I never tire of Friedman's harping on this topic, because he is consistently correct: he was right about this when oil was at $10 a barrel, and he's still right now that is is at over $115/bbl.

In the May issue of Harper's Magazine, Wendell Berry's "Faustian Economics" touches on the American notion of "limitless" resources:

The entire contraption of "Unbridled Energy" [title of a conference on coal resources] is supported only by a rote optimism: "The United States has 250 billion tons of recoverable coal reserves - enough to last 100 years even at double the current rate of consumption."  We humans have inhabited the earth for many thousands of years, and now we can look forward to surviving for another hundred by doubling our consumption of coal? This is national security?

Berry goes on to speculate whether this American notion of limitlessness "perhaps arose from the coincidence of the Industrial Revolution with the suddenly exploitable resources of the New World."  Whatever the genesis of this type of conspicuous consumption, even climate deniers and Fortress Americans must be starting to doubt its "sustainability?"

The Bonus, the Malus, and the Horribilis

Contrast the picayune savings that the McCain/Clinton suspension of the 18.4 cents a gallon tax could mean to drivers, compared with the huge profits accruing to oil companies and Gulf kingdom exporters.  Contrast the American timidity on facing down the automobile and oil industries with a recent French innovation from a conservative, free market President, Nicolas Sarkozy: the "bonus/malus" system at point-of-purchase.

The French system, in effect since the beginning of the year, is by no means perfect, but it does recognize this: giving a "bonus" or tax refund for the purchase of an energy-efficient car will encourage more French drivers to buy same, as paying a "malus" or tax penalty for a gas-guzzler will discourage their purchase.

Instead of "pandering," as Friedman says, to Americans, politicians should show some leadership.  But "we are in the midst of a national political brownout," he concludes.  Spoiled by years of cheap gasoline with an already minimal tax (compare the 18 cent American excise tax, on gasoline that is now at $4.00 a gallon, with a French gas tax that is three quarters of the pump price of 1.384 € /liter (or a whopping $8.22 per gallon).

Pictures are worth a thousand words, so I leave you, thanks to Chevrolet - who is to be congratulated for marketing small (South Korean-made?) Chevvies in Europe - pictures of Chevrolets available in Europe,  and a Chevy SUV for the American market.  It's a bit analogous to the size of a croissant bought at a French cafe and one from your local donut shop.  I could also post a picture of the typical French waistline compared to the US variety, but I won't... 

The SUV pictured here is the Tahoe, which is a hybrid, you'll be happy to know.  Personally, I would rather wait until GM puts out a Hybrid Hummer.  Really, what's the point?  You produce a vehicle that gets the worst gas mileage in the world, then you "improve" its "energy efficiency" by making a hybrid model?

By the way, the Chevrolet Belgium website (link below) advertising campaign shows a small Chevy next to a massive one, with the caption "Get Real."

(Photo source: Chevrolet)

Outsourced US Passports in Thailand – Bangkok Police Arrest Counterfeiter

A few weeks back, Pat Kushlis of “Whirled View” added value to the Washington Times story by Bill Gertz on the travesty of outsourcing sensitive “E-chip” passport production to foreign firms, including a subcontract to a firm in Thailand.  Now, an alert reader in Bangkok told me of today’s arrest of a Bangladeshi counterfeiter, found with hundreds of passports and "more than 1,600 counterfeit documents used to make fake US passports."  Thai police are still hunting for his Burmese business partner.  The police said the man was obviously “very rich.”  No wonder people are concerned about outsourcing American e-chip passports in Thailand.

Here’s a quick rundown of the timeline of action on outsourcing:

•    March 26: Washington Times breaks GPO outsourcing story
•    March 28: Whirled View analyzes implications for fraud
•    April 3: Avuncular American looks at GPO-GOP campaign angle
•    April 4: Whirled View urges us to “follow the money”
•    April 9: GPO chief assures Congress of “extraordinary measures” to secure passport production overseas
•    April 11: Congressman Bill Sali and 10 bipartisan co-signers submit H.R. 5752 to “require that all key components U.S. passports be made in America.”

Representative Sali’s bill has been referred to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs.

Nice little MSM-blogosphere-Congressional concerted action on this issue!  Let’s hope that the House Foreign Affairs Committee reports the bill out for a full House vote, and that the ensuing Senate vote will be veto-proof.  Not sure how many American rice bowls are involved in this contract, but there’s absolutely no point in filling Bangladeshi or Burmese or Thai bowls with money from trafficked American passports.

Embedded in the White House: American Journalism Seen From Europe

(Photo source: White House Correspondents' Association)

Mutual self-debasement (though it’s not even necessary)

Last night’s annual celebrity bash presided over by a baton-waving George W. Bush (see the Washington Post’s appropriately chatty listing of who was seen in the audience) was another reminder that all is not quite right in the land of the free press.  Somehow this tradition (which started under Calvin Coolidge, who escaped from the White House just before the Crash of 1929) has evolved (degenerated?) into a yearly chance to live it up and show that “sure, most of us think this guy is the worst president since the office was invented, but we have to ingratiate ourselves with him for another few months, so that he remembers our names at press conferences.”  The President (all fourteen since Coolidge, that is) gets to show his humorous, human side, and agrees to gentle roasting (stress on gentle, ever since Stephen Colbert hit the quick in 2006).

At least the New York Times had the decency to pull the plug on its attendance: "These events can create a false perception that reporters and their sources are pals, and that perception could cloud our credibility," Times spokeswoman Diane McNulty wrote, quoted in Editor & Publisher. "It's not worth it."

Other views on the state of American journalism abound, and they are mostly of the concerned family member variety.  American organizations like the Committee of Concerned Journalists, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, and the Newspaper Association of America, among others, have sprung into action to help counter a prevailing view of the Mainstream Media (MSM) as clueless, if not compliant, faced with the onslaught of the Bush Administration.  The concerns are shared abroad, with Reporters Without Borders (RSF in the original French acronym) putting the US way down on its list of country reports on press freedom.

One especially lucid view of America from a concerned friend of the United States is that of Jean-Paul Marthoz, a veteran Belgian journalist, academic, and human rights campaigner.  Marthoz has just published his latest book (Editions GRIP and Enjeux Internationaux) “La Liberté Sinon Rien: Mes Amériques de Bastogne à Bagdad.”  I don’t think there is an English translation yet, but with his long history of connections with the US, Marthoz probably had Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” phrase in mind for his title.  The Bastogne of the subtitle is a reference to Marthoz' Ardennes childhood, when memories were still vivid of the defiant American defense of the town in the Battle of the Bulge against superior German forces.

But the America of Bastogne is far from the Baghdad of the Bush administration.  Marthoz, who places himself squarely in the “liberal” (in the American, somewhat left of center sense, not in the European free market libertarian definition) camp, has no time for either neocons or for extreme leftists.  He knows both North and South America well (“Mes Amériques”), and his book chronicles his years as a correspondent and Human Rights Watch official covering the Western Hemisphere.

The heyday of American journalism, and of democracy

The United States that Marthoz most admires is that of Jimmy Carter and Ted Kennedy, when the White House and Congress pressured Latin American dictatorships and - as survivors of human rights abuses told Marthoz - “saved lives.”  He recalls the kind of investigative journalism that inspired him as a young man, the kind that uncovered the true extent of Watergate, and that disseminated the facts from the Pentagon Papers.  A former Fulbright scholar in the US, he did his masters thesis on press freedom.  He likes to quote Senator J. William Fulbright’s dictum, which guides his life’s work:

To criticize one's country is to do it a service and pay it a compliment. It is a service because it may spur the country to do better than it is doing; it is a compliment because it evidences a belief that the country can do better than it is doing. Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism -- a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals and national adulation.

Marthoz told a group of Democrats Abroad Belgium members last week that all was not lost despite the current atmosphere in the States, and the RSF rating of the United States might actually improve for a change, thanks to a Congressional “shield law” to protect journalists from having to reveal their sources.  He notes that the Pulitzer Prizes in 2008 rewarded civic commitment and investigative journalism, both in great need of revival in these times of the “unitary presidency.”

This impressive Belgian journalist – whose goal is “to restore complexity to the world,” the antithesis of the sound-bite oversimplification of “with-us-or-against-us” – deserves a wider audience in the country that welcomed him as a young Fulbrighter.  Perhaps some day a bright Public Affairs Officer at the American Embassy will see that Jean-Paul Marthoz would be an excellent bridge builder between Europe and the United States.  One who believes in a “renewed transatlantic relationship, built on a new foundation,” after the disastrous Bush era.  Maybe under the next president?

Visions of Afghanistan - Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame

“Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame” is the latest film from the Makhmalbaf clan, the incredible Iranian family that keeps putting out films on the lives of ordinary people in Iran and Afghanistan.  Hana Makhmalbaf, now 18, has been living a life of cinema, and dropped out of school in second grade at age 8 to improve her education (how ironic that her main character in “Buddha Collapsed” risks everything to go to school).  Check out her lengthy interview at the "Makhmalbaf Film House," the family website.

Bamiyan is the site of the two immense statues of Buddha dynamited by the Taliban months before September 11, 2001, i.e., before all hell rained on them and their al-Qaeda allies.  Hana Makhmalbaf includes documentary footage of that affront to history, religion, and culture, and the film itself is shot at the foot of the ruins.

What to make of this film, which some reviewers have panned as an “obvious” anti-war story?  On one level, you can watch the story of the children (there are few adults in the film) as a sort of suspense yarn: will little Bakhtay (photo, from the Makhmalbaf website) make it, as she navigates the immensity of the valley, with all its dangers?

The imagery is striking, not least of which is the sight of Bakhtay (played with utter ease and credibility by little Nikbakht Noruz, five and a half years old), in a striking green robe, framed by the arid canyons.  At times, there are elements of magical realism, like a kite that catches fire, or a policeman on a traffic island, in a village with no cars.

The “anti-war” message is, yes, obvious in its depiction of boys playing Cowboys and Indians – though the Indians are the Taliban, and the Cowboys are the Americans.  But here is the way the director sees it:

By showing today’s picture of Afghanistan, I tried to depict the effects of the recent years’ violence on the country. So that the adults could see how their behavior affects the younger generation. Children are the future adults. If they get used to violence, the future of the world will be in great danger.

First, it was the Russian communists, then the Taliban showed up, and now the Americans. One was communist, the other Muslim and the last one either atheist or Christian. But they all had one thing common, and that was “Violence”.

I for one don’t have any qualms about Makhmalbaf’s “message,” and her cinematic skills and the talent of her little actors erase any sense of the burlesque.  You care about her characters, especially tiny waif Bakhtay (Nikbakht Noruz should be nominated for someone’s “Most Promising Actress” award – though she might need a stepladder to reach the podium).

No, this is a wonderful film, at times gripping (are the boys just “playing” Taliban, or are they true believers?) and funny (who said six year old Afghan girls don’t know about lipstick?).  And those cranky reviewers?  They are a distinct minority: the film has been racking up awards in film festivals from Berlin to Montreal to San Sebastian.  16 film festivals can't be wrong.

The Brilliant Senate Future of Clinton and/or Obama

Now that Pennsylvanians have given Hillary Clinton their vote of confidence, the Democratic primary campaign plods on to the fields of Indiana and the hills of North Carolina.  More weeks of nail-biting tallying of delegates – of both super and mortal varieties.  In the end (meaning in November), there will only be: a) John McCain (R-AZ) and b) one of the above.

Which means that at least one of the remaining Democratic candidates will return to the Senate.  Hillary Clinton has 4 years left in her current 6 year Senate term and Barack Obama has 3 years to go in his.  Given their popularity, both should be able to count on many more years of representing their respective states in Washington, should they choose that route.  So let’s try to imagine them back in the Senate, after a bruising Presidential race in 2008.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

April 2010, Washington:

“Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY), Chairwoman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, appears to harbor little of the bitterness of the ill-fated 2008 Presidential campaign against her fellow Democrat, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL).  Their old rivalry for the Democratic nomination was seemingly forgotten as Senator Obama spoke before a rapt assembly today, castigating the McCain Administration for its failure to present a coherent plan for the drawdown of American troops from Syria.”

“Senator Obama, who has become the conscience and the voice of the Senate since the unexpected retirement of legendary orator Senator Robert Byrd in 2009, has done what few Senators in the 21st century would attempt: an extemporaneous filibuster, showing an almost verbatim recall of McCain’s promises when he first ordered the “short, sharp incursion” into Syria from Iraq’s Bandar Province in early 2009.”

"Senator Clinton, for her part, appears to be using her SASC Chairmanship to force McCain Administration figures (Defense Secretary David Petraeus and Secretary of State Joseph Lieberman) to testify in hearings on the alleged Israeli/US collusion in provoking the incursion into Syria.  Vice President Rice, for her part, has accused the Democratic Clinton/Obama duo of “taking out their frustrations on the winner of the 2008 elections, showing an uncanny ability to work in tandem thanks to their greater dislike for the President than for each other.”

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

A little bit of poli-sci fiction for this Friday afternoon.  But I am not the only Democrat beginning to worry about the consequences of the debilitating internecine combat between Clinton and Obama.  Forget the conventional wisdom about the inevitability of a Democratic win in November – this campaign has already lasted way too long, and more months of each side thinking up ways to hurt their opponent will only mean more months of McCain reaping the benefit.  It is entirely possible that both Democratic candidates will be back in the Senate after the election – and not to give the State of the Union address, but to listen to another Republican president give his.

At least we have this as consolation: both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are strong Senators, and both should view the chance of being a voice for their party and its policies as a worthy career choice.  Should either of them be “gaming” the 2008 race with a view to better positioning for the 2012 race, I might humbly suggest that s/he spare us the heartache and bow out now.  That is, if they truly want a Democrat to win the White House in 2008.  Otherwise, it’s back to the Senate for both of them.

When the Emerald City Ruled the Tigris

The University of Southern California (USC) Center on Public Diplomacy has just published my review of Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s modern classic on the folly of Iraq, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone.”  The book has garnered several awards; you can read an excerpt from the first chapter “Versailles on the Tigris” here, on the author’s website.

The timing is appropriate: almost five years ago to the day, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tapped L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer to head what was to become the Coalition Provisional Authority – the CPA, which is the centerpiece of “Imperial Life.”  The CPA existed for little more than a year, then handed over “sovereignty” to the “government” of "Iraq."  But not before publishing, as the Americans were packing their bags, a compendium still available on its archived website, “AN HISTORIC REVIEW OF CPA ACCOMPLISHMENTS,” which ends with this wonderful table of “comparative reconstruction milestones for post-Saddam Iraq and post-WWII Germany.”
                                                                   IRAQ                    GERMANY

Local Governments Installed                2 Months                8 Months
Independent Central Bank                    2 Months                3 Years
Police Established                               2 Months               14 Months
New Currency                                      2 ½ Months            3 Years
Training a new Military                          3 Months               10 Years
Major reconstruction plan                      4 Months               3 Years
Cabinet Seated                                    4 Months               14 Months
Full Sovereignty                                   1 Year                   10 Years
New Constitution                                  2 ½ Years              4 Years
National Elections                                3 Years                  4 Years
War Trials                                            Pending                 6 Months

And you thought Germany was a success story!  Readers who appreciate Chandrasekaran’s tragicomic realism will also appreciate the CPA’s magic surrealism; the 72 page CPA list of accomplishments is a ministry by ministry checklist of “progress” that might have escaped your attention in the ensuing five years.

Matt Armstrong of MountainRunner deemed Chandrasekaran's depiction of the first year of the American occupation of Iraq "instructive on how to create an insurgency through occupation."  Whether it's the Occupation that created the Insurgency, or simply the Invasion that inevitably led to Resistance, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” is a timeless work on this crucial period.  Its portrait of hubris in the early days of the American “Iraq era” has already come to serve as a reference, much as “The Ugly American” and the “Quiet American” are synonymous with the American misadventure in Vietnam.

The Military GRIP on US Foreign Policy

Europe’s fixation on the American presidential race continues.  Yesterday’s conference on “US Foreign Policy After Bush” sponsored by the respected Brussels think tank GRIP (“Groupe de recherche et d’information sur la paix et la securite”) focused primarily on American security policy.  The panel was composed of academics and journalists from francophone Belgium’s left-leaning firmament, though the message was not terribly different from that heard in previous (conservative) European fora: though there are differences between the remaining candidates, in certain key areas, don’t expect the heavens to open even if Barack Obama is elected President.

In a series of slides, GRIP researchers presented graphs showing the ahistoric (when compared to the country’s first century and a half) levels of American military spending since the end of World War II.  In previous major US wars (the Civil War, First World War), US military spending spiked, and then resumed (low) pre-war levels.  As late as the 1920s, US defense budgets sunk as low as 0.7% of GDP.  World War II, morphing into the Cold War, which morphed into the Global War on Terror (GWOT), set a new paradigm, where official defense budgets have built a graphical mountain on the historical timeline.  Accounting for off-budget spending (the “supplemental” spending on Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as projected costs for war veteran medical care, etc.) would require an Al Gore-like “Inconvenient Truth” ladder, where spending would literally go off the charts.

My favorite slide summarizes how profitable defense spending has been – hence how difficult it will be for even a reform-minded president to change the course of the military juggernaut.  It’s a GRIP depiction of the AMEX Defense Index (DFI) over the period September 1996 to present.   It's worth noting that the good times really started rolling after the Clinton Administration's "Last Supper" at the Pentagon with defense industry chiefs in January 1993, when the military industrial complex was "right sized." With profitability like this, and with a defense industry spread over every Congressional District, it will indeed be difficult to steer the ship of state in a direction different to that of George W. Bush.

Today’s Guardian carries a excellent Simon Jenkins piece on a similar theme, “Despite Iraq, America's Love Affair With War Runs Deep.”

The one thing known by all three candidates for the presidency is that whoever wins must do something painful. He or she must negotiate the terms of an eventual retreat from Iraq, not with the Iraqi but with the American people. Even John McCain, who watched the retreat from Vietnam and swears he will "stay a hundred years in Iraq until peace, stability and democracy" are achieved, will eventually leave, if only under the lash of Congress.

Yet now is not the time to admit it. A war that is unpopular with 60-70% of Americans (depending on the question) is not politically sustainable, however stupefying the cost. But the modalities of its ending are unpredictable and possibly humiliating.  Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama may call for early withdrawal, at least of "combat troops". But the real paradox of Iraq is that McCain knows he must find a way of leaving, and Clinton and Obama know they must find a way of staying, if only for the time being. For all of them, getting from here to there crosses uncharted territory and none wants to glimpse the map.

But “getting from here to there,” as Jenkins notes, includes obligatory war rhetoric to show that no candidate is “soft on defense.”  This is mainly a challenge for the Democrats, since no one assumes that McCain is a softie.  So Hillary Clinton delivers a pre-Pennsylvania blast at Iran, saying that she would “totally obliterate” the country if it attacked Israel.  Even Barack Obama has to rattle the sabers, in what amounts to unilateralism aimed at Pakistan.

Despite warnings from past soldier-presidents (George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower) on the dangers of large standing armies and the “Military Industrial Complex,” changing the mindset that puts military might above all other indices of national health, wealth, and yes – power - is more than a daunting task.  GRIP’s presentation yesterday on American military spending in the Middle East from 1950 through 2006 is enough to cause despair - especially when you realize that most of the US money in military assistance programs is out of the same budget that funds American diplomacy, the State Department.  From whatever angle (percentage of overall US aid, percentage of US aid to the Middle East, etc.), the countless billions spent, given, or sold in terms of weapons in the most flammable part of the world is astounding.  Oh yes: Iran is number four on the list of US military assistance recipients.  Iran?  The HQ of the “Axis of Evil?”  The place where they call America “The Great Satan?”  Remember, the graph also includes the period before 1979, when the Shah's Iran was the Number One US arms recipient.

So what has more than a half century of arms-trading-in-the-tinderbox procured for the US?  Several wars, whether direct or proxy (see Osama bin Laden, the fallen angel of the anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan); several regime changes, whether pro or anti-American (see Mossadegh>Shah>Ayatollah for the progression in Iran; for Iraq, Saddam>Bremer>Allawi>Jaafari>Maliki>TBD?); and several million permanently displaced people (Palestinians and now Iraqis scattered over the Middle East, miserable and a source of instability for their reluctant hosts).

GRIP provided the graphs.  But will Americans elect someone who can read them?

Overseas Pennsylvanian For Obama

Several disclaimers are in order:
•    Yes, I was born and raised in Pennsylvania
•    Got my undergrad degree in PA
•    And my first professional job - near Harrisburg, the state capital

However:
•    I haven’t lived there in almost 30 years
•    My adult life has mostly been spent overseas
•    I already voted for Obama in the Democrats Abroad Primary

But I am a Pennsylvanian born and bred, and I support Barack Obama!  Anything for a Google entry.

If a polling agency were to do a profile, I’d probably fit into the Clinton camp: son of Irish immigrants; brought up in a working class, union family.  But that would especially be true if I were in the Molly Maguire country of Scranton, Hazleton, or in the western part of the state around Pittsburgh, the areas where Hillary Clinton was seen trying to impress the locals by quaffing “a shot and a beer.”  For an in depth look at the area in the context of the Democratic Primary, look at this Nation article, "Bowling for Pennsylvania," by Gaiutra Bahadur.

But Pennsylvania – the nation’s 6th most populous state, and tending Democratic when it doesn’t vote for moderate Republicans – is much more than the blighted coal mining rustbelt towns that are so much in the news.  Consider the western Philadelphia suburbs, my native stomping grounds, in this profile by Jim Kuhnhenn of the AP (carried by my hometown paper, “The North Penn Reporter”

Philly suburbs hold the key in Tuesday's primary

MEDIA, - To bisect the heart of the Democratic presidential contest, take the Chester exit of I-95 and wend your way to the Pennsylvania Turnpike.  If Barack Obama has any chance of cultivating an upset on April 22, this 20-mile stretch is fertile land.  These are Philadelphia's western suburbs - a patchwork of charming small towns, elite colleges and working class neighborhoods that constitute one of the most competitive political battlegrounds in the state.

"It is, without question, right at the center of the fight for Pennsylvania," said Rep Joe Sestak, D-Pa., the retired admiral who represents this district and who has endorsed Obama's rival, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. "How my district goes is how the state may go."

Clinton holds a lead in statewide polls. But Obama is strongly favored in Philadelphia and polls show him holding a slight lead in the arc of four increasingly Democratic counties around the city. Delaware County, the one which makes up most of Sestak's 7th congressional district, is his toughest with demographics that also suit Clinton and her blue collar appeal.

Kuhnhenn and Sestak capture an aspect of Pennsylvania that wasn’t depicted in “The Deer Hunter,” that Seventies ode to gun-toting good ole boys who have adjustment problems after Vietnam.  Southeastern Pennsylvania, starting with Philadelphia, has a long liberal tradition starting with the state’s founder, William Penn, whose Quaker pacifism left its imprint.  My own alma mater, state-supported Temple University, has a long history of diversity, and thrives in the middle of one of Philadelphia’s poorest African American neighborhoods.

Barack Obama will have to face racism, whether it's in Pennsylvania during the primaries or in the nation at large should he become the Democratic nominee.   Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell, a Clinton backer, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: "You've got some conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate."  I'd rather not try to game the relative strengths of racists vs. misogynists in Pennsylvania, nor would I want any Democratic contender to appeal to either group.  And my gut feeling is that both racists and misogynists are pretty much in the same camp, so it's a zero-sum game to appeal to either.

I wish my home state a good turnout on Tuesday.