Which weekend was that? The one back in May that ended with his arrest in New York City for allegedly sexually assaulting the Sofitel maid. (But I don’t think that she counts as one of the three – that incident is still “alleged.”) This information comes from a friend of Anne Sinclair, DSK’s current wife, to whom he is said to confessed it.

I now yield to M. Legge’s account:

It would seem that DSK had the idea of “profiting” from one last moment of pleasure before announcing his participation in the Socialist primaries [for next year's presidential election, which he was getting ready to fly back to France to do]. Two women were convened in the rented suite at the Sofitel. From surveillance-camera images, this information is confirmed. That same night the hotel’s receptionist supposedly refused the advances of the former IMF boss.

Wait, I’m keeping score here. If the receptionist was not concubine #3, nor the maid who went to the police, then who was? Well, at this rate that detail should turn up in public soon.

*Strangely, La Libre cites the French newsmagazine Le Point for all this information. I do prefer citing such an ultimate source above all, but in this case I could not find any mention on Le Point’s site. Maybe they’re reserving it for the (paying) print customers?

                          

In any case, the article’s title is “The wind turns in Malawi,” but don’t get too impressed, Paquet is merely trying to be clever*. After a brief mention of that country’s intention to raise its official retirement age to 70 – that when life expectancy even for women is only 51 years – we get to the real subject: Get a load of this, he crows, the Malawi Assembly (i.e. parliament) is bringing back a law from British colonial times that makes it illegal to fart in public!

He then takes that theme and runs with it. I’ll leave most of its further ramifications to French-readers interested enough to click through to the original. But just to give you a trace . . . apparently one good thing about the dictatorship under Kamuzu Banda that ruled the country for thirty years after independence in 1964 was that people were much more discrete with their personal gas-emissions during that time. So does that mean that dictatorship always smells better? No, Paquet points out, look at China, where this particular aspect of personal behavior has been notoriously loose for centuries, under kings, presidents, and Communist dictators.

* Much as I also try to do all the time when crafting titles for the posts of this weblog, I have to admit!

                          

Belgium is effectively on the way to political break-up. Will the political chaos lead to financial turmoil & banking/sovereign debt stress?

January 10, 2011 7:34 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@Nouriel

Nouriel Roubini

. . . wait a sec – look, I’m actually not ready to deal with such issues! Please allow me here instead to join so many Belgians, both French- and Dutch-speaking, in just letting my mind fly very, very far away from any thoughts of state bankruptcy, to the refuge of young feminine beauty. Yes, as so many national media outlets were there to report, Justine de Jonckheere (below, and more pictures here) was chosen last Sunday as Miss Belgium 2011.

Quite apart from the event’s intrinsic appeal, the Miss Belgium pageant is certainly a tonic in these times because of its sheer status as one Belgian national institution that has not been ripped into separate French- and Dutch-speaking halves. Indeed, as La Libre Belgique points out, Sunday evening’s event, broadcast out of the casino in the sea-side (and thus Flemish) town of Knokke, was a killer TV-event. It actually attracted more than 1 in 3 of French-speaking viewers, while the Flemish audience-share, at around 15%, was also double what other top shows usually attract on a Sunday evening.

That’s all very nice, but it doesn’t mean that there’s no tension over the pageant’s results, considering so many native Belgians have such an interest in them. You can rest assured that, at any given time during the tournament, approximately half the country is encouraging – whether overtly or covertly – candidates from a French-Belgian (Walloon) background while the other half is rooting for the Dutch-speaking girls. It’s accepted that whoever wins needn’t necessarily know much about how to speak the country’s “other” language yet, but that one of her first duties (and those of the two runners-up) will be to start studying it to get up to a passable level of ability as soon as possible. Still, and as beautiful as she is, this year’s winner must have certainly induced a hard swallow among tournament officials, for her last name in particular – De Jonckheere – is almost at a slap-in-the-face level of Dutchness – most true French-speakers would have very little idea how to pronounce it! Nonetheless, year after year everyone is ready to accept any result – even that of 2008, when the winner was a Czech emigrée to Wallonia who could speak no Dutch at all – as long as the tournament process is, shall we say, free and fair.

The problem, dear readers, is that this year there are troubling signs that the Miss Belgium contest was anything other than that. For one thing, as La Dernière Heure reports, one contestant claims that the fix was in for Ms. De Jonckheere from nearly the beginning. Now, this whistle-blower is Maureen Lazard, a French-speaking contestant from Walloon Brabant, but she still alleges that Justine De Jonckheere had long been the favorite (in French: la chouchoute) of tournament director Darline Devos, for whatever reason, to the extent that everyone knew she was going to win and the selection process would be distorted to make that happen. (“Devos” is really a Dutch name – de vos, the fox, quite appropriate for a beauty-pageant director – so maybe that had something to do with it.)

Sour grapes from a loser – yes, that’s what all that sounds like. But there’s another, more serious allegation, this time reported in a Flemish newspaper, namely the “SHE” supplement to the Gazet van Antwerpen. Keep in mind that Ms. De Jonckheere is practiced in finding loopholes to rules – she’s a law student – and also that a certain weight in the decision about the winner is contributed by votes sent in from the general public as SMSs. SHE magazine cites evidence that the winner invested around €12,000 to buy telephone calling-cards to engineer a flood of incoming SMS votes in her favor. Again, the complaint has been lodged on behalf of – yes – another French-speaking contestant, a certain Lara Binet out of Liège, but the only answer tournament director Devos offers is that there could not have been any fraud, since she had monitoring personnel in place as votes were counted.

Sounds lame to me. And anyway: look at Justine’s picture again, at those shifty eyes! I have to conclude that the 2011 Miss Belgium Tournament has been tainted by scandal just when that sort of national institution that can truly draw the interests of the land’s Dutch- and French-speakers together was needed more than ever. There may still be the national football team; there may still be the national armed forces; but otherwise such institutions are falling by the wayside one-by-one, with grave implications for the country’s future and therefore for its solvency.

                          

Not to worry, though: Belgium is on the case! Minister for Culture Fadila Laanan – that’s right, she’s of Moroccan extraction – has just unveiled a twenty-point plan for coming to the rescue, as the mysterious journalist “S.L.” discusses in La Libre Belgique. (You can get the 13-page PDF of Minister Laanan’s plan – in French, bien sûr – here. Yes, in the meantime the Belgium government has fallen, but it takes so long to put a new one together that you can be sure that Ms. Laanan will remain at least in a caretaker capacity for some time.)

Alright, now that we’re on the other side of the jump it’s probably time to abandon the snarky attitutde – although really, the thought of Belgium pioneering a public policy approach to much of anything save perhaps French fry quality or beer microbrewing still has to elicit a chuckle. However, what should be kept in mind is the limited scope of the ambition here: Ms. Laanan’s initiative is not even meant for the entire Belgian music industry, but only for that within the country’s French-speaking community. And it is still useful to examine what she has in mind, to see whether she “gets it” and how her proposal squares against other opinions about what ails the music industry,

For the music industry does ail in Belgium, too, even “vertiginously” so, as “S.L.” puts it: a 60% fall in sales over the last six years. What does Fadila Laanan see as the cause of this commercial catastrophe? Two things: 1) Lack of cultural (i.e. governmental) support, and, of course, 2) The explosion of illegal downloading and file-sharing.

Right there you could think that she is on the wrong track. We’re talking here about non-”classical” music, after all – since when did that stand in need of any support from the government in order to thrive? As for file-sharing, that’s the quick-and-easy cause to blame for the record companies’ problems, but in reality the cause-and-effect connection is not definitive; many studies have shown that the sort of finding and sampling functions such file-sharing enables actually serve to increase the music sales. Others would assert that those record companies are hurting mainly because they have ceased to offer much in the way of what customers really want to buy: whole CDs are mostly filled with mediocre songs, for instance, when people really just want to own and listen to the hits. Furthermore, with the increased influence of streaming services the entire notion of “buying” one’s music seems to be giving way to renting it instead, to even a “utilities” model under which (just like for electricity or water – or for Internet) a steady fee is paid for unlimited access – but not ownership – of songs via the Internet.

But there’s little sign of any of that in the specific measures outlined in this Ministry of Culture proposal. Rather, money is mainly to flow into efforts to boost both music’s visibility and professionalism. (Remember, we’re talking specifically here about French-language popular music within Belgium.) Those funds will go to support independent record labels and artistic agencies; to prompt the creation of more video clips as a means to better promote the music; to invest in resources and talent so that both concerts and artistic managers can have a higher degree of professionalism; and the like. At the same time, of course, the government’s legal resources are to be mobilized yet again to counter illegal downloads and file-sharing. Indeed, in her proposal Ms. Laanan specifically promises that Belgium will push hard for this when it takes up the EU Presidency, which it is scheduled to do at the beginning of July. (Of course, that is likely to turn into a farce, among other reasons because the country is sure to lack a working government at that point, but this is a subject for a later blogpost . . .)

Introducing: Larsen

And then the proposal brings up “Larsen.” That, believe it or not, is the name of the streaming music channel that the Ministry of Culture intends to put on-line sometime in June, a “true on-line catalogue of artists of the French[-speaking] Community, available free to all.” Quite apart from the choice of the name – “Larsen” might work as a music channel for Scandinavian lands, one imagines, but it’s hard to see what’s particularly Belgian about it – this seems to show that at least someone there in the Ministry of Culture has an idea of what is really going on in the music industry today. The thing is, “Larsen” also has the potential to work at cross-purposes with the other goals of this initiative – e.g. downloading is a no-no, but hearing a song for free on-line is OK? – depending on what precisely it turns out to be. Which is why, one suspects, it is left so undefined for now, both on the Ministry of Culture’s official announcement and in the Libre Belgique article.

Ever hear the story of King Canute of Merry Olde England? It’s said that he had his throne placed by the seashore, and then sat in it with all his kingly regalia and commanded the incoming tide to halt. It did him little good, and you really have to think that Fadila Laanan’s initiative will be just as successful in stifling current music industry developments, whether or not she confines the Belgian government’s efforts to French-language popular music within that country. Indeed, even the European Union as a whole would have a hard time having any effect. Any such effort would really have to be a global one – and that pretty much describes the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement that has been circulating among governments as of late. Perhaps I should have written about that instead – perhaps I still will – but until recently the ACTA has been kept behind closed governmental doors.

                          

For instance: Brazil is another country ready to assist the Haitians in their hour of need, as you would expect. But in Brazil’s case it is the Ministry of Defense that is taking the lead, as the Dutch newspaper Trouw reports: Brazil sends weapons to Haiti. Weapons? For sure: because people are getting so desperate there by this point that there is the very real threat of a complete break-down of public order, so the place stands sorely in need of some guns that shoot rubber bullets, and other crowd-control armaments.

We can see that from yet another Dutch report, this time from the Algemeen Dagblad: Dutch [team] break off rescue-attempt after gunshots. A Dutch “rescue-brigade” of four ten-man teams (and their dogs) specialized in finding and rescuing people from rubble is finally in Port-au-Prince, but they had to stop their first efforts to rescue people under a collapsed bank after gunfire came ever-closer, and now coordinate with local UN officials for an armed escort. And by the way, it’s a Brazilian who is in command of all UN troops in the country, many of which are Brazilian.

Then there is a rather controversial opinion piece placed today in the Belgian newspaper La Libre Belgique: Are blacks incapable? It’s quite interesting that I can’t find the author’s name anywhere on that webpage, although it does seem he is of African origin himself, as he writes of his “brothers of color” and how they are sure to let him know how they don’t like what he is saying. His lede is brief: “Haitians’ liberty has served for nothing but bringing forth tyrannical regimes.” The situation there is catastrophic now – but it was catastrophic even before the earthquake struck. Much the same applies to the countries of Africa, he writes, still trapped in backwardness and poverty, as they have been for decades since the departure of the colonial authorities. (Also, their own silence now when it comes to offering help of their own to Haiti has been deafening.) The mysterious editorialist attributes this state-of-affairs to black culture, for while all human beings have the same capacity for intelligence, the more “emotional” black outlook on life looks always for a strongman to take charge, and ultimately does not care about the corruption and elites-creation that must ensue. As a result, “we must have the courage to affirm that our culture does not favor [economic] development, it is indeed antagonistic to development.”

A low blow during Haiti’s time of Calvary? Or strong words whose uttering is made all-the-more necessary by the emergency? It does seem that Haiti is fated to be a ward of the US and/or the international community, a basket-case in state form, for quite a long time to come. Anyway, it looks like La Libre does not do comments, so I don’t know how this guy’s “brothers of color” are supposed to check in with their anticipated objections. As for you, dear readers, you’re welcome to do so here by e-mail as always, and perhaps then I could pass along any suitable comments to La Libre.

                          

Now almost a week after the fact, however, attitudes seem to be changing about the case, to Polanski’s detriment. Jan Cienski of the Global Post has a pretty good summary of how that is occuring in Poland, while Doreen Carvajal and Michael Cieply of the New York Times posit the same development in France. (The NYT editors themselves take up the attitude to the case that seems to prevail throughout the American continent: Polanski must be returned to the US to face justice.)

A trip through the on-line French press does turn up indications that the tide has turned against the Oscar-winning director. One interesting piece in the newsmagazine Le Point makes clear how French Culture and Communication Minister Frédéric Mitterand (yes, nephew of the late French president) is now under fire after first springing to Polanski’s defense in the immediate wake of his arrest. Yesterday he was back in front of the press to try to defend his actions. “It’s the place of a Minister for Culture to defend artists in France – period,” he declared, and “Being a great cinema director or a celebrity does not place you above the law, but also doesn’t place you below the law.” Still, he had to add “On the basis of what occurred thirty years ago, I don’t pass judgment, notably because it has not been adjudicated.” (Only technically true, since a plea-bargain had been arranged in the case by early 1978, but Polanski fled the US because he feared the deal was breaking down.)

Meanwhile, over at Le Monde for now the editors are ceding the lead on this story to in-house blogger Jean-Pierre Rosenczveig, whose latest entry is entitled Justice for Roman Polanski. Of course, that title is itself ambiguous. Its meaning depends upon how you want to define “justice,” but also consider that Rosenczveig’s weblog is called “The rights of children viewed by a juvenile-court judge.” It’s no surprise, then, that he also favors Polanski being required to face the music for his deeds of thirty years ago. But Judge Rosenczveig does inject some sanity into the debate with his calm reasoning, emphasizing among other points that Polanski does seem to have committed a crime, recognized as such both in the US and in France, to which he has admitted; that the victim might have “moved on,” been compensated, and thus no longer wishes to keep the case open, but the victim does not control such things: it is always the State, in the form of the prosecutor, trying and punishing the perpetrator in the name of society, not the victim; and that allowing Polanski any further escape would indeed give the most-unwelcome impression that those who are rich and famous need not be subject to the law. Anyway, being returned to the US to face the music will at least draw a line under the affair once and for all, and Polanski probably doesn’t have much to fear: “The Americans aren’t going to cut his head off, and no one wants him to go to prison even if he committed an unpardonable crime in the eyes of the Americans: fleeing.”

With this last point, however, the Nouvel Observateur begs to differ, in an article (with no by-line) entitled In case of extradition, Roman Polanski runs grave risks. The reason is that, in the thirty years since the time of his crime/trial in Los Angeles, American law has become considerably more severe with regard to the sex-with-a-minor offense he is charged with. The piece quotes Stan Goldman, professor at the Loyola Law School (in Los Angeles): “He may not see the light of day again if he appears before a tribunal. In that epoch morals were a bit looser.” The piece goes on from there – again, it’s a shame no author is indicated – to mention that in the recent past some US states (but not including California) have even tried to apply the death penalty to the rape of children, but were only stopped by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision.

Finally let me mention one more article – Liberate Roman Polanski as he awaits his trial, by Daniel Salvatore Schiffer – even though it comes from the Belgian La Libre Belgique. Schiffer posits an interesting historical parallel here right from the beginning in his lede: “The Polanski affair makes one think of the Oscar Wilde trial of the very puritan and Victorian 19th century. With, on the part of the American judges, the same animosity and an identical partiality as the English magistrates [showed].” Obviously this is a pro-Polanski piece, but point is an intriguing one: it’s an attempt ruin Polanski on the basis of a sexual matter, just as the English judicial authorities ruined Wilde, the greatest literary genius of his day, as some sort of scapegoat. After two years imprisonment at hard labor, Wilde chose to leave England for Paris, where he died three years later in penury. Will Polanski be similarly affected? Schiffer wonders. He is at least definitely an artistic genius, and so deserves to be set free pending his trial, at the very minimum.

                          

To be sure, Grimberghs does not claim this new wrinkle in festive occasions (could we call it a “cough-y klatch”?) is yet to be found in Belgium, just mainly in the US and the UK so far. But that may only be due to some lack of Belgian imagination: she also notes that her country recently had to switch from the “blocking phase” of health policy (i.e. trying to keep H1N1 out entirely) to the “attenuation phase” where authorities can only try to the limit the damage, and the total of Belgian swine flu-sufferers now stands at 126, although with no deaths (yet). Meanwhile, a vaccine against it is still only under development, while medication to counteract it (I assume she means Tamiflu here) is in short supply and thus allocated only to those most seriously at risk.

So indeed, why not go try and get it to give yourself the immunity? Studies of the great 1918 Spanish flu epidemic seem to indicate that those who came down with that early had much greater survival rates. And while “swine flu” does seem an intriguing new idea for a party-theme, I have to wonder just what sort of activities that is supposed to mean – what’s the protocol? “Get down, get funky, get infected”? Do you serve drinks in dirty glasses? What specific sort of physical person-to-person interaction is envisioned here? Does everyone sit on the living-room floor and play “spin-the-medicine-bottle”?

On top of that, we learn from the Washington Post that US summer camps are closing down out of fear for the H1N1 virus. Frankly, to me this signals a fading of the traditional American entrepreneurial spirit that may offer a clue to the US’ current economic troubles. No, you don’t cancel summer camps – in fact, you quickly set up and advertise new “swine flu camps” where parents can handily send their children both to ensure that they get the immunity and that others – medical professionals, optimally – have to put up with the kids during that messy, cranky period when they are sick. I can imagine it now: “Good afternoon, boys and girls, I’m pleased to welcome all 110 of you to Porky’s H1N1 Holiday Camp! As you know, we have 55 sleeping bags available to accommodate you – please submit your choice of “sleep buddy” to your assigned counselor . . . ”

UPDATE: Uh oh, don’t get confused: word from the other side of the Belgian cultural divide, i.e. from the Flemings, is that they like to refer to the H1N1 virus in Dutch as the “Mexican flu” instead. Kiss me, Julio!

                          

Belgium’s La Libre Belgique has a good run-down (Re-start more, regulate better) of the task these leaders face. The lede:

The stakes of the “Twenty,” industrialized and developing countries, are at minimum double. Consolidate the chances of economic recovery and avoid new skidding from the financial markets. The G20 will have to convince in both registers.

As La Libre reporter Pierre-François Lovens notes, Barack Obama himself has gone on record as refusing to be satisfied with leaving London having achieved only “half measures.” Yet as Lovens also writes, “Four hours, maybe five . . . That’s the time – a priori derisory enough in view of the stakes – that the heads of state and of government of the G20 will devote on Thursday, in London, to the multiple dossiers” before them at the summit. Furthermore, the basic outlines of disagreement have not changed: the US wants greater spending on stimulus packages from other governments, especially those in Europe, while for their part the Europeans reject this idea while making it clear that they are after an expanded system of international financial regulation in which “no place, no financial product and no institution can exist anymore without supervision or transparency.”

Making a true success out of this highest-level conclave does seem to be a mission impossible; of course I plan to use this forum in a day or two to survey international opinion as to whether that objective was nonetheless achieved. Meanwhile, the French news magazine L’Express carries a treatment of what might be a vital development heading into the summit: France and China reconcile.

Wait, did I hear you object out there “I didn’t know China and France were arguing in the first place”? Of course they were: China last November even called off a planned summit with the European Union (whose presidency was then held by France) because French president Nicolas Sarkozy would not call off the meeting he had planned for the following month with the Dalai Lama. That Chinese pique persisted into last January, when the country’s premier, Wen Jiabao, did come halfway around the world to do a tour of European capitals, during which he skipped France. (Sino-French relations had started going bad even before all that, back last April when the Beijing Games Olympic torch could barely be carried through the French capital due to all the mass protests, even though strictly speaking that wasn’t the fault of the French authorities.)

That’s all over with now, though. Via a communiqué released simultaneously in Beijing and Paris yesterday (Wednesday) morning – and so really at the very beginning of the gathering-in-London around the G20 summit – both governments announced that they had decided . . .

. . . to hold, at the opportune moment, high-level contacts as well as new sessions of strategic dialogue . . . with a view towards promoting bilateral cooperation within different domains and towards assuring a harmonious and stable development of Franco-Chinese relations.

(That was the version out of Paris, I suspect, since the Beijing version probably mentioned at the end of that sentence “Sino-French relations.”) Plus, Sarkozy and Chinese president Hu Jintao got together in London that same day for a private (although certainly not secret) tête-à-tête, occurring shortly after they happened to find themselves seated next to each other at the dinner for all the assembled heads of state.

So that’s nice, they’ve kissed and made up, but how did this rapprochement come about? Simple: the French have completely dropped any advocacy they once had for the Tibetans. More language from that joint communiqué: “out of respect for the principle of non-interference, France objects to all support for the independence of Tibet, in any form whatsoever.” Surrendering completely to Chinese political desires: yes, that’s no doubt an effective way to get the Chinese back on your side!

The question naturally arises: Why this now? The answer, of course, would seem to have at least something to do with this G20 summit. It’s interesting to speculate the possible impact of such a tighter Paris-Beijing axis on what happens today at the summit and what comes out of it. For example, both governments have been particularly insistent that this convocation yield solid results and not just window dressing. Sarkozy, as is well known, has even held out the possibility of walking out on it if he gets too disatisfied with the course of the procedings; President Hu, coming from the rather more decorous East, has gone nowhere near as far.

                          

Which of the many available European lenses to take up for review of this incident? Obviously it should be from a culture with a certain shoe-expertise; the Italian press thereby suggests itself, but long-time readers (Hi Mom!) will realize that Italian coverage is here on €S an exception rather than a rule, due mainly to considerations of linguistic familiarity. The French should be a perfectly-suitable substitute.

Turning first to the newspaper of record, Le Monde gives Bush’s Baghdad shoe-in rather curious, even somewhat schizophrenic, coverage. The main article – Bush and Iraq: “The task has not been easy but has been necessary”, with by-line only to Le Monde and to the French news-agency AFP – takes the high road and only describes Bush’s Baghdad visit and his remarks there – that is, just the hightops of his stay – without mention of any untoward incident to otherwise clog up its account. But then in two separate paragraphs lower on the page, to the left and in their own grey-shaded area, it does give the basic details of the shoe-throwing episode: who the guy was, the accompanying insults, etc.

A Viral Video Already

Then, in an entirely separate on-line article, the newspaper treats the truly notable side-phenomenon in play here, namely how the video-clip has widely been exposed to a world very hungry for it (The Web seizes images of Bush dodging thrown shoes, by-line AFP). According to this piece, already 70 videos having to do with the incident have been submitted to YouTube, where they had already been viewed 600,000 times by noon on Monday, 15 DEC 08. Meanwhile, on another video site Dailymotion, about fifty videos had been submitted and viewed by that same time-point more than 200,000 times. Comments accompanying the videos have ranged from admiration at the President’s skill in dodging (“Bush should be good at playing Wii-Fit!” wrote one viewer on YouTube) to suggestions that al-Zeidi be awarded the Nobel Prize. And indeed, each of the on-line articles in the French press gathered for this round-up featured prominently-embedded videos of the shoe-throwing action. (I recommend as best the one on the Nouvel Observateur page, since it shows the action first at normal speed, with all accompanying audio, and then again in slow-motion like a sports-action replay.)

The article in Libération – Bush avoids the pump-hit; I suspect that this might be a French attempt at a clever pun-headline – does in fact have a super-sized version of the video at its top, with another just over to the right. But the editors of that rather left-wing French paper, like those of Le Monde, also seem afflicted here by a curious streak of even-handedness towards the American president. It’s true that the piece starts out, after the lede, with “The American president George W. Bush has known his last misadventure in Iraq, just avoiding receiving at full-face a pair of shoes thrown by an Iraqi journalist at the moment when he had just affirmed that ‘victory is near’.” (Actually, that’s not true, what the unnamed author claimed Bush to be saying. As you can clearly hear on the Nouvel Observateur video, Bush was merely saying “thank you” in Arabic to Nouri al-Maliki just before the wing-tips took flight.) But then this piece has for much of its second half rather extensive coverage of the praise lavished on Bush during this last visit by Iraqi President Jalal Talabani. It also notes at the end that, of Bush’s handful of visits to the country, this one “is the first time that he comes to a country relatively pacified” – something that is really more a matter of opinion.

It’s not properly French, but do let me include here coverage on the incident from the Belgian French-language paper La Libre Belgique – An Iraqi journalist throws his shoes at Bush. La Libre adds some interesting details that I don’t find anywhere else, mainly about what did and did not happen at Bush’s follow-on destination after Baghdad, namely Kabul, Afghanistan. Naturally, some of the journalists there at the press conference Bush held with Afghan president Hamid Karzai were bracing themselves for some sort of repeat there of the shoe-throwing in Baghdad. (The ones who were not were simply those who had not yet heard about the Iraqi incident, which had at that point occurred only a couple of hours previously.) Perhaps their worries were heightened by the fact that the security-screening to which the journalists had to submit for access to that Afghan press conference had devoted no particular extra attention to their footwear. In fact, according to the article one Afghan newspaperman did try to goad a TV-reporter colleague to action, calling him a loafer and a sneaker (OK, so I made that last part up) and urging him to throw his own footgear into the anti-Bush cause. But that TV reporter, his instigator, and everyone else ended up behaving themselves in the end.

What Further for the Thrower?

Was that perhaps simply the prudent thing to do? Put another way, how will our Iraqi shoe-throwing ace, Muntadar al-Zeidi, be brought to heel? On that subject it’s that aforementioned Nouvel Observateur article that has the answers (Bush attacked: 200 lawyers to defend the show-thrower). One the one hand you have one Iraqi lawyer quoted in this piece that al-Zeidi is due for two years in jail for “having insulted a foreign head of state visiting Iraq,” and it’s also true that he is now in detention and has already been subject to repeated interrogations, mainly to ascertain whether any outside government or other agency sponsored what he did. (He also was tested for drug and alcohol intoxication.) On the other, al-Zeidi’s employer, the “Al-Baghdadiya” TV network, has appealed for his release, and he has picked up the support of one Khalil Doulaimi, a Jordan-based former lawyer for no less than Saddam Hussein. Doulaimi further maintains that he could easily recruit two hundred other legal colleagues – among them some Americans, he claims – to join him in al-Zeidi’s defense, all working for free. He adds: “For an Iraqi this is the least thing to do to Bush, a criminal tyrant who has killed two million people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Zeidi should be set free immediately.”

We should eventually know what al-Zeidi’s fate will be, if he does not simply disappear into the maw of the Iraqi prison system. We truly owe the man something, for providing a simple but classic and very-physical metaphor for expressing the lingering feelings of so many Americans and other peoples of the world for George W. Bush. To be sure, far more serious legal and investigative measures are in order to call him to account, but I think that for Inauguration Day – mark my words! – we can definitely expect some sort of footgear theme to be introduced into the festivities.

                          

“Let’s not go backward, but let’s capitalize on 85% of what was accomplished,” was the appeal from WTO Director Pascal Lamy. But one problem is that there is no further time-period in prospect in which negotiations could be resumed that could reasonably stand a chance of succeeding. This is partly because Lamy’s own term at the head of the WTO is set to expire next year, and meanwhile the current presidential campaign in the US and similar elections scheduled within the EU in 2009 (including federal elections in Germany) can be counted on to choke off any remaining political will in those countries to make the concessions necessary to make the Doha round succeed.

On the other hand, as Le Bussy points out, it’s also not as if the WTO can simply set up another meeting in the near future to call all the trade representatives back to try again, for the nine-days-straight negotiations leading up to the announcement of failure on 29 July produced some heavy bad feelings. The US and India are angry at each other because of the safeguards the latter wanted to keep to allow developing nations to re-erect tariff barriers in agricultural products. (From this account in the NYT, it seems that China joined India on that issue at the eleventh hour and so definitively killed the talks. Maybe George W. Bush can discuss this when he goes to Peking for the Olympic opening ceremony.) But the Chinese were already angry at the Americans, joined in that by the Africans, because of the USA’s refusal to discuss cotton tariffs. And the old Banana War (EU edition) came back from the past to mess up the negotiations: the European Union has run afoul of international trade rules in the past over its inclination to favor banana imports from Latin American countries over others, and this apparently is still unresolved. But then the EU Commissioner for Trade, the UK’s Peter Mandelson, had less-than-complete backing from his political masters, following recent attacks on his negotiating stance from the French government (current EU president).

Regression Is All That’s Left?

Of course, international trade will simply go on, and the WTO will remain the one recognized world forum for resolving trade disputes in anything like a proper judicial manner. But this seeming crashing-out of the Doha round also means that there remain too many tariffs and trade restrictions in place throughout the world. Pure economic trade theory preaches getting rid of your national trade barriers entirely, unilaterally, to gain for country the maximum benefits from trade (namely access to a wider range of goods that your country could not produce itself or could never produce so cheaply). Of course in the real world that means unemployment and bankruptcies and so is a non-starter, so that traditional trade-regime negotiations have involved quid pro quo trade barrier dismantlement between states.

This is done most effectively if it involves the whole world, but now that that approach has gone nowhere the only alternative would seem to be regressing to the way it was generally done prior to World War II: bilateral agreements. Brazil has already announced that it will be seeking those with the world’s major trading blocs. But Brazil can do that: as this recent NYT points out, that country is itself becoming an economic giant. As always, it’s the small and weak among the developing countries that suffer when a multilateral process like the Doha round collapses. In bilateral negotiations they will inevitably hold the weaker hand; and they cannot afford the sort of industry and price subsidies commonly employed in the US and the EU (for agriculture, in particular; but also found elsewhere) to manipulate trade flows their way.