Avuncular American

Belgium's Lost Year: Politics Cancels Governance

(Image source: Brussels Export)

This has happened more than once in the past 12 months: Belgium decides to have an existential crisis when we happen to be away.  But existential political crises are the norm in a country where there are seven parliaments, three languages, and borders that include a wonderful geopolitical construct sometimes called the donut.*

The current kerfuffle is, again, essentially over the future outlines of the "linguistic frontier," both on maps and in how decentralization is pushed to its limits, before the "country" is no more than a shell for the all important regions and communities (Dutch speaking Flemish in Flanders, French speaking Walloons in the south, Germanophones along the eastern border, and a mix of all of the above, plus lots of internationals, in Brussels).  Things came to a head on July 15, the deadline for an "institutional reform" (Belgian for separatism) package.  See Le Soir cartoonist and author of "Dessine-moi la Belgique" Pierre Kroll for his take on the impact of the deadline on the daily life of Belgians.

The recent proffered resignation of Prime Minister Yves Leterme is simply the latest manifestation of the seemingly limitless capacity of Belgian politicians to conduct themselves as if the only thing elected officials should do is play politics.  Things like economic impact, national image, care for the national brand - those are for sissies.  Brinkmanship is the name of the game, and Leterme's resignation (as of this writing, not yet accepted by the head of state, King Albert II) is almost a footnote.  He's still in place, running a caretaker ("affaires courantes") government, and the name most talked about as a replacement in a future (coalition, as always) government is... Yves Leterme ("Leterme II").

Economic, business, and labor leaders throw up their hands in frustration: "A wasted year," sighed Vincent Reuter, head of the Wallonia employers association.  Essentially, the country has had a full year of holdover caretaker governments or short-lived successors since elections in summer 2007.  Months ago Belgian economists hazarded guesses on the cost of the crisis, which has only been compounded since.  The reaction of the politicians?  Hold the economy hostage to the outcome of a redistricting proposal dear to the hearts of Flemish politicians, and anathema to the French speakers.

The redistricting of the Brussels Hal Vilvoorde (BHV) constituency is a vital issue, even though trying to explain it to anyone living outside of Belgium results in understandable yawns.  Vital only because it risks splitting Dutch speakers and Francophones in the only area - the capital and its hinterland - where they live in close proximity.  Francophones (and many interested observers) fear that such a split would only be a precursor to further Flemish moves to bring an end to Belgium as a country.

Rather than splitting BHV, some thoughtful citizens are circulating a petition to unite Brussels and its hinterland, known by its historic name of Brabant (which exists, of course, in Flemish and Walloon versions).   They point out that the greater Brussels represents 2 million people, 1/3 of Belgium's GDP, and "more NGOs, lobbyists, embassies and consulates than Washington DC."  The Greens - probably the only Belgian political grouping that truly coordinates between its French and Dutch speaking sections - had earlier tabled proposals along the same lines, noting the natural synergies that regionalization would bring to the capital area, in terms of transportation and economic development, not to mention the main beneficial side effect of restoring some sense of shared destiny.

But there are other centrifugal forces at play, and not just on the Flemish side.  There has always been a fringe "rattachist" element wanting to find refuge with France, but of late at least one serious politician has come out with a "Belgique française" scenario in case the Flemish carry matters to their logical, separatist, conclusion.  Last month there was brief attention in the international press to the idea of a "Brussels Corridor," floated every few decades when Bruxellois get antsy about being cut off from their French speaking cousins down the road in Waterloo.

*So what about the donut?  It's actually worse than that.  According to Wikipedia (be sure to look at the map):

Baarle-Hertog is noted for its complicated borders with Baarle-Nassau in the Netherlands. In total it consists of 24 separate pieces of land. Apart from the main piece (called Zondereigen) located north of the Belgian town of Merksplas, there are twenty Belgian exclaves in the Netherlands and three other pieces on the Dutch-Belgian border. There are also seven Dutch exclaves within the Belgian exclaves. Six of them are located in the largest one and a seventh in the second-largest one. An eighth Dutch exclave lies in Zondereigen.

The border is so complicated that there are some houses that are divided between the two countries. There was a time when according to Dutch laws restaurants had to close earlier. For some restaurants on the border it meant that the clients simply had to change their tables to the Belgian side.

Let's hope that this doesn't become the template for Belgian cartographers.

Mountaintop Trenches: The Dolomites and Europe’s Future

You have to do a bit of climbing to get to these trenches.  They happen to be Italian trenches in the photo on the left, but on the other side of the Piave Valley there are similar Austrian ditches, scraped out of the rock and peat on the hillsides of these Dolomite peaks.  This is the setting of Hemingway's  "A Farewell to Arms."

Take your worst mental image of trench warfare – with its mud, cold, vermin, and high explosives – and then transpose it to the top of a 6,000 foot mountain during several winters.  That’s the World War I recollection of people in this Italo-Germanic corner of the Alps.  Check out the official site of what has to be one of the most spectacular open-air museums dedicated to the First World War, that of Lagazuoi and the 5 Torri.

Our hiking group - formed ad-hoc by Charlie Tessari (photo below right, looking at the formerly Austrian-held positions), wintertime ski instructor, spring and summer hill walking guide, and author of a book with some of the most beautiful photos of this region - is mostly Italian, and of all ages.  We and a family of Slovaks form the Anglophone contingent, and we get abridged versions of Charlie's explanations of the flora, fauna, and geology of this unique mountain region.  The Slovaks know of the Piave Valley; their grandfathers fought here when Slovakia was a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  They grew up hearing songs of the Piave, and of their grandfathers' long-defunct multinational country.

Nowadays they can drive a few hundred kilometers across Austria and visit the battlefields as tourists.  Slovakia, which has gone through several national mutations in the 90 years since the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburgs waved goodbye to the world scene, is now a part of NATO, of the European Union, and will soon spend Euros just like their former Italian enemies.

Paul Hoffman, former New York Times correspondent and author of “The Sunny Side of the Alps” (a gift from an old friend who knew exactly what we’d appreciate on this trip), writes about this former Austrian region from personal experience.  He married a local girl from the Sud Tyrol (the Italian Alto Adige) in the inter war years, and witnessed first hand the excesses of Fascist nationalism, where the Germanic names on gravestones were Italianized – even the dead weren’t allowed to keep their identity.

World War II and the fall of Fascism led to a mellowing of the nationalism up here, and now signs are bilingual, and there’s a relaxed approach to language.  This year, the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War is being marked along the old mountain battlefields by a series of concerts, multinational hikes and climbs, and various other events.  Europe might be confused over which direction it should take after recent reverses, but there is one avenue that is no longer an option: war.  Make tourism, not artillery duels.  That booming across the valleys these days is summertime thunder, not high explosive.

There's probably no better place in Europe than the peacefully spectacular Dolomites to contemplate the ultimate stupidity of war.

Lawrence of Arabia by Kevin Jackson

Lawrence of Arabia - BFI Film Classics
Kevin Jackson, 2007, paperback, 127 pages

What to do?  Center this review on TE Lawrence, the eponymous subject of the film about which this book is written, or tilt it towards director David Lean, whose centenary we celebrate this year?  Kevin Jackson, author of this beautifully illustrated, fact-filled little monograph, does both, and more.  In a short space, we have recurrent excerpts from the source of it all, Lawrence’s mystical war memoir “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,” plus everything from glimpses into Lawrence’s semi-hermitic postwar period of “mind suicide” to a list of scenes cut from earlier releases.

Jackson, an apparently roguish Englishman who takes pride in his membership in the Collège de ‘Pataphysique  (worth looking up, as are several Oxford English Dictionary words in Jackson’s glossary) was an inspired choice to write this latest work on Lawrence.  His essay is not Middle East centric as an Arabist’s might be, and he realized that a cinephile’s evocative “eulogies would no doubt be a good deal more enjoyable for the writer than the reader.”  The result is a mix of fascinating detail on the “making of” and a sense of why the film and its underlying story remain timeless.

As a writer, Jackson gives proper recognition to the screenplay by Robert Bolt, whose triumph as a playwright (A Man For All Seasons) brought him to Lean’s attention.  Says Jackson:

Bolt knew how to shape complicated historical matter into forms that were dramatically appealing yet reasonably faithful to the record; he could render abstract political and philosophical issues in urgent, concrete terms; his dialogue was trenchant and witty.

We learn that Bolt was later forced to share the screenplay credit with Hollywood-blacklisted writer Michael Wilson, who had written an earlier, discarded, version of the screenplay.  It was only one of several controversies that swirled around the film once it reached blockbuster status.

But it’s not just the writing: Lawrence of Arabia, Jackson says, “usually comes somewhere near the top” of popular lists of Best Films Of All Time.  I first saw Lawrence on the wide screen, a rare treat (the film has been re-released only 3 or 4 times since its first showing in 1962).  Though I own a DVD of the 1988 restoration, everyone who loves this film needs to see it on the big screen.  Lawrence of Arabia is so good, so evocative of the romantic and tragic history of the Arab Revolt against the Turks that it continues to be a point of reference.

Actually, it is TE Lawrence who is still a reference: the US military has made him required reading for budding desert soldiers.  Jackson mentions the Iraq War re-issuance of Lawrence’s “27 Articles,” first published by the British Army at the height of the First World War in 1917 to give troops the benefit of his “lessons learned” in winning hearts and minds: Article No. 13: Never lay hands on an Arab: you degrade yourself...

Reading Jackson’s Lawrence of Arabia, one of the most striking sub-themes is what-might-have-been.  Can’t imagine anyone but Peter O’Toole in the title role?  How about Marlon Brando, Albert Finney, or, when initial interest arose in the 1930s in filming the Lawrence epic, Cary Grant or Laurence Olivier?  Maurice Jarre’s stirring soundtrack might have been otherwise: Sir William Walton, Benjamin Britten, Aram Khachaturian, and Richard Rodgers (but not Hammerstein) were all bruited at some point.  “Maurice Jarre’s score became such a powerful element in the film’s triumph,” Jackson writes, that it’s hard to imagine the alternatives.

Our 21st century sensibilities might be jarred by what Jackson calls the “cod-biblical style of Bolt’s Arab dialogue," and there's a tinge of Orientalism in the film's vision of desert society.  But I can’t think of any popular film made before – or since – that has given as positive a treatment to Arabs and their national cause.  Or a Super Panavision 70 epic that manages to show its hero as a complex bundle of contradictions.  “Bolt’s Lawrence,” says Jackson, “seethes with neuroses.”

David Lean’s directorial genius, Maurice Jarre’s memorable score, and Robert Bolt’s script combine to make Lawrence one of the best historical dramas in cinema.  Though purists have quibbled over the historical fidelity of the film, it is hard to imagine a more nuanced depiction of this incredible story of a blond Englishman leading a revolt in Arabia.  Kevin Jackson says it best:

I consider Lawrence of Arabia not just a remarkable and uniquely moving work, but one of the films which has vindicated the medium of cinema even as it expanded its possibilities.

Jackson’s motivation is amply fulfilled in this BFI volume.  I’ll put it in a place of honor, between “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” and my DVD of Lawrence of Arabia.

Culture Wars, European Style - May '68

I would be remiss in my duty as an observer of the European scene if I let the month of May pass without a comment on May 1968.  Since I was a pimply teenager in Pennsylvania at the time, I cannot speak from personal experience.  But you cannot be alive in Europe in the spring of 2008 without being bombarded with documentaries, books, commemorations - nostalgia of the most maudlin to the intelligently reflective.  At most recent count, 100 books (!) have been published in French alone.

One of the most thoughtful TV programs (now out on DVD), one of the few to put the street protests in France into their international context, is Patrick Rotman's "68."  Francophone readers can listen to an RTL radio interview with Rotman here.  Rotman, as a 19 year old student at the Sorbonne, was a participant and witness.  It was definitely a turbulent year, worldwide.

Anniversaries, especially those ending in round numbers like 40, are fair game for reflection.  Especially when many "soixante-huitards" (in the States, we would say baby boomers) are themselves in their sixties.  In France, there is a particularly contemporary - political - slant to these recollections: President Nicolas Sarkozy is an anti-68, conservative politician, in a country where the dominant intellectual strain grew up in the shadow of the May '68 protests.  Shadows of the US, where "what did you do during the Vietnam War?" continues to fuel political debate, and where the Republican Party would like to program the national DVD player to skip the tracks between Eisenhower and Reagan.

But just like America's boomer hippies have morphed into Wall Street lawyers and Washington politicians, so too have many soixante-huitards joined the establishment.  Probably the best example of a student leader keeping his youthful ideals while succeeding in the political world is "Danny The Red" Daniel Cohn-Bendit, now a member of the European Parliament for Germany's Green Party, though he has as much of a profile in France (born there while his parents fled Nazi persecution, he's perfectly bilingual and bi cultural).  Cohn-Bendit was recently shown chatting with the long-retired chief of the Paris police, who he credits with saving lives (and perhaps French democracy) by holding his fire during the student/labor protests.

"'68" is perhaps most resonant now because of the current existential crisis in the world economic system, with financial, food supply, environmental, and societal (immigration, aging, unemployment) pressures causing many to question the way the Western world organizes itself.  It's another nostalgia "industry," for sure.  But without necessarily offering answers, this season's European retrospectives serve a purpose in forcing introspection of the most useful type.  For the US too, this will be most evident once the Democratic Party finally sorts out its candidate to face John McCain.  Will it be '60s vs. '70s? (age, not decades).  Or will it be McCain national-security-means-guns vs. Obama's more inclusive definition of security through diplomacy, economic strength, and inclusiveness?  The Culture Wars in the United States are not over yet.

It’s My Party – Israel’s Nakba Denial

It's my party, and I'll cry if I want to
Cry if I want to, cry if I want to
You would cry too if it happened to you

Lesley Gore, "It's My Party," 1963

In Europe, some countries outlaw Holocaust Denial, that despicable practice of far right parties (France’s Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen has insisted on calling the Holocaust “a detail of history” and has made other outrageous outbursts.  He's had to pay stiff fines).  I know of no law against Nakba Denial, though Israel would like to outlaw talking about the Nakba at the United Nations:

Israel's UN mission is seeking to outlaw use of the term Nakba, after UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon telephoned Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Thursday night and expressed empathy with the Palestinian people in honor of Nakba Day.  Deputy head of Israel's UN mission, Daniel Carmon, complained that the word Nakba is meant to undermine the legitimacy of Israel's founding and, therefore, use of the term should be should be forbidden.

“Nakba,” or catastrophe, is the term used by Palestinians and other Arabs to describe the loss of their homes and the refugee exodus that accompanied the birth of the state of Israel.  Palestinians, whether they are among the hundreds of thousands who stayed behind in what became post-1948 Israel, or the million-plus who are now living under one sort or another of Israeli control in the Occupied Territories since 1967, or the hundreds of thousands living as refugees (most in camps) outside of historic Palestine – most of these Muslim and Christian Palestinians, whatever their passport (if they even have one) says, must have felt like crying at Israel’s party.

To get some idea of what was lost, just read or listen to the May 15 interview on Democracy Now! with Palestinian doctor and writer Ghada Karmi.  Karmi, who was eight years old when her family “went away for a couple of weeks” from violence in her West Jerusalem neighborhood in 1948, has a unique view of this period, and has written about it in “Married to Another Man: Israel’s Dilemma in Palestine.”  She explains the unusual title:

The reason it’s called that is that I’ve taken that out of an anecdote... At the end of the nineteenth century, when the Zionists in Europe ... held a very big congress, a conference in Basel in Switzerland, at which they decided ... to create a Jewish state... And they decided that that state was to be in Palestine.

Now, they didn’t know what Palestine was like ... so they sent a couple of rabbis to this place called Palestine, and they said, “Let us know if this is a suitable place.” The rabbis went, they had a look, and they sent back this message to Vienna: they said, “The bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man.” Now, of course, it’s clear what they were saying is, yes, the land is very suitable, it’s wonderful, but it’s full of other people, it’s already taken. And, of course, it was taken by my ancestors. I mean, that’s who it was. That’s who the ‘other man’ was.”

It’s worth letting that anecdote sink in a while.  Those who have read their history books know about the 1917 Balfour Declaration expressing the opinion of His Majesty’s Government that there should be a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine, which became operative when Great Britain was given a mandate to govern the former Ottoman province at the end of the First World War.  As James Parkes, in his classic “Whose Land? A History of the Peoples of Palestine” wrote, the Balfour Declaration “recognized that there existed already a historic Jewish right, not to but in the country.”  No matter; the Declaration led eventually to the United Nations Partition Plan, and the rest is – history.

Ghada Karmi concludes with devastating logic: “Without Britain, there would be no Israel.”  She takes issue with the notion of Jews In, Arabs Out:

And if you think about it, that has been the basis of the conflict ever since, that the Zionists wanted a territory free of non-Jews in a territory full of non-Jews, and therefore, they had to get rid of the non-Jews in order to make it a territory for Jews. Now, those non-Jews, i.e. the Palestinians, of course didn’t want to be dispossessed, they resisted being dispossessed, and hence, you have a conflict.

... Married to Another Man... had the Zionists said, “This is indeed married to another man. We can’t go here, because the land is already “married.” We can’t be bigamists. We’re going to move on. We’re going to look for somewhere else”—they didn’t. They were determined to do it, and they did it at the most enormous cost to us as Palestinians, because we were dispossessed and displaced in order to make room for the Jewish state, and of course it had a tremendous effect on the whole Arab region.

So, Israel, have your birthday party.  But don’t begrudge the Palestinians their right to commemorate their nation’s tragedy.  In Lesley Gore’s big hit “It's My Party,” she’s crying about Judy taking away her Johnnie.  She lost a boyfriend.  Palestinians lost a country.

You would cry too if it happened to you

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.

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.

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?

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.

Honorable Dissent: The Resignation of Ann Wright

There will be a flood of "commemorations" tomorrow, the eve of the fifth anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, and we will be on the road (and will miss Brussels' "Literary Wake").

So this would have been my March 19 entry, marking the fifth anniversary of the resignation of American diplomat Mary Ann Wright.  Her resignation letter is on the web in its entirety on "Government Executive.com," but here are key excerpts:

I strongly believe the probable response of many Arabs of the region and Moslems of the world if the US enters Iraq without UNSC agreement will result in actions extraordinarily dangerous to America and Americans. Military action now without UNSC agreement is much more dangerous for America and the world than allowing the UN weapons inspections to proceed and subsequently taking UNSC authorized action if warranted.

I strongly disagree with the use of a "preemptive attack" against Iraq and believe that this preemptive attack policy will be used against us and provide justification for individuals and groups to "preemptively attack" America and American citizens.

We should give the weapons inspectors time to do their job. We should not give extremist Moslems/Arabs a further cause to hate America, or give moderate Moslems a reason to join the extremists. Additionally, we must reevaluate keeping our military forces in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia. Their presence on the Islamic "holy soil" of Saudi Arabia will be an anti-American rally cry for Moslems as long as the US military remains and a strong reason, in their opinion, for actions against the US government and American citizens.

Reading this five years on, I think you might agree that Ann Wright knew her stuff: after all, she had served in Sierra Leone (where she was decorated for heroism), Micronesia, Afghanistan, Mongolia, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Grenada, Panama, and Nicaragua.  Not exactly a list of soft assignments.

I have written about the other two Foreign Service Officers who resigned over the US invasion of Iraq, Brady Kiesling and John Brown.  Ann (as she is known) Wright's case is different, in that she resigned on the very eve of the invasion, while serving as the Deputy Chief of Mission (no. 2 person after the ambassador) at the US Embassy in Mongolia.  Ann Wright was also a Colonel in the US Army Reserve, and had spent a combined total of almost thirty years in active duty and the reserves.  When she wrote her letter, she was leaving a lot.

Ann Wright has become well known in activist circles, and has penned a book "Dissent: Voices of Conscience: Government Insiders Speak Out Against the War in Iraq" with co-author Susan Dixon.  Folksy, articulate, and extremely well-informed, Ann Wright can be seen discussing the book here on "Fora.tv" with fellow dissenter Daniel Ellsberg (of "Pentagon Papers" fame during the Vietnam War), who has written the foreword to her book.  The Ellsberg/Wright duo speak of those American (and British) civil servants and soldiers who risked their careers (and risked imprisonment) to challenge their government's actions in bringing the US and UK to war.

Ann Wright is obviously an authoritative source when it comes to dissenting government insiders.  For those who wish to register their principled opposition but yet not go as far as she, Brown, and Kiesling did, the State Department does have the "Dissent Channel," one of the Secretary's "Open Forum" means of presenting alternate policy views.  It was instituted in the wake of Foreign Service resignations over the bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War.  Now that the US is again mired in a seemingly interminable foreign war, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) is trying to get the State Department to breathe life into these internal dissent mechanisms.