The Shoe Frenzy

The New York Times has voluminous documentation of Iraqis' reactions to the shoe frenzy.

Of Davis and Double Standards

A reader who cloaks him/herself in anonymity writes of my posting "Angela Davis, Moral Idiot":

Is your intention to delegitimize the black liberation struggles of the 60s/70s, or is it to emphasize the failures and injustices of the Soviet government?

I would hope that you aren't suggesting much of a relationship. I would be interested to hear that relationship argued, though. It would certainly be a stretch to base much on a single quote of unverifiable attribution, especially given that the quote is sufficiently contradicted by a lifetime of the professor's writings and lectures. You might inquire into Davis' general stance on incarceration.

My intentions are manifold, but they do not include delegitimizing black liberation. There is no inherent link between black liberation and Soviet oppression, obviously. Insofar as that movement advocated racial separatism and courted dictators like Fidel Castro, it delegitimized itself. To be morally consistent on the two points, one would have supported black liberation, if understood as legal equality of the races, and opposed Soviet tyranny. Though he is not the object of faddish adulation on the left (like Davis is), Bayard Rustin is a chief example of moral consistency, having been a civil rights pioneer and a socialist while managing not to fawn over the Soviet Union. He organized the March on Washington in 1963, just one of his many credits in a lifetime of fighting for human rights, and, though now dead, I wish his story was more appreciated, especially by those who fetishize fellow-travellers.

I have in fact inquired into "Davis' general stance on incarceration," which is why I find her views on arbitrary imprisonment of political dissidents in Warsaw Pact countries to be so ironic and so devastating to her own cause, or at least her own credibility. (Really, how could the irony of a woman who wants to abolish prisons in a democratic country while glibly endorsing the jailing of political activists in a dictatorship escape even the most obtuse of minds?)

Her indignation at racial oppression in this country became hysteria, and this led her to be willfully blind to the enslavement of several hundred million people in the Eastern Bloc. Such a glaring moral blind spot should, I think, cause us to regard her political proclamations with vigilant dubiety.

The Beginning of the End for the British in Iraq

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was in Baghdad today to approve his government's deal with Iraq to withdraw nearly all its forces from the country by mid-2009. You can read more about it here.

Of all the coalition partners except the United States, the British troop contingent has been the largest. It is to their great credit that they did not cravenly flee after the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London the way the Spanish did after the 3/11 bombings in Madrid. The "special relationship" endures.

Price-Distorting Agricultural Subsidies We Can Believe In

President-elect Barack Obama has chosen former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack as his Secretary of Agriculture. It's a victory for useless ethanol production and exorbitant welfare for agribusiness. Too bad; this department really needed change, as Michael Pollan pointed out.

Angela Davis, Moral Idiot

Perhaps the definitive icon of black liberation (separatism/supremacy) in the 1960s and 1970s was Angela Davis. The details of her life, which is not yet over, are easily accessible, but I thought one particular story merits study. It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident and author of The Gulag Archipelago, who told it in a speech to the AFL-CIO on July 9, 1975:

There's a certain woman here named Angela Davis. I don't know if you are familiar with her in this country, but in our country, literally, for an entire year, we heard of nothing at all except Angela Davis. There was only Angela Davis in the whole world and she was suffering. We had our ears stuffed with Angela Davis. Little children in school were told to sign petitions in defense of Angela Davis. Little boys and girls, eight and nine years old, were asked to do this. She was set free, as you know. Although she didn't have too difficult a time in this country's jails, she came to recuperate in Soviet resorts. Some Soviet dissidents--but more important, a group of Czech dissidents--addressed an appeal to her: "Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You have such great authority now. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for those people in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?" Angela Davis answered: "They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison." That is the face of Communism. That is the heart of Communism for you.

If you know anything about the ideological battles of the 20th century, I needn't comment further, and certainly not to not how widely shared this sentiment was on the left.

The Measure of Our Culture

One of the headlines of tonight's On the Record with Greta van Susteren: "SHARON OSBORNE ACCUSED OF ATTACKING REALITY SHOW CONTESTANT." What a sad indication of our culture's voyeuristic celebrity obsession. Greta should be wearing a striped vest and selling tickets to the merry-go-round at the mall, not hosting a television show. Pity.

The Anti-Hero

The last two films lionizing Ernesto Guevara, 2004's The Motorcycle Diaries and the upcoming four-hour Che, have occasioned passionate and eloquent denunciations by two great writers of Anglo-American liberalism. Paul Berman, whose intellectual histories of the generation of May '68 are legend, illuminated Che's despotic side in Slate. British writer Johann Hari wrote recently for The Huffington Post of the ignorance and insidiousness of the cult surrounding the man most commonly seen as a T-shirt silhouette. Read both of these pieces; historical integrity depends on it.

Of Muslim Insanity and the Obligation Not to Capitulate

It is now a fact of life in the West to be confronted with increasingly sweeping and deranged demands by Muslims, both immigrant and native-born. Last year there was the installation of basins for foot-washing at the University of Michigan at Dearborn after Muslim students requested them for pre-prayer ablution. When criticized, the foot-bath lobby hilariously said the sinks were for all students, not just Muslims, as if Lutherans, Jews, and agnostics will find any use for them.

The latest Muslim challenge to the West's long-established constitutional traditions occurred recently in Britain. A blind man, Alun Elder-Brown, was denied entry to a restaurant because he was accompanied by his guide dog, Finn, which offended the Muslim owners. It was a terrible ordeal for him:

Mr. Elder-Brown was taking his girlfriend out to celebrate her birthday with her five year-old daughter last week when he was told he would have to leave his dog, Finn, tied up outside. He showed a card issued by the Institute of Environmental Health Officers certifying he and his dog were allowed into any premises but an argument ensued and the owners threatened to call the police if he did not leave.

"It was humiliating and degrading, especially as there were a lot of people around me," he said. "I was made to feel like a piece of dirt. They told me I couldn't come in because it was against their religious beliefs to have a dog in the restaurant. "They then said I could leave Finn tied up outside. I stayed calm but when they threatened to call police I left." He added: "It was horrible. It put a dampener on the whole celebration."

It is important to note that the restaurateurs' action was illegal under the Disability Discrimination Act, and, though one of them apologized, they should still be prosecuted for violating the rights of the blind. Sadly this is not an isolated incident in Britain. In October 2006 The Daily Mail reported:

A Muslim minicab driver refused to take a blind passenger because her guide dog was "unclean".

Abdul Rasheed Majekodumni told Jane Vernon she could not get into his car with the dog because of his religion.

Islamic tradition warns Muslims against contact with dogs because they are seen as impure.

Ms. Vernon said:

"This experience was very upsetting. . . . I was tired and cold and just wanted to get home but this driver made me feel like I was a second-class citizen, like I didn't count at all. . . . The owner of the minicab firm, Niven Sinclair, was also very insensitive, telling me that what had happened to me wasn't really very important, and I should have more respect for other people's culture. They have shown very little respect for my rights as a disabled person and have never once offered me an apology."

Worryingly, similar incidents in Minnesota were reported last year by The Washington Post:

A large number of taxi drivers in the area of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport are Muslim Somali immigrants. Many say they feel the faith's ban on alcohol consumption includes transporting anyone carrying it.

Some also have refused to transport dogs, both pets and guide dogs, saying they are unclean.

Gratifyingly, the airport authorities imposed strict penalties on drivers who refused to pick up blind or alcohol-carrying passengers. (Is it tangential to mention that "Muslim Somali immigrants" find guide dogs and booze repugnant while their homeland, according to UNICEF, has a female genital mutilation "prevalence of about 95 percent. . . and [it] is primarily performed on girls between the ages of four and 11"?)

The ability of the blind and of disabled people in general to live fulfilling, normal lives is one of the great, compassionate advances in our history. Public accommodation and legal protection for them is essential and is not to be compromised, especially to mollify some insane medieval religious tenet. We must hold the line on our civilization's accomplishments. One doesn't have to be a soothsayer to see that challenges to the equality of the sexes are upcoming on the roster of Muslim demands. We have an obligation not to capitulate.

Suggested Reading

I insist you visit the website of the journal Democratiya and pore over the new issue. It is a cornucopia of intellectual and ideological delights. It is so good I will say this: when we have won the argument against the pacifists, relativists, and defeatists, the nails for the coffin will come from Democratiya.

Book Titles That Never Made It

Salman Rushdie was at the 92nd Street Y in New York two years ago to read from Shalimar the Clown. Before he began, he revealed a merry game he sometimes plays: thinking of book titles that never made it. Among them were Toby Dick, A Farewell to Weapons, The Big Gatsby, For Whom the Bell Rings, Mr. Zhivago, Hitch-22, The Goulash Archipelago, and Light in July. Can you think of any others? (Yes, this is a ruse to determine if anyone is still reading.)

The Shoe Narrative

The endlessly vapid, diversionary, and childish coverage of the disaffected Iraqi journalist who flung his shoes at President Bush during a press conference in Baghdad is noteworthy only because the media has proven again it loves melodramatic anecdotes that can be superimposed upon a geopolitical situation to "prove" a preconceived bias. By showing the video exhaustively and with garrulous commentary, the media is trying to magnify its importance and use it to construct a narrative of two parts: (1.) the acts of the Iraqi journalist are those of righteous indignation against his oppressor (by extension the oppressor of the Arab world), (2.) George W. Bush (by extension the United States), who deserved to be the recipient of an expression of rage in a Middle Eastern fashion because he (we) destroyed Iraq, and the powerful are always deserving of humiliation, comeuppance, overthrow, etc.

In short, never underestimate the ability of the media to squeeze geostrategic insight out of a meaningless moment of mania.

The Job of the Writer

The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth . . . and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.

Susan Sontag, "The Conscience of Words," delivered May 9, 2000 upon receiving the Jerusalem Prize

Didion Returns to the Silver Screen

Joan Didion, whose screenwriting credits with her late husband John Gregory Dunne include The Panic in Needle Park (1971), True Confessions (1981), and Up Close and Personal (1996), will return to film with a script about the late Washington Post editor Katharine Graham. Laura Linney is set to play Ms. Graham, whose tenure included Woodward and Bernstein's breaking of the Watergate scandal.

One Person to Exclude from the Conversation

As the Republican Party and the conservative movement reconstitute themselves, hopefully with drastic reform and modernization and an acknowledgment of demographic changes, there is one person who should play no role in the discussion: Ron Paul. Though he raised millions of dollars on the internet, he wasn't well-received by voters in the Republican primaries. Furthermore, his orbit came to include adherents to various conspiracy theories about 9/11, world government, and a NAFTA superhighway. If Dr. Paul is not marginalized in the conservative conversation it will represent a repudiation of the tough work William F. Buckley Jr. did in ostracizing the Objectivists and the John Birch Society, or as he recalled it: "You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks." In case anyone forgot, here is something I wrote earlier this year about an association I regard as extremely revelatory about Dr. Paul's sordid beliefs:

By now you will have read that during the past thirty years various newsletters bearing the name of Texas Congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul have promulgated racism and paranoia. While the titles have changed—Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, Ron Paul’s Survival Report—the themes have not. The newsletters espouse bigotry of the kind that comports perfectly with his xenophobic, isolationist ideology. This is no cosmopolitan libertarian, as many antiwar liberals have been duped into believing. Ron Paul is a sinister extremist.

Having first appeared in the late 1970s, the newsletters were published without bylines, but “Ron Paul” was cited several times as the editor or publisher (or both). Contained therein are his views on why the Watts riots in 1992 ended: “it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks”; his suggestions to black activists who wanted to rename New York City after Martin Luther King Jr.: “Rapetown,” “Welfaria,” or “Zooville”; his take on the holiday honoring the slain leader: “Hate Whitey Day”; and his assessment of the end of apartheid in South Africa: the “destruction of civilization.” The newsletters also opined on the Louisiana senatorial bid of David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, advising readers that their challenge was to take the “message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom.” A speech he delivered at a neo-Confederate conference in 1996, an announcement for which read “We’ll explore what causes [secession] and how to promote it,” rounds out the primordial racial views propagated by Dr. Paul’s communiqués.

Predictably Dr. Paul’s bigotries are not confined to racism. He indulges in an array of paranoia and hatred, from calling Israel “an aggressive, national socialist state” (a vile statement considering “national socialism” and “Nazi” are synonymous) to entertaining the notion that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was “a setup by the Israeli Mossad.” Other conspiracies the newsletters give voice to include that the Waco shootout was a way for Bill Clinton to have his former bodyguards murdered and that David Rockefeller and fascist bankers were behind the Panama Canal Treaty. It should be obvious that what informs these newsletters is not enlightenment or empiricism but vague insinuations about Jewish bankers and shady global elites.

As these damning revelations about Dr. Paul’s lunatic past have come to light there have been laughable explanations from his campaign. One of his staffers said Dr. Paul wrote some of the articles but “Most of the incendiary stuff, no.” This is implausible and silly and belied by Dr. Paul himself, who in 1996 admitted authorship but complained the media had taken his racist statements “out of context.” The denials are complicated by the fact that, throughout the years, the newsletters have been written in the first person while referring to Dr. Paul’s personal life. There can be little doubt Dr. Paul wrote or approved of the newsletters.

Dr. Paul’s presidential campaign is essentially an artifice composed of two parts. His public proclamations titillate faddish young leftists and libertarians and generate huge fundraising, but with code words and in lesser venues he underhandedly massages reactionary crackpots and conspiracy theorists. It makes perfect sense that the “Ron Paul Revolution” is rife with the creepy dunderheads who accept the “inside job” interpretation of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Now that Dr. Paul’s reprehensible prejudices have been brought to light, I think the naïve liberals who have thrown in with this small-minded chauvinist owe themselves and everyone else an explanation.

"The Spanish Civil War of Our Time"

I beg your pardon if my postings have taken on a genocidal tinge lately, but it is an important subject. So allow me to recapitulate one of the worst failures of nerve of the nineties: the siege of Sarajevo and the genocide of Bosnian Muslims by ethnic Serbs either led or encouraged by Slobodan Milosevic; and one of the great heroes of that era: Susan Sontag, whose hazardous sojourns in that terrorized city were her attempt to bear witness and raise awareness. While there she also helped out in her own way, directing a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which has since been lionized (Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman) and lambasted (Roger Kimball, Jean Beaudrillard). In a 2000 interview she said:

Look, I did not go to Sarajevo in order to stage Waiting for Godot. I would have had to have been insane to do such a thing. I went to Sarajevo because my son, a journalist who had begun covering the war, suggested that I make such a trip. While there for the first time in April 1993, I told people I would like to come back and work in the besieged city. When asked what I could do, I said: I can type, I can do elementary hospital tasks, I can teach English, I know how to make films and direct plays. "Oh," they said, "do a play. There are so many actors here with nothing to do." And the choice of doing Godot was made in consultation with the theater community in Sarajevo. ...

My visit wasn't intended to be a political intervention. If anything my impulse was moral, rather than political. I'd have been happy simply to help some patients get into a wheelchair. I made a commitment at the risk of my life, under a situation of extreme discomfort and mortal danger. Bombs went off, bullets flew past my head.... There was no food, no electricity, no running water, no mail, no telephone day after day, week after week, month after month.

John Burns, who recently finished up as The New York Times chief Baghdad correspondent, wrote about Sontag in 1993:

"Sarajevo is the Spanish Civil War of our time, but the difference in response is amazing," she said. "In 1937, people like Ernest Hemingway and Andre Malraux and George Orwell and Simone Weil rushed to Spain, although it was incredibly dangerous. Simone Weil got terrible burns and George Orwell got shot, but they didn't see the danger as a reason not to go. They went as an act of solidarity, and from that act grew some of the finest literature of their time.

After her first trip here, Ms. Sontag said, she talked with other well-known writers and producers in Europe and the United States who expressed surprise that she had been willing to risk her life.

"But I don't think the fact that Sarajevo is dangerous is really the reason," she said. "I think there is an underlying reason that is deeper and more disturbing, and it is the difference between 1937 and 1993. I think there has been a failure of conscience on the part of writers and intellectuals in the Western world.

"It's not Godot I am waiting for," she said. "Like most of the people in Sarajevo, I am waiting for Clinton."

Ms. Sontag discussed the vacuity and tepidity of the response to the crisis by Western intellectuals in a 1993 interview with a Bosnian magazine:

It is certainly a duty to bear witness in writing and in other forms, to what is going on here. But I don’t fool myself about what most writers are. Most writers are conformists; most writers are servants of the state or some dominant ideology. And some writers are vicious propagandists for evil ideas, like Mr. [Edouard] Limonov, who was up on the hills, shooting down at you, as we know from this film footage. So, one mustn’t idealize writers; I mean, there are, as they say in French, "Il ya les uns et les autres." There are some people like that and there are other people. And even if I think to myself, suppose I could pick up the phone and call Günther Grass, or call Milan Kundera, or Umberto Eco, or any of these world-famous writers like I am, and I know these people—we’re not close friends, but I know these people socially and I have their telephone numbers. If I were to pick up the phone and say, “Come to Sarajevo,” I don’t know if they would come. And—even if they came—I do not know that they would not disappoint you. ...

I’m so old that I know everybody. No, to take an example, Kurt Vonnegut wouldn’t come. When I told my writer friends in New York about my intent—that I was coming—everyone said that I was crazy, it’s very dangerous. Well, of course it’s dangerous, but I said, that’s like telling me the North Pole is cold! Of course I know it’s dangerous. That’s not a reason not to go. ... There is an enormous depoliticization of the Western intelligentsia, the Western writers, the writers of Western Europe and North America. ...[A]ll of these people are just sitting in their huge, rich apartments and going out to the country on the weekends and living their private lives. I mean, that is the truth. I’m sorry to disillusion you, but they don’t involve themselves in any political action in the United States; much less do they think to go abroad and do something serious. These people have nothing to do with anything serious. It’s very, very disillusioning, and I’m sorry to say it. But they don’t care; they don’t have a conscience; they don’t think of the writer as a witness of conscience.

If only Ms. Sontag were alive today to use her eloquence and celebrity on behalf of people who find themselves isolated and abandoned, like the Bosnians fifteen years ago.

MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism

Without a too inflated sense of self-importance, I should like to associate this blog with a declaration drafted in early 2006 in response to the cross-continental spasms of vandalism, murder, and sabotage that followed several cartoons of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper. In full:

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism.

We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.

Recent events, prompted by the publication of drawings of Muhammad in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values.

This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field.

It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism between West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.

Like all totalitarian ideologies, Islamism is nurtured by fear and frustration.

Preachers of hatred play on these feelings to build the forces with which they can impose a world where liberty is crushed and inequality reigns.

But we say this, loud and clear: nothing, not even despair, justifies choosing darkness, totalitarianism and hatred.

Islamism is a reactionary ideology that kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present.

Its victory can only lead to a world of injustice and domination: men over women, fundamentalists over others.

On the contrary, we must ensure access to universal rights for the oppressed or those discriminated against.

We reject the "cultural relativism" which implies an acceptance that men and women of Muslim culture are deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secularism in the name of the respect for certain cultures and traditions.

We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of "Islamophobia", a wretched concept that confuses criticism of Islam as a religion and stigmatisation of those who believe in it.

We defend the universality of the freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit can exist in every continent, towards each and every maltreatment and dogma. We appeal to democrats and free spirits in every country that our century may be one of light and not dark.

Signed,

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Chahla Chafiq
Caroline Fourest
Bernard-Henri Levy
Irshad Manji
Mehdi Mozaffari
Maryam Namazie
Taslima Nasreen
Salman Rushdie
Antoine Sfeir
Philippe Val
Ibn Warraq

There Will Be One Less Indictee in Congress

In a congressional election delayed by Hurricane Gustav, voters in Louisiana elected the first Vietnamese-American, Republican Anh "Joseph" Cao, to Congress and ousted Democrat William Jefferson, the indicted crook who lately used his freezer as storage for $90,000 in cash.

Does the Free Market Corrode Moral Character?

The John Templeton Foundation has been sponsoring a series of Big Questions, in which inquiries into various subjects are explored by a selection of distinguished thinkers. The latest question, posed in the title, is answered by worthy examiners like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Michael Walzer, and Bernard-Henri Lévy. A catalogue of previous questions is available here.

To Belabor the Point About Genocide

I listened earlier today to an interview on Fresh Air, the inimitable public radio show hosted by Terry Gross, with Christiane Amanpour. Few people know she was born in Iran to a British mother and Iranian Christian father and left in 1979 after that wicked ayatollah flew in from France. Anyway, she said something very interesting: one of the reasons intervention in Bosnia was finally achieved was through relentless press coverage, yet Rwanda was not so lucky in part because of the circus of the O.J. Simpson trial. Now of course Mr. Simpson's trial deserved media attention. After all, a psychopathic double murderer purchased a not guilty verdict using high-price, race-baiting attorneys. But it is yet another indictment of our frivolous, fatuous society that we require constant preoccupation with celebrities and their depradations.

About Darfur, in the West there has been unconscionable dithering and a capitulation to Chinese bullying. (China is Sudan's most important patron, extracting its natural resources, shielding it from international condemnation, and even promising to build a new presidential palace for its war criminal leader, who danced mockingly on a public platform after the ICC indicted him for committing genocide.) Mia Farrow has been an unyielding advocate for victims in Darfur, calling the Beijing Olympics the "Genocide Olympics" and convincing Steven Spielberg to sever his ties with the olympics after saying he would go down as the Leni Riefenstahl of the games.

One the most eloquent writers who has taken up the cause of Darfur is Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French intellectual. He and Ms. Farrow gave a presentation in April of this year at the PEN festival in New York chronicling their travels to Darfur and measures that might be taken to stop the atrocities. He cut right through the shame and ridicule of our inaction:

Does what happened in Darfur deserve, if I dare say, the name genocide or not? I know that there is a polemic on this point. Some say that it is a genocide, others say that it is not quite a genocide. There is a sort of discussion similar to the discussion of the sex of the angels in the Middle Ages. What I saw, what I witnessed... makes this sort of discussion completely absurd and frivolous.

Of Genocide and Missing Persons

A reader writes:

And may I point out a gross contradiction in our culture; when a little girl goes missing, or if a woman is killed by her husband, or if a judge is slain, our news networks cover nothing but that story for weeks - towns shut down, candlelight vigils are had, and search parties are formed. This is for one person, one life. If Sudan would get the media coverage of say, Laci Peterson or JonBenet Ramsay it would have been over a long time ago.

If only Sudan could be implicated in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway. Greta van Susteren would be calling for airstrikes, and we would probably get them.

Amanpour Reports

I caught the second half of Christiane Amanpour's two-hour special "Scream Bloody Murder" tonight. In it Ms. Amanpour details several recent genocides, including Saddam Hussein's chemical attacks on Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s, the Serbian-administered concentration camps in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, the massacre of 800,000 by machete in Rwanda in 1994, and Darfur today. She also interviews several heroes who, during these various bloodbaths, "scream[ed] bloody murder" to get the attention of powerful people who might intervene. These include Richard Holbrooke in Bosnia and James Galbraith in Iraq.

Though I haven't yet watched it in its entirety, it's clear this piece of journalism is of superb quality and immense public worth. (It is unimaginable that the the fraudulent hacks at MSNBC and Fox News would ever air anything as valuable as this. They are content to disgrace journalism with their snarky partisanship.) On the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Americans should learn more about the international legal framework that protects human dignity and legally obligates the US to intervene in cases of its severe breech. This month is also the sixtieth anniversary of the drafting of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which the US in shameful belatedness ratified only in 1986. Even so, having assimilated the convention into American law, our government has thus required itself to prevent and/or punish genocide. (Therefore Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush should have been impeached for not addressing incidents in, respectively, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur.)

Susan Sontag, who went to Bosnia in 1993 to bear witness to the unfolding siege and genocide, said in a 1995 interview with Charlie Rose, "'Never again' is true in that the Jews will never again be killed by the Nazis in the 1940s." She was tragically correct that the rallying cry born of the Holocaust has been rendered hollow by inaction. But building public awareness, like CNN did tonight with its unimpeachable report, is essential to preventing future genocides. This is what Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate and human rights campaigner who survived Hitler's extermination camps, was getting at when he said, "Is memory the only answer to the Tragedy itself? But whatever the answer, memory is its most indispensable element."

Notes on the Obama Transition, II

One doesn't need to recapitulate all the appointments President-elect Barack Obama has made so far, but it should be said that his national security team selections augur well for internationalism and interventionism. I say this with especial pleasure because he received the votes of many isolationists, moral relativists, defeatists, masochists, pacifists, and fellow-travellers. Their anguish and incredulity at Mr. Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan will be a pleasure to witness.

Take Joe Biden. During his abbreviated time in the Democratic primaries, he was the most interventionist candidate on the issue of Darfur. In July 2007 he said, "We have to stop talking about it. ... They [Sudan] have forfeited their sovereignty by engaging in genocide. We should impose a no-fly zone if the UN will not move now." He also called for NATO to deploy 2500 troops to crush the janjaweed. (In contrast, the sallow, blithering Bill Richardson advocated waiting around until the génocidaires' job was done. It's a deliverance that this feckless, bumbling dolt won't be in charge of the State Department.)

That job will of course be filled by Hillary Clinton, whose adamantine support for the War on Terror scandalizes the milquetoast wimps who thought they'd finally got rid of her last summer. Mrs. Clinton's views need no further outline, but the woman set to be the ambassador to the United Nations should be better known by the public, and her views offer insight into those of her appointer.

Dr. Susan E. Rice, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs in Bill Clinton's second term, may be the advocate for victims of genocide that humanitarians have been waiting for. (Also noteworthy: Samantha Power, the proponent of intervention, Harvard professor, and author of the Pullitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, is serving on the Obama transition team.) Dr. Rice told The Atlantic Monthly in 2001, "I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required." And in 2006 she wrote,

History demonstrates that there is one language Khartoum understands: the credible threat or use of force. After Sept. 11, 2001, when President Bush issued a warning to states that harbor terrorists, Sudan -- recalling the 1998 U.S. airstrike on Khartoum -- suddenly began cooperating on counterterrorism. It's time to get tough with Sudan again.

After swift diplomatic consultations, the United States should press for a U.N. resolution that issues Sudan an ultimatum: accept unconditional deployment of the U.N. force within one week or face military consequences. The resolution would authorize enforcement by U.N. member states, collectively or individually. International military pressure would continue until Sudan relented. The United States, preferably with NATO involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets. It could blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan's oil exports flow. Then U.N. troops would deploy -- by force, if necessary, with U.S. and NATO backing.

If the United States fails to gain U.N. support, we should act without it.

Her views on Darfur will coincide at last with US accession to the International Criminal Court, which Mr. Obama has promised to do. The ICC is seeking an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, the slave-driving blood-thirsty tyrant in charge of Sudan, and the US could aid this quest by joining the court.

With Republican Robert Gates at the Pentagon, former Marine and exemplar of the military-industrial complex General James Jones as National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake and Richard Holbrooke as additional possible appointments, and not a single initial opponent of the invasion of Iraq yet chosen for his national security team, Mr. Obama has decisively rejected the postcolonial appeasement politics of a considerable segment of his electorate.

Notes on the Obama Transition, I

If hope was a rhetorical abstraction that defined the Obama brand, then change was a tangible desire that his supporters sought to concretize immediately after his election. In their minds change entailed a decisive repudiation of both President Bush's policies and any Democrats who may have enabled them. It was clear to me after his selection of Joe Biden as his running mate, and clearer now that his cabinet has begun to take form, that Mr. Obama is going to disappoint the minions who thought him more left-wing than he turns out to be. The moderate, establishment hue of his appointments is all one needs to prove this assertion.

It is now also clear who was right and who was wrong about his ideological position. Conservative activists, radio talk show hosts, and Fox News pundits were terribly mistaken to smear him as a radical socialist, though their intellectually bankrupt campaign had little else going for it but crazed scare tactics. Young liberals, who were moved to vote for him due more to style than substance and who I can personally confirm knew little to nothing of his platform (on election night I spoke to several who had no idea of his plans for Afghanistan), were wrong to assume his youth and inexperience implied a radicalism of which they would approve.

It seems the people who adjudged him correctly were the conservatives who crossed ideological lines to endorse him, like Christopher Buckley, Andrew Sullivan, Jeffrey Hart (former National Review editor and Reagan speechwriter), and Mickey Edwards (former Republican congressman and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation) and those who wrote favorably of him, like David Brooks and David Frum. They saw him as a consensus-driven, prudent, nonpartisan, soft liberal, and someone in the mainstream of economic and foreign policy thought. Since the election they have been vindicated by his demeanor, his staff selections, his recantation on imposing a windfall profits tax on oil companies, and his support for Joe Lieberman's continued chairmanship in the Senate.

The far left was also correct about Mr. Obama and are probably unsurprised by his actions since the election. People like Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader (who in a racist tirade called the president-elect an "Uncle Tom") and many writers at The Nation warned Mr. Obama was a neoliberal shill for the financial sector (he far outpaced Mr. McCain in contributions from Wall Street) and was too weak to confront corporate power or the foreign policy establishment. So despite the differing grammar of their assessments and their evaluations of what his centrism and conciliatory disposition mean, the "Obamacons" and the far left seem to have had the most accurate analysis of the man who will soon be president.

Felicitous News

Lieutenant General Lloyd Austin, the second-in-command in Iraq, announced today:

November saw fewer attacks than any month since 2003. We have significantly degraded al-Qaida's ability to plan, to resource and to capitalize on ruthless attacks on the Iraqi people.

People around the world should rejoice that the Iraqi people are finally being delivered from the apocalyptic mayhem of the last few years. We have to thank a combination of new leadership in the Department of Defense, General David Petraeus' visionary counterinsurgency tactics, the surge of 30,000 additional American troops, the Sunni Awakening, and the repudiation and marginalization of Muqtada al-Sadr's gangsterism. These outcomes would have been realized much sooner but for the Bush administration's criminally negligent conduct of the war in its first three years.

As violence has declined democratic impulses in Iraq have germinated. Thomas Friedman in The New York Times reported the following:

Iraq’s highest court told the Iraqi Parliament last Monday that it had no right to strip one of its members of immunity so he could be prosecuted for an alleged crime: visiting Israel for a seminar on counterterrorism. The Iraqi justices said the Sunni lawmaker, Mithal al-Alusi, had committed no crime and told the Parliament to back off.

That’s not all. The Iraqi newspaper Al-Umma al-Iraqiyya carried an open letter signed by 400 Iraqi intellectuals, both Kurdish and Arab, defending Alusi. That takes a lot of courage and a lot of press freedom. I can’t imagine any other Arab country today where independent judges would tell the government it could not prosecute a parliamentarian for visiting Israel — and intellectuals would openly defend him in the press.

Though I don't object to President-elect Barack Obama's plans to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, since the conditions have improved so drastically and the Iraqi parliament voted overwhelmingly for a plan to do so, I will never forget that Mr. Obama was colosally wrong to oppose the liberation of Iraq and the subsequent troop surge. If it had been up to him Saddam Hussein would not have been arraigned, convicted, and executed on charges of crimes against humanity, the mass graves would never have been unearthed, and the federal democracy now developing in Iraq would have been a hopeless abstraction. I look forward to his accomplishments in other areas of foreign policy, but on this issue history's verdict has already condemned him.

Saxby Sails Back to the Senate

It's official. Clearly the Republicans were motivated by the prospect of a Democratic takeover.

Pardon the Interruption

In my time away from this blog readers have grown louder and more desperate for content as the days passed without it. They were clamoring for an expert analysis of current events and the world in general; without it they felt rudderless and distraught. So please pardon the interruption. We now return to regularly scheduled programming.