The Republic of Dissent

Bread

Best thing I read last week from Muhammad Idrees Ahmad's bit in the London Review of Books on the recent presidential election in Pakistan:

Terrorism may be foremost in the minds of Western observers; Pakistanis are more worried about the economy, education and corruption. Opinion polls showed that people’s biggest concerns are inflation and unemployment, as well as power outages and high energy costs, which have stunted economic growth and caused much misery: 20-hour blackouts are not unknown. Not all Pakistanis are exposed to terrorist violence; everyone has to buy bread.

 

La dame de fer

Chris Dillow on Margaret Thatcher who died today:

When Thatcher became Tory leader, she faced both gender and class snobbery; she was seen as a shrill lower middle-class housewife. Her success reduced class and gender prejudice amongst the rich. I suspect that my job prospects (as someone with an accent similar to her natural one) improved because of her. I fear, though, that this increased equality of opportunity was only temporary. I don't say all this to sing her praises. I suspect her legacy is mostly a malign one and that she was more of a class warrior than a genuine libertarian. I do so merely to suggest that she was not wholly the devil the left pretends.

I was never able to dislike Margaret Thatcher because she had balls even though she rarely used them correctly.

Softness and diplomacy

From Vali Nasr, author of a new book on Obama's foreign policy The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat:

The White House was ever afraid that the young Democratic president would be seen as ‘soft’ (...) It did not want to try anything as audacious as diplomacy. It was an art lost on America’s top decision makers.

The dangers of hero politics

I  agree almost totally wth Brendon  O'Neill on this:

If America’s failure to shunt Chavez aside in Venezuela spoke to its impotent international reach, then its inability to counteract the idolisation of Chavez everywhere from Hollywood to Western literary circles spoke to its failure to win over large swathes of the cultural elite to American values. It is through loving Chavez that many a modern youth and respectable commentator really communicated their fashionable hatred for America, and more importantly for the modern values it is seen to represent.

Western leftists are in mourning for Chavez, never stopping to ask why they invested so much hope in such a faraway figure in the first place. And those of a more right-wing, pro-capitalist persuasion are celebrating his death, not bothering to ask why it took 14 years and cancer to do to Chavez what their political forebears would have done to a leader they didn’t like in a matter of months.

In a way, everything about El Comandante is in his burial and his mourning, which overshadow the people and the causes he purported to defend.  Hero politics as Hero balling is always flashy, but seldom wins games although it wows crowds.

On Hugo Chávez

Alex Massie slams Hugo Chávez:

Rhetoric about assisting the poor shouldn’t cover-up the fact that Chavez’s Bolivarian revolution was a failure and an increasingly grotesque fiasco at that. All the populist bluster in the world could not disguise that awkward reality.

A few years, I asserted that Chávez wasn't Che Guevara, I have come to realize that he didn't have to be relevant or something other than grotesque.  I think that what Massie and too many people who ignore too conveniently the despair in the slums of Caracas  fail to realize  is that poverty and inequality are so clownish/grotesque in some parts of the world that the fight against them requires true, clownish or even fake true believers to change at least the narrative for people who would be convinced that they have no future and succumb to despair or a life of crime.

Thus, Chávez wasn't Socrates, but he was a gadfly! 

 

 

A powerful speech and then nothing as usual!

From Helen Epstein :

The administration’s neglect of human rights in Africa is a great disappointment, since the president began his first term by laying out ambitious new goals for the continent. In July 2009, when his presidency was only six months old, Barack Obama delivered a powerful speech at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana, the point from which millions of African slaves were shipped across the Atlantic. He called on African countries to end the tyranny of corruption that affects so many of their populations, and to build strong institutions that serve the people and hold leaders accountable. The speech seemed to extend the message of his much-discussed Cairo address a month earlier, in which he called for a new beginning for Muslim relations with the West, based on non-violence and mutual respect. Many thought that the policies of the new president, himself of Kenyan descent, would depart from those of the Bush administration, which provided a great deal of development aid to Africa, but paid scant attention to human rights.

After more than four years in office, however, Obama has done little to advance the idealistic goals of his Ghana speech.

Oh Well as the one himself once said words matter and the trouble here starts with the fact that having an 'african' policy doesn't mean much for there is no africa. Moreover, the saddest fact  is that reality when it comes to Obama's deeds in countries on the african continent doesn't matter because of the worst and most dangerous anti-intellectual form of identity politics.

I bet that at least some Nigeriens are happy to have a drone base in Niamey.

A wonderful and irritating country

Et oui:

It is an absurd exaggeration to say that French industrial workers spend only three hours a day doing anything productive. Yet it is also the case that the 35-hour working week, combined with an entrenched role for unions within companies and intrusive labour rules, gives little flexibility for bosses. (...) Yet the damage to France’s image may be harder to shake off. At a time when the country has lost competitiveness to Germany, the economy is sliding into recession, taxes are at a record high, and the government has conceded that it will miss its deficit-reduction target for 2013, genuine concerns about the prospects of turning things around are wide-spread. Clara Gaymard, the French head of GE, an American conglomerate which successfully manufactures high-tech industrial stuff in France, put it well in her response to Mr Taylor’s letter. Yes, she said, “France’s image abroad is poor”. But “we are both a wonderful country and a very irritating one.

Nous restons tous américains

Pertinent stuff from Glenn Greenwald:

It's certainly true that Americans are justifiably proud of certain nationalistic attributes: class mobility, ethnic diversity, religious freedom, large immigrant populations, life-improving technological discoveries, a commitment to some basic liberties such as free speech and press, historical progress in correcting some of its worst crimes. But all of those virtues are found in equal if not, at this point, greater quantity in numerous other countries. Add to that mix America's shameful attributes - its historic crimes of land theft, genocide, slavery and racism, its sprawling penal state, the company it keeps on certain human rights abuses, the aggressive attack on Iraq, the creation of a worldwide torture regime, its pervasive support for the world's worst tyrannies - and it becomes not just untenable, but laughable, to lavish it with that title.

Assertions of one's nation's exceptionalism are banal and create more obligations than privileges. 

The word is american and America is increasingly going to have an issue with how much others have learned from its recent years.

Détruire n'est pas créer

I agree with Tim Black on this:

Under Cameron’s gaze, the problems in Mali are simply collapsed into a grand narrative in which good people fight bad people, just as Blair, alongside President George W Bush, proceeded to view world affairs through the prism of the ‘war on terror’.

The narcissism of this essentially Blairite approach to foreign policy is as incredible as it is reckless. In each case, they really do think this conflict is about them. Arbitrarily chosen, far-flung trouble spots act as ad hoc stages on which a Western leader can show the people back at home just what a good person he is. For Cameron, it was Libya and now neighbouring African states. For Blair, it was the Former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and, of course, Iraq.

It was a grisly irony, then, that while Blair spoke of the necessity of intervention in north Africa, of trying to do the right thing, the stage of his most infamous display of doing the right thing – Iraq – appeared once more on the fringes of the world’s news bulletins: a suicide bomber, aided by several others, had attacked a police headquarters in the northern city of Kirkuk. At least 36 people were killed and 105 were injured.

At some point, there has to be the recognition that as Camus would say détruire n'est pas créer and that destroying monsters ( which is more often than not about seeking them desperately) isn't the same as fixing problems that are so complex that they require something more than the use of force.

That said power, faith and money have pierced Blair's eyes and ears, which explains why he isn't just irrelevant, but the epitome of what political success can do to the people who are more ambitious and self-righteous than anything else.

Mali, Niger, France, US, Whac-A-Mole

From the great Stephen W. Smith:

The bigger question is not why France decided to intervene but why America has held off. Is it simply imperial overstretch and war-weariness? That seems a little thin, given the hue and cry in Washington about ‘ungoverned spaces’ and ‘terrorist safe havens’. After all, the Sahara is six times as big as Afghanistan and Pakistan combined. And why sink money into the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Partnership – more than $1 billion since 2005 – or foot the bill for Operation Enduring Freedom Trans-Sahara, if at the end of it all al-Qaida is allowed to march on Bamako? Why would Obama order more drone strikes than his predecessor against the leaders of Somalia’s al-Shabaab, a group with relatively weak links to international terrorism, but not lift a finger to stop AQIM from taking over Mali? Unless, of course, in addition to a division of labour with the French, the point is to ‘disaggregate’ the multiple terrorist threats in Africa, tackling each individually rather than addressing any common denominator, and so deny jihadism a chance to coalesce. In this regard, even if the French were drawn into the quicksand in Mali, Nigeria would most likely remain the region’s focal point for the US: with 150 million inhabitants, it is the most populous state as well as the biggest oil producer south of the Sahara, and has an active homegrown salafist-jihadist group, Boko Haram (‘Westernisation Is Sinful’). When I put these thoughts to a US military staffer involved in anti-terrorism in Africa, he replied tersely: ‘What we’re doing in Africa is a sort of Whac-A-Mole’ – a reference to an arcade game in which players force moles back into their burrows by hitting them on the head with a mallet. He went on to quote the sixth president of the United States, John Quincy Adams: ‘America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.’ Well, not any longer perhaps. But France has done precisely that.

THIS can't end well!

Flattening

Dan Drezner on Tom Friedman:

Friedman clearly needs a sabbatical from the rigors of column-writing to get his head back in the game.  In the interest of raising our country's foreign policy discourse, I beg you to put him on leave.

It is just sad to see someone stop growing and decaying

Primus inter pares

From Kevin Jon Heller:

Fortunately — though I know this comes as a shock to the US, which likes to pretend that it is primus inter pares — the US doesn’t get to unilaterally determine whether Palestine is a state. Nor does Israel (and note that that Rice’s “direct negotiations” lament is simply designed to give Israel a veto over Palestinian statehood by continuing to avoid negotiating in good faith).

My suggestion: at all future UN meetings, [Ambassador Susan] Rice should avoid turning her head toward the seat with the State of Palestine placard.  That will make it much easier for her to pretend that more than 70% of the world’s states didn’t recently vote to recognize Palestinian statehood.

Bien envoyé mais c'est plus compliqué !

Conceptual boxes

From Daniel Drezner:

Foreign policy pundits are just like the rest of the monkey-brain population -- we like to put things in clear conceptual boxes -- particularly when we lack specific knowledge of the particulars, as is the case with Mali.  It will be easy, in the coming days, to put Mali into the "Afghanistan" box (bad) or the "Libya" box (good or bad depending on your partisan affiliation) or what have you.  Given that France and the West African countries are willing to shoulder the primary military burden of this engagement, however, it would seem that the U.S. could ramp up some humanitartian assistance for the affected areas.

Ah haven't we seen all of 'THIS' before and has fixing it ever worked?

Predictable unknowns

Pertinent stuff from James Blitz:

In May 2011, many believed the global jihadist movement had been dealt a decisive blow with the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. Now, jihadist threats have emerged on two new and significant fronts. Whether AQIM in Mali and Jabhat al Nusra in Syria turn out to be movements with broad ambitions and which challenge western interests remains to be seen. What cannot be doubted, however, is that the toppling of Gaddafi, who was ultimately the west’s ally in the fight against regional jihadist groups, is a factor in their rise to prominence.

Unfortunately thoughtfulness and patience are not essential qualities in the elaboration and enactment of foreign policy of countries too worried about their power to focus on results instead of actions and reactions.

A quagmire in the desert

Art Goldhammer on the French intervention in Mali:

I don't know if it is possible to have a quagmire in a desert, but Mali may offer an example.

The problem is that wars nowadays are won on TV especially when the victims are more than likely going to be people with no media access and to whom most, especially journalists, will have a hard time relating to!

The paternalistic instinct to 'fix' Haiti

From Justin Peters's review of Jonathan Katz's The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left on Haiti and the 32010 Earthquake:

For as long as Haiti has existed, foreigners have been trying to fix it. Early in the island’s history, the tools of improvement were familiar ones: invasion, repression, economic suasion, and other favorites from the colonialism handbook. France transformed Haiti into a vast sugar plantation; the United States installed several puppet presidents favorably disposed to American corporate interests. But eventually, Haiti stopped being worth the trouble. (...) No one disputes that Haiti needed help [after the [2010 Earthquake]. Left unsaid was the implicit assumption that one certainly couldn’t trust Haitians to help themselves. Aid groups warned potential donors, “Do Not Give To The Haitian Government: Haiti is known to be a corrupt country;” media organizations announced that “the chief culprit of current or past suffering in Haiti” was “intense corruption.” It wouldn’t surprise me if some observers secretly believed the Préval regime had engineered the earthquake in order to steal billions from the international community. (...) The result? Donated money went directly to NGOs and organizations that were often fundamentally incapable of putting that money to its proper use.

The trouble with charity/aid in  'dark' places such as Haiti is that it is based mostly solely on good sentiments and ignores realities on the ground because the need of the fixers/helpers is to parent and to feel good about themselves.

The post-genocidal regime in Rwanda and Congo

Sugary excerpt from Stephen W. Smith must-read post on Congo and Rwanda on the London Review of Book's blog:

The post-genocidal regime in Rwanda has time and again been able to raid and plunder its Congolese neighbour with no, or little, risk of punitive sanctions. Britain finally seems to have reservations about the validity of washing away a genocide with a torrent of crimes against humanity, and the UN Security Council has demanded an end to outside support for the M23 rebels, but the United States is still shielding Kagame from blame. Thanks to American support, Rwanda is about to take up a two-year seat as a non-permanent member of the Security Council. (...)An estimated 700,000 Congolese have been driven from their homes during the last bout of fighting in the east. Tens of thousands of unarmed civilians have been killed by Rwandan forces in eastern Congo. An estimated five million have died as indirect victims of warfare, from hunger, displacement or disease. The combined charges against all the warlords so far indicted by the ICC, from the former Liberian president Charles Taylor to the M23 commander Bosco Ntaganda, a.k.a. ‘The Terminator’, fall short of the war crimes committed by President Kagame and documented by the UN. But the ICC doesn’t seem to know.

The trouble here is as always that the people who could make a difference refuse to see the situation in ordinary terms and instead 'africanize' it. Doing so dehumanizes ordinary Congolese for the insistence that Africa is a country condemns very different olaces on that continent to remain the heart of darkness/blackness. 

 

Viva Europa!

From the great Pankaj Mishra:

The European idea of the nation-state, realized after much horrific bloodshed in Europe itself, was always a poor fit for Asia’s diverse mosaic.

Joseph Roth, who grew up in the multinational Hapsburg empire, was appalled by the imperatives of modern nationalism, according to which “every person must belong to a definite nationality or race” in order to be treated as an individual citizen. Roth, a Jew, suspected that members of minority groups, like himself, would be relegated to third-class citizenship, and vicious prejudice against them would be made respectable in the new nation-states built on the ruins of multinational empires.

The ethnic cleansers of 20th century Europe proved him right. It required a monstrous crime and a repentant political imagination to institute peace between warring European nations and soften attitudes toward minorities.

The battle against bigotry is far from over; Europe’s long and violent past today looms over its inevitably multicultural future.

Ah I have always found fascinating the idea that some things are inevitable especially when it is based on the assumption that ethnicity is destiny and identity!

'Western Guilt' and Rwanda

Interesting stuff from Jessica Pressler:

“From a public-relations point of view, doing work in Rwanda is very astute,” says Tom Zoellner, co-author of the biography of Paul Rusesabagina, whose heroic acts during the genocide were dramatized in the movie Hotel Rwanda. “What happened there was so catastrophic, and it touches a deep nerve of Western guilt, that we allowed that to happen, that it’s been sort of an ­international-aid darling.” In recent years, both Barclays and JPMorgan Chase have sent charitable delegations to the country, but among banks, Goldman Sachs maintains perhaps the most significant presence, dispatching employees to help train female entrepreneurs in the capital city as part of the 10,000 Women program it launched a few months before the 2008 crash.

For the temporary do-gooder, Rwanda also provides a more pleasant volunteering experience than, say, refugee camps in South Sudan, which aid workers this summer likened to hell. “Rwanda is sort of like Tuscany with banana trees,” says Zoellner. It’s temperate and green, and subsequent to the genocide, President Paul Kagame’s business-friendly quasi dictatorship has maintained social order while seeking to lure foreign investment and turn Rwanda into Africa’s Singapore.

Whatever one thinks of Kagame, it is impossible to deny that he is great at international politics in part because he understands that his country is Rwanda and not Africa.

The resiliency of neocons

From Stephen Walt:

(...) the unsinkable resiliency of the neoconservative movement remains impressive. Indeed, there is a certain genius to neoconservatism, which one must grant a certain grudging respect. Unlike their liberal interventionist counterparts, who are always looking for consensus and eager to compromise, the neocons are both remarkably uncompromising and notoriously unrepentant. They don't look back, if only because staring at their record of consistent failure would be depressing. So they always look forward, confident that their fellow citizens won't remember the past and can be bamboozled into heeding their advice once again.(...)neoconservatives are like someone who is constantly telling you to jump off a twenty story building, and promising that if you do, you'll fly. If you decide to be prudent and jump from the 10^th floor instead, and find yourself plummeting toward earth, they'll just say you failed because you didn't follow their advice to the letter. 

To put it simply, Neocons have a lot in common with the Obamabots/Obamaniacs! 

Mali as Afghanistan in 1996

The dumbest statement I have read this week so far from Francois Heisbourg of the Foundation for Strategic Research via the Washington Post:

This is like Afghanistan 1996. This is like when Bin Laden found a place that was larger than France in which he could organize training camps, in which he could provide stable preparations for organizing far-flung terror attacks. 

Comparaison n'est pas raison. Comparing Mali to Afghanistan is as smart and as appropriate as comparing Cap-Vert to Monaco. Wrong similes and metaphors in international politics are always signs of impending doom.

It's still Bush's world

Best comment on last night's debate from Gregor Peter Schmitz over at Spiegel:

Romney and Obama exchanged carefully prepared platitudes as though they were trapped in a world order created for them by White House predecessor George W. Bush.(...) Indeed, it appears as though Stevens' death in election year 2012 has been enough to overshadow the killing of Osama bin Laden and several other top terrorists from al-Qaida and other networks. It has been enough to keep America fixated on the war on terror and preoccupied with the Middle East.

The paradox of this fixation shown by both candidates is that neither Obama nor Romney have shown a real interest in the Muslim world. Despite overtures early in his term, the president did little thereafter to ensure that progress was made. The only regional issue that appears to be high on his priority list is Iran's nuclear program. Romney's plan for the region appears to consist almost entirely of unconditional support for Israel. Both candidates want to continue using drones unhindered.

There is so much cause for concern and the scariest thing is the paralysis of the American media.

Mali

Mali was mentioned four times in tonight's 'foreign policy' debate and sadly neither Obama nor Romney could manage to put things in perspective as Walter Mead did before the debate:

Mali was first destabilized thanks to NATO’s intervention in Libya, which sent weapons and fighters streaming into the northern deserts, where they found little opposition from the government. Other Islamist fighters from the Middle East soon came flocking in to this sandy patch of ungoverned territory. Their ranks are reportedly bolstered by thousands of local child soldiers.

The Libyan afterparty—the unintended consequences of NATO’s little Libya misadventure—sadly drags on well into the night.

Why do I have the sickening feeling that the afterparty is just starting and instead of learning that intervention is not a panacea, idiots who have never been to Mali or n that region of the world (I do not mean Africa) are going to decide to fix everything with 'surgical strikes!'

Mess and accountability

I agree with Walter Meade on this:

But there is a larger failure in Libya. Just as George W. Bush couldn’t dodge responsibility for the decision to go to war in Iraq on the basis of nukes that never showed up, President Obama owns the Libya mess in which the attack in Bengazi was just an incident—as Abu Ghraib was an incident in Bush’s war. Libya, thankfully, is nowhere near as big of a mess as Iraq, but even as President Obama mulls the possibility of retaliatory strikes, it’s not clear that we won’t get sucked further in. And if anything, this president should have learned from Bush’s experience in Iraq: overthrowing governments in the Middle East when you don’t know what comes next is a dangerous hobby.

Clinton can’t deflect final responsibility for that decision from President Obama, and she can’t cover over the mess that has the United States now puzzling over how to fight Al Qaeda and its allies in Mali as well as in Libya — or how to respond to the increase in terrorist strength in Niger and Nigeria to boot. This is a real mess and a serious one, and it flows from a set of poor decisions that the President and no other person made.

Why do I have the feeling that this is the beginning of something awful precisely because American foreign policy is just manufactured badly? 

 

The Benghazi political grenade

From Blake Hounshell on Hillary Clinton taking responsibility for the increasingly Benghazi political hot potato:

(...)Clinton's comments are obviously going to get wide play and will of course be instantly politicized -- regardless of whether she's merely doing the right thing, or whether she's actually just shielding Obama from scrutiny ahead of Tuesday night's debate, as some are already suggesting, or whether, as the conspiracy-minded would have it, she's pulling some Machiavellian maneuver to appear like she's taking responsibility only to make the president look bad and set herself up for 2016. (Clinton may have unintentionally set Obama up to be more directly attacked, by the way: Three Repubublican senators already have issued a press release saying that the president himself needs to take responsibility.)

I never  thought that the way the Obama administration handled the 9/11 Benghazi attack was a political issue until it started reacting too defensively against Republicans' attacks as if it didn't have the excuse of known unknowns and unknown knows as Rumsfeld would said.  That said, Clinton's latest statement now makes it a symbolic political issue at least in one way (which may be insignificant for more people than not may be happy to see her political wounded): how are Clintonites going to react if Obama doesn't at the very come to her bed side now that she has fallen on her sword? How much does Bill still enthusiastically help the One? 

The Nobel comic committee

From Daniel Drezner on the Nobel Peace Prize of the European Union:

[...]Since the start of the 21st century, the following organizations have won a Nobel Peace Prize besides the EU:  The United Nations, the International Atomic Energy Agency, Grameen Bank, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  So... maybe not winning a Nobel Peace Prize is better.  Still, I would like to thank the Nobel committee for a very humorous start to this Friday.

I share Drezner's reaction. I have to admit that I still haven't found a way to stop laughing!  Please, someone help, I'm about to die of laughter.

Just a question: isn't there a little girl in Pakistan or people in Syria or around that area that are more deserving of that pompous recognition?

Illiberal democracy

The sentence of the day is from Clive Crook:

Venezuela is a worked example of the use of anger and intolerance to concentrate power--democratically.

So is the The United States and France for that matter. A few years ago, I assert dismissively that Hugo Chavez wasn't Che Guevarra, the sobering and aching truth is that he doesn't have to be, just like Obama doesn't have to be Martin Luther King and Francois Hollande Léon Blum

An ode to parliamentary democracy

 

Man (pun intended), Australia must be a fun country! I have to learn a lot more about what the Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard is talking about to comment substantively, but I must admit that I love parliamentary democracies. I do for  at least one reason: debate, political leaders, whether they are in power or not, have to face others and answer questions and  learn how to rumble no matter how powerful and entitled they become.

After what we saw last weekend in the US , it is hard not agree that power isolates  and moreover makes one lose touch with reality because it, almost never,  has to answer tough questions until debates in an election year; even then the answers are never persuasive and satisfying.

Responsibility

The following words from Hugh Roberts make me uncomfortable:

The reason Muslims have been demonstrating from Tunis to Jakarta is not that they are exceptionally thin-skinned and liable to throw tantrums at the drop of a hat, nor even that US policy has given them plenty of other grounds for grievance over the years. It is that Islamist movements now collectively dominate but nowhere monopolise the political field and are bound to mobilise their supporters to the hilt whenever any of their rivals begin to do so. This is what the eclipse of the modernist nationalist tradition has led to, and Western – and by no means solely American – policy is responsible for it. The result is growing anarchy in the region from which Americans and American interests cannot realistically expect to remain immune.

Do we really live in a world where there are masters who act freely and slaves who submit and suffer from the actions of the all-powerful?

Motherhood as extra-training for women

Quote of the year from Jacob Zuma, the President of South Africa, who epitomizes the fact that the end of Apartheid in his country didn't mean the end of misogyny:

I wouldn’t want to stay with daughters who are not getting married. Because that in itself is a problem in society … Kids are important to a woman because they actually give an extra training to a woman, to be a mother.

Assange's superfluousness

I agree with Julian Ku on this, however I reserve the right to change my mind after reading what Glenn Greenwald had to say about the whole Assange show:

Assange is acting like a paranoid lunatic and it is astonishing to me that so many folks who should know better instinctively side with an accused rapist whose main argument is that the Swedish (Swedish!) justice system is being controlled by the CIA and US government. (...)n the end, (...) Ecuador will quickly tire of Assange after a few months and kick him out, especially after the global media start forgetting about him.

The vice of the French

Andrew McIntyre on his recent trip to France:

One central problem is that modern economics as taught in French schools and universities has barely changed these viewpoints. The antagonism to free market ideas is illustrated by Theodore Dalrymple in his observation that France's labour-market rigidities are a conscious opposition to the supposed savagery of the Anglo-Saxon neo-liberal model. As he dryly points out, “if sexual hypocrisy is the vice of the Anglo-Saxons, economic hypocrisy is the vice of the French.” (...) As on arriving, as on leaving, Charles de Gaulle airport, always manages to look like something out of a third world country. Chaotic, crowded and bordelique, the baggage-handler strikes, the crowds, the inconsistent and inadequate signage and ad hoc management of check-in counters and queues all seem a symbol of France's economic mismanagement, or perhaps is it simply a gross example of the notorious French indifference to providing efficient and friendly service to members of the public.

Small observation: increasingly I found myself preferring CDG (Charles de Gaulle) airport to JFK, which is just a dump, a sign that New York hasn't yet realized that the world has caught up and that it cannot remain the best worldly city with crappy infrastructures.

International cause célèbres

Sentences du jour from Brendan O'Neill:

The guilty verdict against feminist punk band Pussy Riot doesn't only point to a powerfully censorious streak in modern Russia – it also highlights the dangers inherent in Westerners' transformation of cases like this into international cause célèbres. (...)Pussy Riot have not only been screwed over by their enemies but also, ironically and sadly, by some of their so-called friends.

Unfortunately, I suspect that O'Neill is right.

 

Empire and Viagra

Pankaj Mishra on everlasting imperial fantasies in the 'West':

Even before 9/11, Tony Blair was ready to tend, with military means if necessary, to, as he put it, "the starving, the wretched, the dispossessed, the ignorant" around the world. His apparently more intellectual rival Gordon Brown urged his compatriots to be "proud" of their imperial past. Sensing a sharper rightward shift after 9/11, many pith-helmet-and-jodhpurs fetishists boisterously outed themselves, exhorting politicians to recreate a new western imperium through old-style military conquest and occupation of native lands.Embracing such fantasies of "full-spectrum dominance", American and European policymakers failed to ask themselves a simple question: whether, as Jonathan Schell put it, "the people of the world, having overthrown the territorial empires, are ready to bend the knee to an American overlord in the 21st"? After two unwinnable wars and horribly botched nation-building efforts, and many unconscionable human losses (between 600,000 and one million in Iraq alone), the "neo-imperialists" offering seductive fantasies of the west's potency look as reliable as the peddlers of fake Viagra. Yet, armour-plated against actuality by think tanks, academic sinecures and TV gigs, they continue to find eager customers.

I agree with Mishra with some reservations for I wonder whether Empire is just a 'western' fantasy; in short I feel increasingly uneasy as I get older about the separation of the world between the West and the rest and I hate with a passion the term 'postcolony.' Oh well, I am a marginal eccentric.

Wanting the Brits

Sugary excerpt of the late night from Jean-Claude Trichet on the relationship between The European Union and the UK:

(...)I really think that the UK profoundly belongs to Europe and Europe needs the UK. And there is presently a paradox because General de Gaulle was saying, ‘I don’t want the UK.’ Now all of Europe says, ‘We want the UK.’ And it’s the UK that says, ‘We don’t know.’ In any case, its future in the EU depends only on the UK itself, and that is remarkable.”

Falsely provocative thought: it may be possible that Europe needs Turkey now more than it needs the UK!

Putting an end to France

Alain Badiou on France, its present  and its future or rather lack of one:

Identities here are more frozen. It’s a country in latent crisis, a former planetary great power, with a particular universality, which does not know what to do with its lost greatness. From this point of view, France is at least as much a world being unmade as a world being made. My proposition is that we have to put an end to France. (...)I’ve thought for a long time that France should merge with Germany. I’m very happy, moreover, that other people, such as Michel Serres, now share my opinion. There is no future for France alone. The European combination is teetering, as we’ve seen with Greece, and everyone understands that France and Germany form the hard core of Europe. A merger would make it possible to stand up to the other economic great powers, which neither France nor Germany, nor Europe, is capable of doing today. The French and German economies are already intertwined, so let’s have this hard core realized politically! That could be in the form of a federal state, as is already the case with Germany.

It's good to see that some things never change and that Badiou is still a bold idealist at his best and an unadapted and stubborn ideologue at his worst.

When cock is politics...

Sugary excerpt of the day from Jennifer Thorpe's take on the whole Brett Murray's Zuma painting (The Spear of the Nation) with his cock exposed:

Zuma has characterised himself as a man’s man. He celebrates a masculinity that emphasises sexual virility and supports polygamy in the face of an HIV epidemic spread by multiple concurrent partners; a masculinity that emphasises that men take sex when they want it and, despite being accused of rape, never once says that violence against women is wrong; and a masculinity that is heteronormative and homophobic (see comments about pushing down gay men, and appointment of John Qwelane and Mogoeng Mogoeng). His masculinity has been the core of his politics thus far, and perhaps the core appeal to those who vote for him. When it is under threat the very core of what he stands for is under threat. That the painting was defaced by men is interesting and reflects that perhaps these scary sentiments about manhood and its untouchability are shared by many other men, not only Msholozi.

For now we’ll have to see what happens in court for Zuma and for the two men who defaced Murray’s painting. In the meantime state resources will be spent in court cases that focus on what it means to be a man. The politics of the cock are alive and well. And this whole saga had taught us all that they are not up for discussion.

 I have to admit that I believe that the painting to be on point for it goes to the core of what/who Zuma is and why his politics are problematic: they  justify the worship of the cock, any vile behavior in the name of a non-existent africanness which force morality, ethics to be about who people are (which is determined by their race, gender, class for individuality isn't allowed)  rather than about what they do.  This explains why Zuma can rape have manly sex with a HIV positive woman and still become president of South Africa.

The end of the exception française

Brendan O' Neill on the French elections:

The theme of this campaign is not ‘Should France be run according to left-wing or right-wing principles?’, but rather ‘Is France most threatened by Eastern immigrants or Anglo-Saxon culture? By poor foreigners or the princes of finance? By global jihadists or the “global mafia” (Le Pen’s term for the banking industry)?’. All the candidates share an obsession with the porousness of French borders, a feeling that the Republic is fragile and that it is all the fault of various ‘tribes’ or ‘mafia’. Here, we can glimpse the most significant thread in the campaign: a profound misunderstanding of what is driving the crisis of values in modern France, and a lack of any serious political language with which to address it.
All the candidates look outside of France for the source of the republican crisis. They correctly sense that the values upon which modern France was founded – democracy, equality, liberty, universalism – are held in low esteem today. But they wrongly pin the blame for this fact on either immigrants who refuse to embrace French culture or on a foreign-imported ‘religion of competition’. (...)If the Republic is fragile, it’s because the French elite itself is incapable of upholding the values upon which it was built, not because some Muslims have turned up or because Anglo-Saxon bankers are running riot. It is the inability of French leaders in our relativistic era to assert republican values unapologetically which leads them to launch phoney wars against fantasy external infiltrators instead.

I agree mostly with O'Neill despite the fact that  he is simply showing that there is no exception française.  France, as most countries undermined by a potent nostalgia for an idealised and glorious past due to their fear that the future will be bleak because they losing control of the world,  prefers to look outward for causes to its existential angst to avoid shaking their comfortable reality.

Veiled Frenchness

Jeremy Harding describes a scene of Sarkozy's last big meeting before Sunday's vote:

‘You’re 200,000!’ Sarkozy announced triumphantly, before he laid into the opposition’s preference for the red flag over the tricolore, quoted from Lamartine and promised a new kind of entrepreneurial capitalism to replace ‘finance capitalism’, but he’s been saying that for a while.

A spat erupted just in front of me and a woman fought her way to the edge of the crowd in tears, her hands pressed either side of her hijab. ‘I’m French after all,’ she shouted. Someone in the crowd had thrown a racist insult. ‘This is why France will never lift itself up,’ she said, shaking with rage. Moments later a poor white family – too poor for this rally in a slick part of town – were being questioned by the police.

I'm afraid that the divisive identity politics, which focuses on the idea that immigration is a threat to 'French identity' is here to stay.  Sarkozy has americanized French politics by shifting its focus from deeds, gravitas and grandeur to being and nothingness,

Wishy washy and fluffy francophiles

Adam Gopnik on the French presidential elections and the more than likely future french president François Hollande:

But it’s entirely likely that, after the second round of voting, on May 6th, the next President of France will be François Hollande, the inoffensive, myopic, weight-conscious Socialist candidate, a man so milky-mild that one has to project onto him a secret life to make him seem not just a fully credible politician but a fully credible human being. (And, indeed, Hollande’s love life is more intricate than one might expect: having fathered four children with his lover, the previous Socialist Presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, he left her, or was left by her, for another partner, meaning that his Presidency could include a role for an ex-mistress who is also a would-be queen.)

The strength of Hollande’s candidacy speaks mainly to the weakness of Nicolas Sarkozy’s, and the pervasive sense that his free-market reformist project has failed. After the twelve dead-man’s-float years of the Chirac Presidency, it was hard not to root at least a little for Sarkozy, and, in truth, his economic record, given the circumstances, is far from the worst on the Continent, or off it, for that matter. Yet he quickly came to seem arrogant instead of energetic, and he never quite shook a reputation, earned in the first days of his Presidency, for flashiness and bling. Even his marriage to Carla Bruni, and the child they had together, left the French unmoved. People will forgive a short man with a beautiful wife if he seems sufficiently surprised; Sarkozy seemed merely showy, and his energy, over time, merely antic and self-pleasing.

I have to admit that I like Adam Gopnik a lot, but that I am increasingly irritated by what he writes about France because it is so obvious that he is too much of a romantic to understand and to accept certain realities.  One only needs to read what he was writing about Sarkozy about five years ago to get the fact that Gopnik writes about France the same way BHL (Bernard Henri Lévy) writes about America  that is with passion, but not much more than superficial analysis.

Dangereux!

The cover of the next edition of the Economist making the argument than the more than likely future president of France, François Hollande, is 'rather dangerous':

It is very difficult to take the Economist's views of French politics seriously for although most of its analysis are pertinent, it never reaches the right conclusions in great part because it never understands that France isn't Britain as most American commentators don't understand what it means to a French socialist.

Ennui

The current French  presidential elections bore me so I have nothing original to say. However, Gideon Rachman is correct when he asserts that there won't be a blowout in 13 days. Nevertheless,  to the contrary of what he asserts Sarkozy's resilience isn't surprising, it was predictable and it is unfortunately an impediment to him being able to understand that France isn't America and that the French, unlike Americans, really want their president to be better than them.

Electing a king

Funny bit from Mathiew von Rohr:

On the surface, at least, French presidential elections may have similarities with their American counterparts, where two politicians face off in a duel for power.

But there's also something rather old-fashioned about the French version. Most of the candidates write statesman-like books that people actually buy -- and when they appear on TV, they grandly announce that their appearance is a rendezvous with the voters. One of the peculiarities of this election is the current lineup of hopeless fringe candidates, who the French call les petits candidats. They are the tolerated court jesters in a choreographed show, which ultimately results in the people electing a new king.

I have to admit that I hate the increasing americanization of French politics and the fact that  French presidential elections are becoming like the American ones in the sense that fluff and oomph are almost everything. The trouble with that picture is that kings have much more power than presidents and that choosing one without much thought or analysis is dangerous.

Psyche and fantasies

I'm going to be munching on this sugary excerpt from Rob Marchant this week-end:

[...]something lies deep in the psyche of the European left, which still, despite all logical evidence to the contrary, wants to see these jihadists in Iraq, the Arabian peninsula or Palestine in some degree as freedom fighters. Sticking it to the man: the man in question being the West, the Establishment, the US.

It is a dangerous fantasy, and one which ultimately puts in jeopardy everything we believe in, because those outside our narrow political club do not see things the same way. The disturbing thing is that we can’t see that this kind of coincidence, of a bunch of Jewish-related news stories since the start of the year in the national press, in a country where we’re talking about a tiny proportion of the population. It wasn’t happening ten years ago, or even five. We can’t see that anti-Semitism is back on the agenda in a big way, as I wrote in the New Statesman back in October, and the left is ignoring it.

Marchant isn't wrong but I think it is necessary to enlarge the picture to view all the trees.

Afghan quagmire

Unfortunately, I have the strong suspicion that Hamida Ghafour is right when she says this:

It’s extraordinary that, after a decade of engagement, the Americans could be so clueless about the handling of Islam’s holy book, an ignorance the Taliban leadership deftly used for propaganda purposes by dispatching a suicide car bomber on Monday to a NATO air base in eastern Afghanistan. At least nine people were killed.

It’s a cynical business far removed from spirituality or Islam.

These protests are not really about religion, as offensive as it is to burn any holy book. They’re about poor, disenfranchised people expressing anger over lack of progress and security and finding an easy vehicle for that rage.

The oft-heard refrain that the West has spent billions of dollars in the past 10 years on a failed nation-building experiment simply doesn’t hold up. The vast majority of the money has never reached ordinary Afghans. It has paid for Western armies, the building of embassies, inflated overheads of international aid organizations and corrupt contracts that end up lining the pockets of a few Afghans and Westerners. Western taxpayers, including Canadians, are rightfully fed up with paying for this intractable war.

It's almost as comical as it is ironic that it is a president that was supposed to be exotic, different, worldy, multicultural  understand the world because he spent a few years in Indonesia and has a Kenyan father that made the decision to have a surge in Afghanistan (I have always argued that Obama is what he does, that he is as American as George Bush and thus a normal American president) and that seems to be unable to understand one of the most important lessons of history:

There can't be such a thing as a  friendly and civilizing occupation.

With prejudice

Sugary excerpt from Pankaj Mishra's critical, but fair piece on Niall Ferguson:

The banner of white supremacism has been more warily raised ever since in post-imperial Europe, and very rarely by mainstream politicians and writers. In the United States, racial anxieties have been couched either in such pseudo-scientific tracts about the inferiority of certain races as The Bell Curve, or in big alarmist theories like Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’. It’s not at all surprising that in his last book Huntington fretted about the destruction by Latino immigration of America’s national identity, which is apparently a construct of ‘Anglo-Protestant culture’. As power ostensibly shifts to the East, a counterpoise to dismay over the West’s loss of authority and influence is sought in a periodic ballyhooing of the ‘trans-Atlantic alliance’, as in Philip Bobbitt’s Terror and Consent (2008), which Niall Ferguson in an enthusiastic review claimed will ‘be read with pleasure by men of a certain age, class and education from Manhattan’s Upper East Side to London’s West End’.

I wish I could read Mishra's writings without reservations, but I cannot even though I like him as a writer. Oh well, it's always good to be aware of one's own prejudices.

 

Sarko slam

No comment necessary after this bit from Charlemagne:

On Wednesday 26^th, when the euro zone holds the second session of its two-part summit, the EU’s 27 leaders will make a point of gathering beforehand. The meeting will last just an hour, and will sign off on the plan to recapitalise Europe’s banks. But because the financial sector is part of the single market, which is an issue for all EU states, and Mr Cameron wanted to make sure that the 27 were seen to take the decision, not the 17.

For now, Mr Cameron does not appear to have a very strong hand. Most of the other euro-outs are committed, legally and politically, eventually to joining the single currency. Mr Sarkozy’s harsh words to Mr Cameron were strikingly spiteful: “We are sick of you criticising us and telling us what to do. You say that you hate the euro and now you want to interfere in our meetings.”

British officials shrug off Mr Sarkozy’s legendary rudeness as a personality flaw. “He never pursues it. He is not interested in texts,” says one diplomat.

Qaddafi and vindication

Juan Cole on the death of Gaddafi and the intervention of the US and Nato:

The Arab League, President Obama and NATO have been vindicated in their decision to forestall the massacre of eastern Libyan cities such as Benghazi. The region’s remaining bloodthirsty tyrants, who have not scrupled to massacre non-combatants for exercising their right of peaceable assembly and protest, should take the lesson that mass murder is a one-way ticket for them to the sewage drain of history. As I told the NYT today, ““The real lesson here is that there is a new wave of popular politics in the Arab world… People are not in the mood to put up with semi-genocidal dictators.”

I don't agree with Juan Cole or rather with the way he chooses to phrase the issue for two reasons. The first is that I don't think that death of Qaddafi or of any dictator is the measuring stick as to whether American intervention in the country was successful. If it were the case, Iraq would be a success.

The second reason is that long term matters especially when the policy before intervention whether it was direct or not was to interact with Qaddafi's regime.  In short, my problem is that Cole is solely moralizing the issue because he agrees with the policy instead of judging it on its merit, which is what happens on the ground.

I have to admit that because I lived through the capture of Saddam Hussein and his death, there is something about these flashy events that unsettle me while I hope that everything ends well and while I know the conclusion  will depend on acts not on good feelings and intentions.

Seriousness, facts and terror plots

Glenn Greenwald on the 'Iranian terrorist plot" to kill the Saudi Ambassador to the US:

[...] why would Iran possibly wake up one day and decide that it wanted to engage in a Terrorist attack on U.S. soil when it could much more easily kill Saudi officials elsewhere? and if Iran and its Quds forces are really behind this inept, hapless, laughable plot, then nothing negates the claim that Iran is some Grave Threat like this does [...]

I, for one, am waiting for something more conclusive and convincing than assertions by Holder and co. about what the facts show for I have learned in the Bush and the Obama years not to take claims about terrorism and national security threats at face value for they have become too influenced by ideology and politics.

Skepticism is required for it cools down things to make the issue facts rather than fears and beliefs.  In short, I'm waiting for the Obama to show me the money instead of trying to scare me by appealing to my conviction that Iran is a country with a dangerous government!

Hubris

I'm so happy that the Yankees lost last night (it doesn't redeem the collapse of the Sox, but it makes it easier to find an existential reason to it all) that I'm indulging myself with the conclusion of Greg Grandin's article on American foreign policy and its containment-liberation complex:

Through their inability or unwillingness to question first principles, politicians such as Obama and policy intellectuals such as Samantha Power and Paul Wolfowitz complete the circle linking pragmatism, idealism, and arrogance and keep the wheel of containment-liberation spinning.