world events » Undiplomatic

22 July 2010 Keith Porter
04:44 pm

Treat Your Minorities Well

An important message from the entire Kosovo-Serbia experience, highlighted by today’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling is this: treat your minorities well*.

If you abuse minority populations; if you give special privileges to majorities or any “chosen” group in a society; if you fan the flames of nationalism for political gain; if devise political structures which systematically deny a voice to minority populations; if you seek to eliminate or marginalize certain ethnic groups within your territory… you are playing with fire.

Those frustrated with the ICJ over Kosovo are saying the ruling will cause more separatist groups around the world to seek independence. Perhaps it will. But sovereign nations have tremendous advantages at their disposal in this struggle. Those advantages can be defined (and then employed) by asking these questions:

Do the minorities inside your territory…

enjoy all of the freedoms defined by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
have duly elected and effective representation at the federal, state, and local levels?
have legislative and executive control over the sub-territories where they are in a majority?
have access to and representation at all levels of the nation’s judicial mechanisms?
enjoy the full and equal benefits of your nation’s educational and health systems?
participate fully in an integrated economic system with a level playing field?

Sovereign governments which flinch at these questions are likely the same ones which felt a little queasy after hearing the ICJ ruling on Kosovo today.

*with apologies to Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.

The Mother of All Newspaper Corrections

I imagine that the New York Times definitely is going to regret this error. Take a look at the caption on the photo below, from a screenshot of the Times’ home page earlier today (h/t):

I’m not sure who those lovely young women are, but I’m pretty sure they’re not Hillary Rodham Clinton and Michelle Bachelet.

Blogging Truth to Power in the Middle East

The photo is of Ahmed Maher, another prominent Egyptian blogger and activist who was arrested for helping to organize a pro-democracy group on Facebook. Via CyberDissidents

I had the honor today of moderating a panel on elections and new media co-sponsored by Google and Freedom House. What made it particularly interesting was the participation of a group of eleven bloggers from the Middle East and North Africa — individuals who every day take risks in order to promote human rights, and who often find themselves in trouble for saying and doing things we take for granted. Like their colleague Ahmed Maher, they do not know whether they will be imprisoned for their writing and activism.

Rather than talk about the meeting, I thought I’d let you learn more about the bloggers themselves — and, when possible, offer links to their sites. I encourage you to check them out and to support their important work.

AbdelKader Benkhaled is an active Algerian blogger and member of the political party the Peace Society Movement, or Harakat Mudjtamaa Silm. He regularly contributes to various newspapers, magazines and websites in addition to leading trainings on electronic media in many departments across Algeria. Mr. Benkhaled has attended several training sessions on effective media communication skills, and is a member of various youth associations for bloggers and students.

Bassem Samir is a founding Member of the Egyptian Democratic Academy, which seeks to promote the principles of democracy and citizenship, equality and forgiveness, as well as to renounce the culture of violence, racism, corruption and despotism in accordance with the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Since 2007, Mr. Samir has served as the Director of the Human Rights Unit of the Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth organization, which promotes the principles of political, economic and social liberty in order to redefine the relationship between the individual and the State in Egypt.

Dalia Ziada is the current Director of the North Africa Bureau of the American Islamic Congress. Prior to working at the American Islamic Congress, she was the Egypt Regional Coordinator for the Tharwa Foundation for Diversity, Development and Democracy; researcher for the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information; and was the political reporter and translator for Al-Ahram Daily Newspaper. Most recently, Dalia organized Cairo’s first human rights film festival to high acclaim and was featured in Time Magazine. Dalia is an outspoken women rights activist who advocated against Female Genital Mutilation in Egypt. In addition to blogging, she has translated two books into Arabic and her first book of poems will be published in early 2010.

Esraa Rashid is the Media Coordinator at the Egyptian Democratic Academy. The Academy runs Almahrousa, an online radio which is very popular among Egyptian youth. Creator of the April 6 Strike Group on Facebook in March 2008, she organized a strike in support of workers in Mahalla al-Kobra that lead to her arrest and sentencing of two-weeks in jail. It was the first arrest order of its kind issued to a woman by the Egyptian Interior Ministry. The success of the strike, the size of the Facebook group - over 70,000 members -, and the notoriety she received for her jail term made her a well-known figure throughout Egypt and among human rights activists. Her blog articles focus on human rights violations in Egypt, with a critical perspective on workers’ rights. In 2007, she attended an International Republican Institute sponsored training course in Casablanca, Morocco on the various mechanisms of running a local election.

Kamal Sedra is the Managing Director of the Development and Institutionalization Support Center (DISC), an Egyptian consultancy firm dealing with good governance, human rights, and community development throughout Egypt and the Middle East. Mr. Sedra has previous experience organizing DISC’s advocacy campaigns, and he is the founder and manager of a number of websites such as the Egyptian Transparency Network, Nazaha-eg.net, which won the 2009 e.Democracy Forum Award; Aswatna-eg.net, or “Our Voices,” which covers Egyptian election news; and NGO Jobs (ngo-jobs.net), a site for job and training opportunities. Prior to coming to DISC, he was the head of the Coptic Evangelical Organization for Social Services Training Center. Mr. Sedra has attended 20 professional trainings and conferences on topics including information resource management, anti-corruption and voter education, 7 of which he has facilitated both locally and internationally. He has consulted and served as a trainer for numerous organizations, including YMCA Egypt, Catholic Relief Services, and Mansoura University.

Shahinaz Abdel Salam has been a freelance journalist and blogger in the Egyptian Movement for Change, also known as the Kefaya movement, in Egypt since 2005. She is an avid blogger concerned with the lack of freedom of expression in the Middle East. As an activist, she has volunteered her time and services to NGOs and other civil society organizations in Egypt, sharing and streamlining ideas to encourage the formation of coalitions among human rights organizations. Previously, Ms. Abdel Salam has worked as an assistant journalist for reporters from the Irish Times, Reporters Without Borders, and Grec TV, as well as a consultant regarding blogging, human rights and freedom of expression in Egypt. She is currently working with the Arab Network for Human Rights to produce and write the 2009 annual report on the state of blogging and the Internet in the Arab world. She also continues to contribute news articles to a community-grown blog that expresses the view points of 20 women in 10 Arab countries.

Imad Bazzi is a prominent Lebanese blogger, journalist, and civil society activist. He is a co-founder of the Arab Bloggers Forum, an organization dedicated to improving bloggers’ professionalism, generating debate about social issues and defending internet activists from censorship in the Arab world. Mr. Bazzi, in conjunction with 13 Lebanese bloggers, recently launched the first Lebanese bloggers committee, The League of Lebanese Bloggers. Previously, he was the Communications and Outreach Officer for Greenpeace Mediterranean, and the project manager for the Center of Sustainable Democracy in Beirut. Mr. Bazzi has won several awards for his activism in the blogosphere, including the 2008 Young Arab Artists Prize in Amman and the Hamberton-Campbell award for e-initiatives. He is also in the running for the Best of the Blogs (BOB) Award for “Best Weblog in Arabic,” to be awarded by Germany’s international public broadcaster, Deutche Welle. His blog covers a wide variety of topics relating to Lebanese politics and society, monitors domestic human rights abuses, and condemns sectarianism and ideological agendas. Mr. Bazzi strives to bring about peaceful, democratic change in Lebanon, creating a more just, secure, and independent country. His writings have also appeared in numerous Arabic newspapers and magazines.

Mustapha El Bakkali is a blogger, journalist, poet, and producer, who currently works for the BBC’s Arabic Bureau in Rabat. Mr. El Bakkali has a rich background in video and type media gained through his previous responsibilities as the producer for the television production company Mediacast Maghreb. He is a co-founder and correspondent for Aljazeeratalk.net, a former freelance journalist for Aljazeera.net, the Vice Chairman of the Association of Moroccan Bloggers, and producer and director of a short film on blind Moroccan university students. In 2008, Mr. El Bakkali was awarded 3rd place for the “Best Video Blog” at the Best of the Blogs (BOB) Awards, the world’s largest international Weblog awards ceremony for weblogs, podcasts and video blogs. He is also a founding member of Bloggers Without Borders (Doha, Qatar), and is currently working on a soon to be published book, titled, New Media and its Impact on Arab Youth’s Values.

Abdel Wahab Al Oraid is the Editorial Director of Cultural Affairs and the Director of the Eastern Regional Office for Okaz newspaper in Saudi Arabia. He is a journalist with 18 years of experience in the press industry and has worked with several institutions in the United Kingdom, United States, Bahrain, and Jordan. He was a war correspondent and has covered a number of war zones in Kuwait and Iraq. Mr. Al Oraid additionally plays an active role in Saudi Arabian’s civil society as a member of the Bahraini writers Association, and the Saudi Journalists Association, which aims to protect the rights of journalists in the Kingdom and coordinate their relations with established media. Mr. Al Oraid is a published poet.

Soufiene Chourabi is a journalist for Attariq Al Jadid newspaper, an opposition newspaper in Tunisia that has often come under direct and harsh repression efforts by the government. Mr. Chourabi is also a correspondent for the online news site Menassat.com, which focuses on news, trends, and events concerning the media in the twenty-two countries of the MENA region and his articles focus on the state of free media and press in the Middle East. He is a member of the Tunisian Syndicate of Journalists and has attended trainings for civilian leader activists as well as a Frontline organized training on electronic security.

Fathi A. Al-Dhafri currently serves as the National Coordinator for the Youth for Change program in Yemen, a venture begun in 2008 by TakingITGlobal, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and other local groups to improve the organization of youth activism, through volunteerism, youth activities, or networking opportunities across a selection of 10 Arab countries. Since 2006, Mr. A-Dhafri has served as a consultant and trainer for the Youth Leadership Development Foundation and has attended numerous conferences about youth leadership development in the United States, Italy, Jordan, and Yemen. He is currently working on publishing his book Blogging for Change, an e-book that is composed primarily of postings and news articles that have appeared on his blog. Mr. Al-Dhafri is hoping to expand his knowledge of Web 2.0 skills as a way to sharpen his advocacy and grassroots organizing skills.

I will only add that one participant at the event noted the sad reality that this generation of cyber-dissidents, who have the ability to distribute their writings via the internet, are far less known than the Soviet-era dissidents — Havel, Sakharov, Scharansky, Walesa, etc. — who often had to resort to distributing their essays underground, using carbon paper and word-of-mouth. If you would like to learn more about these activists fine work, I urge you to go to the Freedom House site (linked above) as well as to two other organizations working to make their efforts better known — Global Voices and CyberDissidents

Olympics: Why Go Grunge When You Can Wear Clown Pants?

Before today, I thought that the U.S. snowboarding team’s pseudo-grunge outfits were the coolest official uniforms at the Olympics. Then I saw this.

My apologies for such an obvious mistake. My only question: are these clown pants, golf pants, or a clown’s golf pants?

Photo: Haavard Vad Petersson of the Norwegian curling team gets set to deliver the stone during practice at the Vancouver 2010 Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia, Monday, Feb. 15, 2010. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty) via The Big Picture blog. Used under doctrine of fair use.

Olympics: Jingoism We Can Believe In

Heh:

I haven’t been able to watch Colbert since he landed in Vancouver, but I gotta wonder whether he’s keeping an eye out for those evil, evil Canadian bears.

And while I’m on the subject of the Olympics, would people please stop whining about how the Canadians are not running a perfect games? I mean which would you want — a Zamboni Olympic ice resurfacer breaking down or the detention of anyone who dares to show up to a free speech zone? The difference between Vancouver and Beijing is that the Government of Canada allows its mistakes to be aired in public while the ChiComs do everything they can to hide them.

Call me a spoilsport, but I’d rather watch a faulty torch lighting ceremony than North Korean-style human puppet shows any day of the week.

Guest Post: A Marshall Plan for Haiti?

The following guest post was written by Jacob Francois, an entrepreneur with over eighteen years experience in the financial services industry, and owner of Lakay Financial International, Inc. in addition to reaching out to the Haitian and Haitian-American communities via appearances on radio and television, Mr. François has served 7 years as a board member and two years as president of the Haitian-American Community Association (HACA) located in Chicago. He is also founder of Project 2000 International, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing assistance to Haitian children. The organization is responsible for securing donations in-kind, as well as monetary donations to purchase whatever is necessary to facilitate the education (school supplies, uniforms, shoes, etc.) of these youngsters whose families would otherwise be unable to provide these necessities for them. For more information about these organizations, please follow the above links.

Haiti has been struck by a terrible catastrophe far beyond its economic capacity. Immediate humanitarian assistance is essential, but Haiti will need more that just relief if it is to rebuild and prosper. For this reason, we at the Haitian Priorities Project propose a “Marshall Plan” for Haiti:

$5 billion to help the Haitian people rebuild their livelihood
$2 billion earmarked for the private sector
$1 billion for a 1500-megawatt electrical plant
$1.5 billion to rebuild various government compounds in the 10 departments
$1 billion for a communication system capable of providing at least 1 million land lines
$3 billion to rebuild 5,000 km of roads, connectors, sewers and provide garbage collection
$1 billion for 10 national airports in 10 departments
$1 billion for the agricultural sector
$2 billion for the school sector
$2.5 billion for economic development programs
$700 million for heavy machinery

In all, $20.7 billion per year for three years could put Haiti back on the path to becoming a modern nation. If we put this amount is the context of the United States GDP for 2009, the amount is less than 1/100th of 1 percent of the United States GDP.

The Marshall Plan from its inception, was known as the European Recovery Program, (ERP). The first phase of the program started in 1948 and ran through 1952. The United States implemented the ERP as a tool for rebuilding and creating a stronger economic foundation for countries in Western Europe.

Given the destruction of its infrastructure, Haiti would benefit from a similar plan, which could be dubbed the Haiti Recovery Plan (HRP), and without which Haiti may never be a viable nation.

Haiti is the most impoverished country in the Western Hemisphere with 80 percent of the population living under the poverty line and 54 percent in abject poverty. Two-thirds of all Haitians depend on the agricultural sector, mainly small-scale subsistence farming, and remain vulnerable to damage from frequent natural disasters, exacerbated by the country’s widespread deforestation.

The economy has shown some signs of recovery in recent years, registering positive growth since 2005 after the ravages of hurricane Jeanne in 2004. Several hurricanes damaged the entire system in 2008 as well as the transportation infrastructure and agricultural sector. Haiti has enough natural resources to build a viable nation, although capital investment is lacking and some natural resources possessed by Haiti are deemed strategic reserves to the United States. Haiti has bauxite, copper, calcium carbonate, gold, marble, hydropower and oil.

US economic engagement under the Haitian Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement (HOPE) Act, passed in December 2006, has boosted apparel exports and investment by providing tariff-free access to the US. HOPE II, passed in October 2008, has further improved the export environment for the apparel sector by extending most favored nation preferences to 2018; the apparel sector accounts for two-thirds of Haitian exports and about 8 percent of GDP. Remittances are the primary source of foreign exchange, equaling more than 15 percent of GDP and about twice the earnings from exports.

Haiti suffers from high inflation, a lack of investment, limited infrastructure, and a severe trade deficit. In 2005, Haiti paid its arrears to the World Bank, paving the way for reengagement with the Bank. Haiti has received debt forgiveness for about $525 million of its debt through the Highly-Indebted Poor Country (HIPC) initiative by mid-2009. The government relies on formal international economic assistance for fiscal sustainability.

The United States and France have a moral obligation to correct the wrongs against Haiti dating back to 1824, four years after the Monroe Doctrine was initiated. In 1824, France sent 65 ships to Haitian ports threatening to take the country back to slavery if an agreement was not signed to start paying 100 million francs to France on a yearly basis. At the time, Haiti had to shut down all government services including all the schools. This action had a profound impact on Haiti’s development and on all subsequent government efforts to build viable institutions.

Without substantial new investment, Haiti will never come out of its terrible position. A government operating with less than $2 billion a year, of which 60% is from bilateral aid, will never be able to respond to the needs of a population of 10 million people.

The United States has in particular been helpful. At this juncture, however, if substantial investment is not made in Haiti, the epidemic of boat people to Florida will continue for a long time.

Our plea is to appeal to the humane compassion we know to exist in the Unites States, France, Canada, Venezuela, and all other countries to make their investments in the framework that was stated above in a length of time not to exceed three years. Otherwise, the spiral of misery will continue in Haiti for another two hundred years.

Photo: UNDP Flickr Photostream using a CC 2.0 license

Haiti: Devastation Beyond Comprehension

Imagine, for a moment, that 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina had devastated not merely New York/Arlington or New Orleans but the entire country. That’s what the people of Haiti face today: a tragedy almost beyond comprehension, one that may dwarf any other recent natural disaster.

If some reports are accurate, hundreds of thousands may be dead as many may be missing today because a devastating 7.0 earthquake rocked Port-au-Prince and most of the country on Tuesday. The loss of life, widespread devastation, and collapse of government and society on a national level is nearly complete. Those who could have responded to this tragedy — including the UN Mission to Haiti and international relief NGOs — are among its victims.

Such devastation is almost beyond our comprehension, especially in a place like Haiti, a star-crossed island country of sheer misery and destitution on a good day. The world is now responding with a massive outpouring of emergency aid, rescue teams, and mobile hospitals. They must move quickly to rescue thousands who are alive but trapped in the rubble, and do so when almost all infrastructure has disappeared.

President Barack Obama announced yesterday morning that the U.S. government will provide its full support to the people of Haiti in assisting in rescue and recovery of hundreds of thousands of people and provide food, water and medicine immediately. Using the Joint Southern Command to manage logistics, USAID, led by its new administrator, Dr. Rajiv Shah, will lead and coordinate the USG’s humanitarian response.

Hillary Clinton, who had just left for a week-long trip to the Pacific rim, cancelled her trip, but not before heading to a military base in Honolulu to coordinate the State Department’s response. She soberly remarked that Haiti had just come through some terrible events of “biblical proportions” in recent years, including hurricanes and mudslides, only to be victimized again by another unimaginable and devastating natural disaster.

President Rene Preval, the president of Haiti, now homeless himself, was able to notify his ambassador to the U.S. reporting that he and his family were alive, but he was unable to contact his cabinet members. Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince has been described as virtual dust, with the Presidential palace in total collapse, as well as most of the government buildings. Preval described the macabre scene in an interview with the Miami Herald:

“Parliament has collapsed. The tax office has collapsed. Schools have collapsed. Hospitals have collapsed,” he said. “There are a lot of schools that have a lot of dead people in them.” He said the Roman Catholic archbishop of Port-au-Prince is among the dead and that the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission, Tunisian diplomat Hedi Annabi, is missing.”

Most hospitals are believed to be non-functioning, and water and electricity are virtually non-existent, according to media reports. Injured persons and other survivors are said to be lying in the streets, afraid of returning to their homes, due to strong after shocks, while others have been digging people out by hand to rescue those trapped in the rubble. Police, medical personnel and ambulances have been noticeable by their marked absence on the streets.

The European Union is sending 3 million euros in relief aid; China is providing search teams and the Swiss Red Cross is sending one million Swiss francs. Canada, France and Germany are contributing search teams and money. Hundreds of non-governmental relief agencies from around the world are responding to the crisis.

The Fairfax County, Virginia Fire Department was one of the first responders to fly into Haiti. Fortunately, the airport is functional, but the road between Port au Prince and the airport is still unpassable. U.S. Army engineers will be attending to the airport damage, minimal in comparison to the overall devastation. I know the Army engineers will provide some relief to the Haitian people who are existing in one of the most desperate situations on Earth.

If you haven’t taken action yet, please do what you can. CBS has put together a comprehensive list of agencies you can support.

Photo: UNDP Flickr photostream using CC 2.0

Guinea: The Next Civil War in Africa?

Things are getting weirder — and much worse — in Guinea, home to Dadis Camara, Africa’s newest megalomaniac nutjob. Mark Weston over at Global Dashboard reports today that the UN is putting contingency plans in place should a civil war break:

[A UN World Food Program official told Weston that h]e is going [to the Senegal-Guinea border] to investigate whether there are sufficient telecoms and internet facilities there, in case war breaks out in Guinea and a flood of refugees pours into Senegal. Similar preparations are taking place in Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

The UN’s caution may be well-founded. Guinea’s increasingly-unhinged leader, Dadis Camara, has recruited South African mercenaries to train his supporters in the art of war, in case the majority Peul population decides it has had enough of him and moves to unseat him from power. I asked the WFP man what the Senegalese government’s position is. He said that the president, Abdoulaye Wade, supported Camara when he took over last December, and has maintained a discreet silence since. “Guinea is rich in resources,” he explained. “It doesn’t pay to antagonise those who control them.”

If Senegal, one of the region’s few stable democracies, should decide to turn a blind eye to Camara’s misdeeds in order to ensure access to its oil and gas, it would not be alone. As Tanya reported last month, the Chinese were happy to sign a a $7 billion infrastructure bauxite and oil exploitation exploration deal with the Camara regime just days after his soldiers went on a rampage, beating, shooting, and publicly raping fellow citizens who were participating in a peaceful opposition protest. Guinea has the largest bauxite deposits in the world and may have one of the largest unexplored oil fields. It also is one of the poorest nations in Africa where people live on less than $1 per day.

Roughly four weeks from now, Camara will mark the anniversary of his first year in power. Given his increasingly erratic behavior, he may use that day to move against the opposition. It might be useful for new U.S. Ambassador Patricia Moeller to stop by the President’s office and reiterate the U.S. position that he should step aside and permit elections.

Photo: Reuters file photo (low res) via Daylife, used under doctrine of fair use: Coup leader Moussa Dadis Camara waves to crowds as he is driven through the streets of Conakry in this December 24, 2008 picture. Thousands of Guineans on Wednesday cheered the young army captain chosen as de facto head of state by the military junta that took over the West African country in a coup after the death of President Lansana Conte. Picture taken December 24, 2008.

Obama, China, and the Media’s Noob Kremlinologists

Over at the Atlantic, the always perceptive Jim Fallows has done a series of posts (1 — 2 — 3 — 4 — 5) on the utter failure of the traveling press to report accurately on Obama’s China trip. Fallows main point is that the MSM “manufactured” the perception that the trip was a disaster when in fact it was a relative success. As Fallows notes, the media focused on two elements of the trip — its visuals (e.g. Obama bowing to the Emperor and the joint Hu-Obama press conference where Obama didn’t take questions) and the final joint U.S.-China communique (in which Obama failed to secure any “concessions”) — that are almost never favorable to a U.S. president.

I think that the first reason for this — and one that Fallows doesn’t raise — is that MSM (and for that matter new media) coverage of summits is not unlike the now-dead art of Kremlinology: its practitioners are attempting to parse out trends and conclusions from a very limited data set. If all you have to work with is a series of photo ops and official communiques, then it’s awfully hard to make anything more than the most superficial observations. And given the fact that you’re largely guessing, chances are that you’re going to get it wrong a big part of the time. The one difference between today’s media and yesterday’s Soviet experts is that the media is doing it constantly and near instantly. As a result, its reading of the tea leaves is even less accurate than those now-discredited Kremlin parade-watchers.

Fallows quotes U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman’s reaction to tthe coverage:

I attended all those meetings that President Obama had with Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao,” Huntsman said, referring to the Chinese president and premier. “I’ve got to say some of the reporting I saw afterward was off the mark. I saw sweeping comments about things that apparently weren’t talked about, when they were discussed in great detail in the meetings,” he said.

The problem for the media, of course, is that they’re not in those meetings. (If they were, it would have produced the exact outcome they so blithely reported as reality.) So reporters are stuck — they can tell the truth (”we have no idea what happened”) and look like noobs, or they can speculate (as most did in this case) and try to look wise.

Moral of the story: given the choice between looking like a noob and looking like a reporter, almost every White House reporter is going to choose the latter, even if s/he doesn’t know what s/he’s talking about.

The second reason is, as both Fallows and Howard French note, is that the press now covers the White House as if everything it does is a campaign event. Now on one level, this is true, but sometimes — particularly when it comes to foreign policy summits — it isn’t. But given the habits and tendencies of the media to regard everything as political, it’s almost impossible for them to change their frame of reference. French calls it “instant scorekeeping,” noting that “[e]verything [the press writes] is shot through this prism of short-term political calculation as opposed to thinking seriously about stuff.”

I think that part of the problem is not especially China-related but strikes me as a reflection of something that’s happening in the culture, particularly in the news culture, partially in response to the habits of television coverage and the increased pressures that come from digital media. There’s a growing reflex of instant punditry and reflexive reaction that works counter to more meaningful analysis. We’re in a state where we’re very often privileging the gut or the knee, as in knee-jerk, rather than thinking more meaningfully about things.

I think French (and Fallows) hit the nail on the head, but they miss one thing here: one of the reasons the White House press corps uses the campaign frame is that almost every news outlet now assigns its most able campaign reporters to cover the White House (Chuck Todd, white courtesy phone please). As one White House insider put it to Fallows (on background, of course),

I don’t care if someone criticizes us, I just would like it to be accurate and in context. I fear I am learning that is not the skill of some in the White House Press corps. They are experts on horse races, and so that is the way everything is cast.

I’m only surprised that this official is surprised. If you’re a reporter, and you’ve splent the past year/months/decade covering campaigns, then you’re going to look at everything as a campaign. It’s a manifestation of cynicism, and while unhelpful, it certainly is obvious to anyone able to step back and look at the broader question of how the media covers everything.

The third reason is related to the media’s role as a collective expression of a more generalized national uneasiness about the perceived decline in America’s role in the world. French, again:

The piece that really relates directly to China, I think, and the signals I get from this coverage are equally distressing. The unstated element for me in all of this coverage of Obama’s visit is a kind of hysterical insecurity in the American mind about the possibility—or reality, depending on how you look at it—of American decline. China being the most obvious and immediate symbol of American vulnerability and decline. You put these two things together, the hysterical insta-pundit on the one hand and the hysterical anxiety on the other hand, you end up with this kind of coverage that says essentially that Obama goes to China and doesn’t get instant, public, overt gratification on issues A through Zed and therefore it was a failed trip, or we’re losing ground to China or we have no more standing or we have no more clout or the Chinese moment is upon us—any number of variations on this decline-related theme. . . .

That leads us to the fourth and final reason: the MSM’s long slow slide into parochialism. French again:

To the extent that the American media embarks on this trip with some version of this very familiar storyline—that Obama, this great celebrity, this great speaker, this media star, this grand personality, is going to stroll through China and win the day—to the extent that they bought into that storyline and expected it to function, at any meaningful levels shows an extraordinary misunderstanding of China. You can fault that storyline on many other levels, but it shows a total misunderstanding of China. The Chinese doesn’t want to be part of our storyline.

The reality is that the MSM views everything through the prism of the United States. Their coverage of Obama’s trip reminds me of an old National Lampoon parody of local newspapers (be sure to read the sub-head on the story “Two Dacron Women Feared Missing in Volcanic Disaster”):

John Judis at the New Republic demonstrates just how bad this has become in his commentary on the South Korea leg of Obama’s trip (apologies for quoting at length, but I think it’s worth it):

If you are like me, you can’t name the second largest city in South Korea, you’re not within five or ten million of how many people live there, and you’re not sure how South Korea is currently getting on with China and Japan. So you need help. Both the Post and the Times focus not on South Korea per se, but on Obama’s taking a “stern tone” toward North Korea in his discussions with the South Koreans. The Post suggests that the two sides have agreed to a “new approach,” which will reject “endless, inconclusive disarmament negotiations” with the North. OK, pardon me if I yawn. Haven’t I read this story about forty-two times since 1995 or so. Having read the two stories I came away with exactly nothing.

Now let’s look at the Financial Times story by Christian Oliver and Edward Luce, which is about one-third the size of the other pieces. The headline reads, “Seoul trades on better ties with Beijing than Washington.” Hmm. That’s interesting and says something important about the balance of power in Asia and the world. Now here are the opening paragraphs:

When George Bush senior visited Seoul as US president 20 years ago, things were simple – the US was the undisputed main ally and trade partner. Astonishingly, there was only one weekly flight from South Korea to China, the communist foe.

Barack Obama on Wednesday visits a South Korea where the US is no longer the only show in town. China is now the main trade partner, with 642 flights each week. While the US is still the chief political ally, Mr. Obama’s cheery soundbites on Korean issues are not convincing Seoul that Washington is dedicating enough thought to the peninsula.

One flight versus 642 flights – that’s a small detail that tells a large story about South Korea and China. And what of the rest of the story? In the other newspapers, I learned that the U.S. is going to “satisfy” the demand of the North to send a “high-level” envoy by dispatching Stephen Bosworth to Pyongyang. But in the Financial Times, I learn that China is sending its premier Wen Jiabao and that diplomats in Seoul are not convinced that Bosworth, “a part-time diplomat, keeping a university teaching job in the US,” is the “right man for the job.”. . .

All in all, you get in one-third the length three times more interesting information than in the Times and Post articles, and it’s epitomized in the lead paragraphs comparing the number of flights that now run weekly between China and South Korea.

I’d even take it a step further: the FT reported on how South Korea had changed in the last twenty years (a story you rarely see — the media reserves that particular frame for its coverage of China), while the NYT and WaPo reported on how the U.S. position on North Korea hasn’t changed in the past twenty weeks.

Journalism used to be the first draft of history. Now it’s little more than a post-it note.

(An aside about Photo 1: Is the White House embarrassed about the trip? I could not find a single photo showing Obama with Hu Jintao or speaking to students in Shanghai. The only photos were of the students themselves, Obama at the Forbidden City, and Obama’s motorcade (???) heading to the Great Wall. I had to get this crappy shot from our friends at Dipnote.)

Albania: “We Seem to Have Lost King Zog, But Who Cares”

You probably missed it last week, but Sali Berisha, the prime minister of Albania, has formally requested the Indian government to “return Mother Teresa’s remains” before August 2010, the 100th anniversary of her birth. Berisha also asked France to return the remains of Ahmet Zog, who reigned as King of Albania from 1928 to 1939.

We’ll get back to Zog in a moment, but let’s start with Mother Teresa. There’s just one tiny little problem with Berisha’s request: although she was ethnically Albanian, she was born in Skopje, Macedonia. Nothing like angering the Macedonians, which has a significant Albanian minority (who haven’t necessarily been regarded warmly by their compatriots) and which has had a major diplomatic dispute with Greece over its name since its birth.

The Indian Government was matter-of-fact in its response to Berisha’s request, saying that “Mother Teresa was an Indian citizen and she is resting in her own country, her own land.” The spokesperson for the Missionaries of Charity, Mother Teresa’s Catholic missionary, was a bit less circumspect, calling the request “absurd.” The Conference of Catholic Bishops in India also stated Mother Teresa’s remains should remain in India. Yet Berisha seems not to be bothered by these rebukes, saying that negotiations about her return would be intensified this year.

Then there’s Berisha’s request for King Zog’s remains, which borders on surreal. Before (or since) Zog, Albania has had no history of monarchical rule. In July 1928, then-President Ahmet Muhtar Bey Zogolli pushed a weak government to call elections for a constitutional assembly, which promptly created a constitutional hereditary monarchy and declared him Zog I, King of Albanians.

Zog ruled Albania for most of the interwar period, before fleeing during Italy’s 1939 invasion. He never returned, moving from London to Cairo to Paris (with an abortive attempt to live in the U.S.). In 1961, he died in Paris, where he is buried in the Thiasis Cemetery in a family plot. He did leave a heir, “King” Leka, but a 1997 voter referendum soundly rejected reinstatement of the monarchy.

I called the French for a comment on Berisha’s demand but they were too busy laughing to be able to answer any of our questions.

Didn’t Charlie and I just blog about Albania being a strong candidate to provide ports for U.S. ships for a new U.S. security missile system in Europe? Shouldn’t Albania focus on its new responsibilities to NATO and drill down on the necessary requirements for Council of Europe so it can join its EU neighbors?

But nooo. It takes a lot to out-wacky the rest of the Balkans. It’s not like the region hasn’t had more than its share of oddities. It is not everyday that a government manages to create a diplomatic incident and look deeply stupid all at once. As Balkan schlock goes, this is a a pretty superb can of crazy, something straight out of Monty Python.

Which is not that surprising, given that King Zog jokes were a regular feature of Monty Python’s Flying Circus:

Just how are the police combating the increase with the use of the occult? Ex-King Zog of Albania reports …(phone rings) Well we seem to have lost ex-King Zog there, but who cares.

Who cares, indeed. Perhaps Prime Minister Berisha should spend less time on stunts and more on things that really matter.

Like trying to get somebody — anybody — to take the remains of Enver Hoxha off his hands.

In Case You Didn’t Know Already, Climate Change is A Bad Thing

So today is “Blog Action Day,” where thousands of bloggers all post passionately about an important issue. This year’s topic is climate change.

Okay. Here it goes.

Climate change is bad.

Really bad.

And scary.

Really scary.

We should stop it from happening or something.

Maybe by regulating carbon emissions.

Hey — I know! The world’s governments should all get together and talk about it!

And do something!

There ya go.

I don’t mean to mock a very serious issue — climate change is bad. And the world does need to do something about it.

But convening an online blogging Woodstock isn’t really going to do a damn thing.

Come on, sing it with me!

We are the blogs
We are Al Gore’s children
We are the ones who make a brighter day
So let’s start blogging
There’s a choice we’re making
We’re we’re wasting all your time
It’s true we’ll make a better day
Just you and me and seven thousand other bloggers

Regular readers of this site know that I’m a huge fan of social media (if I wasn’t, why would I be blogging?). But I find things like this project — what I would call premeditated spontaneity — pretty silly. How does getting 7,000 blogs (by the site’s latest count) to write about climate change on a single day somehow make a difference?

Blogging isn’t action. It’s a bunch of people writing about stuff. I mean, they’re not even suggesting you link to an online petition, for crying out loud.

That’s not “action.” It’s cyber-narcissism.

Even if I were to believe that Blog Action Day is a good idea, I’d still have serious doubts about the event’s understanding of strategy.

Just for a moment, let’s assume that world leaders will wake the hell up after they read that Perez HIlton and Wonkette are unhappy about global warming. Don’t you think it would have made more sense to schedule the event a little closer to the UN Climate Change Conference, which doesn’t start until December 7?

I guess Hu Jintao will have to bookmark us so he can remember all this, um, passion when he shows up in Copenhagen six freaking weeks from now.

Guinea: Murder, Rape, and Chinese Investment

Unless you follow international news closely, you may have missed the tragic recent events in Guinea. From a September 29 NYT report:

Streets were deserted and shops were shut tight Tuesday in Conakry, Guinea, a day after government troops went on a brutal rampage at an opposition rally, shooting, stabbing, raping and assaulting dozens of men and women in a packed stadium.

Hospitals in the city were full of the wounded from what opponents of the military government here termed a massacre, and human rights groups continued to revise upward the number of dead, saying Tuesday that about 157 people are known to have been killed. Over a thousand victims had suffered gunshot wounds or other injuries, the groups said.

[A] precise death toll was impossible to ascertain because the army had removed bodies from the stadium where as many as 50,000 had gathered to protest the ruling military junta. . . .Witnesses said women were raped in public by the soldiers and sexually assaulted with their guns; the military fired repeated volleys on unarmed civilians at point-blank range, human rights officials said.

The most brutal soldiers were identified as belonging to the elite, red-beret-wearing presidential guard.

Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara, who took power in a coup d’etat last December after the death of Guinea’s previous dictator, has vehemently denied any responsibility for his soldiers’ brutality.

The government reported 56 dead, saying many persons had been trampled, while human rights advocates have documented at least 150 murders and at least 1,000 injured, substantiated by photographs of countless dead bodies that had been shot. Many of these photos were provided to various news organizations, including the New York Times.

Numerous reports have emerged describing brutal rapes of women and children, including a cellphone photo, also provided to the New York Times that shows soldiers surrounding a woman on the ground. Other media reports from the IRIN Africa news service on the “Aftermath of Rape” in Guinea elaborates in explicit terms:

At an 8 October gathering of Guinean women beaten or raped during the recent military attack on demonstrators, all wept as one young woman presented torn clothes soldiers had ripped off of her.

“We all collapsed in tears. It is unspeakably painful what happened here in Guinea,” Aïssata Daffe of the Union des Forces Républicaines political party.

The gathering was part of an ongoing effort by local NGOs and civil society organizations to collect information about the sexual violence during the 28 September military crackdown in order to appeal for assistance and justice. NGOs are still trying to determine how many women and girls were raped. For now 33 cases have been documented, according to local and international aid agencies.

In response, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement to reporters in Washington, D.C. saying the “events [in Guinea] cannot be allowed to continue” and that “It was criminality of the greatest degree, and those who committed such acts should not be given any reason to expect that they will escape justice.” Clinton quickly dispatched Deputy Assistant Secretary of State William Fitzgerald, who met Camara yesterday and “us[ed] strong language” in a tense discussion that reportedly lasted for more than two hours.

Fitzgerald urged Camara not to run for re-election (Camara’s decision to run after promising not to is what prompted the peaceful opposition demonstration) and told the President that the events of Sept. 28th were directly tied to him. Later this month, Patricia N. Moller, currently U.S. Ambassador to Burundi, should arrive in Conakry to serve as the new U.S. Ambassador. We can only hope that she is able to maintain pressure on Camara.

Most Western diplomats have concluded the violence has undercut any shed of credbility that Camara had once possessed, and do not forsee him continuing as head of the National Council for Democracy and Development (CNDD), the 32 senior and middle ranking military officers (and a few civilians) behind last December’s coup.

Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister of France, announced the suspension of military aid to Guinea, declaring that France could no longer work with Camara and urging intervention by the international community. France is supporting the initiative by the Commission of the African Union to send President Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso as mediator to address the Guinea crisis, and has encouraged the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the African Union, and the UN Commission on Human Rights to set up an international commission of inquiry.

Yesterday in Abuja, Nigeria, ECOWAS issued a Final Communique on the Guinea situation, stipulating that Guinea take a number of specific actions, including a pledge by Samara and other members of the junta that they would not stand for elections. The communique itself is written in quite blunt and uncharacteristically direct language, according to a retired State Department official who has worked extensively in West Africa. The official said that the quantity of strong documentary evidence of the violence was a significant contributing factor to the language — such as saying that “raped men, be treated and released from the hospital” — which is quite unusual and speaks to the chaos and anarchy that must have occurred on the ground.

Amid the disintegration of Guinea society, the junta announced a $7 billion infrastructure mining and oil deal with China. Guinea has the largest bauxite deposits in the world and is one of the poorest nations in Africa where people live on less than $1 per day.

Stay classy, Hu Jintao.

The Nobel Prize: If Obama Hadn’t Won. . .

The Nobel Committee’s unexpected announcement that President Obama would receive this year’s Peace Prize was an extraordinarily atypical choice. Not since the Committee awarded the 1971 prize to Willie Brandt, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (in recognition of his Ostpolitik strategy, which sought to engender a rapprochement between East and West Germany but which had not yet borne fruit) had the committee chosen hope over results. Obama can only hope that the Committee’s optimism proves as prophetic as it did in the case of Brandt.

I would have prefered that the Committee select a human rights activist this year, particularly given the large number of candidates who are more than worthy of the honor. In addition, Obama’s pragmatic approach to foreign policy has, at least to date, de-emphasized human rights in favor of other (albeit legitimate) goals. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said before her first trip to China that human rights would not be on the agenda, it set off alarm bells in the human rights community. Obama’s recent decision not to meet with the Dalai Lama during the latter’s recent trip to the United States didn’t help, nor did the Administration’s recent moves toward ending past Administrations’ policies of isolating Burma.

In each of these cases, pragmatists can make a plausible argument that human rights must take a back seat. The problem is that when human rights regularly finds itself not only in the back seat but the rear view mirror, those risking their freedom (and sometimes their lives) to bring about peaceful change in their countries might start wondering whether the United States intends to remain their advocate and friend.

So in the spirit of hope — and acknowledging that, in our opinion, Obama will prove himself worthy of the honor here are five individuals/groups who could have benefitted much more than the President:

Saad Ibrahim, a renowned human rights activist and professor of sociology at the American University in Cairo. Ibrahim is best-known leader of the Egyptian human rights movement and has helped inspire human rights movements throughout the Arab world. Over the past thirty years, Ibrahim has spent countless months and years in jail. He founded the Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, which focuses on democratization and political and social development. Ibrahim and his colleagues were jailed once again in 2001 on trumped-up charges. Ibrahim left Egypt in 2007, after serving 10 months of a seven-year sentence, when he obtained a foreign grant to study abroad. In May 2009, an appeals court overturned his conviction and he returned to Egypt just two weeks before President Obama delivered his ground-breaking speech in Cairo.

Mir-Hussain Moussavi and the Iranian people. As a candidate for President of the Islamic Republic of Iran during June 2009 elections, Moussavi found himself in the middle of a sudden peaceful uprising dominated by young Iranian voters after official election bodies and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei quickly declared incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the winner. What took place in the days and weeks that followed, captured the imagination of the entire world, if not the Iranian government. Iranians went into the streets by the thousands to protest what appeared to be a rigged election for Ahmadinejad. Persuaded that change was truly afoot, Moussavi grabbed the reins of leadership by urging daily protests, joining many of them, protected by others who feared he would be arrested. The protests continued, hundreds have been arrested and jailed. But when an Iranian police sniper murdered Neda, the protests escalated with crowds chanting her name. (Historically, the Prize has not gone to the deceased.)

Dr. Sima Samar, a physician and women’s human rights activist from Afghanistan, who is the Chairperson of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, and since 2005, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Sudan. Since the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, Dr. Samar has been working on behalf of the women and children. After losing her husband when fleeing the Soviets in 1987, Samar established ten clinics and four hospitals for women and children, as well as schools, serving more than 17,000 students. She worked in refugee camps for diplaced Afghanis, distributing food aid, information on hygiene, and family planning. She has been quoted as saying: “I’ve always been in danger, but I don’t mind. I believe we will die one day so I said let’s take the risk and help somebody else.”

Morton Tsvangirai, the prime minister of Zimbabwe, entered a sharing power agreement in February 2009 with controversial President Robert Mugabe after fighting against him and his despotic rule for ten years as the leader of the Movement for Democratic Change. Mugabe’s despotic rule of Zimbabwe has produced a society increasingly in chaos, including a destroyed economy that had such high inflation that one of Tsvangirai’s first acts was replacing the Zimbabwean dollar with the U.S. one. Only seven days following his election to the prime minister-ship, Tsvangirai’s wife of 31 years and his closest political advisor, Susan Tsvangirai, was killed in a car crash that is believed to have been orchestrated by Mugabe. Tsvangirai has a tough path to cut for bedraggled Zimbabweans, especially with Mugabe loyalists controlling the attorney general’s office and all security mechanisms. Yet since he has taken over the reins of government, industrial production jumped to the highest levels in years, evidenced by an economy that grew by 3.7 percent in the past year, according to the World Bank.

Liu Xiabo, Chinese dissident, academic and the co-author of the pro-democracy manifesto Charter 08, which called for expanded freedom of expression and elections in China, has been in prison since December 2008, although not formerly charged. According to media reports. Liu’s imprisonment appears to be in violation of China’s rule of law which allows for six months in jail without charges, yet when the government was pressed by his legal counsel in June, officials responded that Liu’s case was being properly handled. It is believed that Liu will eventually be charged with crimes based upon articles he published, but not because of his work on behalf of Charter 08. Liu is no stranger to China’s prisons, as he was jailed for his participation in the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests as well as repeatedly in the 1990s. Despite this harsh treatment, Liu remains one of China’s most outspoken critics.

I do hope Obama is true to his promise that he will accept the Nobel for all those around the world who walk, march and agitate for justice and will continue to honor these brave souls in words, but also by his deeds.

More Thoughts on Obama’s Peace Prize

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced this morning that it was awarding President Barack Obama the Peace Prize for “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples,” Obama became only the third sitting president to receive the honor. The other two were Woodrow Wilson, who received the honor in 1920 for his futile efforts to establish the League of Nations, and to Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 for his negotiating peace between Russia and Japan.

Only nine months into his administration, Obama apparently won the Prize for his tone in reaching out to Muslims, exemplified in his ground breaking speech delivered in Cairo earlier this year; his urging to the international community to address pressing global problems such as climate change and the reduction of nuclear weapons, when he recently addressed the UN General Assembly.

But those are as much aspirations as achievements; no one can argue that Obama won because of anything he’s done. In fact, as Charlie noted on Twitter, it would be a mistake to think Obama got it just because he wasn’t Bush (though let’s not kid ourselves — that most definitely was part of Committee’s thinking). It’s more accurate to say that Obama is being honored for turning the supertanker, so to speak — moving the United States away from the disruptive role it played in world politics and back toward its more traditional role as leader and partner.

Now, as the old saying goes, the proof will be in the pudding. The pressure on Obama to deliver on Afghanistan, Iraq, Middle East peace, climate change, and nonproliferation has just gotten significantly — perhaps exponentially — greater. And then there is that sticky issue of human rights, which seems to have taken a back seat to realism in this administration. More to come on that last point later.

Copenhagen: Climate Change and Activist Narcissism

My latest post over at Care2 is up. It’s all about this lovely little mess of a music video:

Here’s a taste:

[The video] is but the latest example of what I like to call activist narcissism, the impossibly naive belief that getting a bunch of beautiful people together to preen and act outraged is an adequate substitute for real change. If these musicians (and impossibly hot actresses) really want to effect change, perhaps they can stop flying around the world on private jets and living in 10,000 sq. ft mansions.

I blame Will.I.Am, the patron saint of the inspiring-multiple-trendy-musicians-and-impossibly-hot-actresses-who-think-they can-sing-mash-up. And as inspiring as “Yes We Can” may have been, can we agree to an immediate United Nations-brokered moratorium on such nonsense?

You can read the whole thing here.

What I don’t write about is the fact that they’ve trashed an awesomely cool song:

The best review of the new version is the one by Sam Roggeveen over at The Interpreter:

Not since the ‘Yes we can’ song recorded by Barack Obama’s celebrity chorus has there been such a sickening display of superiority and completely unmerited self-regard. They’ve even done away with the driving rock cred of Midnight Oil’s original and replaced it with a pop melange that’s as bland as milky tea, so there’s nothing to disguise the fatuous lyrics. Absolutely wretched.

Krugman: A Really, Really Long Period of Prolonged Economic Weakness

I believe the bars of Waterloo, Ontario did very well last night as CIGI ‘09 participants drowned their sorrows after a speech by Paul Krugman.

Actually I am told that non-economists like me found the speech depressing, while real economists found much to argue over in the remarks of the Nobel Prize winner, New York Times columnist, and Princeton professor.

“What a time,” Krugman began, “that is all I can say. For anyone interested in economics, these are fascinating times. But it is an awful time for anyone trying to make a living.”

Among the other things he said (paraphrased)…

This is not over. The acute phase of the crisis is probably over. The end of the world has been put on hold.
But now it is difficult to keep people focused on the fact that avoiding a depression is not enough.
I worry that we will have a really, really long period of prolonged economic weakness.
Nearly all phoenix-like recoveries (and more modest recoveries) have been driven by exports. But this is global. So unless we can find another planet to export to, we can’t all run trade surpluses. So the almost universal path of usual recovery has been closed of to us.
There is no obvious driver for a full recovery out there.
This would, therefore, be a really good time for someone to invent the railroad or the internet or something.
We may be stuck in the woods for some time
We do not have role models for the kind of recovery we need.
But let’s assume we recover. Someday. We still have the problem of a bad system.
So what do we need to do? I have a few thoughts and they all involve international arrangements.
For sure we need: better regulation of financial intermediaries, and we need international liquidity/lender of last resort arrangements.
And we arguably need international macro policy coordination and inflation targets (and the targets should be higher than we typically set).
But it is very doubtful that any of this will happen. In some ways we stepped back from the economic abyss too soon to get the reform we really need.
See a video blog with Krugman.

Following the speech, I said to Krugman that after delivering a message like this, he should buy us all a drink. He said, “Oh, I though I was actually more upbeat than usual.”

A final note, so far at CIGI ‘09 I have met three very good people from London’s Royal Institute of International Affairs, otherwise known as Chatham House. But I did not have the nerve to ask them if staff at Chatham House have to follow Chatham House rules 24/7. (OK, it is an inside joke for foreign policy geeks. The rest of you can Google it.)

(See CIGI ‘09 post #1 here.)

Roberto Unger: “Everything Is Possible”

I am spending most of my weekend in Waterloo, Ontario at the Centre for International Governance Innovation’s (CIGI) annual conference. For a multilateralism geek like me, CIGI is a wonderful place.

Waterloo is also the headquarters of Research in Motion (RIM), the Blackberry people. And indeed, CIGI exists largely because of the vision and generosity of RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie. Like Balsillie, CIGI is interested in improving our world’s system of multilateral cooperation.

CIGI ‘09 is titled “Towards a Global New Deal: Examining the Systemic Impacts of the Global Economic Crisis.” The opening night speech came from Nobel Prize winner and prolific author Jagdish Bhagwati of the Council on Foreign Relations and Columbia University.

Bhagwati gave a cheerful upbeat speech about the need for even more multilateral trade liberalization (and less protectionism) as we work our way out of the global financial crisis. For the record, he only mentioned Smoot-Hawley once. See a summary of the speech from Alan Alexandroff.

This morning’s speaker, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, is one of the smartest people in the world today. I had the pleasure of meeting him last year in his office in Brazil where he was the minister of strategic affairs, and we were producing the Stanley Foundation documentary “Brazil Rising.” Unger is now back to his full time post at Harvard University.

“The world is bent under the yoke of the dictatorship of no alternatives,” is how Unger began his remarks. Among other quotes (perhaps a bit paraphrased) I scribbled down during his dynamic speech:

The global financial crisis gave us a chance to overthrow the dictatorship of no alternatives. But the opportunity has now largely past.
Many countries today are ruled by people who want to be Franklin Delano Roosevelt but don’t know how.
There are two main kinds of progressives and leftists in the world today. First, the recalcitrant left with no real alternative to globalization. They just want to slow it down. Second, the resigned and surrendered left who accept globalization but propose to humanize it with the sugar of tax and transfer.
We need a third kind that proposes to fully reorganize the global economy with the aim of more socially inclusive arrangements.
Humanity cannot establish the creative growth it desires within international institutions as they currently exist.
We should not depend on crisis for advancement. The task of imagination is to do the work of crisis without the crisis.
See a summary of the speech from Alan Alexandroff and a CIGI video blog with Unger.

I agree with much of Unger’s critique and proposed solutions… in my heart. No doubt the dream of the world Unger envisions animates my professional work. But in my head, I am convinced progress is only possible through the evolution of the current structure. Meanwhile Unger only sees success coming from broad, transformative structural change. And so it goes.

Evidently my view of more evolution than revolution is fairly widespread. As evidence, Unger’s inspirational speech was followed by planned panels largely focused on improving rather than throwing out existing systems. This is not a critique. Rather it is an acknowledgment that our more mundane work is best done when we remember the larger context of why we care about these issues in the first place. And Unger delivered that reminder.

One final note. In the Q and A session Unger also reminded us of some truths about Brazil and how similar it is to the United States. These bear repeating here as we lick our 2016 Olympic wounds. Brazil and the U.S. share common colonial roots, westward expansion, the shame of slavery and mistreatment of indigenous people. Plus, Unger says, these are the two most unequal countries in the world when it comes to income distribution. Yet, in both countries people at every point in society continue to believe “everything is possible.”

Tonight, another Nobel Prize winner: Paul Krugman. (See CIGI ‘09 post #2 here.)

Modern China in Three Photos

From The Big Picture’s Coverage of the 60th Anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China:

A man watches a huge overhead screen showing soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army marching, at a shopping mall in Beijing, China, Thursday, Oct. 1, 2009.

(AP Photo/Andy Wong)

There ya go: prosperity and authoritarianism in one nice tidy package.

I am struck by the fact that numerous media outlets in the west called yesterday “China’s 60th Birthday.”

Uh, no.

The last time I checked, China has been around for something like 5,000 years, give or take a century. October 1st marked the 60th anniversary of the founding of the current regime, known as the People’s Republic of China.

The spectacle of the anniversary celebration actually manages to exceed last year’s Opening and Closing Ceremonies. What I’ve not been able to find out is whether Zhang Yimou — the mastermind behind the Olympics events (and apologist for North Korea) — was responsible for this one.

And lest we forget, compare and contrast. First, from yesterday:

PLA tanks roll past Tiananmen Square in a massive parade to mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing October 1, 2009.

(REUTERS/Nir Elias)

Second, from twenty years ago:

The Chinese are awfully good at spectacle, but they haven’t quite got irony yet.

Mahmoud and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week

Please check out my latest Care2 post, which looks what a really, really, really crappy week Mahmoud Ahmedinejad just had. Here’s a taste:

Now [the second nuclear facility] is not merely a small building in the desert. Nope. It’s a Dr.-Evil’s-secret-complex-in-the-mountain kind of facility. And the Administration went public at least in part to demonstrate to the Iranians that it had the intelligence capacity to find out about such stuff. In response, Ahmadinejad canceled subsequent media appearances, including a press conference scheduled to take place this afternoon.

Maybe Ahmadinejad can convince the West that it’s an amusement park ride.

You can read the whole thing here.

If you’re curious where the photo comes from, check out my post from last summer about Iran’s secret missile photoshop project.

Obama the Communitarian

Apologies for the delay in getting this up, but I wanted to give priority to Tanya’s very important post on the events in Belgrade and Keith’s commentary on the G-20.

Yesterday, I posted over at Care2, offering my thoughts on Obama’s UN speech. I urge you to go read the whole thing, but I wanted to highlight one point:

[In his UN speech,] Obama used language consistent with communitarianism, a political philosophy that believes that individual rights must be balanced by the needs and interests of the community. Communitarians argue that each community is shaped by its culture, but also believe that a strong civil society is a prerequisite for a strong community.

Now take a look at some of what Obama said during the speech:

“We can only reach [a future of peace an dprosperity] if we recognize that all nations have rights, but all nations have responsibilities as well. That is the bargain that makes [the world] work. That must be the guiding principle of international cooperation. . . .The United States stands ready to begin a new chapter of international cooperation — one that recognizes the rights and responsibilities of all nations. And so with confidence in our cause, and with a commitment to our values, we call on all nations to join us in building the future that our people so richly deserve.”

As I noted in my post, it’s all there — the focus on balancing rights and responsibilities, the emphasis on needing to work together to achieve common goals, the challenge to other nations to the burden of solving the world’s most pressing problems. Obama went out of his way to call on every nation live up to the UN’s founding vision — what he called “the wisdom that nations could advance their interests by acting together instead of splitting apart.”

It’s an interesting way to approach foreign policy. The danger, of course is that communitarianism by its very nature requires consent, which other countries — including America’s partners and allies — may not want to grant. Without it, it will be much harder to accomplish Obama’s vision.

That said, I think it’s a smart move by Obama, essentially giving the world a vision reasserts American leadership while acknowledging past American mistakes. John Bolton may not like it (surprise!), but we’ve seen more progress on nukes in the past 72 hours than we had seen over the past nine years.

The first major test of Obama’s new approach will be Iran — especially after this morning’s news. Obama has laid the groundwork, and others — particularly the Russians — appear willing to go along.

So far.

Is This Any Way To Run A Planet?

By sunset today, the world will have seen an exhausting four G-8/G-20 global summits within just 10 months: November 2008 in Washington, DC; April 2009 in London; July 2009 in Italy; and now the Pittsburgh gathering. And what do we have to show for it?

There is certainly a case to be made that, over the last year, these world leaders formed a “crisis committee” which displayed a surprising amount of flexibility in dealing with the global financial collapse. I will leave it for others to grade that performance, but of course, there is no way to know what would have happened without these interventions.

As the dust settles on this whirlwind of activity, however, it is past time to ask: Is this any way to run a planet?

The United Nations received more attention than usual this week as it hosted Barack Obama for his first speech and for his role chairing a Security Council meeting on nuclear issues. But again, coverage and commentary was mostly consumed with the presence of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Muammar Qaddafi. The flaws of the UN, namely giving prominence to rogue leaders, were more salient than its ability to solve global problems.

The G-20 was far more the focus of serious discussions and an agenda relevant to lives around the world. And now we are seeing the first stages of agreement on how these high level summits should play out in the future.

There are really two major issues which need to be addressed sooner rather than later.

First, who will sit at the table? The G-8 is too narrow and too homogenous (and too void of China) to be taken seriously any longer as the world’s boardroom. The G-20, by contrast, represents every region of the world and includes 80% of the world’s population and economy. Maybe 20 is not the magical number for the new global summit regime, but the ultimate membership number will be far closer to 20 than to 8. And countries who find themselves at this top level table should understand and take seriously the role they have in looking out for global, rather than merely national, interests. My friend Alan Alexandroff explains the relevant issues.

And second, what should this new G group do? I believe a group this powerful should not waste their time on anything less than the most pressing problems facing the planet. And from among those they should tackle only the most intractable. Problems which rise to the G level should be those which can’t be solved without heads-of-state leadership and direction. And this includes economic issues, security issues, and more. My colleague David Shorr explains the level of expectation… and accountability… we should apply to the G summits.

The new G arrangements being discussed in Pittsburgh could be a step in the right direction. In the end, public pressure will be vital to get the G reform we really need. All of us should raise our expectations of these leaders, remind them of their responsibilities, and hold them accountable for the commitments they make.

Couric to Ahmadinejad: “Is This A Lie?”

Sometimes it’s better to just start with the video (h/t):

Ahmadinejad is a lot of things — a dictator, a liar, a hate-monger, a killer, and a buffoon. Watching him smile while Couric showed him that picture eliminated any doubt in my mind that he is also a very dangerous psychopath.

Kudos to Couric for calling him out and doing it in the most devastating way possible.

Serbia: Shoved Back in the Closet

It was a very unpleasant weekend for LGBT people in the city of Belgrade, who were “warned” it was too dangerous to participate in the second Belgrade Gay Pride march in less than a decade. Last Thursday, a French man had his head bashed in by football club hooligans. Four days later, they went after an Australian man, who allegedly “looked gay.”

The government was so intimidated by these Serbian skinheads and ultra-nationalists, who have for months have warned on Neo-Nazi websites (like Storm Front — see its Serbian thread) and in Serbian media (according to a Women in Black listserv that was provided to me) that they would do everything possible to prevent the march from happening.

Despite earlier statements to the contrary, Prime Minister Mirko Cvetkovic pulled the plug on the march early Saturday morning — twenty-four hours before it was supposed to take place — during a meeting with the Belgrade Gay Pride’s organizing committee.

(Translation: “It is Time for Equality”)

So much for it being time for equality.

It didn’t have to be this way. President Boris Tadic, who is hell bent on entering the European Union via the Stabilization and Association Process (not withstanding that little problem of outstanding ICTY warrants for fugitives Ratko Mladić and Goran Hadžić) had announced his support for the march last Friday:

The state will do everything to protect people, whatever their national, religious, sexual or political orientation, and no group must resort to threats and violence, or take justice into its own hands and jeopardize the lives of those who think or are different.

And yet ultimately in the end, the state did not do everything it could to support the march. Nice words by Tadic, yet empty and completely unfulfilled.

In the end, a combination of poor planning (by Minister of Interior and Deputy Prime Minister Ivica Dacic, who had promised adequate police protection for the Pride parade as early as August 24) and political spinelessness were enough to doom the event. Dacic went so far as to suggest that it would be better not to hold the pride parade altogether so as to prevent people from being hurt and property destroyed. He said the parade had not been banned, but simply postponed.

So much for human rights for all.

But Dadic did not reveal the full story, which is much more unsettling. The organizers, who had hired security expert Zoran Dragisic to prepare their own security plan in order to maintain order and assist the police in doing their job, were told that if they went ahead with the march without the government’s backing, they would be held responsible for any and all damage done to private and public property.

Comments from another list serve communication by “Ana” tells the full story:

The organisers commissioned a security risk study and worked intensively with the police and other state institutions in order to obtain their support for the purpose of guaranteeing the safety of the Pride participants. The importance of the safety issue cannot be overstated given that in the last month before Pride would have taken place. . .an aggressive hate-speech campaign was launched by. . .the neo-fascist groups Obraz [Honor] and Srpski narodni pokret 1389 [Serb Popular Movement 1389, a reference to the 1389 Battle of Kosovo].

I saw with my own eyes Belgrade covered with graffiti calling for a ban of the Pride [march], the murder of gay people, and the their expulsion from Serbia. “We are waiting for you” and “The streets of Belgrade will be covered with blood, but the Pride will not take place” are two examples of the [graffiti] message,s which [also] called for lynch[ing] of the people taking part in the Pride. So, not only [were] the people who wrote these. . .examples of hate-speech. . .not ready to allow their LGBT fellow-citizens the freedom of love, but they were even actively inciting violence against the LGBT population.”

The Pride committee was right when it said that “The Republic of Serbia has capitulated. We have not.”

This is the second time in the last eight years that a gay pride march was preempted by right-wing violence. In 2001, a march was disrupted by ultranationalists, many of them in Cetnik berets and beards, who attacked participants.

So much for safety for all.

This time around, ultra-nationalists openly celebrated their victory in stopping the march, gleefully pronouncing the cancellation of the march as “a great victory for normal Serbia.” The Serbian Orthodox Church also condemned the march, calling it a “Sodom and Gomorrah parade” but did not openly embrace violence. Nonetheless, march organizers believed that the church’s position could have helped incite violence.

The problem of violent ultranationalism, wrapped in the robes of an militantly reactionary Serbian Orthodox church, is a major problem for the Tadic government. Despite the government’s arrest of thirty-seven ultra-nationalists on Monday for assembling in the center of Belgrade in defiance of a recently passed law banning such gatherings (a law that is somewhat dubious from a civil libertarian standpoint), a much more pervasive problem remains that Serbian politicians and leaders must address head-on: the deeply embedded criminal legacy that exists in Serbian society as a consequence of the Slobodan Milosevic years.

Milosevic permitted para-military groups to proliferate and act with impunity. He supported — and often benefited politically from — ultra-nationalists like Vojislav Šešelj (who led the Serbian Radical Party and is now standing trial in the Hague for his alleged war crimes) and the notorious Željko Ražnatovic, (a.k.a. “Arkan,” who led “Arkan’s Tigers,” known for raping and plundering entire Bosniak villages and who was assassinated by other criminal elements in January 2000). The culture of hate Milosevic fomented and sustained continues to haunt Serbia to this day.

If Tadic really wants Serbia to join the EU on his watch, he will have to accomplish what no one else has before him has had the political will to do: clean up Serbia’s criminal and violent nationalistic elements once and for all.

Now is the time for Tadic to lead not by word but by deed. Only genuine and concrete enforcement of human rights for all Serbians — regardless of their sexual orientation — can begin to scrub away the stain that so permeates Serbian society.

Turning the Tide on Nuclear Security

The most tangible and urgent danger facing the developed world today is arguably the threat of terrorists obtaining nuclear material. Highly enriched uranium could be used to craft a crude fission device of significant magnitude. Plutonium or low enriched uranium could be used for a “dirty bomb” spreading radiation and panic.

The possibility of so-called “loose nuclear material” falling into almost anyone’s hands was driven home by this piece in the Washington Post earlier this week. And, thank goodness, it is a threat taken seriously by the Obama Administration which has made securing all of this material over the next four years a top priority.

Loose nuclear material, nuclear nonproliferation, and overall disarmament are on the agenda today as 15 heads-of-state meet at the United Nations Security Council. U.S. President Barack Obama chairs the historic meeting which is expected to pass a meaningful resolution. (UPDATE: The resolution passed unanimously. Full text here.)

Today’s action is just one step in a long path to lower nuclear dangers around the world. The U.S. decision to drop a missile defense plan to be based in eastern Europe has already lowered tensions. (One wag said we are getting a good deal of benefit for giving up a failed system intended to defend us against a threat which no longer existed.)

This new atmosphere will likely be beneficial to talks between the United States and Russia to drastically cut their strategic nuclear arsenals. Something both sides desperately want to do, but in the real world can only accomplish in tandem.

And if a U.S.-Russia deal can really be reached, watch out. Big global change could be in store.

All the other nuclear powers in the world, when asked why they won’t reduce their arsenals or cooperate more on nonproliferation, say, “Why should we when the U.S. and Russia won’t reduce theirs?” Well if that roadblock is cleared, all kinds of new agreements and arrangements will be on the table.

Imagine the possibilities if this is the context for the global summit on nuclear security being held by President Obama in Washington, DC next March. We may very well look back on September of 2009 as the moment when the nuclear tide finally began to turn.

(More from the Stanley Foundation on nuclear security here.)

Red Dawn: Australia’s Climate Crisis

I hope to have some thoughts on Obama’s speech to the UN a little later today, but right now I want to focus on what may be the most underreported story of the day: what’s happening in Australia.

Take a look at this. It’s not Mars.

Sydney woke up this morning to a massive dust storm that turned the sky red and sent hundreds to hospitals with breathing problems. The Associated Press, via the NYT:

Australia’s worst dust storm in 70 years blanketed the heavily populated east coast Wednesday in a cloud of red Outback grit, nearly closed the country’s largest airport and left millions of people coughing and sputtering in the streets.

No one was hurt as a result of the pall that swept in overnight, bringing an eerie orange dawn to Sydney, but ambulance services reported a spike in emergency calls from people with breathing difficulties, and police warned drivers to take it easy on the roads.

Dust clouds blowing east from Australia’s dry interior — parched even further by the worst drought on record — covered dozens of towns and cities in two states as strong winds snatched up tons of topsoil, threw it high into the sky and carried it hundreds of miles (kilometers).

The Australian provides an idea of how bad the air quality was:

Paramedics were called to help 469 patients suffering from breathing problems from 6am yesterday — 218 of them in Sydney, where particulate matter brought by the dust storm peaked at more than 15,500 micrograms per cubic metre of air.

A reading of more than 100mcg/m3 is normally taken to indicate poor-quality air, and more than 200 is ranked as hazardous to human health under the air quality index used by the [New South Wales] government. Yet officials said readings yesterday were “off the chart” and throughout the day remained several times higher than the worst levels that would normally be seen in a bushfire, of 300 to 500mcg/m3.

Last night, even as the dust began to disperse, the readings were still more than 3000 in most parts of Sydney, reaching 4750 in the lower Hunter region and 4231 in the central tablelands.

To give you an idea of how bad this is, people were worried in the leadup to the 2008 Olympics that Beijing would have particluate matter levels of between 200 and 300 mcg/m3. Here are the readings taken by the BBC in the days leading up to the Opening Ceremonies:

During the storm today Sydney was 550 times worse than the worst pre-Olympic reading.

As Jared Diamond noted in his book Collapse, Australia is one of the most fragile modern societies in existence. Although this video (from Phillip Adams of the Australian Broadcast Corporation) is two years old, it provides a pretty good idea of the challenges the country faces:

As Adams notes, Australia is “looking down the barrel of a disaster.” He talks about the potential of a Katrina in Australia, but as today’s events show, there are multiple potential crises. Right now, the biggest challenge the country faces is not water, but the lack thereof. Its entire infrastructure is predicated on a water table that, given weather patterns, is unsustainable. The country is quite literally drying up.

Before the day was over, the Australia’s red dawn had passed. Below are two shots of downtown Sydney. The lower one was during the storm; the upper one was taken from the same spot later that afternoon:

The dust storm may be over, but Australia’s more fundamental climate challenges aren’t going anywhere.

The Big Picture has an amazing roundup of photos taken during the storm — well worth your time.

Photo 1: ArmyofDolls2009 via Flickr, using a CC BY-ND 2.0 license.

Photo 2: ArmyofDolls2009 via Flicker using a CC BY-ND 2.0 license.

UN General Assembly Opens

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will deliver opening remarks to the General Assembly in New York beginning at approximately 9 a.m. ET this morning.

United States President Barack Obama will speak at approximately 9:45 a.m. ET

You can view live coverage online at: www.un.org/webcast

Update: President Obama said, “Those who used to chastise America for acting alone in the world cannot now stand by and wait for America to solve the world’s problems alone.” His full remarks are here.

Update 2: Muammar Qaddafi’s scheduled 15 minute speech ran for 100 minutes. Joshua Keating at ForeignPolicy.com has an insightful summary.

Update 3: Full text of all UNGA opening session speeches are available here.

President Obama’s Global Governance Tour

President Obama will, in the space of 48 hours this week, address the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly, chair a rare “heads-of-state” level meeting of the United Nations Security Council, and host a meeting of the G20 leading nations in Pittsburgh.

At the General Assembly on Wednesday, I expect a cross between the president’s April speech in Prague and the one given by US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice last month at New York University. If nothing else, the image of Barack Obama behind that green marble podium, representing the United States of America in front of all the other world leaders, will send an unmistakable message about the nature of our democracy.

Of course the most newsworthy items at the UNGA will likely be President Obama’s Tuesday meeting and photo with the Israeli prime minister and the president of the Palestinian Authority… and his efforts to avoid crossing paths with President Ahmadinejad of Iran and Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi.

As for the Security Council, the topic will be nuclear arms control. And the president has been quite forceful on this issue. He campaigned on deep strategic arms cuts with the Russians and a plan to secure all loose nuclear material (the stuff terrorists can get) within the next four years. Reports say the president rejected the first revised nuclear arms plan from the Pentagon because it didn’t go far enough to reduce our arsenal. And last week’s announcement scrapping the missile defense shield in eastern Europe could open the door for the broadest global cooperation on nukes in a generation. Thursday’s Security Council meeting will be the first indicator. A draft resolution to be debated at the session has been leaked.

Finally, Air Force One leaves New York Thursday for Pittsburgh and the G20 summit. Note that this is the fourth global summit in 10 months. We had the G20 in Washington in November and then again in London in April. July was the G8 (which actually had about 30 countries in attendance) in Italy. There is a very real case of summit fatigue in major global capitals.

Some have already set low expectations for this G20 session. Protectionism is on the rise and bonus pay (a populist issue with no real impact on the global economy) may steal the spotlight. But I will be reading other tea leaves in the Pittsburgh confab.

The G meetings have become the red hot center of 21st century global governance.

These rotating, informal gatherings have the flexibility needed for today’s fluid policy environment. The G8 is moving to include more of the world’s rising powers, and the G20 has proven nimble in the face of a global financial crisis. The real tests will therefore be a) can these bodies continue to show leadership even after the current crisis fades, b) can the Gs find ways to keep moving beyond photo-ops into further accountability for their pledges, and c) can they find meaningful ways to interface with the legitimate, universal institutions (like the United Nations) to implement and lock in real international cooperation?

I plan to write more on all of this as the week unfolds.

Missile Congeniality

This post is jointly authored by Tanya and Charlie.

Unless you’ve been living in a cave with Osama, you probably know by now that President Obama announced on Thursday that he was ending the so-called “missilie shield” plan devised by his predecessor.

Timing is everything in life, but it looks like the Pentagon and the White House had a meeting of minds. Updated intelligence made it pretty clear that Iran will not soon have the capacity to launch inter-continental ballistic missiles on the U.S.

This was Obama’s first major national security decision outside of Afghanistan and Iraq, and it further reinforced the widespread perception that he is a hard-headed realist when it comes to foreign policy. That was further reinforced by the fact that Brent Scowcroft, Bush 41’s national security advisor and the most eminent realist in either party, quickly praised the decision:

I strongly approve of President Obama’s decision regarding missile defense deployments in Europe. I believe it advances U.S. national security interests, supports our allies, and better meets the threats we face.

Setting aside the lovely press release-ease for a moment, Scowcroft couldn’t have done much more to help Obama at a time when most conservatives were accusing him of appeasement (more on that later).

But if Scowcroft liked it, the Russians liked it even more. In response, they announced that it would not deploy its Iskander tactical missiles in Kaliningrad — which happens to be just a short flight to Berlin and other popular tourist destinations.Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said he “valued” the U.S. decision; Prime Minister-for-life Vladimir Putin was equally celebratory, saying that he hoped that Obama’s “correct and brave decision [would] be be followed by others.”

The Obama team is not abandoning missile defense altogether; it remains concerned about Iran’s short- and medium-range missile capacity. The White House argues that its new approach will be “stronger, swifter, smarter,” with plans to start deploying existing SM-3 interceptors using the sea-based Aegis system in 2011. An improved version will follow in 2015, using both ship- and land-based systems.

Turkey is one possible home for the 2015 deployment. It remains a strategic player within NATO but it also is friendly with Iran. Coincidentally, Turkey happens to be shopping for long range missile defense systems at the moment, which I’m sure has absolutely nothing to do with their candidacy. Unless, of course, it does.

(One brief aside: does anyone else note the irony here? Back in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union deployed missiles to Cuba in part because the United States had deployed missiles in Turkey. Ultimately, the crisis was resolved when the two countries agreed on a quid pro quo withdrawal while denying publicly that they were doing any such thing. Now, nearly fifty years later, the Russians are happy to see missiles redeployed to Turkey. Somewhere, Khrushchev and Kennedy are laughing.)

The one surprise is that Albania — yes Albania — is a candidate to host some of the missiles. Not only is Albania now a member of NATO (something that somehow escaped the notice of almost everyone but Albanians), it has 362 kilometers of coastline and four cities with the capacity to host American cruiser and destroyers.

Albania is eager to join the EU , hoping that its membership in NATO will help it make its case (not that that has helped Turkey, which has been a member of NATO since 1952 and is nowhere near EU membership). Sali Berisha, Albania’s ambitious prime minister (and a former communist), no doubt would be delighted to host NATO ships in its ports to shipborne Aegis systems.

The only person not happy is Polish President Lech Kaczynski, who faces a tough reelection battle next year and who had trumpeted the missile shield as evidence of his administration’s ability to defend Poland against Russia. Fakt, a right-wing Polish tabloid sympathetic to Kacynski, screamed “Betrayal! The USA has sold us to the Russians and stabbed us in the back.” Unfortunately for Kaczynski, the Polish people don’t seem to share such sentiments — a new poll released Saturday shows that 48 percent of respondents thought that the Administration’s decision was good for Poland, and only 31 percent disagreed.

The Czechs — the other supposed beneficiaries — were largely indifferent to the news that they would not have a missile shield. This may be in part because the decision to deploy missiles to the Czech Republic was largely designed to reinforce the Bush claim that the system wasn’t aimed at the Russians.

One of the best parts of the White House’s decision was its work behind the scenes to coordinate the decision with NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen. Shortly after the U.S. announcement, Rasmussen called for a new strategic partnership that would entail a “joint review” with Moscow of global security challenges within the NATO framework:

Mr. Rasmussen called on Moscow for a “genuine new beginning in our relationship, in our own interests and that of the entire international community”. Referring to the US missile defense rethink, he said “the new plans will make capabilities ready sooner than the previous plans and will provide us with broader coverage.”

“There is no reason to fear [that] these plans will weaken the defense of any ally. “Improved relations between NATO and Russia will also be to the benefit of our eastern allies,” he said.

Meanwhile, back in Teapartystan, neoconservatives and 9/12 activists came together in a rare show of unity to denounce the White House decision as appeasement. Bloggers and politicians alike dragged out the increasingly hoary Munich metaphor, accusing Obama of caving to both the Russians and the Iranians.

John McCain — the same man who, one year ago, was willing to use U.S. force to prop up a corrupt regime in Georgia — wasn’t much better. He called Obama’s plan “untested” (as opposed to the vaporware that the Bushies were pushing) despite the fact that it is the same Aegis missile technology currently being used on the — wait for it — USS John McCain.

In the end, Obama chose pragmatism, deciding to abandon a fantastic scheme in favor of engagement with Russia — and at the same time, sustaining efforts to contain Iran’s missile capacity. To put it another way, Obama understood the distinction between strategy –building a stable relationship with Russia — and tactics — countering the threat of Iranian medium- and short-range missiles. That’s something the Bush Administration never really got the hang of in its eight years.

Photo: Public domain via Wikipedia

Saturday Surprise: A Breakthrough in the Middle East?

Not to put too fine a point on it: Holy Crap.

Via the apparently sleepless and time-off-less Laura Rozen:

THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
__________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release September 19, 2009

Statement from White House press secretary Robert Gibbs

On Tuesday, September 22, President Obama will host a trilateral meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The trilateral meeting will be immediately preceded by bilateral meetings between President Obama and the two leaders. These meetings will continue the efforts of President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and Special Envoy George Mitchell to lay the groundwork for the relaunch of negotiations, and to create a positive context for those negotiations so that they can succeed.

“It is another sign of the President’s deep commitment to comprehensive peace that he wants to personally engage at this juncture, as we continue our efforts to encourage all sides to take responsibility for peace and to create a positive context for the resumption of negotiations,” said Special Envoy Mitchell.

Wow. Talk about close-hold. I don anyone sawcoming. Just earlier this week there were several articles suggesting that the negotiations were stalled and that nothing was going to happen soon (sorry — posting quickly; will try to get the links up later). So much for that theory.

If George Mitchell actually is the one pulling this off (and assuming that it actually leads to something more than another faux deal), think about what that means: he will go down as one great — if not the greatest — peacemakers of our time. First Northern Ireland, and now this. And with little fanfare and even less attention.

Punkistan

Via Londonstani over at Abu Muquwama, the rise of Pakistani Punk. First a band called Bimbu Sauce (read Londonstani’s original post to get an idea of just what the band’s name means).

Next, co-VEN. Londonstani has a link to the video for “Ready to Die.” Here’s a version recorded live in Lahore that translates those part of the song that are in Urdu:

Apparently MTV has a channel on Pakistani cable, but it looks like most of what they play are variations on Bollywood or Eurodisco (plus one particularly strange Beatles rip-off). In fact, all they’re missing is Kanye crashing their version of the VMAs.

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