https://www.wrmea.org/north-america/saving-the-united-nations-from-the-u.s.html

Saving the United Nations from the U.S. 

IAN WILLIAMS

NORTH AMERICA

POSTED ON DECEMBER 21, 2024

(L-r) Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-MN), Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) call on the Senate to take up the Israel Security Assistance Support Act during a news conference at the U.S. Capitol on May 16, 2024, in Washington, DC. In response to President Joe Biden's pause in shipment of some weapons to deter Israel from launching a full-scale ground operation in the Gaza city of Rafah, the legislation would freeze the budgets for the U.S. Defense Secretary, Secretary of State and National Security Council if the weapons are not delivered. (CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES)

Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2025, pp. 36, 54

United Nations Report

By Ian Williams

MEDIEVAL MAPS always showed Jerusalem as the center of the world. Theology apart, they were in a sense, anticipating Palestine’s position at the center of gravity in the United Nations universe. Without prejudice to Kashmir, Myanmar, Western Sahara and the Congo, for example, no other issue poses such knotty problems to the world community and rule of law, since it encapsulates a core issue: Does international law have meaning or relevance?

U.S. officials have threatened the International Criminal Court (ICC) with sanctions, countenanced action against its officials and  looked on with a mild moue of distress as the Israeli Occupation Forces shoot U.N. officials and U.S. citizens engaged in relief work while the White House draws innumerable lines in the sand for Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that he promptly erases with tanks, bulldozers and gunships. “Self-defense” just does not cut the mustard any more for apologists, not least with the latest master stroke of the ICC announcing Myanmar indictments. Can U.S. pontificators masticate a sandwich that has Vladimir Putin on one side and Gen. Min Aung Hlaing on the other—with Netanyahu as the filling? 

During the Balkan Wars, many young State Department professionals struck the board and cried “no more!” at the shameless double standards. The Clintonian response was simply to avoid all use of the word genocide to avoid any legal obligations by the U.S. 

The current generation appears either to be opportunistically complaisant in the face of Netanyahu’s genocide, or worse, true believers in Israel and its claimed right to self-defense. In his last days as president, Barack Obama let through a conscience-easing resolution against Israel: there is little or no chance of any such significant gesture from the Biden administration in its dying days. 

In contrast, Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris have just forfeited their chances of power with their shameless abasement to indicted war criminal Netanyahu—who had spent his term as Israeli prime minister campaigning against their re-election. 

Observers often wonder whether the U.N. could survive without the United States. We have been here before. Time to reverse the query—how can the U.N. survive in any meaningful way with the U.S. as a malignant metastasizing tumor at its core? 

In the end the Devil is in the details. In the past, despite repeated purges of U.S. foreign policy personnel, the State Department retained a residual legalism as officials have tried to reconcile the passing politically motivated whims of officials to stay within the law. John Bolton as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. cut the Gordian knot—he simply asserted that international law did not apply unless the U.S. said so, thus avoiding confusion. In his crusade against the ICC, Bolton’s initiative to punish member states that failed to explicitly offer preemptive amnesty to American troops brought the U.S. into more disrepute than the U.N. and not just its “moral” standing. It was simply shrugged off and forgotten by most members. This time, the organization’s members would get their retaliation in first. It is pointless to try creative engagement with bigots. 

While appreciating his need for caution, many people were despairing of Karim Khan, the ICC prosecutor. After all, other judges on the ICC have been threatened, bullied and blackmailed by Israeli agents. But he pulled a geopolitical rabbit out of his British barrister’s wig with the Myanmar charges. To the rest of the world, how does the U.S. greet an indictment of Putin and threaten sanctions against the U.S. and its international signatories, like Britain and France, for taking the same actions against Netanyahu? And now, the vultures are fluttering home to roost as in an adroit master stroke, Khan has announced his action against the head of the Myanmar junta. 

In any rational politics, this would pose U.S. officials an insoluble dilemma: How can they welcome General Min Aung Hlaing’s arrest while attacking Netanyahu’s? To Khan’s delight, Myanmar, like Israel, is not a signatory, but like Israel it committed crimes on the territory of a state that was—Bangladesh. 

President-elect Donald Trump’s U.N. ambassador pick, U.S. representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY), has joined Israel’s call to defund the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). When she  launches off at the U.N., delegates should program their ChatGBT with the translation “yada yada yada” for her keynote message and media should deride, rebut or mock her. 

There is no upside to pandering to her nor even trying to reason with her since her delusional world actually has a solid grounding in reality. Stefanik’s future career plans are founded on massive American Israel Public Affairs Committee-related donations. Like Nikki Haley before her, her limited vision sees the world stage as merely the green room in which she prepares herself for the Oval Office. The interests of the U.S., the world, even humanity at large are entirely peripheral. It is true that the U.S. as U.N. founder convened the early meetings of the U.N. in Long Island. But what a long, twisted road for U.N. diplomacy to bring it down to Long Island politics for an obsessive career-oriented and parochial politician.

---

U.N. correspondent Ian Williams is the author of U.N.told: The Real Story of the United Nations in Peace and War (available from Middle East Books and More).

 

 Way To Go Comrade!

My old friend Mike died last month….I admire and will I hope emulate his equanimity towards his end. Thanks to Sandra for the link to a moving deity-free memorial.

 

Mike McCrink 1948 2024

Mike McCrink did not invoke any deities when he called me in New York with his oncologist’s gloomy prognosis. While concerned to tie up loose ends for his survivors, he was almost as disturbed about the aftermath of the British and American elections as he was about his personal medical news. I was not surprised that his ironic laid back world-view coped well with dire scenarios, personal and political. 

Between tumors and Trump & Starmer, we did seem to be overdrawing on the Apocalypse account. For half a century we had helped each other navigate through some stormy political and marital and medical shoals and assisted each other in doting dad-hood, which he took very seriously. In one of his pithy pub aphorisms, he remarked that while people like us were rhetorically uncommitted to marriage, it said a lot for the institution that we tried it so often in the face of all the evidence against!

Both of us were beneficiaries of the recently born British welfare state and both naked out our existence to what increasingly seems like its faltering finish. Without illusions, both of us knew it was better than that went before and that it was deteriorating in front of us. We had shared over fifty years of politics together, from the time he turned up from London following the twin idols of Chairman Mao Tse Tung and Reg Birch to join us in the Liverpool branch of the Communist Party of Britain (Marxist Leninist),  which wobbled between the latter’s autodidact Cockney philosophy and esoteric Chinese sloganeering.

Luckily we shared an irreverent sense of humour and relished indulging in Maoist concepts like “bombarding the headquarters,” and ”it is right to rebel,” while we often acted out like the Peoples’ Front of Judea (Splittist). The party actually did have some sound perceptions, but its Leninist founders increasingly frowned upon any disrespect for the headquarters, let alone bombardment or any actual rebellion. I remember Mike musing over a pint that the putative revolutionary party of the working class probably had fewer members and less influence than the Flat Earth Society! 

We were even more underwhelmed when Chairman Reg decided that Albania’s Enver Hoxha had the answers.  We never found what  the Albanian for “42” was, whether in Gheg or Tosk, but recognized Taurine excreta when we smelt it. We did truly and sincerely believe in emancipation of the working class, right up to now, but since we both came from the toiling masses ourselves, we had no great illusions about the outcome. We demonstrated and picketed about Apartheid, Vietnam, West German persecution of Leftists, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the so called Prevention of Terrorism laws, but we realized we were bearing witness, rather than shaking the world.

We had a PR strategy which leveraged our small numbers - to picket unpopular reactionary targets and get the local media to cover our protest. So we picketed the German and South African consulates. We discovered that both had recently closed because of the slump in shipping in the port of Liverpool. We discovered about the closure when the caretaker poked his nose through the door to find out what was happening. He broke this news just as we launched into our set-piece orations for Radio Merseyside - so we told him to shut up and get shut the door while we carried on!

We might occasionally have our head in the clouds, but Mike always had his feet firmly on the ground. Maybe his time as an altar boy inoculated him against dogma, Leninist or Christian, and our exposure to “Marxism -Leninism,” inoculated us against Leninism for when Trotskyist Militant Hattonistas escaped from the Life of Brian to try to impose Bolshevik discipline on Liverpool Labour Party. In the end, we discovered that the secret to avoiding disillusion is to avoid illusion. 

Perhaps one of his more idiosyncratic contributions was treating heroin users with acupuncture, which he had gone to China to study. I later suggested find out if he consider a potential retirement income from his (genuine) Chinese acupuncture qualifications but assumed that  since it was outside the NHS, it was not a secure income stream. I half-jokingly suggested veterinary acupuncture but he was not sure the customer base would see the point.

So he fell back into Further Education. We shared a predilection for history with an economic and social angle and I did urge him to try writing, but perhaps he predicted, accurately from my own experience, that the profession did not offer much in the way of fortune nor fame.

Always concerned about the excluded, he carried on teaching problem kids in Edinburgh after many contemporaries had cashed in their pensions. He was in harness right to the end - because he enjoyed it - and it was the right thing to do! 

It is 35 years since I moved to New York and Mike’s TransAtlantic companionship has been a constant support not least during my tediously frequent NDEs in the ICU at Columbia which in the end enable us to quip together about his approaching demise. It was heartbreaking but gratifying when he called a few days before the end, and told me it was his last call -to thank me for being a good friend.  I hope I face my exit with equal grace and equanimity.

Ali Velshi - anchored in Reality

 Many TV “anchors” evoke keel-hauling as appropriate recognition for their work. Algorithm-picked by WASPy bean counters, they spell out infantile scripts and ask idiotic, loaded questions that pander to their proprietors’ whims, betraying their ignorance and bias whenever their interviewees stray off script. 

In the absence of paid, real journalism opportunities, it’s understandable that journalists accept such jobs. However, we do not give Emmy’s to “resting” actors for their recitation of the day’s specials, and so we should also restrain our adulation for those who front wannabe news programs. 

A notable exception is Ali Velshi, who like his predecessor, and fellow Canadian, Peter Jennings, has a knowledge of world affairs and the strength of character to avoid pandering to herd-think.  Ironically Velshi arrived to take up his CNN position as the 9-11 bombings brought down the twin towers, which inaugurated the redoubled era of doublethink in the media that we have never recovered from. 

Speaking from experience, it was career-halting thoughtcrime to mention that there was no evidence at all for Saddam Hussein’s involvement, let alone to mention previous US support for the Afghan fundamentalists who transitioned from “freedom fighters” to “terrorists, when they switched their “primary contradiction” from the USSR to the US.

At the 66th floor of the World Trade Center the FPA invited Velshi to tell us about his new book, Small Acts of Courage It is an entertaining and informative work that ties his extended family history to  geo-politics and exemplifies how journalists should look at the world. Velshi’s family history does not determine his world view, but it certainly informs and illustrates it.

Velshi’s life is a cross section of British Imperial history. His family were originally from (British) India and involved with Gandhi in the struggle for civil rights for Indian subjects in South Africa. It is indicative of Ali’s objectivity that he carefully notes that that struggle did not then extend to rights for black South Africans. 

The family’s political activity was a good try, but Apartheid was developing nonetheless, and squeezed out of its property, they moved on to British East Africa, and then on to British North America, or Canada, which, under the premiership of Pierre Trudeau had become the effective the spiritual head of the Commonwealth, establishing standards of genuine multicultural cohabitation both internally and internationally. The UK itself of course had retreated into the xenophobic isolation from which it has only occasionally emerged.

In recognition of Velshi’s exemplary journalism, his book and his “purple heart,” for the rubber bullet he took when covering a “Black Lives Matter” in Milwaukee, the FPA also presented him with its “Sharp Pen Award.” 

Ali brought genuine journalism to the small screen, with CNN, Al Jazeera, and MSNBC. He even took screen financial journalism to a new level above stock pumping. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Again cutting out from the lemming flow, when he went to Minneapolis to cover the protests about Floyd, he did not lazily and pejoratively call them “riots.” He was covering what he stresses was a non-violent demonstration when a police rubber bullet hit him in the leg and brought him down to the enthusiastic applause of Donald Trump.

Maybe TV anchors should start wearing splints on their legs in emulation of the MAGA’s cultists’ ear bandages? In his conclusion, he prescribes “Citizenship is something you have to practice. It’s a muscle that atrophies if you don’t use it, and if it does, other people will be willing to take advantage of its weakness.” 

To pastiche an imperial poet, if you can keep your head when all around are losing theirs, then you might win the FPA’s Sharp Pen Award.”

The TLS 14 May had a review of Kim Wagner's book in the US- Filippino war and commented justly, on the failures of Western Journalism. It made me think of the coverage of Gaza and the Israeli slaughter there,which poured vitriolic scorn and it recalled how since October 7 Western newsdesks have taken uncritically as gospel outright propaganda from the IOF and hysterical fiction from religious fanatics (Zaka) including mass rapes, burnt babies, hearing the sound of corpses being raped  and not noticing massive civilian casualties.

Mark Twain’s merciless interrogation of official dispatches from the scene of the slaughter, “Comments on the Moro Massacre, March 12 1906.” shows objective journalism is possible.

Twain had immediately seen the bloody holes in the official account, and I have used his piece with journalism students often. “The enemy numbered six hundred -- including women and children -- and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother,” he wrote, for which thought -crime he would probably have any invitations and awards withdrawn.




A Twain-style interrogation of gloating reports of military triumphs that celebrated the rescue of four Israeli hostages at the cost of four others accidentally killed and hundreds of Palestinian civilians “including women and children” would be welcome.




https://www.the-tls.co.uk/history/twentieth-century-onwards-history/massacre-in-the-clouds-kim-a-wagner-book-review-adam-hochschild/

"Comments on the Moro Massacre"

by Samuel Clemens (March 12, 1906)

Huckleberry Finn 

From Voices of A People's History, edited by Zinn and Arnove

This incident bum upon the world last Friday in an official cablegram from the commander of our forces in the Philippines to our Government at Washington. The substance of it was as follows:

A tribe of Moros, dark-skinned savages, had fortified themselves in the bowl of an extinct crater not many miles from Jolo; and as they were hostiles, and bitter against us because we have been trying for eight years to take their liberties away from them, their presence in that position was a menace. Our commander, Gen. Leonard Wood, ordered a reconnaissance. It was found that the Moros numbered six hundred, counting women and children; that their crater bowl was in the summit of a peak or mountain twenty-two hundred feet above sea level, and very difficult of access for Christian troops and artillery. Then General Wood ordered a surprise, and went along himself to see the order carried out. Our troops climbed the heights by devious and difficult trails, and even took some artillery with them. The kind of artillery is not specified, but in one place it was hoisted up a sharp acclivity by tackle a distance of some three hundred feet. Arrived at the rim of the crater, the battle began. Our soldiers numbered five hundred and forty. They were assisted by auxiliaries consisting of a detachment of native constabulary in our pay—their numbers not given—and by a naval detachment, whose numbers are not stated. But apparently the contending parties were about equal as to number— six hundred men on our side, on the edge of the bowl; six hundred men, women and children in the bottom of the bowl. Depth of the bowl, 50 feet.

Gen. Wood's order was, "Kill or capture the six hundred."

The battle began—it is officially called by that name—our forces firing down into the crater with their artillery and their deadly small arms of precision; the savages furiously returning the fire, probably with brickbats—though this is merely a surmise of mine, as the weapons used by the savages are not nominated in the cablegram. Heretofore the Moros have used knives and clubs mainly; also ineffectual trade-muskets when they had any.

The official report stated that the battle was fought with prodigious energy on both sides during a day and a half, and that it ended with a complete victory for the American arms. The completeness of the victory is established by this fact: that of the six hundred Moros not one was left alive. The brilliancy of the victory is established by this other fact, to wit: that of our six hundred heroes only fifteen lost their lives.

General Wood was present and looking on. His order had been, "Kill or capture those savages." Apparently our little army considered that the "or" left them authorized to kill or capture according to taste, and that their taste had remained what it has been for eight years, in our army out there—the taste of Christian butchers.

The official report quite properly extolled and magnified the "heroism" and "gallantry" of our troops; lamented the loss of the fifteen who perished, and elaborated the wounds of thirty-two of our men who suffered injury, and even minutely and faithfully described the nature of the wounds, in the interest of future historians of the United States. It mentioned that a private had one of bis elbows scraped by a missile, and the private's name was mentioned. Another private had the end of his nose scraped by a missile. His name was also mentioned—by cable, at one dollar and fifty cents a word.

Next day's news confirmed the previous day's report and named our fifteen killed and thirty-two wounded again, and once more described the wounds and gilded them with the right adjectives.

Let us now consider two or three details of our military history. In one of the great battles of the Civil War ten per cent of the forces engaged on the two sides were killed and wounded. At Waterloo, where four hundred thousand men were present on the two sides, fifty thousand fell, killed and wounded, in five hours, leaving three hundred and fifty thousand sound and all right for further adventures. Eight years ago, when the pathetic comedy called the Cuban War was played, we summoned two hundred and fifty thousand men. We fought a number of showy battles, and when the war was over we had lost two hundred and sixty-eight men out of our two hundred and fifty thousand, in killed and wounded in the field, and just fourteen times as many by the gallantry of the army doctors in the hospitals and camps. We did not exterminate the Spaniards—far from it. In each engagement we left an average of two per cent of the enemy killed or crippled on the field.

Contrast these things with the great statistics which have arrived from that Moro crater! There, with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded—counting that nose and that elbow. The enemy numbered six hundred—including women and children—and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.

Now then, how has it been received? The splendid news appeared with splendid display-heads in every newspaper in this city of four million and thirteen thousand inhabitants, on Friday morning. But there was not a single reference to it in the editorial columns of any one of those newspapers. The news appeared again in all the evening papers of Friday, and again those papers were editorially silent upon our vast achievement. Next days additional statistics and particulars appeared in all the morning papers, and still without a line of editorial rejoicing or a mention of the matter in any way. These additions appeared in the evening papers of that same day (Saturday) and again without a word of comment. In the columns devoted to correspondence, in the morning and evening papers of Friday and Saturday, nobody said a word about the "battle." Ordinarily those columns are teeming with the passions of the citizen; he lets no incident go by, whether it be large or small, without pouring out his praise or blame, his joy or his indignation about the matter in the correspondence column. But, as I have said, during those two days he was as silent as the editors themselves. So far as I can find out, there was only one person among our eighty millions who allowed himself the privilege of a public remark on this great occasion—that was the President of the United States. All day Friday he was as studiously silent as the rest. But on Saturday he recognized that his duty required him to say something, and he took his pen and performed that duty. If I know President Roosevelt—and I am sure I do—this utterance cost him more pain and shame than any other that ever issued from his pen or his mouth. I am far from blaming him. If I had been in his place my official duty would have compelled me to say what he said. It was a convention, an old tradition, and he had to be loyal to it. There was no help for it. This is what he said:

Washington, March 10.

Wood, Manila:—I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag.

(Signed) Theodore Roosevelt

His whole utterance is merely a convention. Not a word of what he said came out of his heart. He knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a day and a half, from a safe position on the heights above, was no brilliant feat of arms—and would not have been a brilliant feat of arms even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets. He knew perfectly well that our uniformed assassins had not upheld the honor of the American flag, but had done as they have been doing continuously for eight years in the Philippines—that is to say, they had dishonored it.

The next day, Sunday,—which was yesterday—the cable brought us additional news—still more splendid news—still more honor for the flag. The first display-head shouts this information at us in the stentorian capitals: "women slain in moro slaughter."

"Slaughter" is a good word. Certainly there is not a better one in the Unabridged Dictionary for this occasion. The next display line says:

"With Children They Mixed in Mob in Crater, and All Died Together."

They were mere naked savages, and yet there is a sort of pathos about it when that word children falls under your eye, for it always brings before us our perfectest symbol of innocence and helplessness; and by help of its deathless eloquence color, creed and nationality vanish away and we see only that they are children—merely children. And if they are frightened and crying and in trouble, our pity goes out to them by natural impulse. We see a picture. We see the small forms. We see the terrified faces. We see the tears. We see the small hands clinging in supplication to the mother; but we do not see those children that we are speaking about. We see in their places the little creatures whom we know and love.

The next heading blazes with American and Christian glory like to the sun in the zenith:

"Death List is Now 900."

I was never so enthusiastically proud of the flag till now!

The next heading explains how safely our daring soldiers were located. It says:

“Impossible to Tell Sexes Apart in Fierce Battle on Top of Mount Dajo.”

The naked savages were so far away, down in the bottom of that trap, that our soldiers could not tell the breasts of a woman from the rudimentary paps of a man—so far away that they couldn’t tell a toddling little child from a black six-footer. This was by all odds the least dangerous battle that Christian soldiers of any nationality were ever engaged in.

The next heading says:

“Fighting for Four Days.”

So our men were at it four days instead of a day and a half. It was a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory. Those savages fighting for their liberties had the four days too, but it must have been a sorrowful time for them. Every day they saw two hundred and twenty- five of their number slain, and this provided them grief and mourning for the night—and doubtless without even the relief and consolation of knowing that in the meantime they had slain four of their enemies and wounded some more on the elbow and the nose.

The closing heading says:

“Lieutenant Johnson Blown from Parapet by Exploding Artillery Gallantly Leading Charge.”

Lieutenant Johnson has pervaded the cablegrams from the first. He and his wound have sparkled around through them like the serpentine thread of fire that goes excursioning through the black crisp fabric of a fragment of burnt paper. It reminds one of Gillette’s comedy farce of a few years ago, “Too Much Johnson.” Apparently Johnson was the only wounded man on our side whose wound was worth anything as an advertisement. It has made a great deal more noise in the world than has any similarly colossal event since “Humpty Dumpty” fell off the wall and got injured. The official dispatches do not know which to admire most, Johnson’s adorable wound or the nine hundred murders. The ecstasies flowing from Army Headquarters on the other side of the globe to the White House, at a dollar and a half a word, have set fire to similar ecstasies in the President’s breast. It appears that the immortally wounded was a Rough Rider under Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt at San Juan Hill—that extinguisher of Waterloo—when the Colonel of the regiment, the present Major General Dr. Leonard Wood, went to the rear to bring up the pills and missed the fight. The President has a warm place in his heart for anybody who was present at that bloody Collision of military solar systems, and so he lost no time in cabling to the wounded hero, “How are you?” And got a cable answer, “Fine, thanks.” This is historical. This will go down to posterity.

Johnson was wounded in the shoulder with a Slug. The slug was in a shell—for the account says the damage was caused by an exploding shell which blew Johnson off the rim. The people down in the hole had no artillery; therefore it was our artillery that blew Johnson off the rim. And so it is now a matter of historical record that the only officer of ours who acquired a wound of advertising dimensions got it at our hands, not the enemy’s. It seems more than probable that if we had placed our soldiers out of the way of our own weapons, we should have come out of the most extraordinary battle in all history without a scratch.

The ominous paralysis continues. There has been a slight sprinkle—an exceedingly slight sprinkle—in the correspondence columns, of angry rebukes of the President for calling this cowardly massacre a “brilliant feat of arms,” and for praising our butchers for “holding up the honor of the flag” in that singular way; but there is hardly a ghost of a whisper about the feat of arms in the editorial columns of the papers.

I hope that this silence will continue. It is about as eloquent and as damaging and effective as the most indignant words could be, I think. When a man is sleeping in a noise, his sleep goes placidly on; but if the noise stops, the stillness wakes him. This silence has continued five days now. Surely it must be waking the drowsy nation. Surely the nation must be wondering what it means. A five-day silence following a world-astonishing event has not happened on this planet since the daily newspaper was invented.

At a luncheon party of men convened yesterday to God-speed George Harvey, who is leaving to-day for a vacation in Europe, all the talk was about the brilliant feat of arms; and no one had anything to say about it that either the President or Major General Dr. Wood, or the damaged Johnson, would regard as complimentary, or as proper comment to put into our histories. Harvey said he believed that the shock and shame of this episode would eat down deeper and deeper into the hearts of the nation and fester there and produce results. He believed it would destroy the Republican party and President Roosevelt. I cannot believe that the prediction will come true, for the reason that prophecies which promise valuable things, desirable things, good things, worthy things, never come true. Prophecies of this kind are like wars fought in a good cause—they are so rare that they don’t count.

Day before yesterday the cable-note from the happy General Dr. Wood was still all glorious. There was still proud mention and elaboration of what was called the “desperate hand-to-hand fight.”—Doctor Wood not seeming to suspect that he was giving himself away, as the phrase goes—since if there was any very desperate hand-to-hand fighting it would necessarily happen that nine hundred hand-to-hand fighters, if really desperate, would surely be able to kill more than fifteen of our men before their last man and woman and child perished.

Very well, there was a new note in the dispatches yesterday afternoon—just a faint suggestion that Dr. Wood was getting ready to lower his tone and begin to apologize and explain. He announces that he assumes full responsibility for the fight. It indicates that he is aware that there is a lurking disposition here amidst all this silence to blame somebody. He says there was “no wanton destruction of women and children in the fight, though many of them were killed by force of necessity because the Moros used them as shields in the hand-to-hand fighting.”

This explanation is better than none; indeed it is considerably better than none. Yet if there was so much hand-to-hand fighting there must have arrived a time, toward the end of the four days’ butchery, when only one native was left alive. We had six hundred men present; we had lost only fifteen; why did the six hundred kill that remaining man—or woman, or child?

Dr. Wood will find that explaining things is not in his line. He will find that where a man has the proper spirit in him and the proper force at his command, it is easier to massacre nine hundred unarmed animals than it is to explain why he made it so remorselessly complete. Next he furnishes us this sudden burst of unconscious humor, which shows that he ought to edit his reports before he cables them:

“Many of the Moros feigned death and butchered the American hospital men who were relieving the wounded.”

We have the curious spectacle of hospital men going around trying to relieve the wounded savages—for what reason? The savages were all massacred. The plain intention was to massacre them all and leave none alive. Then where was the use in furnishing mere temporary relief to a person who was presently to be exterminated? The dispatches call this battue a “battle.” In what way was it a battle? It has no resemblance to a battle. In a battle there are always as many as five wounded men to one killed outright. When this so-called battle was over, there were certainly not fewer than two hundred wounded savages lying on the field. What became of them? Since not one savage was left alive!

The inference seems plain. We cleaned up our four days’ work and made it complete by butchering those helpless people.

The President’s joy over the splendid achievement of his fragrant pet, General Wood, brings to mind an earlier presidential ecstasy. When the news came, in 1901, that Colonel Funston had penetrated to the refuge of the patriot, Aguinaldo, in the mountains, and had captured him by the use of these arts, to wit: by forgery, by lies, by disguising his military marauders in the uniform of the enemy, by pretending to be friends of Aguinaldo’s and by disarming suspicion by cordially shaking hands with Aguinaldo’s officers and in that moment shooting them down—when the cablegram announcing this “brilliant feat of arms” reached the White House, the newspapers said that that meekest and mildest and gentlest and least masculine of men, President McKinley, could not control his joy and gratitude, but was obliged to express it in motions resembling a dance. Also President McKinley expressed his admiration in another way. He instantly shot that militia Colonel aloft over the heads of a hundred clean and honorable veteran officers of the army and made him a Brigadier General in the regular service, and clothed him in the honorable uniform of that rank, thus disgracing the uniform, the flag, the nation, and himself.

Wood was an army surgeon, during several years, out West among the Indian hostiles. Roosevelt got acquainted with him and fell in love with him. When Roosevelt was offered the colonelcy of a regiment in the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish war, he took the place of Lieutenant Colonel and used his influence to get the higher place for Wood. After the war Wood became our Governor General in Cuba and proceeded to make a mephitic record for himself. Under President Roosevelt, this doctor has been pushed and crowded along higher and higher in the military service—always over the heads of a number of better men—and at last when Roosevelt wanted to make him a Major General in the regular army (with only five other Major Generals between him and the supreme command) and knew, or believed, that the Senate would not confirm Wood’s nomination to that great place, he accomplished Wood’s appointment by a very unworthy device. He could appoint Wood himself, and make the appointment good, between sessions of Congress. There was no such opportunity, but he invented one. A special session was closing at noon. When the gavel fell extinguishing the special session, a regular session began instantly. Roosevelt claimed that there was an interval there determinable as the twentieth of a second by a stop-watch, and that during that interval no Congress was in session. By this subterfuge he foisted this discredited doctor upon the army and the nation, and the Senate hadn’t spirit enough to repudiate it.

Footnotes

1 Samuel Clemens, "Comments on the Moro Massacre" (March 12, 1906). Fust published in Mark Twain's Autobiography, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924). Reprinted in Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War, ed. Jim Zwick (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1992), pp. 170-73. From the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

Chinese Whispers

 https://www.youtube.com/live/432fKLGdy_4?feature=share

It's the Law! Whether Russia or the US!

 Ian Williams

WRMEA June July 2022

 WHETHER THE UNITED NATIONS can survive this “Special Military Operation” on a member state is a moot point. The invasion of Ukraine is a direct challenge to the whole 1945 world order enshrined in the U.N. Charter. And that is not good news for people like the Palestinians, whose advocates and diplomats have invoked the “unique legitimacy” of the U.N. and its refusal to authorize Israel’s acquisition of territory by force. The closest parallel is the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, where the U.N.’s response was entirely legal if perhaps ill-advised in subcontracting the details to the klutzes in Washington.

No friend of the Palestinians should wield “What about?” to justify Vladimir Putin’s illegal aggression on Ukraine, let alone the illegal and inhumane ways in which he has waged that war. But it is indeed legitimate to raise the questions in Washington, although the purpose should be to hitch Palestinian issues to the Ukrainian bandwagon, not to give Putin a “Get-out-of-The-Hague-Free” card in the Superpower monopoly game.

For half a century, the U.S. veto has vitiated the Palestinian cause at the U.N., so it was almost a coming of age for Moscow when the General Assembly vote on Russia’s veto against the Ukraine Security Council Resolution was as badly supported as previous U.S. vetoes on behalf of Israel.

However, U.S. diplomats—and media— were making no such odious comparisons as they crowed about Putin’s lack of support. Admittedly the reportage usually added (very) small print to the self-congratulations, that General Assembly resolutions are “not legally binding.” Archivists in the State Department could remind them that the reason for their alleged lack of effect is that for 30 years the U.S. has eroded their standing by declaring them as “not legally binding.”

That was, of course, because most such resolutions condemned U.S. vetoes protecting Israel. In the U.S. presentations, somehow the General Assembly resolution partitioning mandatory Palestine and setting up a Jewish state was indeed as binding and unalterable as the Laws of the Medes and Persians. But then, the Uniting for Peace resolutions were legally effective enough to fight the Korean War— until Palestine resurrected the procedure and Washington denigrated it.

Washington is not alone in suffocating in the stink of its own hypocrisy. Russia claims its veto from the U.N. Charter, whose core principle is a ban on “the acquisition of territory by force” accompanying the principle that all sovereign states are equal. Of course, the veto means that some states are more equal than others, but the U.N. Charter did not give Russia a permanent seat on the Security Council. That privilege belonged to the U.S.S.R., which was with Ukraine (and Belarus!), a founding member of the U.N. in 1945. The U.S.S.R. dissolved in 1991, after which Moscow usurped the seat. There was no formal vote on it, but the diplomatic identity theft went unchallenged, but not un-noticed, at the time. U.N. diplomats did discuss it but, like abuse within the family, decided that discretion was the best path.

Even so, albeit 30 years on, it is a useful point to make against Putin’s specious legalism of a “special military operation” against a state he claims is not really a country. However, it is not practical to remove Moscow from the Security Council, although Russia’s removal from the Human Rights Council sets an interesting precedent for a challenge to its delegation’s credentials for the General Assembly. 

Secretariat inactivity apart, U.N. agencies of every description have responded to the war with material help and facilitated the rescue of civilians under siege by Russian forces, but U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has ducked the chance to “name and shame” and has instead been the soul of wriggly circumspection. That might have been acceptable if he were keeping his powder dry ready for a big diplomatic push. A U.N. Secretary-General has a role, indeed a duty, to provide a ladder for preposterous politicians like Putin to climb down from the tree in which they have trapped themselves.

Sadly, it took several months to get Guterres to attend to the war in person, without a ladder, and then only after hundreds of former and present U.N. luminaries signed a letter demanding action. When he went to the region, he raised eyebrows—and hackles—by calling on Putin first rather than the obvious victim. The Russians showed their appreciation by rocketing Kyiv within hours of Guterres landing there. Anyone who thinks that was an accident will maintain that the Black Sea flagship Moskva was hit by a stray iceberg. Belatedly Guterres gave the firm U.N. position that “in line with the resolutions passed by the General Assembly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a violation of its territorial integrity and against the Charter of the United Nations.” He added “There is one thing that is true and obvious, and that no arguments can change: We have not Ukrainian troops in the territory of the Russian Federation, but we have Russian

troops in the territory of [Ukraine].”

During the war, Russian troops have breached numerous international conventions with attacks on civilians, in voluntary transfers of population, looted cultural property and so on ad infinitum. Whatever you think of Russian military prowess, it is not a People’s War as Mao or Ho Chi Minh preached, and, as far as winning hearts and minds go, the Russophone Ukrainians in the East, who have borne the brunt of the Special Military Operation, have been vociferously inveighing against their aspirant liberators—in Russian.

One small bright spot was the successful move by Liechtenstein, ironically endorsed by the U.S., to trigger a General Assembly vote whenever a permanent member casts a veto. Almost ironically as he looked around at the ruins Russia had wrought of the U.N. Charter and the post-World War II settlement, Moscow’s representative claimed that “the division of powers between the Assembly and the Council has allowed the United Nations to function effectively for more than 75 years.” This “effectiveness” is indeed news to millions of people from Indochina to the Congo, the Balkans and the Middle East, whose lives have been afflicted by the “scourge of war,” unhindered by the U.N. Charter and the organization it set up to end it forever.

Consistently, as a frequent victim of the veto, the Palestine delegation was a cosponsor of the measure, leading to an Israeli delegate to protest that it was against the rules. But then the Israeli delegate compounded her obtusity, trying to reconcile the good vetoes that Washington used with the bad ones that Russia had wielded. “In some cases, the problem has been the text of the resolution before the Security Council, not the veto itself.”

Indeed, as she implies, the text of a resolution might well call Israeli actions into question and “in the case of a particular resolution in the Security Council that does not promote peace and security, the veto should be cast.”

From now on, supporters of Palestine can and should use every occasion of a General Assembly debate on a U.S. veto to relate American statements about Russian frightfulness in Ukraine with Israeli behavior in Gaza. Bombings of civilians, deaths of children, violation of boundaries, defiance of Geneva conventions, annexation of territories acquired by force: you would almost think that Putin had studied the Israeli blueprint, and as Adolph Hitler famously concluded over the Ottomans’ Armenian massacres, “they got away with it.”

It is a reciprocal learning process as the barbaric Israeli assassination of Al Jazeera’s Shireen Abu Akleh demonstrates. Who knows though, maybe the White House foreign policy team might also learn from the self-serving expediency and manifest ambivalence of Israel and the Gulf states to U.S. resolutions on Russia and let them know they cannot expect automatic diplomatic and military support.

And maybe the U.S. can once again realize that international law is not something you can turn on and off when Israel is involved: that you cannot preach effectively against annexations in Ukraine, while condoning land grabs in the Golan, West Bank and Western Sahara. ■

Sanctions! not BDS.

  https://www.palestinechronicle.com/ian-williams-deterioration-of-intl-human-rights-mechanisms-blamed-on-us-defense-of-israel-video/

Ratcheting up the clicks at the moment. Well done Omar and PDD!

Albright's State Deportment

 Accessed 18 April 1999

Albright's State Deportment/ IAN WILLIAMS

[A Review of] SEASONS OF HER LIFE:

A Biography of Madeleine Korbel Albright.

By Ann Blackman.

Scribner's. 398 pp. $27.

Flirtatious and ferocious at the same time, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright stamps the world stage over Kosovo, threatening fire from heaven if Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic does not agree to peace terms. Just as over Bosnia, she may even believe what she says. Unfortunately, the Serb leader is much better informed. He knows that whatever the public differences, Belgrade and Washington are united in wanting to avoid NATO airstrikes (even if they come to pass). Albright's grandstanding is a necessary part of the charade in which the United States acts scary and the Serbs act scared.

 With her ability to be stridently parochial, and insular as well, in six different languages, Madeleine Albright has been the perfect Secretary of State for this Administration. Never one to let substance interfere with a good soundbite, she has reinvented herself whenever it has been advantageous to her ambitions.

 But does she really merit a biography on the scale of Seasons of Her Life? As Ann Blackman frames the problem, "What makes her, among all the other brilliant men and women in America, stand out?" Almost inadvertently, emerging from Blackman's hard work is a portrait of Albright that shows she would be outstanding mainly by dint of her mediocrity in any such gathering (thus well meriting the nickname Madeleine Halfbright, which State Department staff members gave her after her appointment as US ambassador to the UN).

 However, she would also stand out for her burning ambition--and for her intensive cultivation of social and political connections of the kind available to someone of substantial wealth. (Madame Secretary benefited from a generous divorce settlement after what she has described as a "Cinderella marriage" to a millionaire.) Blackman actually writes that "Albright's greatest appeal is that she is just like us, only wealthier"! This has perhaps unwitting overtones of Hemingway's putdown of F. Scott Fitzgerald's remark about the rich--"They are different from you and me": "Yes, they have more money." But it really sums up the secret of Albright's success more aptly than any neofeminist reading of progress from the log cabin of Kinder, Küche, Kirche to political glory.

 In becoming the first woman to head the State Department, Albright achieved cult status in some superficially minded quarters. People Blackman terms the golden girls--Democrats like Barbara Mikulski, Barbara Kennelly and Anne Wexler--spoke out prominently in her favor, for example. But many of us who followed the careers of Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi need convincing that the absence of cojones in itself guarantees wisdom, virtue or empathetic statesmanship. Even so, those redoubtable women, political warts and all, were elected despite their sex. Blackman's account makes it clear that Albright was appointed to public office by a symbol-sensitive White House because she was a woman. "Frankly, [President Clinton] wanted another woman in the cabinet," Blackman quotes a wisely anonymous but assumedly knowledgeable source as saying. In fact, cojones did help Albright directly, since her use of the word at the United Nations over Castro's downing of a flight of Cuban exiles helped lock her in the media eye as a staunch anticommunist--and an electoral asset for the President in Florida.

 Blackman's bibliography cites Albright's PhD dissertation, her MA submission for Columbia, one from Wellesley and a mere quartet of memorable public speeches, significant for their carefully crafted soundbites rather than their insights. Certainly no male so thinly qualified would have even been on the short list to head State--nor would a better-qualified woman lacking Albright's social connections. Among her predecessors, Warren Christopher may not have played to the gallery, but he had a long record of public service and had been Deputy Secretary of State prior to his Cabinet appointment. Cyrus Vance had been Deputy Secretary of State as well (and LBJ's emissary to North Vietnam) before he was elevated.

 Blackman's journalistic integrity rescues this book from the hagiographic gushing that it occasionally approaches. However, that creates a constant dissonance between biographical intent and delivery of the content. For example, she asserts that Albright has made sure that "women's rights are a central priority of US foreign policy" but then goes on to report that there has been no great leap forward in the number of female ambassadors on her watch. She quotes a close friend of Albright as saying, "Gender didn't hit her in any real way until she got to the United Nations. Feminism wasn't an important cause for her until recently."

 Even at that, it appears mainly to be a stepping stone. For example, Blackman reports that while Albright was nominally in charge of the US delegation to the International Women's Conference in Beijing, she disdained actual attendance, except insofar as she could share Hillary Clinton's plane for the one-day fly-in visit. Significantly, the book is as silent as Albright was herself about the sexually adventurous Clinton's sacking of Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders (another, more neglected female first) for her statement at the UN that masturbation did not carry a risk of AIDS. In a more political vein, Albright's first move on arrival at the UN was to push out April Glaspie, the former chargé d'affaires in Iraq who carried the can for the Bush Administration in its confused signals to Baghdad before the start of the Gulf War. Glaspie had been serving her penance at the US Mission to the UN. In short, sisterhood may have been a force in getting

Albright appointed, but it is not a concept she has put into practice much herself.

 Blackman also records that her globetrotting protagonist was not going to attend the Copenhagen UN Social Summit at all, considering the war against global poverty too soft a subject for her consideration. Until, that is, Al Gore announced he was going, whereupon Albright, then UN ambassador, decided to hitch a lift with him. As Blackman says, she "understood that if she were to have any chance at higher office, she would need to spend time with people who could influence the decision." Brown-nosing becomes an art form in these pages, which occasionally read like Diary of a Nobody in the third person, as they record Albright's delight at getting this or that invitation, or mortification at being left off this or that power list.

 Despite the log-cabin-to-State-Department nonsense that she and her spinmeisters have woven, it is clear that Albright came from a relatively affluent and privileged background. No amount of spin can transform a privileged, upper-middle-class upbringing, with governesses and Swiss private schools, into a life of deprivation.

 Few people would regard being the daughter of a college professor and having to take a scholarship to Wellesley as swimming against the social stream. After marrying into money, Albright used her wealth to consolidate her position as a Georgetown hostess whose rabidly hawkish cold war sentiments, seemingly picked up through hero worship of her Czech émigré father, could always find a popular echo among Democratic movers and shakers. (Albright was an outsider of her own creation, since she had set herself on being rich, WASP and Wellesleyan and remade herself in this image, renouncing Catholicism for a comfortable Episcopalianism.)

 At least we are spared any hint of a radical past. Albright, it seems, was a proto-neocon from the beginning. During the sixties, when, Blackman stereotypically tells us, "antiwar radicals who grew their hair long and smoked pot" and "black-power advocates sporting 'Afros'" besieged college presidents, Albright found the demonstrations at Columbia "a pain in the neck." Albright, we deduce, neither wore an Afro nor smoked the demon weed; instead, she struggled with her postgraduate work and wrestled with the dilemma of whether to leave the children at home with the housekeeper.

 Interestingly, and once again reflecting the dissonance between the biographer's task and this volume's contents, the body of Blackman's text takes seriously Albright's amazing amnesia about her Jewish ancestry and the price her grandparents paid for their ethnicity. Blackman does record in her introduction that she found "very few people who believe [Albright] was truly ignorant of her family heritage." As Blackman herself says, it "stretched the imagination." Within months of her appointment as Secretary of State, in other words, Albright was revealed to be someone who was either suffering premature Alzheimer's or who was pathologically covering up knowledge of her family history. On the face of it, neither is an optimal characteristic for running the foreign policy of the world's only superpower. Blackman fails to consider what the effect of these revelations would have been if they had surfaced before her appointment: Discussions made public at the time reveal that Albright might have found herself scoring more negative points for her Jewishness than positive points for her womanhood at a bean-counting White House.

 There is much in this book with the ring of truth--but what rings out loudest is the sound of silence when it comes to examining the record of Albright's public life as opposed to her personal history. Blackman disclaims any attempt to analyze her subject's approach to US foreign policy in favor of following "the path Albright walked to shatter the glass ceiling." Would it be conceivable for a biographer of Henry Kissinger to write about his struggle with his Austrian-Jewish origins in an administration that was frequently tinged with anti-Semitism--and not mention Vietnam or Cambodia?

 Yet in Seasons of Her Life, Blackman gives almost as much prominence to Albright's presidency of the trustees of the Beauvoir Elementary School in Washington, DC--an affluent private establishment not much patronized by the majority population of the District--as she does to her career at the UN. In one way this is reasonable, since it was the nearest thing to public office Albright held before becoming ambassador to the UN in 1993.

 There is much talk of facials, hairdos, dating and dresses, but not one single mention of Rwanda. In fact, in 1994 Albright fought single-handedly in the Security Council to stop any UN reinforcements whatsoever from going to Kigali while somewhere between half a million and a million Tutsis were being massacred. All agree that loyalty to Clinton has been one of her virtues. She was never more loyal than in this championing of Presidential Decision Directive 25, which ruled that the United States would veto any UN peacekeeping operation that did not directly benefit US interests. Her pride in her Czech origins is continually stated, but in this case it was ironically justified. "The crocodiles in the Kagera River and the vultures over Rwanda have never had it so good," Karel Kovanda, the Czech ambassador to the UN, reprimanded his colleagues on the Security Council (and by implication one in particular) in an attempt to get reinforcements for the tiny UN contingent in Kigali.

 In another example of diplomacy by soundbite and photo-op, Blackman reports that Albright went to Somalia to wear a flak-jacket with US troops for the cameras and that she decided Boutros Boutros-Ghali should be fired as Secretary General of the UN because of that organization's failure there. However, Blackman does not mention her heroine's role in pushing the UN to fight a vendetta with Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid, which could be regarded as the cause of the debacle in which eighteen US Rangers were killed. Nor does she mention that the key incident in which the soldiers were killed was an American operation initiated and carried out without even informing, let alone consulting, UN forces on the ground.

 Blackman gives the dubious credit for sacking Boutros-Ghali to Albright without really explaining why she did it. Perhaps closer examination would have led Blackman to examine the most likely hypothesis: that, Salome-like, Albright danced in front of Jesse Helms with Boutros-Ghali's head, in return for promises of easy confirmation as Secretary of State from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman.

 Blackman fails to explore what is, on the face of it, a highly unlikely yet continuing alliance between Albright and Helms. In fact, they share an intensely parochial and reactionary view of the world. Perhaps the most germane comment is the cable home from former British Ambassador Sir John Weston, who, in best "Yes, Minister" style, alerted the Foreign Office to the failings of the new Secretary of State. "She is not always good at accepting the need to apply to the United States the same standards and expectations she requires of others.... There is a mildly irritating tendency to create a fixed position and then to look around for others to save her from the detailed consequences of it.... Her reaction to being exposed or brought under pressure from sudden turns of events are sometimes tetchy, verging on the panicky."

 It is perhaps significant that Weston has retired from the Foreign Service. Most of the other diplomats who were privately so dismissive of her joined the fawning chorus of congratulations once she became Secretary of State. The same process has been obvious in the media, where her career has been written up as if she were some combination of Metternich and Mother Teresa.

 In fact, most of the press who covered Albright at the UN had as little time for her as she had for them. Her spinman would go straight to Washington to get the pliable coverage he wanted, bypassing the New York staff. From the time of her arrival at the UN, it was obvious where her ambitions lay, and her media effort was directed solely at the State Department. However, she had apparently been cautioned that it would not do to look too eager, so everyone was supposed to conspire in pretending that it was not so.

 I must confess an interest here. Not long after Albright took over, her spokesman, Jamie Rubin, bell, book and candled me from the US Mission in 1994 for writing a profile of Albright in the New York Observer that referred to her "barely concealed ambitions...to become Secretary of State." Rubin complained that I had not recorded his denial of any such ambition; she and her staff have a strong view of the proper role of journalists: as stenographers whose task is to write down every word.

 When the Washington Post's Michael Dobbs revealed his findings about Albright's family being massacred during World War II, Blackman records that Albright's response was to call Post publisher Katharine Graham, who wisely realized that it was too late to do anything about the story. Rubin's response was to spoil Dobbs's scoop by leaking his results to other outlets who could assure a more sympathetic, if not sycophantic, stance. Later, one press occasion in Belgrade was canceled simply because Dobbs was the pool reporter.

 Blackman says she asked Albright about the prevailing State Department doctrine that if someone writes something 99 percent positive and 1 percent negative about her, she will focus on the 1 percent. The champion of free speech and the American way of life told her chillingly, "So eliminate the 1 percent." It is to Blackman's credit that she has significantly exceeded the single percent. While most of her editorializations are in the traditional inside-the-Beltway mode of never attacking a possible source and the impressive negative percentage is always ascribed to others, I'd be surprised if Blackman ever got another exclusive interview. In Washington, access is given to stenographers, not investigators.

 Blackman's integrity and resourcefulness show through the pink cotton wool padding. I only wish she had adopted the persona of the little girl revealing the insubstantiality of Empress Albright's new clothes and dug a little deeper. She could have explained just why Albright is the perfect embodiment of this Administration's content-free foreign policy, in which one deranged Senator from North Carolina or a campaign donation from a banana magnate has more weight than all of America's allies put together, let alone the rest of the world.

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Ian Williams, The Nation's UN correspondent, has reported extensively on Madeleine Albright.

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