Sunday, September 12, 2004

Iraq: The Bungled Transition

Peter Galbraith, who is a former US ambassador to Croatia and who participated in the Clinton administration's successful effort to end the Bosnia conflict, writes in this very informative analysis, "Iraq: the Bungled Transition", that the Bush administration's cronyism, inconsistency, and lack of planning has turned the transition to Iraqi "self-rule" into a fiasco. Although this may be perfectly obvious to anyone who reads the newspaper (and we all know who proudly admits that he doesn't), if you don't know what the TAL (Transitional Authority Law) is or why it was important, you may not understand why the US reconstruction effort has been such an utter failure. Galbraith makes clear that the US has already effectively jettisoned the idea of women's rights, minority protections, and representative democracy in Iraq, and offers an unremittingly bleak outlook on Iraq's political future if the Bush administration stays the present course.

I found particularly worthy of gallows humor the following anecdote in Galbraith's article about the lack of relevant qualifications -- except, of course, for political patronage -- among the Bush administration's appointees in the reconstruction effort:

The privatizing of Iraq's economy was handled at first by Thomas Foley, a top Bush fund-raiser, and then by Michael Fleisher, brother of President Bush's first press secretary. After explaining that he had got the job in Iraq through his brother Ari, he told the Chicago Tribune—without any apparent sense of irony—that the Americans were going to teach the Iraqis a new way of doing business. "The only paradigm they know is cronyism."


I'll post the full Galbraith article as a comment on this post, in case the link goes dead. As for the Iraqis...let us wish them safety, and hope.

Saturday, September 11, 2004

Disconnecting the dotted lines

The NY Times's article today on the Bush service records controversy (CBS Defends Its Report on Bush Military Record) doesn't put the story to rest, but the kicker at the end of the article -- that the signatures on the documents in question appear authentic -- strongly suggests the likelihood of forensic over-eagerness by bloggers with a partisan agenda. Then again, I'm sure the doubters will say that signatures can be forged (or simply reproduced by scanner), so I doubt the questions will disappear. What we need is an enterprising reporter (or blogger?) on the political beat to find other examples of documents that came from the same office and that have the same physical features. Meanwhile, Maureed Dowd's Op-Ed from two days ago, "Cheney Spits Toads" (reproduced in a comment on this post), offers a political archeology -- for me, much more compelling -- of a different sort. But I guess I'm just one of those liberal "paragraph people" (as opposed to the "spreadsheet people") whom David Brooks claims vote predictably along a pattern determined by our liberal arts college majors (in those years in my major, the now defunct Semiotics, "liberal" was a dirty word).

Friday, September 10, 2004

Bloggers drive controversy

Well, we bloggers are on the cutting edge, according to this CNET news story about blogs that have entered into the presidential race's political fray. This kind of amateur sleuthing, despite its dubious methods and conclusions, is afterall just a different kind of literary analysis....

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

A global strategy to reduce terror

Rami Khoury, editor of the Lebanon-based Daily Star newspaper, writes in this article of the need for a global strategy to reduce terror. His essay appears in the wake of the horrific attack on a Russian school in Beslan last week, and other appalling recent incidents of terror, such as the late-August bus bombing in Be'er Sheva, Israel, that left 16 Israeli civilians dead and as many as 100 wounded.

Khoury writes that terror must be understood, paradoxically, as obeying market forces. Where there is a demand for terror, there will be those whose interests lie in supplying it. To combat such trends, he argues, we need to study the specific conditions of alienation and dehumanization that have bred active local terror markets in certain places and under certain pressures. Khoury contends that Arab societies must come to terms with the fact that in recent years the most stunning acts of terror (although not the greastest quantity -- that dubious distinction probably goes to South America) have arisen from within due to "root causes [that] are almost totally local and indigenous."

At the same time, Khoury points out that the militaristic responses of powerful nations such as the U.S.A., Russia and Israel have by and large contributed to fomenting more terror, rather than quelling it. This is because these powerful nations tend to respond to terror as a straightforward military threat, rather than understanding that its roots are in social, economic, and political problems that must be addressed first and foremost in these arenas.

Khoury's analysis makes sense, but it is, as he acknowledges, a point of view that is difficult to absorb -- not least, it may be said, because his concept of a global strategy to reduce terror requires patient and consistent efforts to build democracy, increase human rights and political freedoms, and to redress economic inequities. Such efforts are not easily sustained by those whose power offers the opportunity for furious -- if ultimately ineffectual -- reaction. --Lincoln

Letter to the Editor: On obesity and schools

Published on September 25th

Editor, Mobile Register

To the Editor:

Your editorial today, "Schools Can Help Fight Fat," mentions that more than one in four students in Alabama is believed to be overweight -- an appalling number. You urge the Alabama Board of Education to address the role of schools in helping to reduce obesity among students. While the Board of Education studies the matter, school principals and local school boards themselves should take the initiative to deal with some of the most obvious culprits in the obesity epidemic.

One such contributing cause can be seen in a casual stroll through the grounds of Mobile's highly rated Murphy High School. Shockingly, soda machines -- rather than drinking fountains or art works -- nestle in every corner of the school's extensive common areas. These machines, replete with child-friendly ads for their hyper-sweet and nutritionally empty wares, are grim reminders of the many ways in which corporate commerce has invaded our public spaces and institutions.

Students in school should not be subjected to a daily barrage of enticements to buy products that we know are harmful to their health. It may be painful for public schools to wean themselves off the profits that soda and junk food machines generate (why else would there be so many of these machines at a school like Murphy?), but plumping up budgets at the expense of student waistlines seems downright malicious. As for the rest of us, our duty is to make sure that sufficient funding is available so that public schools like Murphy don't need to turn to corporate sales of junk food to provide a decent education for Alabama's youth.

Sincerely,
Lincoln ...
Mobile, Alabama