This has to be an important development, in the first place because of the vital importance these days of the IAEA, which is more-or-less the UN’s atomic power/atomic weapons supervisory agency. (It is formally an autonomous organization, but reports to both the UN General Assembly and the Security Council.) Just think of all the countries where possession/non-possession of nuclear weapons is currently an issue: North Korea, Israel, Syria – and then, of course, Iran. It’s also important because of the very troublesome relationship the US has had in the recent past with the IAEA, particularly under the George W. Bush administration (e.g. over whether the 2003 invasion of Iraq was really necessary), which actively campaigned against the re-election to the post in 2005 of Dr. ElBaradei.

Again, these days the main atomic trouble-spot is Iran (if only because, in North Korea’s case, the cat is already long out of the bag). So what is Amano’s view on the alleged Iranian ambitions for nuclear weapons? “I see no sort of indication of that in official IAEA documents” – that is, put him on the skeptics’ side (when even Dr. ElBaradei, in a recent interview with the BBC that the Volkskrant article cites, maintains that his “intuition” tells him that that is what the Iranians ultimately are pursuing). Amano’s attitude here will certainly go down rather poorly among most ranges of American public opinion but, again, it is the official attitude of the IAEA itself, i.e. of the impartial experts who are supposed to know (and whose expertise was blatantly ignored in the Bush Administration’s rush to war in 2003). For what it’s worth, it is also the long-held view of leading Middle East expert Juan Cole, who has also covered past American attempts to fool the IAEA into detecting an Iranian weapons threat by supplying it with forged evidence.

                          

“Everybody loves the skull-and-crossbones,” he begins – hey, think of Errol Flynn, think of Johnny Depp! But we need to realize, he continues, that these pirates operating off of the Somali coast are not “desperate fisherman” (verzweifelte Fischer) but rather “a professionally-run business, run by gangsters and financed by serious businessmen.”

(Actually, that BBC article on these pirates that I cited in the previous blogpost does list “ex-fishermen” as an important component of these pirate gangs. There’s no mention there about how “desperate” they might be, but they are termed “the brains of the operation because they know the sea.” Oh, and from everything I’ve read the Somali pirates also do not display the “skull-and-crossbones” flag, or any flag for that matter. That’s either because they rely on sneaking up on ships and taking them by surprise to capture them, or because they have yet to hire a proper media advisor – or perhaps both.)

(UPDATE: And then again, if they are so objectionable, why is it that venture capitalists [are investing] in Somali pirates? H/t LOLFed.com.)

But Die Tageszeitung is a distinctly left-wing newspaper, in a left-wing country (by American standards), and even operating out of headquarters located in a distinctly left-wing quarter (Kreuzberg) of that country’s capital (I mean Berlin, of course), so Semler’s rhetorical fire does not stay on the pirates for long. The “Great Powers” get a swipe for their supposed responsibility for letting Somalia deteriorate into the sort of mess that allows such pirates to operate with impunity, for sure, but the ship-owners themselves hardly come away from his scrutiny unscathed. “They often sail under flags-of-convenience [Billigflaggen], pay starvation-wages when they pay at all, have contempt for environtmental rules and/or transport war-materiel into crisis-areas.” Wait: aren’t they among the victims here? Or, if they are really so evil as Semler seems to believe, can we at least start to sympathize with the Somali pirates’ own claims that they are merely a “coast guard” operating to repel these rapacious capitalists from their country’s waters?

Pirate Jurisprudence

Finally, Semler devotes some considerable attention to the issue of the basis upon which these pirates can be prosecuted by the German warships that have been sent – authorized by a UN Security Council resolution – to deal with them. And there he also sees a problem, since formally-speaking these pirates are not enemy soldiers but rather simply criminals – and it is the German police and justice systems that are authorized to deal with criminals, not the German armed forces. “Under no circumstances may police powers be granted to the [German] Federal Navy,” he writes. If you think about it a bit, you can easily understand his concern: that vital dividing line between the armed forces and police has not only been of considerable concern in Germany’s own notorious past, but is also a contemporary issue for many critics of the Bush administration, alarmed at the recent establishment of a “Northern Command” administrative structure enabling operations for the US armed forces within the US itself.

As Semler himself reports, the German Defense Ministry has taken steps to address this concern, namely including on those ships it is sending towards Somalia actual police officers to take custody of any pirate-prisoners, who then would be tried by the Hamburg criminal court (and presumably jailed in Germany if convicted). But this strikes him as an absurd set-up. Why not just start a convoy-system for merchant ships instead? he suggests.

Well, that did (ultimately) succeed against the German U-boat threat in both World Wars I and II. Tell you what, though, Herr Semler: what if we also change the Kreuzberg traffic rules so that you are only allowed to drive to and from work every day in convoy?

                          

As befits this blog’s name, though, we like to take a Euro or at least international perspective on things whenever we can, and there are certainly such angles to this story. In fact, the two I can detect are attractively symmetrical. On the one hand, Treasury Secretary Paulson announced that foreign-owned banks active in the US capital markets will also be eligible to exchange faltering financial assets for American cash via the proposed “bail-out” facility. On the other, administration officials are starting to look to foreign treasuries to contribute funds towards this bail-out.

As the New York Times reports today, that effort does not seem to be doing well in its early going.

Reporters Mark Landler and Carter Dougherty quote an anonymous US administration official that “We’re certainly not prepared to put ourselves in a position where there’s a free-rider problem,” but that attitude is likely to be sheer bravado: what, either the German government (for example) contributes some funds to the cause or the US government will refuse to do anything to prevent the American financial sector from suffering a melt-down, out of spite? And yes, I chose explicitly to mention the German government there, because we already have a good picture of attitudes there, as touched upon in the NYT report and also in the Economist’s Certain Ideas of Europe blog. There we read about rather acerbic comments from over the weekend by Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel, blasting both the Americans and the British for their previous confidence in financial market self-regulation.

We can get a bit more insight into this attitude from Markus Sievers’ article in today’s Frankfurter Rundschau (Friendship Ends When It Comes To Money). “By return receipt the Europeans send back across the Atlantic the request [for contributions to the American bail-out fund] with the barely-softened message: You were so stupid to trigger this financial crisis. Now you need to see about ending it.” It’s an understandable sentiment, one we could expect to see displayed by the American authorities in the face of a similar financial crisis in Europe – “Why should our taxpayers contribute their money to solve some other countries problem?” Still, Sievers also goes on to make the obvious but still-valid point that the worst of this financial crisis is surely yet to come – could he be cautioning European officials that some day, soon, they might stand in dire need of financial help from the American government themselves?

(Sievers also expects heated international arguments over sharing the financial pain to break out in earnest after the US elections, a view which I myself do not understand: What is holding the presidential candidates back now from tearing into foreign countries for allegedly acting as “free-riders”? It’s attacking foreigners, not being diplomatic, that wins you points in front of the American electorate. If Obama and McCain are not taking this rhetorical tack now, it’s probably only because this is a secondary consideration at this time as both campaigns struggle to grasp what is going on in the financial markets and issue appropriate pronouncements.)

Finance Not The Only Thing That’s Broken

On the topic of the financial crisis, let me also briefly mention here an analysis in the Danish newspaper Information by long-time US correspondent Martin Burcharth (USA’s capitalism faces a hard test). Burcharth describes what is going on as “a total collapse in investors’ confidence in the international financial system,” and notes that blame should not only laid at the feet of the Bush administration. In his view, the Democrats under Clinton also deserve some share of that blame, as they were also friendly towards the concept of financial market deregulation. (For example, the Glass-Steagle Act that had separated commercial and investment banking operations since the 1930s was repealed by an act of Congress in 1999.)

But Burcharth makes a profounder point: “The root of this rot [råddenskab] is not limited to those politically responsible. The entire democratic system in the USA is in desperate need of renewal.” What he’s talking about here, of course, is the sway Wall Street has held over Washington for quite some time with its enormous contributions to political campaigns (including, it must be said, to the Obama campaign), and the swarms of lobbyists it sends to throng the national corridors of power. Naturally, then, he does not recommend that the administration’s huge bail-out plan be passed by Congress without many added provisions to protect the taxpayer and, basically, not make it such a capitulation to the demands of Wall Street.

Initial indications from the reaction of Congress to the Treasury proposal suggest that such provisions are indeed likely to be added. But as for the renewal of the USA’s entire “democratic system” – well, good luck with that: the country is presently not only at the cusp of an electoral campaign, but also facing these terrible financial problems.

                          

“Lies in ruins”? That is not Burcharth’s opinion, but rather that of a couple of American academic experts that he interviewed, including Politics Prof. Steven van Evera of MIT: “It took five years to soothe the revolt in Iraq. In the meantime Osama bin Laden has rebuilt his strength in Pakistan. . . . This is completely unacceptable.” What is more, since 2001 Pakistan has received $10 billion in US aid in exchange for an implicit promise to take action to root out the Taliban and other Islamic militants sheltering within its borders – a promise which has now been implicitly devalued through that new, “secret” assertion from President Bush’s office that US forces will feel free to move into Pakistan to undertake that task themselves.

In Search of a Trophy

Why did it happen that Bush signed that particular order just relatively recently, in July? Well, what has been the big development in that part of the world over the past summer? That would be the fall from power of Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, who announced his resignation (in the face of impending impeachment) to the nation in a televised address on 18 August. Clearly the Bush administration was well aware of Musharraf’s weakening position well before things came to that; and where it had been willing to rely on Musharraf ever since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 to hit the Islamists in the tribal border areas – including not undermining him by violating the Pakistani border with NATO forces – it finally ran out of patience when it became clear that either Musharraf would soon be gone, or he would at least be a much less-powerful figure, under siege from his enemies in the new Parliament.

In a very pleasingly comprehensive manner, in his article Graham Usher lists three main reasons why Bush took the significant step of issuing that order in July:

1. He is genuinely afraid of losing the struggle in Afghanistan. Just as NATO will seems to be flagging, with withdrawals of coalition troops seeming a much better bet than further contributions because of flagging political will in the home countries, so is the pressure increasing from a stepped-up volume of cross-border incursions into the country from Pakistan. Something needed to be done to reverse this momentum.
2. The trust between the CIA and the ISI (that’s Inter-Services Intelligence, the main Pakistani intelligence agency) is shot by now. One big, big annoyance leading to Bush’s new policy was the growing sense American military authorities had that tipping off the Pakistani’s to an incursion into their country only resulted in that information being passed along to those targeted by it. And then it seemed rather clear that the ISI had played a leading role in last July’s bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul.
3. Finally, there is also the issue of George W. Bush’s continual attempts to fashion a suitable “legacy” before he has to leave office. As Usher quotes one source: “Bush wishes to capture a real al-Qaeda top-figure in the tribal areas. He would love to be able to say to the American voters that the Iraq problem is solved and the Afghanistan problem is on the way to becoming solved. Only the Pakistani tribal areas stand in the way.”

The problem here, though, is that this new policy is very high-risk because of the tremendous pressure it puts on the new Pakistani government, and particularly on the new president, Asif Ali Zardari. In the wake of the American cross-border attack that killed 20 people, Pakistan’s Army Chief of Staff Ashfaq Kiyani warned that his forces would fight back against such attacks. The new prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gilani, endorsed that stand. Only Zardari has yet to react; perhaps he owes the Americans too much, in terms not only of the continuing aid-money, but also because of the influence they exerted to make Pervez Musharraf go away peacefully last August in the first place.

This is dangerous in view of the fact, asserted by Usher, that the Taliban in those tribal provinces are now supported by the broad majority of Pakistani public opinion – including that of the Army’s lower ranks. It seems President Zardari is now merely the fig-leaf barely obscuring Pakistan’s fundamental and thorough-going refusal to get on the “right” side of NATO’s and Afghanistan’s war with the Taliban – and how long can we expect that he will last?

                          

For today, though, I think that it would be suitable to turn our attention to the supposed ultimate source of that al-Qaeda attack, and also the first target for retribution by US forces in its aftermath. That is of course Afghanistan, or specifically al-Qaeda as embedded within a Taliban host environment. Actually, putting it that way shifts the proper focus a slight bit from Afghani territory per se to the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan lying along the Afghani border. These are hardly “federally administered,” they are in fact a region completely out of the control of the Pakistani government, where various varieties of “neo-Taliban” and Muslim fundamentalist forces are based (including, it is thought, what is left of al-Qaeda), and from which these forces sally forth to attack NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The addressing of this topic now is boosted considerably by Dexter Filkin’s excellent article, “Talibanistan: Right at the Edge” in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine. The take-away: The Taliban and al-Qaeda fully control these tribal areas, and the Pakistani government has no problem with that. Any purported actions by the Pakistani army against the region are sheer political theater, designed only to fool the outside world – and in particular Pakistan’s billion-dollar paymaster, the US – that something serious is being done. And then we have today’s report in the New York Times of President George W. Bush authorizing sometime in July “American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government.” (The NYT reporters Eric Schmitt and Mark Mazzetti note “It is unclear precisely what legal authorities the United States has invoked to conduct even limited ground raids in a friendly country” – but when has mere legality ever been a consideration for the Bush administration?) The same article quotes “Pakistan’s top army officer” (without naming him – so that must be Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Kiyani) as declaring “that his forces would not tolerate American excursions,” but one happened anyway on September 3, a Navy SEAL helicopter raid within Pakistan. The Pakistani authorities then closed the supply route for NATO forces in Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass for a few hours – first to show “how serious [they] are,” but then allegedly only due to “security reasons.”

Terrorist Breeding-Ground

This view of the extremist danger residing there in the so-called Pakistani Federally Administered Tribal Areas is by no means confined to Washington. As Der Tagesspiegel reports, on his recent visit to Berlin the Afghan foreign minister Rangin Dadfar Spanta termed that area “a breeding-ground for terrorists,” and called for a “geographical” expansion of the struggle against radical Islamists, presumably including in that the recent sort of incursions into Pakistan carried out by US forces. But he also expressed his government’s support for the new Pakistani president, Asif Ali Zardari, and his stated intention to start going seriously after those Islamic militants in the tribal areas.

But where have we heard “start going seriously after them” before? From former Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf’s government, that is where, and Der Tagesspiegel’s Christine Möllhoff (Once your reputation is ruined) sees even less hope that Zardari will do what he promises than she had in his predecessor. Her article’s very first sentences read “You wouldn’t even trust Asif Ali Zardari with your car-keys, so bad is the reputation of Pakistan’s new president. The 53-year-old is regarded as a man without morals or principles, who is deeply corrupt and will stop at nothing.” This is, you may recall, the widow of Benazir Bhutto, known throughout the sub-continent as “Mr. 10 Percent” for his regular kick-back demands back when his wife headed the Pakistani government in the late eighties and early nineties, which afterwards landed him for a long stretch of time in jail.

Everyone Wants a Slice of Mr. 10 Percent

Still, Möllhoff can offer up one slight ray of hope that “Mr. 10 Percent” might do the right thing and actually send his forces against the tribal militants. He is now in a position of responsibility, and knows that his country would basically go bankrupt were it not for US financial support, so maybe he will be willing to dance to the Americans’ tune. It’s certainly true that the militants have thrown down their gauntlet to the new Pakistani president, as Le Monde’s special correspondent in Islamabad, Frédéric Bobin, reports (In Pakistan, the Taliban defy the new president Asif Zardari). Bobin notes how they prepared a special welcoming gesture for Zardari: last Saturday (6 September), as he was being elected president, a suicide-bomber killed thirty-three people in Peshawar, the main city in that tribal district. And he goes on to outline the tricky challenge that Zardari faces: suppressing the Islamist militants (if that is really what he desires to do) while maintaining good relations with both the US and the Pakistani military that has to do this dirty work for him (and which has a history of destabilizing civilian governments, particularly when they are headed by the Pakistani People’s Party, which was the power-vehicle of the Bhutto family and which he now heads) – and of course with Pakistani public opinion, in theory at least the ones who have put him into power, and which is becoming more and more angry about the American military incursions into Pakistani territory, which infringe on the country’s notional “sovereignty.”

(Quick side-note: Bobin mentions “ground combat” by Pakistani forces against militants in the valley of Swat. I wonder if they will strike out trying to capture the Sultan in charge there – just a gratuitous baseball reference there, folks.)

Indeed, further such incursions could lead to the collapse of the Pakistani government, at least according to a report in the Flemish newspaper Het Belang van Limburg (“American raids in Pakistan destabilize Pakistani army”). That is the conclusion of a confidential report delivered to the White House last month (together with an oral briefing) from the National Intelligence Council, which is the internal governmental “think tank” for the US intelligence community. The message is that the indignation that both the Pakistani army and public opinion (including the legislature, which voted to condemn last Saturday’s commando raid) show in reaction to the American incursions is 100% real. Such raids will therefore tend to drastically lower the domestic standing of any who seem to support them, in particular the new president, which could lead to Zardari’s early departure from that post even though such further instability would ordinarily be the last thing anyone in the country desires.

Cambodia Incursion Precedent

It’s true that the Bush administration has been willing to put up for years with the aggravation of allowing an untouchable sanctuary across the border in Pakistan for Taliban fighters fighting NATO forces in Afghanistan. No doubt all that time the pressure from the American military has been intense to be allowed to go after these personnel in their sanctuaries, and evidently that patience has now come to an end – despite the great pressure that such measures will put on that neighboring state, which is already marked by chronic instability (but which also is a nuclear power, let it be noted). The situation easily brings to mind that of the Vietnam War: in that conflict over-the-border sanctuaries for guerrilla fighters were also a big problem, mainly located in Cambodia. Starting in 1970, the Nixon-Kissinger team then in charge of US foreign policy finally lost patience, acceded to US military demands to be allowed to go after them, and so gave a green light to both a massive bombing campaign (initially secret) and military incursions into Cambodia which aroused massive domestic opposition (including the notorious Kent State riots). Ultimately, those incursions did nothing to turn the tide of the war, but they did do much to destabilize the Cambodian government, ultimately leading to the mass-killing horrors of the Khmer Rouge.

At least Cambodia never possessed a nuclear arsenal; neither did it have a sixty-year history of tension, marked by disputed territory and punctuated by several wars, with its neighbor in the other direction. George W. Bush of course is still US president and Commander-in-Chief, and it must also be noted that this new move of allowing US military raids into Pakistan seems very close to the sorts of measures advocated on the campaign trail by the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Still, the volatility in that part of the world, always unpleasantly high, has been ratcheted up another step.

                          

If those American journalists had that problem catching up with information on Palin, you can guess the problem was even more acute for the foreign press. Still, European coverage has risen to the challenge with an assortment of treatments of the Alaska governor’s naming – even if I nowhere saw any mention of the budding Alaska state trooper firing scandal that could bring some heavy rain on her parade later on. Anyway, let’s go check that coverage out – starting this time in Poland.

To Marcin Bosacki, the correspondent of Gazeta Wyborcza (Woman McCain’s Vice President), filing from Denver, Palin is “the hero of the [American] anti-abortion movement” for her refusal to abort her latest, fifth child last year when pre-natal tests showed it would like be afflicted with Down’s syndrome. “In present-day America such a choice is a rarity,” he writes. (Remember that Poland does not allow abortion.) And although McCain’s vice-presidential also-rans Romney and Pawlenty are now furious with him for passing them over, what Bosacki characterizes as his “poker-play” does bring two electoral advantages: 1) It assures him of support from religious conservatives, and 2) It should help him attract more votes from female voters disappointed with Hillary Clinton’s loss in the Democratic primaries. Plus, this surprising bit of news enabled the McCain campaign neatly to nip in the bud any further discussion or dwelling upon Obama’s acceptance speech Thursday night before 80,000+ supporters in Denver.

(By the way, Bosacki may be misinformed about Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty’s supposed anger towards McCain in that yesterday, even before the naming of Palin as the vice-presidential pick, he had removed himself from consideration.)

Denmark’s Jyllandsposten brings its readers up-to-speed on Palin (Sarah Palin is McCain’s new partner) with the tantalizing fact that “Palin is known for her talent of riding the snowmobile, and for being an enthusiastic hunter and fisher.” More practical in a political sense is her ironclad opposition to abortion. But an accompanying article – McCain has met his candidate only one time – casts doubt on whether this was a very good choice, pointing out that McCain last met Palin only six months ago, and that for the first time, and that “she is completely without international experience.” It prints prominently comments from Paul Begala, former counselor to President Clinton: “For a man who is 72 and has been afflicted with cancer four times to choose someone who is so completely and utterly unqualified to become president, this is shockingly irresponsible.”

Child-Like Pleasure in the Big Gamble

Coverage by the leading Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad includes a brief treatment by that paper’s weblog by Tom-Jan Meeus covering the American elections (Sarah Palin: Conservatives react), but the primary value-added there are links to Palin’s New York Times editorial of the beginning of this year, urging that polar bears not be declared endangered species, and an embedded YouTube video of one of her television ads when she was running for Alaska’s governor.

More in-depth is the analysis in the paper’s main pages by Meeus and his NRC colleague Merijn de Waal: McCain gambles with an inexperienced running mate. The lede: “With the choice of Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska, as running-mate McCain tries to get Hillary’s Clinton’s angry supporters on his side.” “John McCain is a lover of the big gamble,” the editors declare, “with a rebellious streak who takes almost a child-like pleasure in leaving the world – and also friends and close colleagues – behind in complete surprise.” Sure, Palin had been on the lists of potential running-mates over the past months, but no one really took her seriously. Clearly her naming is aimed at still-disenchanted Hillary Clinton supporters, for whom the chance to bring about the first female US vice president might have some appeal – except that a pro-choice position was a strong part of the political make-up of Hillary and her supporters, while both McCain and especially Palin are clearly pro-life. Thus these targeted Hillary-supporters, if they consider voting Republican at all, might still face a perplexing dilemma. Then again, it all might not matter anyway: Meeus and De Waal go quickly through recent American electoral history to build a case that vice-presidential candidates have not really influenced the outcomes of presidential elections, with the case study par excellence being the victory of George H.W. Bush (running-mate: Dan Quayle) over the ticket of Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen in 1988.

By the way, you might have heard that yesterday was John McCain’s 72nd birthday. It was also the twentieth wedding anniversary of Todd and Sarah Palin, report the NRC editors! To think that she was yanked down to the “lower 48″ to appear in her political “coming out” instead of being able to spend the day with her husband! After all it’s summer, so there probably wasn’t any snowmobile race for him to go compete in, am I right?

She’s Into Guns & Religion

Another Dutch newpaper, De Volkskrant, also carries an extensive analysis by Diederik van Hoogstraten of McCain’s pick (Palin: A Christian who likes to hunt, fish, lead). Yes, to Van Hoogstraten McCain’s selection of Palin also appears to be a gamble, but still one with some upside to it, the primary one being a once-and-for all settling of where the Republican ticket stands on abortion – it is unreservedly against it. But also, while Barack Obama is admittedly a “young and fresh” political figure, in Sarah Palin John McCain has found another one who is even younger and fresher, and someone an Alaska newspaper once called “a refugee from mainstream politics.” Van Hoogstraten also contributes an interesting angle as to why Palin’s evangelical Christian faith together with her love of hunting and fishing are being played up so – her candidacy is the perfect counter-example and rejoinder to the remark Obama made in the spring that got him into so much trouble, the one about Americans resorting to “guns and religion” for solace in difficult times. It’s true that her international exposure is basically zero, and while Van Hoogstraten mentions McCain playing up her “military experience” at the joint presentation yesterday, that “experience” only amounts to being in command of the Alaska National Guard ex oficio as governor. But with her outsider’s track-record and reformist reputation, it’s also possible that Palin could be a means for the McCain campaign to try take over for itself Obama’s brand of bringing the country “Change we can believe in.”

Finally, Dietmar Ostermann at the Frankfurter Rundschau agrees with this last “Change” point (McCain’s Youth Cure). “The signal is clear,” he writes. “McCain completes the break with the Bush years, he escapes the Establishment, and wants to position his Party anew as a force for reform.” Palin brings “youthful freshness” to McCain’s campaign, puts the votes of the Hillary supporters back in play, and will henceforth make it harder for the Democrats to identify McCain with the Bush administration.

                          

The rest of the brief article has mostly to do with various other pronouncements from Rester. The very next paragraph is great: Rester complains that his profession has gained a bad reputation due to all the reports about the CIA mistreating detainees in various secret prisons. “His work is little appreciated by the public and that sticks in Rester’s craw.”

Of course, as the article goes on to note, by now the CIA has admitted that it has subject detainees to waterboarding in the past. But Rester wants to make it clear that at Gitmo there have only been two cases of inmates being harshly treated – and, he adds, that was when the infamous prison-camp had only just been opened. I guess they were still trying to get their bearings then about how they were supposed to interact will all these characters in the bright-orange jump-suits that the military airplanes were delivering to them.

The article does mention one instance of “success” derived from what we are to believe is Gitmo’s standard “ask-and-ye-shall-receive approach,” namely a map of the Tora Bora region in eastern Afghanistan that inmates were persuaded to draw and which was useful to the American forces there. However, it does not name the reason why this entire subject of “We just ask them normal questions – honest!” has come up now, which is of course that the Bush administration has now identified six such inmates that it wants to try – using those “military commissions” – and to execute for allegedly complicity in the September 11 attacks. So the government is now pushing hard the idea that it used normal non-coercive (add “humane” and/or “legal” here to taste) questioning techniques – either exclusively or else at least in some strange parallel way to the “harsher” techniques.

Not that that additional explanation would do anything to alter the impression any literate Flemish-Belgian would take from this piece: Why did they have to torture them in the first place if they didn’t have to go that to get their information?! In all, this is a short + sweet, remarkable piece: it just lays out the facts, ma’am, and Rester’s various opinions and explanations, adding no opinions from the actual writer. None are needed for the point to be clear.

                          

FAHRENHEIT POINT-BY-POINT

Le Monde’s New York correspondent, Eric Leser, goes considerably further with his exegesis of Moore’s latest film in an article entitled The Truths, Misunderstandings, and Errors of a Militant Film. For all its success, Leser asks, is Fahrenheit 9/11 built on a solid basis of facts? He then looks into this question in depth, treating several of Moore’s assertions in the film with an objectivity that many Americans might have trouble crediting to those rascally, surrender-monkey French:

• True facts: The Bush family has indeed benefited considerably from its ties with highly-placed Saudi families. “The film-producer [i.e. Moore] is on solid ground here,” Leser reports. There’s so-called “Bandar Bush,” Saudi prince; there’s the lucrative work Georege H.W. Bush has done for Saudi clients via the Carlyle Group; there’s James Bath, Bush junior’s old National Guard buddy, who arranged for investment into Bush’s old Arbusto oil company by the Bin Laden family. (This American treatment, syndicated via Knight-Ridder Newspapers, casts doubt on that last story about Arbusto, however.)
• Also true: The Bush administration’s careless neglect in the summer of 2001 about the threat of an imminent terrorist attack, especially in the face of that infamous August 6 presidential briefing. Instead, George W. Bush spent 42% of his presidential term before September 11 on vacation (calculation not from Michael Moore, but from the Washington Post).
• A doubtful assertion: As claimed in the movie, that the United States attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan primarily to ensure the construction of a natural gas pipeline for the benefit of the Texas-based company Unocal (and this would have been also for the benefit of Enron, by the way).
• Also disputable: The “special favors” nature of the evacuation of Saudis from the US immediately after the September 11 attacks. The September 11 commission reported that these flights carrying the Saudis back home almost certainly only happened once US airspace had been reopened for traffic. Furthermore, no less than one of the administration’s harshest critics, former national security adviser Richard Clarke, took the responsibility for authorizing those flights and has stated that he would do the same thing again.
• Misunderstanding: In the film Moore expressed voice-over incredulity after trying to interview an expert about Saudi Arabia in the shadow of the Saudi embassy in Washington, D.C., and being accosted there by a Secret Service agent. What, the Secret Service protects foreigners and not Americans? Well, as a matter of fact one of the duties of the Secret Service (in addition to combatting currency counterfeiting, did you know?) is to protect foreign embassies.
• Complete poppycock: The visions Moore presents in his film of a pre-war Iraq where families picnic, children fly kites, and all is right with the world – under the beneficent smile of Saddam Hussein, presumably, reproduced in one graphic form or another on every street-corner.

CHOOSE YOUR PROPAGANDA

All very valuable. But even more intelligent is the editorial about Moore’s latest work by Daniel Schneidermann in Libération, entitled Moore: Hard Propaganda, Soft Propaganda. Fahrenheit 9/11 really must be some sort of “must-see” film, Schneidermann remarks: the Cannes Film Festival jurors said so, and all the French media says so now. So see it he did; and he came away a little disappointed. For one thing, those famous “seven minutes” in the Florida elementary school when, after having been whispered the news about the Twin Towers attacks, Bush apparently froze in shock and continued mechanically with reading “My Pet Goat” (French linguists note: the translation of that title here is Mon ami le bouc): those aren’t seven minutes, they’ve been drastically shortened! Perhaps they really should have been the full seven minutes, Schneidermann suggests, to allow the audience to savor what they’re seeing all the more.

More substantially, however, Schneidermann finds that, in Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore is fighting with both the tools and the ethos of his enemies, namely with (tools) innuendo and the cheap exploitation of emotion (cf. the use of the American mom reading her dead soldier son’s last letter home) and (ethos) a take-no-prisoners, win-at-all-costs attitude that itself refuses to bow to any consideration of “fair play” or Geneva Convention-equivalent. Anything is fair game, if only because the other guy started it all first.

But that last might be the most important point: the “other guy,” namely the Bush administration and indeed the entire American Establishment, did start it first. The American journalists who will accept and print anything coming out of the government without doing the most minimal fact-checking; those who swallowed uncritically the Administration’s lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and who continue to sway this way and that like charmed snakes as Attorney General Ashcroft appears at Department of Justice press conferences to warn vaguely of imminent al-Qaeda attacks and adjust the “terrorist alert level” up and down; in sum, in Schneidermann’s excellent formulation, “everything that has de-brained [décervelé] the American people and a part of the world regarding the War in Iraq – all these also were spreading propaganda, but without saying the word. Perhaps some of them didn’t even know that they were.”

Ultimately, although it’s a small consolation, Michael Moore plays hardball but makes it clear that he’s doing it – you actually don’t have to go see the film. Whereas the other side is inescapable and insidious, having pervaded most of the American government and the American media. But my own interpretation fails me here; let me quote to you from Schneidermann’s excellent last paragraph (my own translation and editing, of course):

The hard propaganda of the sharp-shooter against the soft propaganda of the system. Combat propaganda against the conspiracy of useful idiots. At least the former, flaunting itself as propaganda, allows its spectators the choice of refutation. . . . There’s hardly a newspaper, for example in France, which hasn’t brought up (and quite rightly) the factual errors of the film. In contrast, the second form of propaganda, that of the dominant media, doesn’t flaunt itself as anything. It envelopes you, it plays you like a violin, it sings with a thousand voices: ministers, experts, citizens, journalists, as Moore himself shows in his film, via judicious montages. In all, it gets around you in a manner that is all the more perverse in that the little droplets making it up don’t even know that they collectively make up a grand wave of propaganda.

MOORE TARGETS FOREIGN LEADERS, TOO

Moving on, and back to Le Monde, that newspaper also had a very interesting report on a news conference Moore held on 6 July (Michael Moore Hopes to Cause Changes in Pro-War Countries with “Fahrenheit”). One thing I need to ask right off the bat: I hadn’t heard anything about this from the British or American press. Did I somehow miss out on getting the word, or can it really be true that this is the sort of event you won’t find reported in the British or (especially) the American press?

Anyway, Moore made clear at this news conference that his target-list for “regime change” is by no means limited to George W. Bush. (Although “regime change” this November is so vitally important – and isn’t it, though? – that he won’t actually travel outside the US until after then, so as to not to divert effort from that number-one “mission.”) He blasted Australian premier John Howard, whose country after all sent a couple of thousand troops for combat in Iraq: “He at least gives the appearance of having half a brain . . . it’s really shameful.” Naturally, Moore would be very glad for Fahrenheit 9/11 to have the same kind of political effect down-under as he intends for it to have in the US. And he blasted the behavior over the war of Tony Blair, also “otherwise an intelligent man”: “That’s something science will have to explain. Maybe one day someone can examine him, put him under hypnosis.” Asked a question by a Japanese journalist, Moore blasted the Japanese government for the 550 men it has recently sent to Iraq; and he had similar unkind words (and wishes for another speedy “regime change”) for Silvio Berlusconi of Italy.

ONSLAUGHT OF THE “HOLLYWOOD MACHINE”?

Note, however, that all the attendance- and money-figures attesting to Fahrenheit 9/11′s great success merely put it at the top of the history of documentaries made, not of all films, not by a long shot. Indeed, the Nouvel Observateur also reported on developments during the film’s second week in France; as the title to its article indicates, “Fahrenheit 9/11″ Dethroned by “Spiderman 2″. And that newsmagazine is actually inclined to see this as something deliberate, namely (as it puts it) “the Hollywood machine” quickly coming up with another one of its expensive, seductive blockbusters (filming costs: around $200 million) to win audiences away from all that serious stuff and put Moore’s film back in its rightful subordinate place.

This sets the stage for a remarkable article in another French newsmagazine, L’Express (Hollywood, How Many Divisions?), by Renaud Revel and Denis Rossano, that reminds us that the French will always view American films as a mortal danger to their culture, despite the occasional rebel product like Fahrenheit 9/11. The article keys in on the career of Jack Valenti, for decades head of the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and friend and confidante of powers-that-be, whether they be Democratic or Republican. Valenti is 83 years old now, and ready to step down after a career during which his objectives as MPA head have been unwavering: as Revel and Rossano put it, to put the rest of the world’s cinema under the American yoke, and to put Hollywood in turn in the pocket of the White House.

How else can you explain the harassment that Fahrenheit 9/11 has had to endure just to be shown? There was that earlier pressure on Disney not to release the film at all. When that didn’t succeed – indeed, of course, it was counter-productive in that it gained Moore’s film more attention and media coverage – then lo-and-behold, the MPA decided that it really contained so much graphic violence that it shouldn’t be allowed to be seen by people under 17 years of age without adult supervision. The authors also maintain that pressure is being exerted by the Hollywood studios against actors too inclined to support Democratic Party candidates, in the form even of that nightmare from Hollywood past, the blacklist.

In any case, there definitely exists (assert Revel and Rossano) an American “military-cinematographic complex” (and you thought we only had the “military-industrial complex” to worry about?). It stretches back to the meeting Franklin Roosevelt had in 1942 with movie industry captains, about getting films made to steady domestic morale and support the war effort, and has continued up to and through a similar meeting (featuring Jack Valenti) with George W. Bush and Karl Rove, weeks after the September 11 attacks in 2001. Look, why do you think the American military is always ready to drop everything and devote troops and equipment to help make Hollywood war-epics ultra-realistic, from The Longest Day to Saving Private Ryan? And why is the history of the American cinema dominated by tales of muscled superstars (e.g. Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone, and of course Arnold) venturing forth to defeat America’s enemies?

So it should have been no surprise that the first candidate to replace Valenti as MPA head was Victoria Clarke, former Pentagon press spokeswoman. It did happen that a general outcry against that choice forced her nomination to be withdrawn, but no matter, write Revel and Rossano: whoever succeeds Valenti will first have to visit the White House to get the blessing of whoever resides there.

                          

Things have reached a point, Bernstein notes, where “more recently” the French weekly Nouvel Observateur published an editorial entitled “We Are Not All Americans.”

That sort of mention always makes my antennae pop up and go “zing!”, and my fingers scramble to my keyboard to summon my faithful search engine. (Trusty “Geegor,” if you know what I’m trying to say.) Of course Geegor found this Nouvel Observateur article on-line, and a mighty interesting piece it is, too. Problem is (and, darn it, material in the Nouvel Observateur seems to suffer from this chronically), it’s written in French.

Hey! Hooya gonna call? Why, your friendly neighborhood EuroSavant, of course! Just look under the “Savant” heading in your local Yellow Pages!

Or, if you’re interested in what the French have to say, and you’re blessed with a connection to the Internet, you could instead click on “More…”

First, a little truth in advertising. Bernstein wrote that this article was published “more recently” (you’ll note I put that phrase in quotes), and he’s technically correct: it’s dated 26 September 2002 (I say again: “2002″), which is “more recent” when benchmarked against the date 11 September 2001, but is way before the US-led move against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq – which is why you would assume they all hate Americans out there now – had really got up much of a head of steam. In fact, the article was written on the occasion of the (narrow) victory by Gerhard Schröder in last year’s German general elections, a victory he won partly, you’ll recall, by in a sense running against the United States, or at least against the Bush administration. So by no means is this an article about why the French have now fallen out of love with Americans as a result of Iraq and all that – it is instead probably a rather more interesting article about how the French were already out of love with Americans way before any of that other ugly stuff happened!

(I hope that this isn’t too disheartening for you American readers out there. If all else fails to cheer you up, just remember – it’s only the French. Uhhh . . . oops, sorry, not true. Well, it is only a French writer, in a French magazine, at least. Meanwhile, EuroSavant is thrust into the awkward, unprecedented situation of reviewing an article in the foreign press that is not contemporary, but somewhat old. But I hope you can see the connection with this special date.)

Now, to the piece itself: Does it live up to its hype? Not really. As mentioned, the article was written by Nouvel Observateur editor Jean Daniel shortly after Schröder’s electoral victory in Germany, but it’s more appropriate to note that it also appeared shortly after the release of the document “The National Security Strategy of the United States of America” to the Congress and to the public. That is what Daniel is really upset about, and it offers him the occasion to inveigh against the cold-blooded, realpolitik principles he finds that new security doctrine is built around, as well as the way the administration is trying to apply this doctrine (remember, back in September, 2002) to Iraq.

Daniel calls the document the “new Bible of Pax Americana,” and it was this security doctrine which, most notably, introduced and advanced the notion of the necessity of preemptive war. The new menace to the security of the United States is premeditated terrorism, and the best defense against it is attack. A reactive policy of absorbing the first blow and then counter-attacking may have been an appropriate stance for America in the past, but now the terrible capabilities of weapons of mass destruction, and the modern difficulty of predicting and detecting potential attacks, mean that “[w]e can no longer permit our enemies to strike first.” That means, as Daniel puts it, “the United States proposes to intervene everywhere insufficiencies and failures of democracy can give rise to attempts at terrorism.” Her weapons – including most especially the American nuclear arsenal – which during the Cold War were weapons of last resort, now have become, in Daniel’s words, “instruments of intimidation and military aggression against her neighbors.”

The National Security Strategy document goes on to state that “[t]he United States must maintain its capacity to inflict defeat upon whatever enemy, and to dissuade potential adversaries.” In so doing, it will respect “the values, the judgments, and the interests” of its partners – but must be prepared to act alone if its own interests and specific responsibilities demand that. Daniel asks: Does this mean breaking with the UN? With NATO? With the EU? The sad thing is that such a statement is probably completely unnecessary as, especially after the September 11 attacks, any international organization of which the US was a member would have sympathized with what the US felt that it had to do (such as attack Afghanistan) and would have not raised any objection. There would have been no need to threaten to go it alone. Yet that language is there nonetheless, and it paints an ugly picture of a superpower determined to defend “democratic values” everywhere, acting as judge and jury: only the superpower judges which “democratic values” are under threat, and where, and who is doing the threatening.

Daniel then applies these principles to the question of Iraq, and even back then almost a year ago he comes up with questions that still resonate today – perhaps because they have yet to be satisfactorily answered. What relation does Iraq have to the need to conduct a war on terrorism? Wouldn’t a war against Iraq actually divert forces needed to pursue a war on terrorism? What implications does the alleged need to impose democracy on Iraq have for North Korea, or the rest of the Middle East? At that time, George W. Bush had just delivered his speech to the UN General Assembly demanding action against Iraq. After reading this new security doctrine, Daniel is sure that, if UN action is not forthcoming, then America will be willing and prepared to act alone. And then “it will be necessary to re-think our conception of anti-Americanism.”

America did not act alone against Iraq, strictly speaking, but she went to war in cooperation with a group of self-selected coalition partners, and by-passed UN approval. Still, as Bernstein’s New York Times article makes clear, anti-Americanism has nonetheless changed in the intervening time, becoming more virulent and widespread.

                          

Le Monde diplomatique can be relied upon to lay out a “French” point-of-view carefully fashioned to be about as opposite to what the American administration would want you to believe as possible, short of setting up your own direct feed to Osama bin-Laden’s propaganda department. But stepping out of the confines of Fox News and the various other US media outlets which often are but thinly-disguised cheerleaders for administration policy, to be confronted with a foreigner’s viewpoint, is what this site is supposed to be all about, right? (Or is it instead about foreigners discovering the various innovations that make America great, such as Hooters Air? Or America discovering the innovations that make Europe great, like medically-prescribed marijuana? Just let me know.)

Gresh starts his article with some juicy quotations to show how the Americans have got things wrong, from Donald Rumsfeld (translated from the French: “We can say with confidence that the world is a better place since the United States led a coalition of forces into Iraq.” July 9, 2003), House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (“In the Arab world, before September 11, they thought that the US was a paper tiger. . . . They laughed at us. And now they see that it’s serious and a real power. And they respect power.”), and MidEast specialist Daniel Pipes (“The war in Iraq will result in a reduction in terrorism . . . . I expect that Muslim anger will probably diminish after an allied victory in Iraq.”)

But all these ideologues are simply living in their dreams, Gresh writes. The Bush Administration might think it has won the important battles in the War Against Terrorism – Afghanistan, Iraq – but it is still losing the war. Two years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan is still in chaos, with violence and insecurity everywhere outside the heavily-militarized capital, Kabul. And of course al-Qaeda has experienced a recent renaissance, what with its strikes in Saudi Arabia, in Morocco, in Jakarta, and the recent bombings of the Jordanian embassy and UN headquarters in Baghdad. In fact, as he points out, the most effective methods for capturing al-Qaida operatives have turned out to be standard police methods, of infiltration and arrest; those terrorists which armies have gone after may be dead (in which case they are useless for providing more intelligence), or in fact they are still at large (such as Mullah Omar of the Taliban, and Osama bin-Laden himself).

Gresh finds it strange that Saddam’s regime was able to restore basic infrastructure and services to his people within a short time after the 1991 Gulf War, even while continuing to face UN sanctions, while Coalition occupation forces are still struggling with that problem. Perhaps one reason is Washington’s refusal to enlist the help of the companies which helped build Iraq’s infrastructure in the first place. These tended to be European companies, such as Siemens, Alcatel, and ABB; rather than turning to them for help, it seems a better policy, in the eyes of top administration officials, to hand the job of rebuilding off with lucrative contacts to American companies (e.g. Halliburton) with sterling records of contributing to Republican campaign coffers.

In the meanwhile, the whole country suffers from a lack of drinkable water, electricity, and security, and Iraqis justifiably ask themselves whether they are truly better off than under Saddam. Even Baghdad International Airport hasn’t yet been able to be reopened, keeping Iraq in further isolation from the rest of the world. The Pentagon wants to attribute the daily acts of violence to hangers-on of Saddam Hussein and his Baath regime, and ignores the widespread hostility among the Iraqi population which the Coalition occupation has prompted. As for the Governing Council, it is fatally handicapped by factionalism; the Shiites on it only talk to fellow Shiites, the Sunnis only to Sunnis, the Kurds only to Kurds. As for the troop contingents that Washington has managed to gain from other countries to go share the occupation burden in Iraq, it’s still usually Washington that is paying their costs. (Gresh implicitly casts doubt on the competence of Polish forces to hold up their end of occupation by sarcatically reporting on their “shock weapon”: copies of speeches by Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski that they have brought along, in Polish, English, and Arabic, which “no doubt will win for them Iraqi hearts.”)

In all, the list of Western offences against that population is long in Gresh’s eyes: the decade-long economic sanctions; the passivity as the Shiite rebellion erupted in the spring of 1991, thus allowing Saddam’s security forces a free hand to brutally suppress it; the thousands of civilian casualties during the war that finally toppled Saddam’s regime. So, to Gresh, all the talk about “helping Washington” deal with the situation in Iraq is misplaced; it is the Iraqi people who should be helped first and foremost, and, to this end, “there is no other way to peace than that of the United Nations.”

In all, “neo-imperialist” ideology has run up against several hard facts in Baghdad and Kabul. These are: 1) The American army simply doesn’t have the resources to play world-wide sheriff, and so far the “coalition” is much more help; 2) The US is not prepared, nor even disposed, to play a “nation-building” role, which necessarily involves great expense; and 3) Most importantly, it has been shown that mere military victories don’t amount to much in the end when they fail to also gain a political and moral legitimacy, both in the country in question and vis-à-vis the international community.

One can only hope, Sabatier writes, that this turn to the UN marks a certain shift to pragmatism on the part of the Bush administration – and that it will not try, for example, to dictate to the UN the conditions under which its influence in Iraq will be widened. France, too, needs to be pragmatic; leaving the Americans to stew in Iraq in the mess they’ve created for themselves cannot be a valid policy, but neither can be unconditionally joining the Americans in that mess, which after all France did not create but even warned about in the months leading up to the war. Pragmatism must trump ideology, both in Washington and in Paris.