Roundup: Media's Take
This is where we excerpt articles from the media that take a historical approach to events in the news.
Paul Krugman: 21st Century America is Starting to Look Like 18th Century Poland
Pratap Chatterjee: Could Pakistan 2010 Go the Way of Cambodia 1969?
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Hollis Robbins: The Minstrel Origins of "Who Dat?"
Source: The Root (2-9-10)
Is it OK to say “Who Dat?” Now that the Saints have won the Super Bowl, the phrase (if anyone had missed it before) is ubiquitous, and the question is both moot and even more pressing.
The answer is yes, it’s OK.
The phrase has its roots in vernacular poetry of the 19th century and was popularized by black entertainers. The documented history of the phrase begins with the African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), famous for poems such as “We Wear the Mask” and the line “I know why the caged bird sings” (from the poem “Sympathy”) and well as for humorous verse written in black dialect. His poem “When Malindy Sings” (1895) features the lines “Who dat says dat humble praises/Wif de Master nevah counts?” The idea behind writing dialect was that the language evoked the real speech of the folk population.
In 1898, Dunbar collaborated with gifted African-American composer Will Marion Cook (1869-1944), who had studied violin at Oberlin Conservatory and composition with Antonin Dvorák at the National Conservatory in New York, to write the lyrics and libretto to a show called “Clorindy: The Origin of the Cake Walk.” “Clorindy” opened at the fashionable Casino Roof Garden on Broadway the summer of 1898. The show featured an all-black cast (no blackface) and was an immediate hit (the New York Times called it “sensational”). The most popular number was “Who Dat Say Chicken in Dis Crowd”...
The association of the phrase “Who Dat” with the New Orleans Saints began in 1983 as the brainchild of two brothers, Steve and Sal Monistere, who worked in a recording studio, First Take. According to Times-Picayune writer Dave Walker, Steve heard the “Who dat?” chant and decided to incorporate it into a radio spot featuring “When the Saints Go Marching In.” He recruited five Saints players (black and white) to chant “Who dat?” for the recording session, Dave Waymer, Brad Edelman, John Hill, Reggie Lewis and Louis Oubre. Aaron Neville sang. Once again, the phrase “Who dat” was promoted by black voices—this time long after the uncomfortable minstrel connotations had disappeared from the American cultural consciousness.
Michael O'Donnell: Scalia v. The World
Source: The Nation (2-4-10)
[Michael O'Donnell is a lawyer in Chicago whose writing on legal matters has appeared in Bookforum, the Los Angeles Times and the Christian Science Monitor]
The dean of the modern conservative legal movement, Justice Antonin Scalia, is neither an intellectual nor a primitive. He is both. Scalia has fused the cerebral and the atavistic strains of conservatism in a manner that leaves one wondering if they were ever distinct at all. For decades Scalia has beguiled conservative law students with his abhorrence of compromise and the colorful, take-no-prisoners style of his opinions. More than any other contemporary jurist, he claims to abide by a host of scrupulous legal principles: strict fidelity to a statute's text, adherence to the Constitution's original meaning, respect for the nation's federal structure of government. But notwithstanding these "neutral" principles and his habit of adorning his defense of them with intellectual flourishes, Scalia writes his opinions in boiling ink, mixing prodigious citations and vast learning with callous disregard for others and bursts of derision bordering on bigotry....
Joan Biskupic began covering the Supreme Court in 1989, three years after Scalia joined the Court. One might have expected her to pull a punch or two in American Original: The Life and Constitution of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia so as not to be shut out of the most interesting chambers. But while American Original is no scathing critique, neither is it an easy endorsement. Biskupic clearly admires Scalia's pluck: on a beat where dry written opinions and aversion to the press are commonplace, he stands out as brash, funny, outspoken and controversial--a walking headline machine. But she dislikes his inconsistent jurisprudence, devoting an entire chapter to Bush v. Gore, as well as the caustic and sarcastic tone of his writing, which has only become sharper and more pronounced over the years, eroding the collegiality of the Court and leaving Scalia increasingly alone in dissent. "Scalia wrote with a recriminatory tone that often undercut his effectiveness," she writes. "He was hyperbolic and almost entirely dismissive of arguments from the other side." She gathers representative examples of his disrespectful references to his colleagues' opinions: they "cannot be taken seriously," are "beyond the absurd" and even should be considered "nothing short of preposterous." In light of the justices' reluctance to criticize one another personally, Biskupic also obtained several surprisingly candid observations made by Scalia's colleagues about his negative influence on the Court. "I think everybody respects Nino's wonderful writing ability and his style and all the rest," Justice Stevens told Biskupic. "But everybody on the Court from time to time has thought he was unwise to take such an extreme position, both in tone and in the position." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a close friend of Scalia's, was even more direct in an interview with Biskupic: "I love him. But sometimes I'd like to strangle him."
Biskupic does not provide any revelations in her portrait of the past fifteen years of Scalia's career, but she has lent it depth and texture. She has made excellent use of the archives of Justices Lewis Powell and Harry Blackmun from the 1980s and early '90s to flesh out the lonely role Scalia has earned for himself on the Court. Biskupic has a fine eye for a telling memo or private comment; Blackmun's archives in particular overflow with revealingly wry jottings. For example, when Scalia circulated a notably shrill dissent in 1988, Blackmun wrote in the margin of the draft, "Screams! Without the screaming, it could have been said in about 10 pages." Biskupic also cites a number of instances in which Scalia was assigned to write an opinion and then lost the majority because of his sanctimoniousness and refusal to compromise. On other occasions, Chief Justice Rehnquist simply declined to assign a case to Scalia for fear that this would happen.
Biskupic calls Scalia "the purest archetype of the conservative legal movement that began in the 1960s in reaction to the Warren Court." That's not quite right. Scalia is indeed the top conservative legal thinker of our time, universally admired by the right, but he was one of the patrons of the modern conservative legal movement, not one of its products. The prominence of his generation is fading and a new, more effective generation is in ascendance. It is well organized and strategically deft, with an eye always on results. Its purest archetype is not the grandiose but easily ignored Scalia, who at his worst might as well be standing on a corner shouting at people, but the faux-modest radical John Roberts, who in 2005 took the seat on the bench that Scalia thought was his to become Chief Justice of the United States.
Nick Turse: The 700 Military Bases of Afghanistan
Source: TomDispatch.com (2-9-10)
[Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University's Center for the United States and the Cold War. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books). His website is NickTurse.com.]
In the nineteenth century, it was a fort used by British forces. In the twentieth century, Soviet troops moved into the crumbling facilities. In December 2009, at this site in the Shinwar district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province, U.S. troops joined members of the Afghan National Army in preparing the way for the next round of foreign occupation. On its grounds, a new military base is expected to rise, one of hundreds of camps and outposts scattered across the country.
Nearly a decade after the Bush administration launched its invasion of Afghanistan, TomDispatch offers the first actual count of American, NATO, and other coalition bases there, as well as facilities used by the Afghan security forces. Such bases range from relatively small sites like Shinwar to mega-bases that resemble small American towns. Today, according to official sources, approximately 700 bases of every size dot the Afghan countryside, and more, like the one in Shinwar, are under construction or soon will be as part of a base-building boom that began last year.
Existing in the shadows, rarely reported on and little talked about, this base-building program is nonetheless staggering in size and scope, and heavily dependent on supplies imported from abroad, which means that it is also extraordinarily expensive. It has added significantly to the already long secret list of Pentagon property overseas and raises questions about just how long, after the planned beginning of a drawdown of American forces in 2011, the U.S. will still be garrisoning Afghanistan.
400 Foreign Bases in Afghanistan
A spokesman for the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) tells TomDispatch that there are, at present, nearly 400 U.S. and coalition bases in Afghanistan, including camps, forward operating bases, and combat outposts. In addition, there are at least 300 Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) bases, most of them built, maintained, or supported by the U.S. A small number of the coalition sites are mega-bases like Kandahar Airfield, which boasts one of the busiest runways in the world, and Bagram Air Base, a former Soviet facility that received a makeover, complete with Burger King and Popeyes outlets, and now serves more than 20,000 U.S. troops, in addition to thousands of coalition forces and civilian contractors.
In fact, Kandahar, which housed 9,000 coalition troops as recently as 2007, is expected to have a population of as many as 35,000 troops by the time President Obama's surge is complete, according to Colonel Kevin Wilson who oversees building efforts in the southern half of Afghanistan for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. On the other hand, the Shinwar site, according to Sgt. Tracy J. Smith of the U.S. 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, will be a small forward operating base (FOB) that will host both Afghan troops and foreign forces.
Last fall, it was reported that more than $200 million in construction projects -- from barracks to cargo storage facilities -- were planned for or in-progress at Bagram. Substantial construction funds have also been set aside by the U.S. Air Force to upgrade its air power capacity at Kandahar. For example, $65 million has been allocated to build additional apron space (where aircraft can be parked, serviced, and loaded or unloaded) to accommodate more close-air support for soldiers in the field and a greater intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability. Another $61 million has also been earmarked for the construction of a cargo helicopter apron and a tactical airlift apron there.
Kandahar is just one of many sites currently being upgraded. Exact figures on the number of facilities being enlarged, improved, or hardened are unavailable but, according a spokesman for ISAF, the military plans to expand several more bases to accommodate the increase of troops as part of Afghan War commander Stanley McChrystal’s surge strategy. In addition, at least 12 more bases are slated to be built to help handle the 30,000 extra American troops and thousands of NATO forces beginning to arrive in the country.
“Currently we have over $3 billion worth of work going on in Afghanistan,” says Colonel Wilson, “and probably by the summer, when the dust settles from all the uplift, we’ll have about $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion worth of that [in the South].” By comparison, between 2002 and 2008, the Army Corps of Engineers spent more than $4.5 billion on construction projects, most of it base-building, in Afghanistan.
At the site of the future FOB in Shinwar, more than 135 private construction contractors attended what was termed an “Afghan-Coalition contractors rodeo.” According to Lieutenant Fernando Roach, a contracting officer with the U.S. Army’s Task Force Mountain Warrior, the event was designed “to give potential contractors a walkthrough of the area so they'll have a solid overview of the scope of work.” The construction firms then bid on three separate projects: the renovation of the more than 30-year old Soviet facilities, the building of new living quarters for Afghan and coalition forces, and the construction of a two-kilometer wall for the base.
In the weeks since the “rodeo,” the U.S. Army has announced additional plans to upgrade facilities at other forward operating bases. At FOB Airborne, located near Kane-Ezzat in Wardak Province, for instance, the Army intends to put in reinforced concrete bunkers and blast protection barriers as well as lay concrete foundations for Re-Locatable Buildings (prefabricated, trailer-like structures used for living and working quarters). Similar work is also scheduled for FOB Altimur, an Army camp in Logar Province.
Bob Brecher: Iraq and the Fig-Leaf of Just War Theory
Source: openDemocracy (2-8-10)
[Bob Brecher is the founder of Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics and Ethics at the University of Brighton]
Dissension over the legality of the Iraq war, and the history of western military interventions since 1945, reveals the paucity of international law's moral underpinnings. The article continues our series Lest we forget: remembering historic conflicts, openSecurity’s new editorial project in association with History & Policy, asking historians to reflect on wars gone by and the light they shed on present conflicts.
Discussing the Chilcot Inquiry into the invasion and occupation of Iraq on BBC Radio 5 on 20 January this year, John Rentoul, quoting Nick Cohen, challenged ‘the anti-war mob’, and more specifically Philippe Sands, to tell him how any war could be ‘illegal’. Cohen, like Rentoul, is an apologist for the Iraq War, petulant about critics who insist it was illegal. His petulance, elaborated in the article quoted below, is rooted in his (entirely correct) insistence that the murderous Sadaam Hussein regime was itself acting in ways which were plainly illegal. But my concern isn’t with whether two wrongs make a right. Rather it’s with Cohen’s ‘simple question’:
I am growing old and grey waiting for John Humphrys or Jon Snow to show a spark of journalistic life and ask Nick Clegg, Philippe Sands and all the rest of them the simple question: "What do you mean by an 'illegal war'?"
As a straight question, ‘What do you mean by an “illegal” war?’ is pretty silly. Why? Because there’s an obvious answer: a war is illegal if it contravenes international law. But of course that’s just Cohen’s point: when it comes to war, legal niceties are practically neither here nor there. (To which I would add: and remember that the law itself is founded in violence, crucial though its protections genuinely are.)
But surely the notion of legal and illegal war has its roots in a moral framework, that of just war theory? Indeed it has. Just war theory, however, turns out to be the problem, not the solution. That’s why we need to take Cohen’s cynicism seriously.
The present system of international law has its roots in “local” law, that’s to say in the laws of the various political groupings that held sway before the inception of the present world-wide system of nation states. It is in pre-national medieval Europe that Just war theory began to be formalised as a Christian theological response to the apparent necessity of war in certain situations. Thus it began to enter the legal thinking of pre-national western states; and the moral provisions of just war theory continue to underlie today’s international law concerning war -- just as other areas of the law too have their roots in morality. So the notion of an illegal war is based in the idea of an immoral war, an unjust war; and contemporary international law concerning war basically holds that it is only those wars that are (regarded as) morally justified – just wars – that are legal. (The condition is a necessary one: in principle at least, no genuinely immoral war can be legally justified. It is not, however, a sufficient condition: some morally justifiable wars might – for technically legal reasons – be nonetheless illegal.)
So what makes a war just? Based on the idea that individuals have a right of self-defence, the theory was developed in response to Christianity’s problems with always turning the other cheek. It proposes one set of conditions that apply to going to war (ius ad bellum); and another to the conduct of war (ius in bello). In brief, going to war is reckoned just if:
Yvette D. Clarke: Black History is American History
Source: Huffington Post (2-8-10)
[Yvette D. Clarke is a Democratic congresswoman representing New York's 11th Congressional District.[
It was August 28th, 1963, and the greatest civil rights coalition in modern history had descended upon Washington. Hundreds of thousands of protesters trekked through the heat, stretching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial. For several hours, marchers heard oratory expression from civil rights, religious, labor, and student leaders from across the country....
It is in this same spirit that all Americans should celebrate Black History Month. Throughout this month, we all pause to reflect and celebrate our rich and wonderful mosaic. We examine and highlight the history of the African descendants in America, and know that each and every one of us has come this far because of our faith in this country. It is a time to celebrate our collective strength which pulled us through past struggles; a time to recognize our present day victories, and honor those who brought us to this point. This month we recognize that while our nation continues to confront and break down any remnants of bigotry and hate, we can see the sun over the horizon. Only by acknowledging the success and sacrifice made by those who came before us, can we fully understand what we must do to ensure the liberty of those who will succeed us....
We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness. I encourage all Americans to take time during this month, and throughout the year, to reflect upon the many contributions African Americans have made to the building of our nation.
Con Coughlin: Endgame for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran?
Source: Telegraph (UK) (2-9-10)
[Con Coughlin is the author of 'Khomeini's Ghost'.]
First came the announcement that Iran had successfully launched a space probe carrying two turtles, a hamster and a worm. Then its nuclear scientists announced that they would maintain their defiance of the West by ratcheting up the country's controversial uranium enrichment programme. Finally this was followed by yesterday's announcement from the Iranian Defence Ministry that it will shortly begin production of "advanced" unmanned drones that are capable of carrying out "assaults with high precision" against neighbouring states.
Every year since 1979, millions of Iranians have celebrated Dahe-ye Fajr, the 10 days of dawn, by proclaiming their loyalty to the Islamic revolution. The festival marks the period between the triumphant return of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolution's founding father, from exile in Paris on February 1, 1979 and the establishment of the Islamic republic 10 days later. The festivities range from commemorative services held at Khomeini's mausoleum in Tehran's southern suburbs to political rallies proclaiming the revolution's achievements.
But this year the government of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has used the festivities as a platform to issue a succession of headline-grabbing pronouncements. And just to make sure no one misunderstands Mr Ahmadinejad's intentions, the Iranian president has publicly warned that he will mark the 31st anniversary of the Islamic revolution this Thursday by delivering a "telling blow" to the world's leading powers, a message that hardly serves to reassure Western concerns about Iran's future intentions.
Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary, yesterday responded by warning that the West should punish Tehran's latest act of defiance on its nuclear programme by toughening up the international sanctions regime, while in London the Foreign Office described Tehran's decision to start enriching uranium to 20 per cent, as opposed to the current level of 3.5 per cent, as a "matter of serious concern".
Iran's current level of enrichment only produces uranium that can be used in nuclear power stations. But by enriching uranium to 20 per cent Iran will be taking a significant step towards producing the highly enriched uranium that is used to make atom bombs. In addition, Iran has informed the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna that it intends to build another 10 uranium enrichment plants.
But before Western governments become too alarmed by Tehran's provocative stance, the regime's recent announcements need to be examined within the context of the country's deepening political turmoil, which many of Mr Ahmadinejad's political opponents confidently predict will surface again during Thursday's climax to this year's anniversary celebrations.
Ever since Mr Ahmadinejad was proclaimed the victor in last summer's hotly disputed presidential election contest, his regime has been besieged by angry protesters who claim his victory was rigged, and that his hardline conservative supporters are denying the Iranian people their proper democratic rights.
In the past the regime has been able to suppress anti-government protests through the highly effective expedient of relying on the brute force of the Revolutionary Guards, the guardians of the Islamic revolution. In both 1999 and 2003, the last time that the regime was seriously challenged by pro-democracy protesters, the demonstrations quickly subsided after the guards broke into student dormitories at Tehran University and hurled protesters to their deaths through the windows.
Similar tactics have been used to crush Iran's pro-reform Green movement, which materialised in the immediate aftermath of last June's elections after
Mir-Hossein Mousavi, the former Iranian prime minister who championed the interests of the reform movement, claimed he had been denied victory by widespread ballot-rigging. Iranian human rights activists claim that up to 500 people have been killed since the elections, a number that is set to rise after the regime last month announced it had begun executing political prisoners accused of participating in last year's protests.
But despite being the victims of the most repressive measures experienced in Iran since the heady days of the 1979 revolution, the Green movement shows no sign of dying down, much to the consternation of Mr Ahmadinejad and his supporters.
Part of the explanation for this is the fact that today's opposition movement has a far broader base than its predecessors. Previous anti-government protests drew heavily on student campuses for their support, whereas today's Green movement has the backing of Iran's prosperous middle classes – the bazaaris – who are as much outraged by Mr Ahmadinejad's woeful mismanagement of the Iranian economy as they are critical of his uncompromising political agenda.
As a consequence, it is no understatement to say that Iran is currently experiencing its most turbulent spell of political instability since Khomeini's triumphant return from exile in Paris. And, just as happened in 1979, the governing regime is deeply concerned about the outcome...
Mary Dejevsky: Ukraine Says Goodbye to the Cold War
Source: Independent (UK) (2-9-10)
[Mary Dejevsky is the chief editorial writer and a columnist at The Independent.]
The last time Viktor Yanukovych featured prominently in the Western media was more than five years ago. When the drama of Ukraine's Orange Revolution was at its height, he played the villain. With his power base in the east, his clumsy style and his compromised victory, he was the Kremlin-backed devil to the angelic duo of Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko.
This weekend, Yanukovych narrowly won the run-off to succeed Yushchenko as President. His rival was the same Tymoshenko – la Pasionaria of those revolutionary days. Assuming her threatened legal challenge fails – and international observers judged the first round of the election to be about as free and fair as an election can get – Yanukovych will have first crack at forming a government. Already pessimists inside and outside the country are lamenting the failure of the Orange revolution, denouncing Russia's revenge, and predicting the re-absorption of Ukraine into the Russian orbit.
Such an approach should be scotched before it is translated into policies that would be damaging for all concerned. Yes, five years on, the Orange Revolution has been a disappointment. The young people who thronged Kiev's snow-swept Independence Square inspired admiration around the world. It would have taken a rare political leader to meet their sky-high expectations.
And Yushchenko and Tymoshenko were quick to disappoint. They fell out almost at once, and the country's parliament degenerated into a fractious talking shop. Ukraine was on a political and financial slide well before the global economic crisis struck. When I visited last spring, the political mood was sour; the young activists of 2004-5 had retreated into further study, private business, or nothing very much at all.
But the many different roads of disillusionment with the Orange Revolution do not lead automatically back to Moscow. What has been most striking, and most hopeful, about the 2010 election is the extent to which it has not been a contest between West and East, either globally, or within Ukraine.
Five years ago, Ukraine's election was a veritable post-cold war battleground. Senior members of the US administration made their way to Kiev; US money helped fuel the Orange movement. Russia was, typically, even more heavy-handed. Vladimir Putin, then President, visited Ukraine three days before the vote and prematurely congratulated Yanukovych on a victory already seen as tainted.
Such open outside partisanship made Yushchenko a proxy Westerner and Yanukovych a proxy Russian, and Ukrainian voters divided accordingly. The west and centre of the country favoured Yushchenko, while Crimea and the east preferred Yanukovych. And with pro-Western allegiance went support for Ukrainian membership not just of the European Union, but of Nato. Tymoshenko, who became the first post-Orange Revolution prime minister, was fiercely anti-Russian. Yanukovych stood for everything she did not.
Yet to divine such a clear-cut division was always too simplistic. Ukrainians' different views about Russia depend in part on where they live and what language they speak. But on independence they are in absolute agreement. In no poll since the independence referendum of 1991 has a majority, even in the east, sought a retreat from statehood. Any argument is not about rejoining Moscow, but about how far the facts of geography should determine Ukraine's politics. Here, the election of 2010 suggests a shift...
Monday, February 8, 2010
Jeff Bergner: Republicans Need to Change "The Narrative"
Source: The Weekly Standard (2-8-10)
[Jeff Bergner has served as staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, assistant secretary of state, and professor of government. His forthcoming book is on the role of German idealist philosophy in shaping the modern idea of a human being.]
Recent electoral successes, including Scott Brown’s landmark victory in Massachusetts, have positioned Republicans once again for a role in governing, and far sooner than they might have supposed. But are they ready to govern? It all depends, for the problem with many Republicans (and I am a Republican) is that they, along with liberals, subscribe at a visceral level to The Narrative.
What is The Narrative? The Narrative is the official story about America. It is a story composed by the political left, which entered American public life with the progressive movement in the early 20th century and was elaborated in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and ’40s.
The story runs like this. America was founded on the ideal of equality, though that ideal at first was barely put into practice. The story of America is one of progress toward the fulfillment of the ideal of equality. The end of slavery and the achievement of women’s suffrage are landmarks in this story. All fair enough. So is—less plausibly—the federal income tax, originally established to fund the government but later used to redistribute wealth and tax advantages among Americans. Then came the many programs of direct payments to individuals, the so-called entitlements, beginning with Social Security and extending to Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, aid to dependent children, farm subsidies, and myriad others. And today the health care
reform bill before Congress takes its place in America’s advance toward equality. Each and every policy that aims to level distinctions between Americans has found its place within The Narrative....
That The Narrative should move many Republicans as well as Democrats is hardly surprising. It is, after all, pervasive. This is the story presented to children at school by teachers and textbooks all across the nation. And, while the left-leaning American professoriate may think of itself as contrarian or skeptical, it operates in lockstep to offer The Narrative as the official view on virtually every college campus. It is reinforced at every turn by the print and electronic media, in the arts, and in every mainstream avenue of American culture....
Herein lies the problem for Republicans who subscribe to The Narrative. Even when they doubt the wisdom of “moving too fast” on a given policy initiative, they remain captive in a larger sense to The Narrative. Even as they argue that “the time is not right” to endorse the latest progressive project, they concede the substance. Now, it may be true that it is peculiarly inappropriate to launch a massive new health care entitlement, for instance, at a time of deep recession, double-digit unemployment, and low tax revenues. But that begs the larger question whether there is actually any time when it would be good to establish a government-run health care system in the United States. “Not now,” “not so fast,” “not just yet”—these are the stock-in-trade of Republicans, arguments hinting that at some later date the reform they currently oppose might win their vote. In a very real sense, Democrats are correct: Republicans these days are the party of no.
Republicans captive to The Narrative are thus condemned to a perpetual rearguard action against the consolidation of government-imposed equality. For them, the very definition of a successful administration or Congress is one that doesn’t lose too much ground too fast. This is dispiriting for Republicans. It is also dispiriting to a sizable segment of the American electorate, which is uncomfortable with such a limited range of political options. Consider conservative voters: Why should they care about the 2010 elections? A Republican victory might slow the consolidation of government power, but does anyone think it would reverse it or chart a significantly different course? Is this even the goal?...
James Branch: Is That Black History Stuff Really Important?
Source: Fort Worth Star-Telegram (2-8-10)
[James Branch of Fort Worth is a member of the 2010 Star-Telegram Community Columnist Panel.]
Recently, out of the clear blue sky, one of my daughters asked, "Do we celebrate Black History Month in college?"
"Yes," I nonchalantly replied. I recognized immediately by her intonation and my paternal instinct that she was expecting a more immersive reply....
Having planned and promoted numerous black history programs in various educational settings over the years, I was taken aback by her comments. I believe that educational institutions should always be leading the charge in providing historical information. This generation must not feel that history is not important or that it is an imposition on someone's time.
Has this month become a token gesture? A tradition dedicated to maintaining political correctness? Maybe complacency has crept in. Even in 2010, can our curricula even be trusted to present a balanced glimpse into such an intricate and complex past?...
My daughter's history, just as all history, must include the truth -- good, bad or ugly. We are in a time when unity is more vital for our nation than race. We must instill an understanding in our youths that character far exceeds color....
The local schools will once again go into their storage cabinets and dust off, tape and staple up all of the black history memorabilia from this time last year. Rosa Parks once refused to ride at the back of the city bus; now those are the seats that our youths skirmish over. We simply will not be able to make any sense of what is happening in today's world if we don't know what has happened beforehand.
Yes, this black history stuff is important.
Thomas H. Benton: The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind'
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (2-8-10)
[Thomas H. Benton is the pen name of William Pannapacker, an associate professor of English at Hope College, in Holland, Mich. He writes about academic culture and welcomes reader mail directed to his attention at careers@chronicle.com.]
A year ago, I wrote a column called "Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don't Go," advising students that grad school is a bad idea unless they have no need to earn a living for themselves or anyone else, they are rich or connected (or partnered with someone who is), or they are earning a credential for a job they already hold.
In a March 2009 follow-up essay, I removed the category of people who are fortunately partnered because, as many readers wrote in to tell me, graduate school and the "two-body problem" often breaks up many seemingly stable relationships. You can't assume any partnership will withstand the strains of entry into the academic life....
Some people have mistaken my position that graduate school in the humanities is fine for the rich and connected for the view that that's how it should be, as if I am some kind of smug elitist. It often happens that readers—looking only at an excerpt from a column—mistake practical advice about coping with a harsh reality for an affirmation of that reality, instead of a criticism of it.
One reason that graduate school is for the already privileged is that it is structurally dependent on people who are neither privileged nor connected. Wealthy students are not trapped by the system; they can take what they want from it, not feel pressured, and walk away at any point with minimal consequences. They do not have to obsess about whether some professor really likes them. If they are determined to become academics, they can select universities on the basis of reputation rather than money. They can focus on research rather than scrambling for time-consuming teaching and research assistantships to help pay the bills. And, when they go on the market, they can hold out for the perfect position rather than accepting whatever is available....
Again and again, the people who wrote to me said things like "Nobody told me" and "Now what do I do?" "Everybody keeps saying my doctorate gives me all kinds of transferable skills, but I can't get a second interview, even outside of academe." "What's wrong with me?"...
Such people sometimes write to me about their thoughts of suicide, and I think nothing separates me from them but luck....
Graduate school may be about the "disinterested pursuit of learning" for some privileged people. But for most of us, graduate school in the humanities is about the implicit promise of the life of a middle-class professional, about being respected, about not hating your job and wasting your life. That dream is long gone in academe for almost everyone entering it now.
If you are in one of the lucky categories that benefit from the Big Lie, you will probably continue to offer the attractions of that life to vulnerable students who are trained from birth to trust you, their teacher.
Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon "the life of the mind." That's why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility.
Gerard Alexander: Why Are Liberals So Condescending?
Source: WaPo (2-7-10)
[Gerard Alexander is an associate professor of politics at the University of Virginia.]
...It's an odd time for liberals to feel smug. But even with Democratic fortunes on the wane, leading liberals insist that they have almost nothing to learn from conservatives. Many Democrats describe their troubles simply as a PR challenge, a combination of conservative misinformation -- as when Obama charges that critics of health-care reform are peddling fake fears of a "Bolshevik plot" -- and the country's failure to grasp great liberal accomplishments. "We were so busy just getting stuff done . . . that I think we lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos in a recent interview. The benighted public is either uncomprehending or deliberately misinformed (by conservatives).
This condescension is part of a liberal tradition that for generations has impoverished American debates over the economy, society and the functions of government -- and threatens to do so again today, when dialogue would be more valuable than ever.
Liberals have dismissed conservative thinking for decades, a tendency encapsulated by Lionel Trilling's 1950 remark that conservatives do not "express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." During the 1950s and '60s, liberals trivialized the nascent conservative movement. Prominent studies and journalistic accounts of right-wing politics at the time stressed paranoia, intolerance and insecurity, rendering conservative thought more a psychiatric disorder than a rival. In 1962, Richard Hofstadter referred to "the Manichaean style of thought, the apocalyptic tendencies, the love of mystification, the intolerance of compromise that are observable in the right-wing mind."
This sense of liberal intellectual superiority dropped off during the economic woes of the 1970s and the Reagan boom of the 1980s. (Jimmy Carter's presidency, buffeted by economic and national security challenges, generated perhaps the clearest episode of liberal self-doubt.) But these days, liberal confidence and its companion disdain for conservative thinking are back with a vengeance, finding energetic expression in politicians' speeches, top-selling books, historical works and the blogosphere. This attitude comes in the form of four major narratives about who conservatives are and how they think and function.
The first is the "vast right-wing conspiracy," a narrative made famous by Hillary Rodham Clinton but hardly limited to her. This vision maintains that conservatives win elections and policy debates not because they triumph in the open battle of ideas but because they deploy brilliant and sinister campaign tactics. A dense network of professional political strategists such as Karl Rove, think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation and industry groups allegedly manipulate information and mislead the public. Democratic strategist Rob Stein crafted a celebrated PowerPoint presentation during George W. Bush's presidency that traced conservative success to such organizational factors....
Fareed Zakaria: U.S.-China Growing Pains
Source: WaPo (2-8-10)
Despite the recent squall in U.S.-Chinese relations, both countries have powerful reasons to cooperate with one another. These have grown over the past two decades, a progression that both countries seem to recognize....
...[T]here are two trends that could take a manageable situation and make it something more worrisome. The first is a growing perception in China that it is no longer as reliant on the West, and in particular the United States, as it was. In the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping brought China out of the cold by embracing America and opening up to foreign investment. This was different from the somewhat predatory, export-driven strategy of Japan and South Korea. But, the China scholar Minxin Pei argues, this was not an ideological conversion to free-market capitalism....
Today, China is awash in capital; it has many top-notch local companies; and this year forthe first time, the primary engine of Chinese growth has been its domestic market, not exports. As China expands, that internal market will probably become its dominant concern.
A similar reality applies in foreign policy. Mao restored relations with the United States in some measure to buy himself an ally against the Soviet Union. China has needed the United States as a political ally ever since; Jiang Zemin's fuzzy embrace of the United States was part of a strategy whose goal was concrete: membership in the World Trade Organization. Today, China commands respect across the globe. It is confident, even cocky, in bilateral and multilateral fora.
None of this is nefarious. But Beijing's newfound arrogance is not joined with a broader vision. The country does not appear ready to play a global role. In international summits Beijing has been largely focused on pursuing its interests in a fairly narrow sense....
The second factor that could exacerbate Sino-U.S. tensions is America's economic fate. There's great fear that the U.S. economy is in deep structural decline... Of course, if that happens, America will have plenty else to worry about as well.
Paul Krugman: 21st Century America is Starting to Look Like 18th Century Poland
Source: NYT (2-7-10)
We’ve always known that America’s reign as the world’s greatest nation would eventually end. But most of us imagined that our downfall, when it came, would be something grand and tragic.
What we’re getting instead is less a tragedy than a deadly farce. Instead of fraying under the strain of imperial overstretch, we’re paralyzed by procedure. Instead of re-enacting the decline and fall of Rome, we’re re-enacting the dissolution of 18th-century Poland.
A brief history lesson: In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Polish legislature, the Sejm, operated on the unanimity principle: any member could nullify legislation by shouting “I do not allow!” This made the nation largely ungovernable, and neighboring regimes began hacking off pieces of its territory. By 1795 Poland had disappeared, not to re-emerge for more than a century.
Today, the U.S. Senate seems determined to make the Sejm look good by comparison....
How bad is it? It’s so bad that I miss Newt Gingrich....
The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.
Don’t hold your breath. As it is, Democrats don’t even seem able to score political points by highlighting their opponents’ obstructionism....
After the dissolution of Poland, a Polish officer serving under Napoleon penned a song that eventually — after the country’s post-World War I resurrection — became the country’s national anthem. It begins, “Poland is not yet lost.”
Well, America is not yet lost. But the Senate is working on it.
Amir Taheri: Will Tehran choose the Tiananmen solution?
Source: Times (UK) (2-8-10)
[Amir Taheri is author of The Persian Night: Iran under the Khomeinist Revolution.]
An east-west street of more than 30 miles divides Tehran, Iran’s megapolis of a capital, into two halves: a modern north and a traditional south. Thirty years ago the thoroughfare was named after Reza Shah, the founder of the Pahlavis, the last dynasty of monarchs in Iran. Today it is called Enghelab (Revolution) Street after the turmoil that led to the creation of the first theocracy in the country’s history.
In one of those ironies of which Iranian history is full, on February 11, the anniversary of the Khomeinist seizure of power, Revolution Street will be the dividing line between two forces fighting for the country’s future. Under an informal deal negotiated between the authorities and the opposition, two rival marches will be held to mark the anniversary.
Pro-government rent-a-mob crowds will have their orgy of clenched fists and “Death to America” to the south of the street; the pro-democracy movement will march north of Revolution Street, shouting “No to Islamic Republic, Yes to an Iranian Republic!” and “Down with the Dictator!”
Iran’s division into two camps was revealed last June when Ali Khamenei, the “Supreme Guide”, endorsed the results of what most Iranians believe to be a fraudulent election, which gave President Ahmadinejad a landside and a second four-year term. Over the past eight months, however, the dispute has moved beyond the issue of a stolen election as a fully-fledged pro-democracy movement has emerged that rejects the Khomeinist regime.
Even some former regime grandees, such as former President Khatami and Mir Hossein Mousavi, the former Prime Minister and main opposition candidate in last June’s presidential election, now publicly admit that the Khomeinist revolution has failed and that theocracy always leads to despotism.
Suddenly Mr Ahmadinejad and Mr Khamenei appear to have become irrelevant as millions of people in insurrectional mood are pitted against the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, which must decide whether to abandon the regime or drown its opponents in a bloodbath.
The more radical elements within the Revolutionary Guard, including its commander, Major-General Mohammad Ali Jafari, have publicly argued for a “Chinese solution” — a bloodbath modelled on the Tiananmen massacre of students in Beijing in 1989. Others, including the high command of the regular Army, have warned against such repression. The Khomeinist religious and political Establishment is equally divided between the “eradicators” and the “conciliators”. Millions of Iranians are waiting and watching to see which side is likely to prevail.
Increasingly isolated even within the Establishment, Mr Ahmadinejad is desperately trying to rally what is left of his radical base by beating the drums of xenophobia. Yesterday he tried to reassert his “anti-imperialist” credentials by announcing the start of a new programme of uranium enrichment of up to 20 per cent in defiance of four UN Security Council resolutions.
His declaration, broadcast live on state television, seemed to be an abrupt contradiction of what his Foreign Minister was saying. Only hours before Manouchehr Mottaki announced Tehran’s readiness to exchange Iranian low-grade enriched uranium with higher-grade foreign enriched uranium at some unspecified point. The stratagem was devised by Russia and France to provide the US President, Barack Obama, with a fig leaf to cover the failure of his “extended hand” policy towards the Khomeinist despots.
Later this week the so-called 5+1 group — the five permanent members of the Security Council and Germany — will have to decide what to do with Mr Mottaki’s apparent offer. Germany has already described the offer as “too little too late” while there are signs that the Obama Administration, too, is beginning to abandon some of its illusions about soft-soaping the Khomeinist regime into a more reasonable behaviour.
For years, two clocks have been simultaneously ticking in Iran: one counts the regime’s days, the other marks progress towards a Khomeinist bomb. Thanks to the pro-democracy movement, the first clock may now be running faster.
What happens on the streets of Tehran this week may stop that clock, at least for now, or make it tick faster. That would help the 5+1 decide whether to increase pressure on Tehran or accept its coming nuclear arsenal as a fait accompli.
While it is difficult to predict the behaviour of a regime drunk on its own apocalyptic rhetoric, the “Chinese solution” is unlikely to work in Iran. Mr Khamenei and Mr Ahmadinejad are incapable of uniting the ruling establishment in the same way as Deng Xiaoping was in 1989. Nor could they rely on political machinery such as the Chinese Communist Party...
Pratap Chatterjee: Could Pakistan 2010 Go the Way of Cambodia 1969?
Source: TomDispatch.com (2-7-10)
Sitting in air-conditioned comfort, cans of Coke and 7-Up within reach as they watched their screens, the ground controllers gave the order to strike under the cover of darkness. There had been no declaration of war. No advance warning, nothing, in fact, that would have alerted the "enemy" to the sudden, unprecedented bombing raids. The secret computer-guided strikes were authorized by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, just weeks after a new American president entered the Oval Office. They represented an effort to wipe out the enemy’s central headquarters whose location intelligence experts claimed to have pinpointed just across the border from the war-torn land where tens of thousands of American troops were fighting daily.
In remote villages where no reporters dared to go, far from the battlefields where Americans were dying, who knew whether the bombs that rained from the night sky had killed high-level insurgents or innocent civilians? For 14 months the raids continued and, after each one was completed, the commander of the bombing crews was instructed to relay a one-sentence message: "The ball game is over."
The campaign was called "Operation Breakfast," and, while it may sound like the CIA’s present air campaign over Pakistan, it wasn’t. You need to turn the clock back to another American war, four decades earlier, to March 18, 1969, to be exact. The target was an area of Cambodia known as the Fish Hook that jutted into South Vietnam, and Operation Breakfast would be but the first of dozens of top secret bombing raids. Later ones were named "Lunch," "Snack," and "Supper," and they went under the collective label "Menu." They were authorized by President Richard Nixon and were meant to destroy a (non-existent) "Bamboo Pentagon," a central headquarters in the Cambodian borderlands where North Vietnamese communists were supposedly orchestrating raids deep into South Vietnam.
Like President Obama today, Nixon had come to power promising stability in an age of unrest and with a vague plan to bringing peace to a nation at war. On the day he was sworn in, he read from the Biblical book of Isaiah: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks." He also spoke of transforming Washington’s bitter partisan politics into a new age of unity: "We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another, until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices."
Return to the Killing Fields
In recent years, many commentators and pundits have resorted to “the Vietnam analogy,” comparing first the American war in Iraq and now in Afghanistan to the Vietnam War. Despite a number of similarities, the analogy disintegrates quickly enough if you consider that U.S. military campaigns in post-invasion Afghanistan and Iraq against small forces of lightly-armed insurgents bear little resemblance to the large-scale war that Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon waged against both southern revolutionary guerrillas and the military of North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, who commanded a real army, with the backing of, and supplies from, the Soviet Union and China.
A more provocative -- and perhaps more ominous -- analogy today might be between the CIA’s escalating drone war in the contemporary Pakistani tribal borderlands and Richard Nixon’s secret bombing campaign against the Cambodian equivalent. To briefly recapitulate that ancient history: In the late 1960s, Cambodia was ruled by a “neutralist” king, Norodom Sihanouk, leading a weak government that had little relevance to its poor and barely educated citizens. In its borderlands, largely beyond its control, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong found “sanctuaries.”
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Frank Rich: Mullen's Testimony Puts Bigots in a Tight Spot
Source: NYT (2-6-10)
A funny thing happened after Adm. Mike Mullen called for gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military: A curious silence befell much of the right. If this were a Sherlock Holmes story, it would be the case of the attack dogs that did not bark....
Many... Republican[s]... said little or nothing. The right’s noise machine was on mute. The Fox News report on Mullen’s testimony was fair and balanced — and brief. The network dropped the subject entirely in the Hannity-O’Reilly hothouse of prime time that night. Only ratings-desperate CNN gave a fleeting platform to the old homophobic clichés....
Mullen’s heartfelt, plain-spoken testimony gave perfect expression to the nation’s own slow but inexorable progress on the issue. He said he had “served with homosexuals since 1968” and that his views had evolved “cumulatively” and “personally” ever since. So it has gone for many other Americans in all walks of life. As more gay people have come out — a process that accelerated once the modern gay rights movement emerged from the Stonewall riots of 1969 — so more heterosexuals have learned that they have gay relatives, friends, neighbors, teachers and co-workers. It is hard to deny our own fundamental rights to those we know, admire and love....
...[T]he most common last-ditch argument for preserving “don’t ask” heard last week, largely from Southern senators, is to protect “troop morale and cohesion.” Every known study says this argument is a canard, as do the real-life examples of the many armies with openly gay troops, including those of Canada, Britain and Israel. But the argument does carry a telling historical pedigree. When Harry Truman ordered the racial integration of the American military in 1948, Congressional opponents (then mainly Southern Democrats) embraced an antediluvian Army prediction from 1940 stating that such a change would threaten national defense by producing “situations destructive to morale.” History will sweep this bogus argument away now as it did then....
The more bigotry pushed out of the closet for all voters to see, the more likely it is that Americans will be moved to grant overdue full citizenship to gay Americans. It won’t happen overnight, any more than full civil rights for African-Americans immediately followed Truman’s desegregation of the armed forces. But there can be no doubt that Mike Mullen’s powerful act of conscience last week, just as we marked the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro, N.C., lunch counter sit-in, pushed history forward. The revealing silence that followed from so many of the usual suspects was pretty golden too.
Ben Fountain: Haiti and the Drug Trade
Source: NYT (2-6-10)
[Ben Fountain is the author of the short-story collection “Brief Encounters with Che Guevara.”]
In 1999 I made a day trip from the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, up to the wanly charming town of Kenscoff, a couple of hours drive into the mountains. I’d done this journey before, but not in several years, and as the road wound upward I couldn’t help being astonished by the sprawling mansions that had taken over the hillsides.
Where this road had once offered peaceful views of terraced fields, patches of forest, clusters of modest farmhouses, there now hulked villa after mind-boggling villa, as if the McMansions from Dallas’s flat-as-a-pancake suburbs had been transplanted to the mountains overlooking Port-au-Prince. Had oil been discovered in Haiti? As every turn revealed new vistas of architectural bombast, my Haitian friend in the passenger seat was shaking his head, muttering the same word over and over:
Drogue. Drugs....
...[I]f Haiti is to be rebuilt, or not merely rebuilt but transformed, then drug trafficking needs to be recognized for what it is, a primary force — arguably, the dominant force — in Haitian political life for the past 25 years....
In any country, this kind of wealth would provide ample incentive and means for acquiring power, but in Haiti the drug trade exerts an influence out of all proportion to other sectors of society. The narrative of Haitian politics since the fall of the Duvalier regime in 1986 closely tracks the rise of drug trafficking. As Haiti struggled to hold elections in the years immediately after President Jean-Claude Duvalier’s ouster, compelling evidence pointed to the involvement in cocaine trafficking of Col. Jean-Claude Paul and other high-ranking officers, a faction of the Haitian military that was, perhaps not coincidentally, especially pitiless in its suppression of the democratic movement.
The military continued to be closely linked to the drug trade during Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s brief first turn as president, cut short by the coup of Sept. 30, 1991, and little changed after his ouster. Indeed, Port-au-Prince’s chief of police, Lt. Col. Joseph Michel François, emerged as the next key man in Haitian drug trafficking, presiding over a notorious network of soldiers and paramilitary attachés that, in addition to expanding the country’s drug trade, carried out a ruthless program of political terrorism in which thousands of Haitians were murdered....
Then there’s the other part. The United States leads the world in cocaine consumption, which means there is a line that goes straight from our stupendous drug habit back to the conditions in Haiti, all those years of toxic governance that set the stage for so much destruction, so much death and injury.
So it’s come to this: the richest country in the hemisphere and the poorest, the first republic and the second, trapped together in the New World’s most glaring modern failure, the war on drugs. It would be naïve to hope that Americans will quit their cocaine any time soon for Haiti’s sake. But it would be equally naïve not to recognize this huge obstacle standing in Haiti’s way, and the role we’ve played in creating it. Our aspirations for Haiti lead straight through our addictions.
Amy Wilentz: The Dechoukaj in Haiti This Time
Source: NYT (2-6-10)
I first stepped onto the broad central square that was the heart of the Haitian government on the morning of Feb. 7, 1986. Just hours earlier, when it was still night, I’d seen Jean-Claude Duvalier, heir to his father’s dictatorship, flee the country with his wife, children and mother, driving a BMW sedan down the airport road and taking it onto a United States cargo plane bound for France. He’d left so late that I was exhausted when dawn came, but still we all descended on the sprawling plaza to see what the new day would bring. Haiti’s experiment with democracy had begun, sort of....
The Haitians hadn’t just gotten rid of Baby Doc, after all. They’d also begun to expunge the legacy of his father, François Duvalier, a far more important historical figure than Jean-Claude. Papa Doc, who died in 1971 and bequeathed the country to his feckless 19-year-old son, had ruled for 14 long years as an old-fashioned dictator. He used the apparatus of the state to sweep away his enemies, to spy on opposition leaders and to murder perceived and actual rivals, their families, their maids, their dogs. He left corpses on street corners to rot, burned down houses, sometimes with the residents locked inside, lied without shame to foreign officials and the press and shut down all speech at home. He patrolled the countryside with a network of underlings and thugs.
With his ultraviolent rule, Papa Doc set a tone for Haitian governance that has been copied since, but never quite duplicated. Still, his regime was based not just on violence but also on ideology. He’d come to power as a noiriste, an advocate for black power in a country where black power had a singular meaning: to end the rule of Haiti’s mulatto elite, which had been in control of the country’s economy and cosmopolitan life for more than a century, and whose hegemony had been strengthened by the United States during its military occupation from 1915 to 1934.
Papa Doc wanted what the elite had, literally (houses, bank accounts, businesses, land, status), and black power was the ideology he used to justify his depredations. He was the Midas of corruption, though, and noirisme in Haiti was undone by his rule. Although the dark-skinned middle class was empowered during his regime, by the time his son was overthrown (taking his light-skinned and controversial wife with him), most of that class was also eager to see the end of Duvalierism. The family’s rigid kleptocracy had further impoverished and isolated Haiti, and everyone wanted out. (And the story continues: Last week, a Swiss court agreed to release more than $4 million in no doubt ill-gotten gains to Jean-Claude Duvalier.)...
Dechoukaj could rip apart cement and exhume the dead, but it could never quite uproot Duvalierism. Duvalierism, it turned out, was a political state of mind, not a phenomenon arising from a single figure. In a land utterly impoverished by its historical and geopolitical heritage, no dechoukaj could fully uproot the longstanding political culture: the desire for a strong leader to make things better single-handedly; the reflexive populist recourse to a cult of personality; the autocratic tendencies of the political class....
So while Haiti moved forward in its experiment with democracy, it was with a halting step. In 1990, Haitians elected a former Roman Catholic priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a kind of political dechoukeur himself, in the first free and fair elections in the country’s history. But coups, a mistrustful elite, foreign meddling and his own little-d Duvalierist tendencies conspired to destroy Mr. Aristide’s presidency....
There is no strongman now, no juntas, no Duvalier to tell the people what to do. (No President Aristide, either, who, from his exile in South Africa, is weeping over the earthquake in front of the cameras, and hoping to come home.) Instead, the Haitian people themselves have marched into the dechouked field and set about rebuilding the country....
Maybe utter destruction concentrates the mind. In these conditions, do-it-yourself democracy simply works best. The quiet president, operating behind the scenes with the international community, instead of strutting before the foreign press and claiming he’ll fix everything, is perhaps at this moment not such a bad leader for Haitian democracy, after all.
Niall Stanage: End of American Era in Northern Ireland
Source: Daily Beast (2-6-10)
[Niall Stanage is a New York-based, Irish-born journalist and the author of Redemption Song: An Irish Reporter Inside the Obama Campaign (Liberties Press, Dublin).]
British and Irish leaders announced on Friday, with much fanfare, that an accord had been reached to allow Northern Ireland to take over its own law-and-order powers from Britain. The agreement, which should take effect in April, saves the Catholic-Protestant government in Belfast.
Though the agreement can plausibly be called a breakthrough, its historic significance is as much about the roles of America and Britain as diplomatic brokers as it is about the incremental progress in stabilizing Northern Ireland’s power-sharing administration.
It is, in many respects, the end of an era in great-powers diplomacy.
Bill Clinton, who has been all but canonized in Ireland for his role in bringing the 30-year conflict known as ‘The Troubles’ to an end, once said of the bickering parties, “They are like a couple of drunks walking out of a bar for the last time. When they reach the swing doors, they turn right around and go back in and say, ‘I just can’t quite get there.’”
Clinton made those comments more than a decade ago, and he soon had to apologize for them. Mocking remarks about a fondness for booze are not looked kindly upon by either sensitive Irish-American activists or abstemious Northern Irish Protestants.
Even so, his words have only resonated more deeply over time, as a succession of self-inflicted crises have arisen in Northern Ireland. Every time, the squabbling parties in Belfast have turned to governments in Washington, London and Dublin for rescue.
Supporters of high-level international engagement argue that the U.S., in particular, has proven to be a valuable guarantor of the peace process. That may have been true in the early days, when the process was struggling for traction.
But the problem with having a permanent guarantor is that it ends up providing a license to act irresponsibly, since someone else can always be counted upon to clean up your mess.
This is an especially important concept to remember in the wake of the latest supposedly historic accord, which was reached between the Irish Republicans of Sinn Fein and the pro-British loyalists of the Democratic Unionist Party (D.U.P.).
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Friday's deal meant “we are closing the last chapter of a long and troubled story.” If that proves true, it will not be before time. After all, the rigid dogmas that once underpinned the conflict have long since been binned.
The Irish Republican movement, comprised of the guerrilla Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) and Sinn Fein, used to be defined by its supposedly unquenchable determination to overthrow the Northern Irish entity by force of arms, subsuming it into an all-Ireland state.
These days, Sinn Fein still gives voice to a desire for a united Ireland, but it came to a de facto acceptance that Northern Ireland’s constitutional status would not change except by the will of its people 12 years ago, when it signed the Good Friday Agreement. The I.R.A., meanwhile, put itself out of meaningful existence five years ago with an order to its members to restrict themselves to “exclusively peaceful means”.
The Democratic Unionists have also abandoned plenty of their old shibboleths. The party’s founder and figurehead, the Reverend Ian Paisley, for years railed against Irish Republican perfidy, often in Biblical terms. There could be no negotiations with the I.R.A., much less any talk of a deal with them, he said.
Lo and behold, in 2007 Paisley assumed the co-leadership of a power-sharing administration with Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness, an acknowledged former I.R.A. commander. The two men got along with such incongruous jollity that they soon earned the nickname “the Chuckle Brothers.”
So why did the two parties find themselves cooped up in a castle near Belfast for most of the past two weeks, until the most recent agreement was signed? And why were the prime ministers of the U.K. and the Republic of Ireland summoned to their sides?..
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Gerry Adams: Another Good Friday
Source: Guardian (UK) (2-6-10)
[Gerry Adams is president of Sinn Féin, member of the Legislative Assembly of Northern Ireland for West Belfast and abstentionist MP for West Belfast at Westminster.]
It was another "Good Friday" in the peace process yesterday. Hillsborough Castle was the setting for the final piece of the jigsaw of devolution which saw agreement between Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist party on the transfer of policing and justice powers and other outstanding matters arising from the Good Friday and St Andrews agreements.
Many had thought it wouldn't, couldn't happen. That our respective positions were too far apart. But it did, and it was achieved primarily as a result of very intense discussions between Sinn Féin and the DUP. This is a hugely important, as well as symbolic moment. This is the political parties in the north of Ireland demonstrating our ability to negotiate a successful agreement together. It marks a new phase in the process.
The current crisis had been in progress for some time. Last year I had warned the British secretary of state that the political institutions were not sustainable in the longer term because they were not functioning on the basis of equality and partnership. Sinn Féin's strong view was that the governments were in default of their obligations as guarantors of the Good Friday and the St Andrews agreements. London and Dublin are not facilitators. Their function is not to "close the gap between the parties". Their duty is to uphold the agreements and hold the parties to what they had signed up to.
Ten days ago a protracted negotiation began. Sinn Féin's focus was on getting agreement between the parties in the north. As the DUP finance minister Sammy Wilson put it, we needed a deal "made in Ulster" . But it could only be accomplished by the leaders of unionism working genuinely to secure a new beginning which would see the proper functioning of joined-up government based on equality and citizens' rights.
The agreement that has now been reached will not only see the transfer of powers on policing and justice in April, but also by the end of the year the transfer of responsibility from London to Belfast for dealing with the issue of parades. We have also agreed a process to progress the rights of Irish language speakers, clear the backlog of executive papers and decisions which are still pending, and advance the all-Ireland aspects of the St Andrews agreement. It is a detailed and timeframed agreement.
Of course, there will be some who will rail against it. The naysayers will study the details, seeking points of criticism. But they are the minority. The vast majority want this process to work. Public opinion in recent weeks has overwhelmingly favoured a deal...
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