Plagiarists Please Apply

So just how desperate for content can the National Ledger be? That's what I'm wondering after heading over to their site earlier today to see if they had done anything to address the blatant plagiarism engaged in by one of their authors -- a Mr. Vincent Gioia, a retired patent attorney and apparent former president of the American Rose Society. As I noted in an earlier post, I discovered that Mr. Gioia plagiarized a recent article on the Energy Independence and Security Act by using a newfound technological breakthrough that we journalists like to use: the Google.

Now, after thanking me for bringing the plagiarism to his attention, National Ledger editor CK Rairden told me three days ago that "we will deal with the matter". So, how did he deal with it? By publishing Mr. Gioia -- again -- this time so that he can rail against "global warming zealots", like those, apparently, who think global warming is a real phenomena. I guess I shouldn't expect much from a conservative tabloid site that runs plagiarists right alongside breathless "news" articles about naked teen starlets -- but, damn it, I do.

Again, I ask: Is there really such a dearth of Republican hackery that the National Ledger need publish people like Vincent Gioia to pass off the work of others as their own?

Apparently.

Article on the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement

My latest article for Inter Press Service, regarding the U.S.-Colombian free trade agreement and the opposition its engendered from organized labor is now online.

An excerpt:

Despite the continued violence, Colombia has benefitted from increased trade with the United States over the past several years. Passed by the U.S. Congress in 1991 and recently extended another 10 months, the Andean Trade Preferences Act, under which tariffs on most exports from Colombia coming into the United States are removed, has increased employment and boosted Colombia's economy. Last year, Colombian exports to the United States totaled nearly 9.4 billion dollars -- mostly in the form of crude oil, coal, and flowers -- up from less than 3.0 billion dollars when the preferences were first enacted.

But Colombian labour leaders and independent observers say the increased trade has not led to much improvement in the status of workers' rights. A 2006 U.S. State Department report on Colombia found that "freedom of association [is] limited in practice by threats and acts of violence committed by illegal armed groups" against labour unions, and noted that Colombian NGOs often complain that the government has "arbitrarily detained hundreds of persons, particularly social leaders, labour activists, and human rights defenders".

Last year, the Cincinnati, Ohio-based fruit giant Chiquita was ordered by a U.S. federal court to pay a 25-million-dollar fine after executives at the company were found to have authorised payments to the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia, a violent right-wing paramilitary group linked to labour violence. According to Vasquez, his organisation has found that the Chiquita case may only scrape the surface of the extent to which U.S. corporations have supported violence against organised labour.

"[T]here are other American transnational enterprises, for example Dole and Del Monte, in which we began to see evidence appearing of their links to these paramilitary groups and to anti-union violence," Vasquez said.

Those links were the focus of a recent trip to Colombia by Rep. William Delahunt, a Massachusetts Democrat. Speaking to IPS, Delahunt would not say whether he discovered anything in Colombia implicating other U.S. corporations. "I really don't want to disclose that at this point in time... but yes, it was very productive, it was significant," he said.

Violence directed against unions and the role some U.S. corporations have played in supporting it is an important aspect of the debate over the FTA, say labour activists, but it is far from the only one.

"Even if Colombia had a sterling record on human rights, if there were no assassinations of trade unionists, the Colombia free trade agreement would still be a bad idea," said Economic Policy Institute global policy director Tony Avirgan.

"These agreements provide for the extension of patents and [intellectual] property rights, particularly in terms of medicines, that go way beyond what's provided for in the United States," Avirgan said.

"They should be called corporate rights' agreements rather than free trade agreements," he argued. "It's a misnomer because they're not much about the exchange of goods, but they are about empowering corporations."

Plagiarism and Conservative Media

Is there something intrinsic to mainstream conservatism that causes it to so often lend itself to misrepresenting the work of others as one's own? Though I ask in jest, whether it's an aide to President Bush resigning after getting caught plagiarizing college journalists or the White House itself stealing the term "enhanced interrogation" from the Nazis, it certainly seems like Republicans have had the plagiarism market fairly well cornered as of late.

Just today, while doing some research on the "Energy Independence and Security Act", I discovered some more right-wing plagiarism, this time at a conservative news site called The National Ledger. It seems a writer by the name of Vincent Gioia, a self-described retired patent attorney, didn't feel like writing a whole article on the energy bill on his own -- so it he just stole an article from Fox News.

In his March 2nd piece, Gioia writes:

A little-noticed provision of the ironically named "Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007" that was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush last December bars the federal government from purchasing fuels whose life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions are greater than those from fuels produced from conventional petroleum sources.

Now, from a column by Steven Milloy at Fox News:

A little-noticed provision of the ironically named "Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007" that was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Bush last December bars the federal government from purchasing fuels whose life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions are greater than those from fuels produced from conventional petroleum sources.

Sound a little familiar? It continues. From Gioia:

The Financial Times in its February 15th edition noticed that section 526 of the energy bill prohibits the federal government from buying oil that was produced from Canadian tar sands, a reserve that holds about two-thirds the amount of recoverable oil as compared to reserves in Saudi Arabia.

Now compare, again, with Milloy's column:

The Financial Times article reported on how section 526 of the energy bill prohibits the federal government from buying oil that was produced from Canadian tar sands, a reserve that holds about two-thirds the amount of recoverable oil as compared to reserves in Saudi Arabia.

In the final example, while speaking of how Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) are looking to force the Pentagon to comply with the aforementioned measure, note how Gioia deftly attempts to cover up his lack of original material:

Waxman and Davis apparently expect the military to take on the impossible task of tracing the source of the fuel it purchases and then to refuse North American oil from unconventional sources apparently in favor of oil from OPEC sources such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. How’s that for energy independence and security?

Now compare with the original:

Waxman and Davis apparently expect the military to expend the Herculean effort of tracing the source of the fuel it purchases and then to refuse North American oil from unconventional sources apparently in favor of oil from OPEC sources such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela. How’s that for energy independence and security?

Clearly there's no question that this is a case of plagiarism. So has National Ledger taken the offending article off its site and issued an apology? Why, of course not. After I pointed out Mr. Gioia's "borrowing" of Mr. Malloy's column, the editors at the site have taken the article off of their homepage -- but not their site. And they continue to host a whole slew of articles by the same plagiarist, though it's uncertain how much of these articles the author wrote himself versus how much he borrowed from more talented, established columnists.

The moral? That apparently, in the age of Google, some people still are so brazen (and incapable of writing their own material) that they'll blatantly steal from others -- and that their publishers will simply try to cover for them.

If you have a minute or two to spare, feel free to go here and tell the editors of The National Ledger that you prefer your right-wing talking points to be original, thank you very much.

He's Back

I'm speaking of Ralph Nader, of course. His decision has already provoked the expected whining from the partisan Democratic types, including former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt:

People can disagree about whether the corrective leader is Clinton, McCain or Obama, yet all but extreme, angry, illogical, and utterly estranged people will agree that Nader has no business again trying to tilt an election in a divided country to someone with whom he surely disagrees, namely, John McCain. So why is the press covering him?

Got that? Only the most "extreme, angry, illogical, and utterly estranged people" could view Nader as anything other than the devil incarnate. Leave it to a former top Clinton bureaucrat to be so sure (and full) of themselves that they can write such partisan tripe. And he continues:

[T]he media should ignore him consistently and firmly. He has no measurable support. He has no credibility on issues. He does not deserve to be on Meet the Press; he does not deserve press coverage of any kind. Only if and when polls show he has a few percent of support might he plausibly deserve mention.

Right, because the media dedicates so much print and airtime to alternative points of view as it is. Why, we can't let our coverage of Britney Spears' crotch give way to actual intellectual discussion or coverage of the likes of Ralph Nader or Scott Ritter, or any number of others who question the establishment bipartisan consensus. For the former chief regulator of the public airwaves to adopt the tone of a high school principal while admonishing disobedient reporters for covering anyone outside of the major two parties is revealing, if not at all surprising.

As a commentator at another site pointed out, being a mainstream partisan Democrat means believing two contradictory things simultaneously: that George Bush stole the 2000 election from Al Gore, and that Ralph Nader is a "spoiler" who cost Gore the election. Then again, one shouldn't expect consistency from people who view the world through partisan eyes, whether as a member of the Blue team or the Red team, and certainly not from the likes of Reed Hundt, who owe their careers to their commitment to partisanship.

Republicans in the late 1990s screamed bloody murder when Clinton bombed Serbia, adopting the most strident of non-interventionist rhetoric. Of course before that time and certainly since, the same Republicans have endorsed bombing everywhere from Tehran to Paris with nary a concern about "policing the world." And the Democrats have, clearly, been no better. Commitment to principle flies out the door when it's your team in power.

Anyway, rather than vilify Nader or accept Mr. Hundt's directive that I dare not speak his name for fear I will be visited by the ghost of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and led on a journey to a mythical Gore-Lieberman (that second name is, conveniently, often dropped by Mr. Nader's Democratic critics) White House, why not just let the man speak for himself? Or channelling Mike Gravel/John Lennon on "partisan censorship", why won't you let Nader say what he wants to say (power to the people)?

So for all of you committed partisans out there, here he is from last Sunday's Meet The Press:

The Impending Obamatarian Dictatorship

According to Barack Obama's wife, Michelle:

Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.

Now, obviously I don't expect an Obama presidency to institute work camps and reeducation centers -- rhetoric such as this is par for the course these days, and is merely symptomatic of a larger problem infecting U.S. politics. Americans are no longer expected to merely vote for an individual that they believe will best enforce the laws of the land. As the blogger IOZ points out, Americans go to the polls to elect a Caesar-like figure who, for a period of four to eight years, is expected to become a de facto dictator. And in an age when a president can unilaterally decide to attack a foreign country without congressional approval, the president-as-dictator view is not merely fear mongering hyperventilation -- it's fact (and for those who think I'm referring just to the Bush years, you might want to look up Bill Clinton's bombing of a Sudanese aspirin factory and air war on Serbia, just for starters).

But returning to Michelle Obama's comment, as Daniel Larison at The American Conservative writes:

You have to marvel at the use of so many phrases implying coercion, rather than persuasion: require, demand, never allow. I’m sorry, but in a still nominally free country the chief magistrate of a republic does not make demands of citizens, but enforces the laws enacted by their representatives. That is what the President does, or is supposed to do. He does not, cannot, rightfully require things of any citizen that the citizen does not already owe to his country, namely loyalty and patriotic service. That is what he is allowed to ask from us, because it is something we are already obliged to render. It is not he who permits and allows, but, at least in theory, we who permit him to serve us. He will not be a jefe or archigos to whom we are swearing personal allegiance (despite the confusion of some Bush supporters on this point), but a public servant who executes the laws and obeys the Constitution.

Regardless of whether you feel Barack Obama is the most supremely qualified candidate for president out there, if he is elected he'll be assuming dictatorial powers. If he so chose, he could send U.S. troops to Darfur or to any number of global hotspots on a whim. He could have you (and your grandmother) renditioned (my spellcheck clearly has a pre-9/11 mindset, as it considers that word a typo) to be tortured in some hellhole in Eastern Europe, if he so chose. The question isn't whether Barack Obama would exercise these powers more wisely than his opponents, it's whether he should have these powers to begin with. And considering the corrupting influence of power, I'm not sure I'd trust Jesus with the presidency, much less Barack Obama -- not that some of his supporters would know the difference.

Recommended Reading

First off: I apologize for the lack of posting. Between coming down with the flu and starting a new job (in the same week), I haven't had much motivation to blog about the happenings in the world. So to make up for the lack of posting, here are three recent articles that I found interesting.

The first is from Scott Ritter, the former UN weapons inspector in Iraq (who I interviewed in April 2006 for Alternet). In an article for Truthdig entitled, "Iraq's Tragic Failure", Ritter examines the state of the U.S. occupation and the complete disconnect in the way it is portrayed here in the United States. His depressing (and probably right) conclusion?

If there is any winner in all of this it will be the Sunni resistance, or at least its leadership hiding in the shadow of the American occupation, as it continues to exploit the chaotic death spiral of post-Saddam Iraq for its own long-term plan of a Sunni resurgence in Iraq. That the Sunni resistance will continue to fight an American occupation is a guarantee. That it will continue to persevere is highly probable. That the United States will be able to stop it is unlikely. And so, the reality that the only policy direction worthy of consideration here in the United States concerning Iraq is the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of American forces continues to hold true. And the fact that this option is given short shrift by all capable of making or influencing such a decision guarantees that this bloody war will go on, inconclusively and incomprehensibly, for many more years. That is the one image in my crystal ball that emerges in full focus, and which will serve as the basis of defining a national nightmare for generations to come.

The next piece is by Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, who examines the Democratic Party's complete failure to end the war in Iraq -- despite promising to do so in 2006, and despite (rightfully) trashing President Bush's Iraq policy. With the liberal blogosphere all aflutter over their next messiah, Barack Obama, it's nice to see that some people still judge politicians not just by their rhetoric, but what they actually do. As Taibbi writes:

Democrats insist that the reason they can't cut off the money for the war, despite their majority in both houses, is purely political. "George Bush would be on TV every five minutes saying that the Democrats betrayed the troops," says Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, an Independent who voted against the war but caucuses with the Democrats. Then he glumly adds another reason. "Also, it just wasn't going to happen."

Why it "just wasn't going to happen" is the controversy. In and around the halls of Congress, the notion that the Democrats made a sincere effort to end the war meets with, at best, derisive laughter. Though few congressional aides would think of saying so on the record, in private many dismiss their party's lame anti-war effort as an absurd dog-and-pony show, a calculated attempt to score political points without ever being serious about bringing the troops home.

"Yeah, the amount of expletives that flew in our office alone was unbelievable," says an aide to one staunchly anti-war House member. "It was all about the public show. Reid and Pelosi would say they were taking this tough stand against Bush, but if you actually looked at what they were sending to a vote, it was like Swiss cheese. Full of holes."

Finally, we come to this article by Christopher Ketcham over at the Huffington Post regarding the burgeoning secessionist movement in Vermont. An excerpt:

Here's how it will be with Vermont: The leaders of its secessionist movement, the Second Vermont Republic, want to feed, shelter, clothe, and fuel a free republic broken from the empire. This doesn't mean the little country will sink into Albanian isolation, its citizens ceasing to trade with China or refusing to watch the rot beamed on DirecTV satellites. It will continue to be a tourist destination, its slopes welcoming New Yorkers and Quebecois equally. But the state's secesh want to keep their tax dollars at home and put them toward localized food economies (calling it "food sovereignty"), energy supplies based on wind and water, and credit lines out of community lenders freed from the distant tyrannical rate controls of central banks.

And about that job: I'm now covering climate change policy full-time, though I will be continuing to report on foreign policy -- my first love -- for Inter Press Service as often as I can. And so you know.

The Final Flip-Flop

So the big political news today is that Mitt Romney has decided to drop out of the race for the Republican nomination. That led me, for the first time, to check out Mr. Romeny's campaign website, where I noticed what may be his final "flip-flop" of the '08 campaign season. The first picture upon the site's loading includes the following quote from the former Massachusetts governor:

"If this were only about me, I would go on. But I entered this race because I love America, and because I love America, I feel I must stand aside, for our party and for our country."

The very next picture that loads is accompanied by the following quote from Romney following "Super Tuesday":

"Ann [Romney's wife] came to me and she said, 'You know, the one thing that's clear tonight is that nothing's clear.' But I think she's wrong. One thing that's clear is this campaign's going on." [emphasis mine]

Luis Posada Carriles and the Cuban Five

Luis Posada Carriles, an admitted terrorist who is widely believed to have masterminded the bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976 that killed 73 people, currently lives free in Miami, Florida. Meanwhile, the so-called "Cuban Five" -- five Cuban intelligence agents who were spying on Cuban-American exile groups in Florida that have been linked to acts of terror -- are serving prison terms ranging from 15 years to two consecutive life sentences in maximum security prison, despite never having passed any classified U.S. government secrets to the Cuba.

My latest piece for Inter Press Service contrasts the two cases, and is now available online here. You can also read it over at CommonDreams or at Alternet.org.

The Crisis in Gaza

Unfortunately, Dennis Perrin's analysis of the deteriorating humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and the response from prominent U.S. liberals -- or, more precisely, the lack thereof -- is spot on:

The official narrative is that the peace-loving U.S. and its dovish Israeli ally don't want to strangle Palestinians trapped in a rotting cage, but Hamas forces their hand. What's happening is more of a rescue mission -- to rid the Palestinian people of their Islamic captors and return them to the responsible arms of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who knows his place in the regional plan. The only way to do this is to squeeze the blood out of Gaza, for sometimes love must take violent forms in order to achieve lasting results. In this case, rough love includes closing all border crossings, cutting off food, medicine and fuel to the entire area, while shutting down Gaza's only power plant. That this accelerated the death and disease rate is unfortunate, but necessary. Remember when you tried to housebreak your first dog? All those hours spent beating it, starving it, denying it water and clean shelter? What Israel is doing to Gaza is a bit like that, only to 1.5 million strays.

Read the rest here.

And over at Juan Cole's blog, check out this op/ed by Stanford University professor Joel Beinen for more context on the situation.

Bill Richardson to Negotiate with the FARC?

This afternoon I spoke with Congressman Bill Delahunt (D-MA), who recently returned from a trip to Colombia where he was investigating allegations that some U.S. corporations may be providing support for right-wing paramilitary groups -- as Cincinnati-based Chiquita was found to be doing last year. Asked whether he found anything implicating other U.S. companies, he told me: "I really don’t want to disclose that at this point in time, but yes, it was very productive, it was significant."

Delahunt has also been involved in trying to mediate a solution to the FARC hostage situation in Colombia, something I covered back in December for IPS. The FARC are said to be holding upwards of 700 people hostage, including three U.S. military contractors. A number of people have suggested that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter or New Mexico Governor (and former U.N. ambassador) Bill Richardson could play a role negotiating with the FARC.

Asked about either as a possibility, Delahunt told me: "[Bill Richardson] gave a call to [Congressman] Jim McGovern (D-MA), [and] it’s my understanding that he wants to get involved."

Richardson's involvement has the potential to be a breakthrough, as the Uribe government in Colombia certainly isn't interested in having Hugo Chavez renew his role in negotiations (after being fired in November). The FARC would also like to have a high-profile American to negotiate with, and Richardson would likely have more freedom to do so as he wouldn't be as restricted as a member of the Bush administration or a sitting U.S. Congressman might be.

I'll have more on this story and the upcoming Colombian Free Trade Agreement next week.

Israeli blockade of Gaza

The Christian Science Monitor has an important piece by reporter Dan Murphy on the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza. Israel, in response to a continual stream of rocket fire, has shut off all electricity and aid to the Gaza Strip, which has been under Hamas control since last June. As Murphy notes, Israel's collective punishment has predictably hurt the weakest and most vulnerable members of Palestinian society:

Almost all of Gaza's bakeries were shut on Monday, and the United Nations – which distributes the food relief that 90 percent of Gaza's 1.5 million residents rely on – says it may have to halt food distribution by Friday, because they're running out of plastic bags and fuel.

Mr. Yusuf, a welder who lost his job after the Hamas takeover because most construction in Gaza stopped after Israel cut off cement shipments, says the family has been close to getting [their sick daughter] Mara out on three occasions, only to be tripped up by the Kafka-esque procedures for leaving the territory.

"The Tel Aviv hospital told us they could take us Jan. 10, for instance. But then the security clearance only came through on the 11th. The hospital told us that they didn't have a space for us that day, and that we're not allowed to use the security clearance unless we have a guaranteed spot at the hospital."

Khaled Radi, the spokesman for the Hamas-run Gaza health authority, says the ministry has enough diesel to run "three, maybe four, days" without fresh shipments. "We've been told quite clearly by Israel: Stop the rockets, and then we'll send supplies. But I have no control over the rockets."

Ayman Sisa, the director of the dialysis department at Shifa Hospital, says he's had to cut back weekly treatments for patients from three times a week to two, because 10 of his machines have broken down and he hasn't been able to import spare parts. "A lot of these people would be dead in a week without their treatments," he argues. "But if more machines go down, we'll have to cut back further."

Last month I covered a congressional hearing on U.S. aid to Palestine (or, more accurately, U.S. aid to Fatah) for IPS, and was struck by the lawmakers' total lack of concern over the humanitarian situation in Gaza. In U.S. politics, aid to Palestine is talked about in terms of how it will affect Israel's security -- not how it will affect the lives of actual Palestinians.

U.S. Policy Toward Cuba

Earlier this week I attended a conference sponsored by the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, which is home to a number of former Bush administration officials such as Paul Wolfowitz and John Bolton, that sought to examine a U.S. role in a post-Castro, "free Cuba". If you think the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have deterred the neo-cons' penchant for elaborate nation-building schemes, think again.

Click here to read my piece for Inter Press Service on the event, with additional reporting by Jim Lobe.

Trade Soars as Labor Rights Languish

On Thursday the Economic Policy Institute held a forum on the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). I covered the event for Inter Press Service, and my article is now available online. An excerpt:

Passed by the U.S. Congress in 2000, AGOA allows certain goods from Sub-Saharan African countries -- notably petroleum products and apparel -- to enter the United States duty-free and largely without any quota restrictions. It also encourages the growth of the textile industry in Least Developed Countries (LDCs) by extending duty-free market access to apparel made using foreign sources of fibre, largely from Asia.

The agreement currently affects trade relations with 39 countries and has led to a large increase in trade between the United States and Africa. According to the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, in 1999 U.S. imports from Africa amounted to roughly 13.7 billion dollars. In 2006, the last year for which data is available, that number rose to 59.2 billion dollars.

But labour rights activists say the increase in trade and jobs brought by AGOA has not led to a corresponding improvement in conditions for workers. They argue many labourers work up to 16 hours a day for nothing more than the bare minimum legal wage, which they say falls well short of covering the cost of food, shelter and transportation.

"Our goal shouldn't simply be to provide any job through our [U.S.] trade policy," Bama Athreya, executive director of the International Labour Rights Forum, told attendees at the forum, "but to provide really decent jobs that come with dignity, respect, and the possibility that these workers can prosper in the future and expect a better life for their children."

Click here to read the rest.

It's a start...

Well it looks like the FARC made good on their promise to release two of the people they had been holding hostage in the Colombian jungle for the past several years, Consuelo González and Clara Rojas. Gonzales is a former Colombian congresswoman, while Rojas was an aide to former Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt who, along with Betancourt, was kidnapped inside of FARC-controlled territory while campaigning in February 2002. While in captivity Rojas gave birth to a boy, named Emmanuel, who was supposed to be released along with her and Gonzales as a goodwill gesture to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez for his efforts to negotiate a hostage-prisoner exchange between the FARC and the Colombian government. However, in a exceedingly bizarre twist, it turns out the boy, now three years old, somehow had escaped from the FARC years earlier -- apparently without the FARC realizing. That fact was revealed by Colombian President Álvaro Uribe just last month, and DNA testing shows he is indeed the son of Gonzales de Perdomo.

It'll be interesting to see if the release of the two hostages will restart the negotiations that were cut short by the Uribe government in November. The FARC are still thought to be holding around 750 more hostages, including three U.S. military contractors.

Last month I covered the FARC hostage situation for Inter Press and spoke with Colombian Senator Piedad Cordoba, who had been working with President Chavez to negotiate a hostage release.

DIPNOTE

Apparently the U.S. State Department maintains a blog entitled "DIPNOTE," a name that, shall we say, lends itself to some ridicule.

But that's not why I'm mentioning it. I just so happened to visit the site earlier today when I stumbled across the following "Question of Week":

Lots of polls show that foreign publics have a poor opinion of the U.S. Some people argue that this means the U.S. should change its policies to make them more popular outside the U.S. Others contend that foreign policy decisions need to reflect U.S. national interests, irrespective of their popularity.

Does the popularity of United States matter and should it affect policy decisions?

I could write a rather lengthy, pretentious post explaining, in detail, why foreign opinion of the United States matters ever so much. Instead, I'd like to just point out the picture that the U.S. State Department chose to represent the United State's unpopularity abroad:


Now, obviously the protesters in this picture are in front of the White House, which last time I checked was firmly entrenched in these here United States. A conspiracist might ask, is the State Department saying anti-war protesters aren't Americans?! But that's not the angle I want to take. Rather, I think the picture points out the ridiculousness of the question's premise. I mean, why should the opinion of foreigners have an impact on U.S. foreign policy when clearly the opinion of Americans doesn't matter? After all, Democrats took over Congress in 2006 due in large part to the American public's unhappiness with the war in Iraq. So what happened? President Bush sent more troops there -- and Congress continued to appropriate hundreds of billions of dollars for a war most of its members claim to oppose. But don't worry, the 2008 election is already shaping up to be the Most Important Ever. And this time things will really change.

Right?

The inanity of the New York Times

I don't usually comment on sports, and I can't say I very much care whether Roger Clemens has or has not used steroids, but this article by Katie Thomas in today's New York Time, "Nonverbal Actions Add to Clemens's Story", is really something special:

From his parched, pursed lips to the jut of his shoulders, Roger Clemens was holding something back, three body-language analysts who watched him over the past two days said Monday.

“There’s more to the story,” said Janine Driver, a body-language consultant who trains law enforcement officers in truth detection. “There are several probing points that lead me to believe that he’s not going to be completely truthful.”

Now first off, can you imagine the Times asking "body-language consultants" to analyze a speech by Dick Cheney or George W. Bush? Or to analyze Colin Powell's infamous presentation to the United Nations on the eve of the Iraq war? (As a side note, the White House website that hosts the transcript of Powell's speech -- which has since been thoroughly debunked-- has for a headline "Iraq: Denial and Deception". No comment necessary.)
The answer is, "of course not." An establishment newspaper like the Times, which itself was extremely influential in building public support for the war in Iraq, would never think to critique the body language of a member of the political establishment like they would a Major League Baseball player. Clemens, who certainly isn't the most sympathetic of characters, is a safe target for the Times' choice of analysis, while a respected figure like Colin Powell is not.

But there's also another reason why the "paper of record" would never apply the type of "analysis" they put Clemens through to a member of the political establishment, as the Times reveals later in the story:

In the “60 Minutes” interview, for example, the analysts noticed that Clemens swallowed hard, looked down, and licked and pursed his lips when answering questions — all signs, they said, that he might not have been telling the truth. “That’s indicative of deception, that’s indicative of stress,” said Joe Navarro, a retired F.B.I. agent who trains intelligence officers and employees for banks and insurance companies. Navarro has also written a book about how to tell whether someone is bluffing in poker.

Nevertheless, Navarro warned against concluding that Clemens was lying. Even the most skilled body-language experts are right in only about half of all cases, he said, and investigators often study body language to decide when to dig deeper. It is not evidence that someone has committed wrongdoing; Clemens might have been showing stress from defending against potentially career-killing allegations. “He clearly shows signs of distress, but we don’t know why he’s being distressed,” Navarro said. [emphasis mine]

In other words, body-language analysis is more or less a fraud. Any type of analysis that is only right in "about half of all cases" is no better than mere intuition (though the CIA may still be jealous of that success rate). Nevertheless, it's perfectly acceptable to apply said analysis to someone like Roger Clemens, who most people view as being "guilty" of having used steroids. Applying it to President Bush or Condoleeza Rice? Not so much.

Another look at "Charlie Wilson's War"

Chalmers Johnson, the author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, reacts to the Hollywood-version of U.S. support for the Afghan mujahideen as portrayed in the film, "Charlie Wilson's War", and he's none too pleased:

What to make of the film (which I found rather boring and old-fashioned)? It makes the U.S. government look like it is populated by a bunch of whoring, drunken sleazebags, so in that sense it's accurate enough. But there are a number of things both the book and the film are suppressing. As I noted in 2003,

"For the CIA legally to carry out a covert action, the president must sign off on -- that is, authorize -- a document called a 'finding.' Crile repeatedly says that President Carter signed such a finding ordering the CIA to provide covert backing to the mujahideen after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. The truth of the matter is that Carter signed the finding on July 3, 1979, six months before the Soviet invasion, and he did so on the advice of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in order to try to provoke a Russian incursion. Brzezinski has confirmed this sequence of events in an interview with a French newspaper, and former CIA Director [today Secretary of Defense] Robert Gates says so explicitly in his 1996 memoirs. It may surprise Charlie Wilson to learn that his heroic mujahideen were manipulated by Washington like so much cannon fodder in order to give the USSR its own Vietnam. The mujahideen did the job but as subsequent events have made clear, they may not be all that grateful to the United States."
In the bound galleys of Crile's book, which his publisher sent to reviewers before publication, there was no mention of any qualifications to his portrait of Wilson as a hero and a patriot. Only in an "epilogue" added to the printed book did Crile quote Wilson as saying, "These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world. And the people who deserved the credit are the ones who made the sacrifice. And then we fucked up the endgame." That's it. Full stop. Director Mike Nichols, too, ends his movie with Wilson's final sentence emblazoned across the screen. And then the credits roll.

Neither a reader of Crile, nor a viewer of the film based on his book would know that, in talking about the Afghan freedom fighters of the 1980s, we are also talking about the militants of al Qaeda and the Taliban of the 1990s and 2000s. Amid all the hoopla about Wilson's going out of channels to engineer secret appropriations of millions of dollars to the guerrillas, the reader or viewer would never suspect that, when the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, President George H.W. Bush promptly lost interest in the place and simply walked away, leaving it to descend into one of the most horrific civil wars of modern times.

I can't say I disagree with Johnson's take on the film, which he calls "imperialist propganda", though I was a bit more forgiving in my own review last month. While the film was indeed superficial in its account of the history of U.S. involvement with the mujahideen -- and laughably jingoistic in its portrayal of Russian soldiers -- I wasn't expecting much to begin with, Hollywood being what it is. That said, I did find Philip Seymour Hoffman's portrayal of a CIA agent to be pretty entertaining, if only for his obscenity-laced tirades against his higher-ups at the agency.

Iowa Fallout

Now that Barack Obama has won the Iowa caucus, one can be sure that the Clinton campaign is preparing a major push back to highlight the "contrast" between Hillary and the current messianic savior of the liberal blogosphere.

Of course, if the Clinton campaign's efforts at contrast are anything like their attempts over the past few months -- they've already insinuated that Obama had a cocaine problem (could he have been a dealer?), and that he may be a muslim (gasp!) -- then expect this to get pretty ugly.

Any bets on when the rumor that Obama fathered a white child out of wedlock comes out?

Iowa Caucus Reaction

Over at A Tiny Revolution, Jonathan Schwarz is somewhat encouraged by Barack Obama's victory in the Democratic caucus, but not necessarily because of Obama's positions, but for what he appears to represent:

It's... a very good thing to have a viable politician who's not just "black" (by American standards) but has used cocaine, has a weird name, has Muslim family members, and has dated white women -- just as it was a good thing to have a president like Clinton who everyone knew had smoked pot and cheated on his wife. The forces of reaction have always counted on using such things to destroy anyone who gets in their way. If American society is becoming less insane in these areas and that tool is no longer available to reactionaries, it's a small but real step forward.

Meanwhile, Ezra Klein at The American Prospect can barely contain his enthusiasm following Obama's win, gushing:

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

American liberals criticize the cult of personality surrounding Ronald Reagan, and to a lesser extent George W. Bush, but many seem to fall over themselves when a "great communicator" on their side (the Blue Team) regurgitates the same empty platitudes and "the American dream" claptrap they rightly criticize when it occurs on the other side (the Red Team).
As Dennis Perrin notes in response to Klein's piece:

There are few things more nauseating than American liberals giddy over politicians. Their worst features rise to the surface and emit an acrid stench, perfume to the faithful, noxious to the rest. Saint Obama's victory in Iowa has many online libs on their knees today, hands stretched upward to the light, dopey gleam on their faces, tongues wagging uncontrollably.

As for the Republican side, Texas Congressman Ron Paul pulled in 10% -- more than twice the number who voted for former "national frontrunner" Rudy Giuliani. I never thought I'd see the day when a politician who calls the United States an "empire" and refers to 19th century anarchist Lysander Spooner on national television would be able to gain even half that amount in a Republican primary, especially one held in Iowa. As you may recall, Paul got into a spat with Giuliani earlier this year in a debate hosted by Fox News over the root causes of 9/11. Paul, a principled non-interventionist, argued that the U.S. troop presence on the Arabian peninsula and the continual bombing of Iraq throughout the 1990s played a large part in motivating the 9/11 hijackers -- a point confirmed by the 9/11 Commission Report and backed up by people such as Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA unit in charge of tracking Osama bin Laden. Naturally, Giuliani claimed to have never heard the concept of "blowback," and in true demagogic fashion, "demanded" that Paul retract his statement -- which he of course refused to do. At the time television pundits called the exchange a clear win for Giuliani that made him look "tough" in the face of the "crackpot" Ron Paul. As is so often the case with the punditocracy, however, they were wrong. Paul enjoyed tremendous exposure thanks to the exchange, which led to record-breaking fundraising for a guy most of these same pundits dismissed as "fringe," while Giuliani's campaign has crashed and burned.

It's also interesting to note that Paul spent less time than any other Republican candidate in Iowa -- even less than Giuliani, who has been trying to claim that he didn't try all that hard to do well there.

Of course, Paul's success hasn't stopped Fox News from excluding the antiwar Republican from a debate this weekend. Fox claims to only have room for five candidates -- Huckabee, Romney, Thompson, McCain, and Giuiliani -- and that they are only including those candidates who have registered double-digit support in national polls. Never mind that Paul is polling on par with Giuliani and beating Thompson in New Hampshire, and that the only actual verifiable poll -- the Iowa caucus -- showed Paul breaking into double-digits and beating one of the invited candidates; to Fox News, Paul's position on the war makes him unacceptable and "fringe," regardless of how the actual voters feel. [Insert quip regarding Fox News being "fair and balanced."]

Charlie Wilson's War

A few weeks ago I went to a screening of the film "Charlie Wilson's War", which attempts to depict Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson's efforts to increase U.S. support for the Afghan mujahideen in their war against the Soviets during the 1980s. While I found the film entertaining, I also found it predictably superficial when dealing with U.S. foreign policy. Though the creators of the film imply that U.S. support ultimately backfired, they never explain the how or why of it.

In one scene, Charlie Wilson meets with then Pakistani dictator General Zia, who demands that all U.S. support for the mujahideen -- hundreds of billions of dollars -- be distributed solely by the Pakistani intelligence services. It's never mentioned that the people the Pakistanis chose to fund were the religious zealots who became the Taliban. Rather, the filmmakers portray the blowback from U.S. support of the mujahideen as the result not of a policy that was poorly thought out and doomed from the beginning, but because Washington didn't "follow through" with money for schools and other nice things. It's telling that the screenplay is written by Aaron Sorkin as the film doesn't question the idea that the United States has any business funding rebel groups on the other side of the globe, but on the few reactionaries (in the film's case, congressmen other than Charlie Wilson) who lacked the vision to support aid for Afghan reconstruction (the film ends with a quote from Charlie Wilson: "we f----- up the endgame"). This portrayal follows Sorkin's "West Wing" which depicted a White House staffed largely by idealists trying to do good, if only to be thwarted by a few shortsighted lawmakers. However the view that things could have worked out in Afghanistan were it not for the lack of U.S. reconstruction dollars strikes me as woefully naive. The Afghan capital of Kabul has been inundated with NGO's and aid money following the U.S. invasion after 9/11, yet much of the country remains mired in official corruption and extreme poverty, with the looming threat of a resurgent Taliban. U.S. support for the mujahideen was bound to backfire, in my view, regardless of whether the United States funded reconstruction projects or not. You give a bunch of bad people guns and money and bad things are going to happen -- a fairly simple truism to me, but something U.S. policy makers have struggled to understand.

Also, as columnist Robert Scheer notes over at Truthdig, the film portrays the Soviets as soulless killers while the mujahideen are portrayed as nothing but a cruelly persecuted band of noble rebels:

The movie does not mention that the mujahedeen went to war against the Soviet-backed government then in power in Kabul after the government committed the unpardonable crime of allowing female students to attend rural schools. The film casually notes that Gen. Zia, the U.S. ally in this effort to bring “freedom” to Afghanistan, was, like so many of the movie’s heroes, a hard case full of contradictions, as exemplified by his having murdered Pakistan’s previous ruler, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Of course, I admit I could just be nitpicking. After all, not many people going to the movies are looking for a history lecture (unless, of course, it involves a secret treasure map written in invisible ink on the back of the Declaration of Independence -- but I digress). And at around 90 minutes, "Charlie Wilson's War" isn't nearly long enough to deal with the full history of U.S. aid for the mujahideen during the 1980s, at least not in a manner that could also be entertaining and funny. That said, I think it's important to note where the movie is wrong, as all too often it seems U.S. policy makers and the public at-large have bought into a Hollywood-inspired, fictionalized view of the U.S. role in the world (think "Saving Private Ryan") that frequently avoids or dismisses as mere aberrations the darker episodes in U.S. foreign policy history.

*As a side note, I've received a number of hits to this site from people searching for "Charlie Davis's War." I can only hope that this post will draw in even more unsuspecting moviegoers.