I’ve been sitting on this great post about reforms to US bankruptcy laws and how they fit into the general pattern of risk being shifted from business to workers and to ordinary people in general. But I waited too long and Paul Krugman’s already written it. So go and read his piece, and then, if you want, you can look at the things I was going to write that Krugman hasn’t said already.
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From the category archives:
World Politics
As mentioned here, there has been a general increase in repression in Iran in recent years, and several bloggers have been arrested and imprisoned Similar repression is taking place in Bahrain. You can keep up with developments and suggested actions with The Committee to Protect Bloggers.
This is worth thinking about in relation to the current euphoria about positive developments in Lebanon and Israel/Palestine (and some positive gestures in Egypt and Saudi Arabia), and attempts to tie all this to US policy in Iraq.
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I recently wrote about seeing Ray Takeyh, Senior Fellow on the Council on Foreign Relations, speak about the nuclear threat from Iran. At the time, he mentioned that he would be publishing a piece with Ken Pollack on the subject. I see, via Belgravia Dispatch, that it’s out.
The authors argue that the West cannot force Iran to stop their weapons program; they rule out a full-scale invasion, targeted bombing, or wishful thinking about a coup. But a combination of incentives and sanctions that provide Iran with significant economic benefits for nuclear compliance can make butter more appealing than guns. It’s a serious and detailed piece, well worth printing out and reading.
How likely is it that the Bush administration will pursue this path? I doubt that anyone has any better ideas, but after their pointed rejection of the comparable North Korean framework, it’d cause a bit of whiplash.
Could anything be more “Airmiles” than the suggestion that we start an essay competition to foil Bin Laden?
What I would do with the $75 million we have budgeted as rewards for bin Laden and Zarqawi is use it instead to sponsor an essay contest for high school students in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria and Egypt. The contest entry form would say the following: “In 2,000 words, write an essay on one of these two topics: 1. Why do you believe the Arab-Muslim world is fully capable of achieving democratic, representative government and how do you envisage it coming about through peaceful changes inside your country, without any American or other outside help. 2. Write an essay about the lives of any of the great medieval Arab or Muslim mathematicians, scientists or philosophers and how their innovations helped to shape our world today.”
You know what else we should ask? Turn-ons and turn-offs. Then they could be like, “I’m Miss September from Egypt. Turn-ons: democratic government, long walks on the beach; turn-offs: rude guys!”
I’m one of the objects of denunciation in “an article by Louis Proyect on marxmail”:http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/FredHalliday.htm . Proyect is disgusted with various former editors of the New Left Review who have supported “humanitarian intervention” here and there. It is certainly true that I did (and still do) support the intervention in Kosovo, but Proyect has much more specific allegations:
bq. In October 2000, the NLR asked Bertram to write an article on the anti-Milosevic revolt. However, editor Susan Watkins nixed the article since it implied political support for the forced absorption of Yugoslavia into Western European economic and political institutions.
The NLR never asked me to write such an article, I’ve never written such an article (asked or not), and so Susan Watkins couldn’t have “nixed” it. In fact, I’ve had no contact whatsoever with NLR since 1993. I don’t know whether the facts adduced by Proyect against other people in his piece are accurate ….
(Thanks to Henry for drawing my attention to this.)
[UPDATE: Proyect has now edited the piece so that Marko Attila Hoare is referred to as the author of the rejected NLR piece. I hope that’s correct]
Iranians are stocking up on candy and flowers with which to bestrew invading US troops, according to Thomas Friedman who says “many young people apparently hunger for Mr. Bush to remove their despotic leaders, the way he did in Iraq.”. His evidence for this proposition is the following
Oddly enough, when I last visited America, I met plenty of people who “love anything their government hates,” and assured me that the kind of thing I saw on Fox was not really the way most Americans felt. They didn’t feel able to confess to me that they were longing for the arrival of a Franco-German liberation army, but no doubt if I’d had the benefit of an Oxford education, I would have been able to detect their eagerness for an invasion, civil war and so on.n Oxford student who had just returned from research in Iran told me that young Iranians were “loving anything their government hates,” such as Mr. Bush, “and hating anything their government loves.” Tehran is festooned in “Down With America” graffiti, the student said, but when he tried to take pictures of it, the Iranian students he was with urged him not to. They said it was just put there by their government and was not how most Iranians felt.
Iran, he said, is the ultimate “red state.”
The Iraqis will be going to the elections at the end of the month, so it is unsurprising that the insurgents have stepped up their campaign of blowing up tanks and chopping off heads. The is an awful lot of rubbish talked about the Iraqi insurgents; a simple look at the geographical distribution of their attacks shows that they unlikely to all be Sunnis or Ba’athists, and they are not targeting civilians in much greater proportion to military targets than we are. Whatever Christopher Hitchens thinks, they are the direct moral equivalent of the Viet Cong; they represent much of what is worst about the human condition, and any future in which they gained power would most likely be outright disastrous, but for all that, to take up arms against an occupying foreign army is not an ignoble thing to do, and I can quite understand why lots of people on the left have been sympathetic to them.
But history has passed them by. Iraq is not Vietnam (or more specifically, Iran is not China) and they have no hope of victory. All they can really do is prolong the occupation and therefore the misery. The time has well past by which anyone with brains in their head could reasonably hope for anything other than swift and reasonably democratic elections, a declaration of victory and for the coalition troops to jump in the tanks, start the engines and stop driving when they see the first McDonalds. Whatever happens, this war will have been a collossal waste of money and life; tens of thousands of excess deaths to create a puppet state. (By the way, as part of their debt relief deal, the Iraqis are currently negotiating a program with the IMF which will involve removing the market-distorting provision of subsidised food to the poor. I do hope that the Lancet will do a study into the effects of that, and that war crimes trials will result). But this is by the by as far as supporting the Iraqi resistance is concerned. Below the fold, I’ve posted a poem by Robert Burns that sums it up better than I ever could.
Spotted in Toronto, where I spent part of last weekend – while George Bush is Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2004_12/005349.php, Time Canada’s “Newsmaker of the Year” is “Maher Arar”:http://www.timecanada.com/CNOY/story.adp?year=2004. It makes for an interesting juxtaposition.
We all got worked up about the British governmen’t proposed law on incitement to religious hatred. But it isn’t the only thing going on in the world of free speech and censorship. Last night “hundreds of Sikhs in Birmingham protested outside a theatre”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/4107437.stm (and a few tried to storm the building) that was staging a play depicting scened of sexual abuse inside a Sikh temple. And the United States “has added Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV station”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4106595.stm to its list of terrorist organizations on the grounds that its broadcasts incite violence. Al-Manar has also been taken off the air in France. “Reports of the French decision”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,11882,1373845,00.html give some detail both of Al-Manar’s offensive content and of the grounds of French action:
bq. A guest on a live discussion programme said there were Zionist attempts to spread Aids and other diseases to Arabs. On December 2, the station accused Israel of “an unprecedented campaign” to stop it revealing to European viewers “the crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israel”.
bq. The French broadcasting authority, CSA, said in a letter to al-Manar that Israel had never been held responsible for crimes against humanity by an international judicial body. Al-Manar’s words, it said, could constitute an incitement to hatred or violence on grounds of religion or nationality.
[Note: I’m leaving comments open, but discussion should focus on how these cases bear on principles governing hate speech. I’ll delete any comments which veer off into generalised comment on Israel-Palestine etc.]
Amidst all the election news of the past month from all over, I have had little energy to compile a post about a referendum taking place tomorrow in Hungary: extending Hungarian citizenship to Hungarians living outside of Hungary’s borders. (Pick any country around Hungary and you’ll find relevant populations from Slovakia to Romania, from Serbia to Ukraine). When a nationalist party becomes desperate in securing votes, it comes up with interesting ideas. Why not extend voting rights to all Hungarians across the globe? Those who left in 1956 or who live as frustrated minorities in other countries may be the perfect targets for their nationalistic message. Give those people voting rights and the party may be able to secure quite a bit of popularity in the future.
Apparently there are no details about what it would take for people to prove their Hungarian “origins” (seems like opening a can of worms to be asking that kind of a question in this area of the world). That may be one aspect that would allow the current government (made up of parties that are not backing this initiative) to temper the effects of a majority yes vote.
One facet of all this of additional interest to me is how the country would proceed with the voting rights of those living abroad. The only way those of us abroad can currently cast our votes is to go to the Hungarian embassy in the country in which we reside. Obviously, this leads to few votes from those not residing in Hungary. For the initiative to be really effective, they would have to tweak this part of the system as well.
The outcome of the referendum tomorrow will only count if at least a quarter of those eligible to vote – so about two million people – plus one vote for the same outcome.
UPDATE (Sunday, Dec. 5, 2:30pm CST): The referendum did not get the requisite number of votes with the same outcome to count. Out of 8 million 24 thousand eligible voters, at least 2 million 6 thousand plus one would have had to vote yes. With 95 percent of votes counted (36.8 percent participation), 1.39 million voted yes to expanding citizenship to Hungarians beyond the country’s borders, 1.32 voted no. Let’s not even think about how much this whole fiasco cost the country…
Columns in the Guardian by Jonathan Steele and John Laughland, asserting that demonstrations against the rigging of the Ukraine election were a Western-funded plot, have been the subject of a lot of criticism here and on other blogs. As far as Laughland is concerned, Chris gave us a good rundown on his views and assocations (which could broadly be described as lunar right) some months ago, and there’s more, in the Guardian itself, from David Aaronovitch.
Now we get this column from Anne Applebaum claiming that Steele and Laughland are part of a leftwing plot
The larger point, though, is that the “it’s-all-an-American-plot” arguments circulating in cyberspace again demonstrate something that the writer Christopher Hitchens, himself a former Trotskyite, has been talking about for a long time: At least a part of the Western left — or rather the Western far left — is now so anti-American, or so anti-Bush, that it actually prefers authoritarian or totalitarian leaders to any government that would be friendly to the United States.
Applebaum is generally well-informed and, while she does not name either Steele or Laughland, she says “Neither author was a fringe journalist”, which implies some familiarity with their positions. In any case, she presumably reads The Guardian. Why then doesn’t she acknowledge that the views they put forward draw the (minuscule) support they have attracted from the right as well as the left ?
UpdateOver at my blog, commenter Alex points out that Applebaum used to work for The Spectator which has published Laughland fairly regularly.
The Ukraine crisis is dragging on, and could still collapse into violence, but I’ll restate my view that the likely outcome is a new runoff election, which Yushchenko will win. He almost certainly had a majority to begin with, and has generally behaved in a statesmanlike manner after the election, while Yanukovich has floundered, and generally looked like the thug he apparently is.
I’m appending another eyewitness report from Tarik Amar, forwarded by Dan Hardie
I’ve been looking through the headlines on international AIDS day. The BBC discusses “the disproportionate impact on women in Africa”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4052531.stm . “India has 5.1 million people infected with HIV”:http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/asiapcf/12/01/china.india.aids.reut/ , and nobody really knows how many victims there are in China (CNN). “HIV and Aids are expected to kill 16 million farm workers in Southern Africa by 2010” reports the “South African Independent Online”:http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=68&art_id=vn20041201042230610C465958 . In Britain the “Guardian tells us”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1363277,00.html that a fifth of respondents to a poll blame the victims. In “Lebanon”:http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=1&article_id=10570 , only a quarter of victims receive any kind of treatment. In Uganda “a government minister warns the UN”:http://www.365gay.com/newscon04/11/113004uganda.htm not to give advice to gays on safe sex because homosexuality is illegal. Please add more links in comments throughout the day.
The OSCE must be doing something right, given the “loud yelps of dismay”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/d1af5d44-416b-11d9-9dd8-00000e2511c8.html from Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov in the _FT_ today (warning: hidden behind paywall). Lavrov complains that the OSCE “has deviated from its original objectives” and that “some countries’ approach to the OSCE’s work is increasingly based on obvious double standards.” Dire warnings in diplomatic speak (“the very survival of the OSCE will depend on its ability to capitalise on its comparative advantages”) follow on demands that the OSCE revert to consensus-based decision-making and show a greater sensitivity to national and cultural differences. All of which amounts to a barely-stifled howl of complaint at the OSCE’s role in monitoring electoral behaviour in Ukraine, and blowing the whistle on some of the dodgy goings-on associated therewith. Since the early 1990’s, the OSCE has pioneered a very effective form of “limited intervention”:http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/Piecing_together.pdf that has helped prevent or mitigate ethnic conflict in a variety of trouble spots, as well as promoting democracy through election monitoring and norm diffusion. It’s clearly working well enough to discomfit the Russians. The final outcome in Ukraine is still up in the air (although it looks increasingly hopeful), but the process is very interesting indeed. It suggests yet again that outside actors can help promote democracy through monitoring, information diffusion and censure of bad behavior when the internal conditions are right. If Ukraine does indeed become a democracy over the next several years (I still wouldn’t lay hard money on this outcome) it will demonstrate that soft power, preventive diplomacy and constructive intervention can work, even in the teeth of vigorous opposition from the regional hegemon. Indeed, it will stand as an important counterexample of successful democracy-building to the mess in Iraq. Too early to say, of course, but worth keeping an eye on.
Norman Geras presents a central part of the argument for war, arguing that war can be justified even when it is predictable in advance that it will do more harm than good, and that even aggressors aren’t fully responsible for the consequences of the wars they start. Here’s the crucial bit
in sum, those in the anti-war camp often argue as if there wasn’t actually a war going on – the real conflict on the ground being displaced in their minds by the argument between themselves and supporters of the war. Everything is the fault of those who took the US and its allies into that war and, secondarily, those who supported or justified this.
Except it isn’t. As I said in the earlier post, the war has two sides. One counter-argument here is likely to be that those who initiate an unjust war are responsible for everything they unleash. But first, this begs the question. Much of the case for the war’s being unjust was that it would have bad consequences. Yet, many of those bad consequences are the responsibility of forces prosecuting a manifestly unjust war – in both its objectives and its methods – on the other side. Secondly, it’s simple casuistry in assessing the responsibilities of two sides in a military conflict to load everything on to one of the sides – even where the blame for having begun an unjust and aggressive war is uncontroversial. Were the Japanese themselves responsible for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Adolf Hitler was responsible for many terrible crimes during the Second World War. But the fire bombing of Dresden? This is all-or-nothing thinking.
To respond, I’ll begin by asking a question. Suppose those of us on the Left who opposed the Iraq war had prevailed. To what extent, if any, would we have been responsible for the crimes that Saddam would undoubtedly have committed while he remained in power?