Category: Politics

Posted on

[bringing the war home]

Major Eric Wolf of the United States Marine Corps is a logistics officer who has served a six-month tour in Iraq. He’s also my brother-in-law — my wife’s sister’s husband — and he and three of his four kids are staying with us at the moment. They’re moving from his Washington, DC, posting to Camp Pendleton in California, and they’ve decided to do it as a drive across the country in the family van. (His wife and one of his daughters chose to fly instead.)

Shortly after his arrival at our apartment, Eric dropped the news that he’s going back to Iraq almost immediately after he gets to Camp Pendleton. Last time he flitted around the country collecting information on how units were using their equipment in various contexts, but this time he’ll hopefully have a safer job. Still, I’m not happy to have yet another family member in a Middle Eastern war zone (my brother Effie is still in Safed, though he’s heading for Jerusalem tomorrow). This morning I awoke from dark dreams of a first visit to Israel that, instead of giving me the warm and relaxed feeling virtually all Jews get when they go there, was full of falling bombs and foreboding.

All day I’ve had John Kerry on the brain — not John Kerry the presidential candidate, but John Kerry the antiwar protester in 1971:

Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say they we have made a mistake … We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? (Full Testimony | Video Excerpt)

Substitute “Iraq” for “Vietnam,” and these words could’ve been spoken by a soldier yesterday.

Of course, there’s an easy answer to Kerry’s questions: lie to the troops. According to a recent Zogby poll, “Nearly nine of every 10 [US troops surveyed in Iraq] — 85 percent — said the US mission is ‘to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks,’ while 77 percent said they believe the main or a major reason for the war was ‘to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.'” Even so, “an overwhelming majority of 72 percent of American troops in Iraq think the US should exit the country within the next year.”

This is the situation into which my brother-in-law is being tossed, this time with no particular mandate, but just to fill some boxes on a troop chart.

Posted on

[the race for secretary-general]

Yesterday the Security Council held an informal straw poll to see where they stand on the various declared candidates for UN Secretary-General — Kofi Annan’s term ends on December 31 of this year — and Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon of South Korea got the most endorsements.

To understand what this means, it might be helpful to back up and explain how the Secretary-General is chosen. According to Article 97 of Chapter XV of the UN Charter, “The Secretary-General shall be appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.” On the surface, this makes it look like the power resides with the General Assembly, but in reality the Security Council recommends just one candidate, which the General Assembly then approves or not. So it’s the Security Council’s views that matter most.

In the secret-ballot straw poll, each Security Council member could check “encourage,” “discourage” or “no opinion” next to the name of each declared candidate. (The declared candidates are Thai Deputy Prime Minister Surakiart Sathirathai, former Under-Secretary-General Jayantha Dhanapala of Sri Lanka, and Indian novelist and UN Department of Public Information head Shashi Tharoor.) Minister Ban received 12 “encourage” votes, one “discourage,” and two “no opinions.” Tharoor came in a close second.

So who’s the “discourage,” eh? If I had to guess, I would say Japan, whose attempts to join the Security Council as a permanent member South Korea has vigorously resisted. But who knows?

Posted on

[bombs in israel]

Northern Israel is under attack, and this includes the town of Safed, where my brother is living with a family friend. He tells me he was awakened at 2:30 a.m. by a blast about three blocks away. He’s now in the hills out beyond the city, which are hopefully less of a target than the city center. But with bombs raining down and the violence escalating, it’s a scary situation. Hopefully he’ll get himself to Jerusalem soon, out of range of the rockets, where he can stay with friends. For the moment though, he seems to be stuck. I’m chatting with him now.

Posted on

[a change at gitmo?]

According to the New York Times, the Pentagon today has decided to apply the Geneva Conventions to all detainees worldwide.

If this is actually what happens, or even if it becomes officially the standard by which detentions are expected to be conducted, it would be an enormous shift in executive policy and a welcome rollback of one of the worst moral and strategic failures of the Bush administration.

The article itself, however, is less than clearcut on the administration’s policy change. The announcement of the new approach is attributed only to “a senior defense official.” Beyond that, the article is mostly a murky discussion of the recent Hamdi v. Rumsfeld decision and potential Congressional responses to it. (The BBC’s breaking news report is much sparer.)

Unfortunately, I’m not sure even the Geneva Conventions ban either rendition or secret prisons.

As an odd little side note, the Geneva Conventions prescribe payment for all prisoners, set at rates of Swiss francs per month that made some kind of sense when the Conventions were first signed. That means that each detainee below the rank of sergeant — which presumably all of them are, in the present case — is entitled to 8 Swiss francs, or roughly $6.50, per month. The real question, of course, is whether we make the pay retroactive so that detainees can collect the $350-odd that’s coming to them.

Posted on

[why nepal doesn’t matter]

From Overheard in the Office:

Rep: The King of Nepal has declared martial law and has cut off all
communication, so I cannot check the status of that rug order…

As a rule, if the major economic impact on the rest of the world of a country’s total collapse is a delay in carpet shipments, nobody is going to care very much that the country is collapsing. A tiny hiccup in oil delivery can shake the world, and big industrial players and consumer markets are important too. But poor little Nepal isn’t even a terribly major carpet producer. Its main product is itself, in the form of tourism, but political instability has a way of killing tourism. So now Nepal’s major product is, I guess, nothing. (And no, you can’t build an export economy out of tiger balm, wooden chess boards and tiny violins.) Which means that no one beyond Nepal is going to do much about its current crisis — unless, of course, Nepal threatens the economies of larger, more developed nations (cf. Afghanistan, an economic basket case if ever there was one, but a basket case that managed to close the New York Stock Exchange). If you’re hunting for international intervention and aid, exporting terrorism is evidently more effective than exporting nothing.

Let’s just hope dirt-poor sub-Saharan Africans and Latin Americans don’t figure this out, or we’re in for exceedingly nasty weather.

Posted on

[can we have our tragedy back now?]

So the Bush camp has rolled out its first campaign ads, and guess what they’re about?

One of the most infuriating things about the Bush administration has been the way it has stolen 9/11, so that it has become more and more difficult for people to mourn sincerely — whenever the subject of the attacks comes up, it’s now inextricably tied to Bush’s policies and propaganda.

But if the Bushies think they get to own 9/11 forever, they’re wrong. Press coverage of their first big campaign offensive has focused on how offensive the campaign feels to the victims of 9/11. The White House no longer controls the media storyline.

Let’s hope the criticism continues.

Posted on

[why i live in new york city]

In the warmth on Saturday, Jenny and I went for a long walk through Prospect Park. On our way we were passed by a Haitian protest supporting Aristide and denouncing American and French intervention.

The next day, I went to a John Edwards rally at Long Island University. On a stage full of soldiers, black people and Chassidim, he gave exactly the same stump speech he always gives, except he said he was glad to be at LIU and welcomed all the Deaniacs to his camp. I could hardly see him — the stage was actually lower than the gallery where we all crowded around — and the whole thing had the surreal atmosphere of being inside of a giant infomercial. Which is, more or less, my problem with Edwards: like a good infomercialist, he has one pretty good speech that he performs pretty well. And that’s it.

Probably the best thing about the whole event was waiting on line next to a Trinidadian woman who wandered up, asked what we were lined up for, asked if it was free, and declared, “Well, I’m stayin’ then.” She shared her views on all the candidates. She liked “that little guy from Ohio,” and she didn’t like Kerry, and she thought Edwards was okay, but she was going to vote for Sharpton on Tuesday because “He brings them to the table,” and without him, she said, the candidates would never have talked about Haiti or about black people. She has a point. Then she started in about her great dream of one day visiting Czechoslovakia (never mind that it doesn’t exist anymore). She’d heard Prague was beautiful, and that was where she wanted to go.

After the Edwards rally, I met Jenny at Satalla in Manhattan to hear Huun-Huur-Tu, the throat-singing quartet from Tuva, a small republic within the Russian Federation somewhere off near Mongolia. Playing soulful folk songs that are all about horses, they create fascinating harmonic overtones in their throats — something roughly like a Tibetan monk’s growl, or perhaps an astonishingly lovely burp, that manages to ascend into the higher registers and make melodies there that dance over the earthy strains of their bowed and plucked instruments. If they come to your town, go hear them; recordings don’t do the music justice.

Posted on

[electronic voting]

My friend R over at Ambiguous.org has for a while been talking about the dangers inherent in new electronic voting systems, which could potentially be hacked. Well, R, you are now joined by this New York Times article:

For more than a year, [leading electronic-ballot manufacturer] Diebold … has been fighting conspiracy theories popularized on the Internet that say its Jetsons-at-the-polling-place wares serve as cover for an ongoing effort to stuff electronic ballot boxes on behalf of the Republican Party.

Diebold executives, along with outside computer security experts who are seeking to fix the voting machines, say the conspiracy theories are bunk. The company’s chief executive, Walden W. O’Dell, did not help matters, though, when he sent out a fund-raising letter for the Bush campaign last summer saying he was committed to “helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes for the president next year.”

Sure, it’s an administration with a fuzzy record on fair balloting. And sure, it’s an impossible-to-audit new voting system developed by a company committed to this administration’s reelection. But surely democracy is too precious to everyone involved for them to tweak it. So let’s all just trust the powers that be to guarantee our freedom, safety and democracy. Because the price of freedom is eternally trusting our leaders. Isn’t that how it works?