An old Asia hand to the UN
By Ian Williams
Some of the article covers material that I've already posted. Click for the full article, or just read below for the update.
Asia Times
NEW YORK - Seemingly substantial rumors are sweeping Washington and the UN that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, at President George W Bush's suggestion, is about to appoint Burton Lynn Pascoe, currently US ambassador to Indonesia, as head of the UN's Department of Political Affairs.
At least it won't be former ambassador John Bolton, and at least Pascoe is a foreign service professional deeply aware of the rest of the world. A three-year spell in Taiwan and a knowledge of Mandarin, time in Central Asia and China and you begin to see why Ban could feel he could appoint such a nominee.
Indeed, one cannot help speculating how much toing and froing there was before the White House came up with a candidate so unusually experienced and knowledgeable by this administration's (or indeed others') standards and whose Asian experience would make him acceptable to Ban.
Even so, it does not augur well for the United Nations or the United States to have any American identified with the current White House (or for that matter any previous administration's) heading such a crucial department, especially as one of the leading neo-cons, ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, has been nominated to replace Bolton.
………
Pascoe is too sophisticated to thank Bush publicly for his appointment, as did Christopher Burnham, the previous under secretary general for management. But one cannot help thinking that he will keep his fingers crossed when he takes the international civil servant's oath.
……..
However, it is still early days. Ban's "mis-speaking" on the UN's attitude to the death penalty over Saddam Hussein's execution was a rite of passage in which he had not yet shed his mental position as South Korea's representative. However, he has a considerably better chance of transitioning into a genuine international civil servant than Pascoe.
Tuesday, January 09, 2007
Monday, January 08, 2007
Ban, American Moguls at UN?
Khalilzad: Good News and Bad for UN
The Nation
Ian Williams
The impending appointment of Zalmay Khalilzad to replace John Bolton as US ambassador to the United Nations is mixed news. Khalilzad takes his directions from Vice President Dick Cheney, and since the beginning of the Reagan Administration has been an ardent supporter of the various neocon adventurist positions.
While he almost certainly shares the neocons' bedrock contempt for international law and the UN, Khalilzad does not carry Bolton's baggage: decades of obsessive fulmination against the international body. As a Muslim of Afghan descent who possesses more social and diplomatic graces than his predecessor, he will probably do a better job of advancing the White House agenda.
Progressives who called for the dismissal of Bolton might have crossed their fingers and hoped he stayed. After all, do we really want an effective diplomat representing the Bush-Cheney agenda? Much better, surely, to have an ineffective bully and blowhard who provokes opposition than someone who has charm and diplomatic skills. We may now be seeing that experiment in real time.
But Khalilzad's appointment leaves open the question of who will be the next US nominee to high office in the UN. It was rumored that he was under consideration to be under secretary general for political affairs, and the United States had expressed interest in taking over the position as head of peacekeeping.
The French seem to think that they have a lock on peacekeeping... but then the British thought that their man John Holmes was on the trail for that or political affairs until he ended up in the important but less politically sensitive position heading humanitarian affairs, so there may be room for disappointment. Maybe Paris misinterpreted Ban Ki-moon's still-less-than-perfect French? Perhaps to ward off American interest, Ban has reportedly been considering splitting the responsibilities of peacekeeping between its administrative and logistical side and the more overtly political aspects.
There still may be the chance for a nightmare scenario in which Bolton is nominated for one of the presumed American senior positions in the UN hierarchy. I advance this theory for several reasons: The Bush Administration is arrogant and/or stupid enough to try such a stunt, and Bolton is obsessive enough about the UN to seek another post. But my main reason for raising it is prophylactic--the hope that people will be so horrified at the thought that they will not let it happen. (Note that these positions are not subject to confirmation by the US Senate since they are technically made by the secretary general. It is considered polite for everyone to pretend not to notice the US arm-twisting when the Secretary General makes his decision.)
However, we should not get too personal about Bolton. It would be a disaster for the United Nations and the United States to have any American identified with this White House (or for that matter the previous one) heading such crucial departments.
Indeed, Britain's recent close proximity to US positions probably counted against the appointment of Holmes to the peacekeeping post. The advantage of the UN for rational American policy is not only that it provides a global legion of sepoys to carry out duties that would swamp the US military. An independent globally respected body can implement resolutions, even American-inspired ones, while one that is overtly American-dominated would have far less credibility. Indeed, the perception of following narrow American interests that would accompany almost any conceivable nomination from this Administration would put UN staff and peacekeepers across the world at considerable risk.
For all the complaints from Republicans in Congress, Washington has always had far more say in the UN than is good for the organization, and while on one level such senior appointments would line up perceptions with reality, they would reap no benefits for anyone.
If Ban Ki-moon thinks that putting a US-approved appointee in such jobs will insulate the organization from criticism, he should consider that American presidential-patronage nominees have been in charge of UN management for fifteen years of unrelenting American media and Congressional criticism of UN management.
In fact, the first item of any serious reform of the UN was already derailed by the United States with the enforced appointment of Josette Sheeran Shiner as head of the World Food Program, which rescinded Kofi Annan's already belated declaration of personnel independence.
Ban Ki-moon was off to a good start in reclaiming that lost ground by appointing two women--Alicia Bárcena of Mexico to the traditionally US-held position of under secretary general for management, and Dr. Asha-Rose Migiro of Tanzania (hitherto foreign minister) as his deputy, replacing Mark Malloch Brown, the retiring British incumbent.
The Nation
Ian Williams
The impending appointment of Zalmay Khalilzad to replace John Bolton as US ambassador to the United Nations is mixed news. Khalilzad takes his directions from Vice President Dick Cheney, and since the beginning of the Reagan Administration has been an ardent supporter of the various neocon adventurist positions.
While he almost certainly shares the neocons' bedrock contempt for international law and the UN, Khalilzad does not carry Bolton's baggage: decades of obsessive fulmination against the international body. As a Muslim of Afghan descent who possesses more social and diplomatic graces than his predecessor, he will probably do a better job of advancing the White House agenda.
Progressives who called for the dismissal of Bolton might have crossed their fingers and hoped he stayed. After all, do we really want an effective diplomat representing the Bush-Cheney agenda? Much better, surely, to have an ineffective bully and blowhard who provokes opposition than someone who has charm and diplomatic skills. We may now be seeing that experiment in real time.
But Khalilzad's appointment leaves open the question of who will be the next US nominee to high office in the UN. It was rumored that he was under consideration to be under secretary general for political affairs, and the United States had expressed interest in taking over the position as head of peacekeeping.
The French seem to think that they have a lock on peacekeeping... but then the British thought that their man John Holmes was on the trail for that or political affairs until he ended up in the important but less politically sensitive position heading humanitarian affairs, so there may be room for disappointment. Maybe Paris misinterpreted Ban Ki-moon's still-less-than-perfect French? Perhaps to ward off American interest, Ban has reportedly been considering splitting the responsibilities of peacekeeping between its administrative and logistical side and the more overtly political aspects.
There still may be the chance for a nightmare scenario in which Bolton is nominated for one of the presumed American senior positions in the UN hierarchy. I advance this theory for several reasons: The Bush Administration is arrogant and/or stupid enough to try such a stunt, and Bolton is obsessive enough about the UN to seek another post. But my main reason for raising it is prophylactic--the hope that people will be so horrified at the thought that they will not let it happen. (Note that these positions are not subject to confirmation by the US Senate since they are technically made by the secretary general. It is considered polite for everyone to pretend not to notice the US arm-twisting when the Secretary General makes his decision.)
However, we should not get too personal about Bolton. It would be a disaster for the United Nations and the United States to have any American identified with this White House (or for that matter the previous one) heading such crucial departments.
Indeed, Britain's recent close proximity to US positions probably counted against the appointment of Holmes to the peacekeeping post. The advantage of the UN for rational American policy is not only that it provides a global legion of sepoys to carry out duties that would swamp the US military. An independent globally respected body can implement resolutions, even American-inspired ones, while one that is overtly American-dominated would have far less credibility. Indeed, the perception of following narrow American interests that would accompany almost any conceivable nomination from this Administration would put UN staff and peacekeepers across the world at considerable risk.
For all the complaints from Republicans in Congress, Washington has always had far more say in the UN than is good for the organization, and while on one level such senior appointments would line up perceptions with reality, they would reap no benefits for anyone.
If Ban Ki-moon thinks that putting a US-approved appointee in such jobs will insulate the organization from criticism, he should consider that American presidential-patronage nominees have been in charge of UN management for fifteen years of unrelenting American media and Congressional criticism of UN management.
In fact, the first item of any serious reform of the UN was already derailed by the United States with the enforced appointment of Josette Sheeran Shiner as head of the World Food Program, which rescinded Kofi Annan's already belated declaration of personnel independence.
Ban Ki-moon was off to a good start in reclaiming that lost ground by appointing two women--Alicia Bárcena of Mexico to the traditionally US-held position of under secretary general for management, and Dr. Asha-Rose Migiro of Tanzania (hitherto foreign minister) as his deputy, replacing Mark Malloch Brown, the retiring British incumbent.
A Clark's Tale
I really do think there is a solid case for impeaching George W. Bush – and Dick Cheney as well come to think of it. But when I got an email passed on from Ramsey Clark, asking me to support his impeachment campaign, I had to demur.
There are many good reasons for opposing the war, but none of them involve the innocence of Saddam Hussein, Clark's erstwhile client. Bush lied about the war. The Bush dynasty covered up their complicity in Saddam's crimes, but that does not exonerate the latter.
Ramsey Clark has simply no credibility on this matter. He has a consistently recidivist record of defending war criminals, tyrants and butchers from Milosevic to Saddam. My article on Clark in Salon in 1999 still holds in still holds, and if anything, he has probably gone down hill since.
There were legitimate war resisters in the Second World War. Few of them had the bad taste to defend Hitler and Mussolini, yet what is about so much of what passes for the Left in America that they are so undiscriminating. They ally themselves with supporters of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, in Rwanda, and now the butcher of Kurdistan. It is perfectly acceptably, and indeed politically much more sensible to recognize that the US war can still be wrong even though Saddam Hussein was indeed an evil dictator.
And what is worse, Clark is a lousy lawyer. For example, in his defense of Rwanda genocide indictee Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, aligned with Neocon sentiment against multinational tribunals -- somewhat ironically for a case originating in Texas -- said his client faced execution if extradited. Unlike Texas, the Tribunal, of course, has no death penalty, and indeed when it found Ntakirutimana guilty of participating in the killing of hundreds who had sought refuge in a Seventh Day Adventist hospital, it only sentenced him to ten years – about what he would get for a driving offence while black in Texas.
Perhaps it is no wonder that Clark's clients are all found guilty are imprisoned, die in prison or are executed. I would sooner trust him with brain surgery than with drawing up credible articles of impeachment. I groan when I see him representing war resisters from the forces, seeing any legal defense disappear in a cloud of Neo-Trotsykite rhetoric inspired by his sponsors.
There are many good reasons for opposing the war, but none of them involve the innocence of Saddam Hussein, Clark's erstwhile client. Bush lied about the war. The Bush dynasty covered up their complicity in Saddam's crimes, but that does not exonerate the latter.
Ramsey Clark has simply no credibility on this matter. He has a consistently recidivist record of defending war criminals, tyrants and butchers from Milosevic to Saddam. My article on Clark in Salon in 1999 still holds in still holds, and if anything, he has probably gone down hill since.
There were legitimate war resisters in the Second World War. Few of them had the bad taste to defend Hitler and Mussolini, yet what is about so much of what passes for the Left in America that they are so undiscriminating. They ally themselves with supporters of ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, in Rwanda, and now the butcher of Kurdistan. It is perfectly acceptably, and indeed politically much more sensible to recognize that the US war can still be wrong even though Saddam Hussein was indeed an evil dictator.
And what is worse, Clark is a lousy lawyer. For example, in his defense of Rwanda genocide indictee Pastor Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, aligned with Neocon sentiment against multinational tribunals -- somewhat ironically for a case originating in Texas -- said his client faced execution if extradited. Unlike Texas, the Tribunal, of course, has no death penalty, and indeed when it found Ntakirutimana guilty of participating in the killing of hundreds who had sought refuge in a Seventh Day Adventist hospital, it only sentenced him to ten years – about what he would get for a driving offence while black in Texas.
Perhaps it is no wonder that Clark's clients are all found guilty are imprisoned, die in prison or are executed. I would sooner trust him with brain surgery than with drawing up credible articles of impeachment. I groan when I see him representing war resisters from the forces, seeing any legal defense disappear in a cloud of Neo-Trotsykite rhetoric inspired by his sponsors.
Saturday, January 06, 2007
Repelling Boarders
One of the many sites on the Israeli side of Middle East conflict is “Myths and Facts.” Usually they share a common disability to see the other side- for example a recent release on this one demanded that the Palestinians abide by the road map, but was deafeningly silent about the near simultaneous announcement that the Israelis were, in total defiance of the same road map, building a new settlement in the West Bank to house settlers removed from Gaza so the IDF could declare a free-fire zone there.
The 28 December announcement was more interesting than most since it inadvertently threw up a new angle. It took the Bush administration to task for seeing “nothing wrong in considering a plan to declare an independent Palestinian state with provisional boarders (sic)within the next 2 years.”
I suspect he meant borders. And in that sense I share his dislike. There should be a Palestinian state with its borders based on the 1967 Green Line with mutual adjustments agreed by the parties.
But his repeated mis-spelling of boarders does open up thoughts based on regarding Israeli settlers as “boarders.” In one sense of course, the word refers to temporary paying guests in a household, which opens up the possibility of telling the settlers to pay the rent for the last thirty years - and serving them a week’s notice to vacate the premises.
Secondly boarding is what pirates do to ships. “Repel boarders” is the cry in the Hornblower- style movies. And it is indeed true that the settlers are collectively guilty of a form of piracy, boarding and illegally seizing Palestinian territories. Interestingly, piracy still has a mandatory hanging sentence under old international conventions... but let that pass. After all, Saddam Hussein was not even charged with trying to invade Iran.
But by free association with swashbuckling, we move to the attacks mounted by the IDF on Ramallah this week, while Olmert was trying to enlist the cooperation of Mubarak. Even Israeli politicians were outraged, and prepared, at least off the record, to talk about IDF sabotage of the political leadership.
It is yet more evidence of the stranglehold of the Shin Bet and IDF, now overwhelmingly dominated by Likud appointees, over Israel’s allegedly civilian leadership, and vindicates yet again what I said November 12 on Impunity and Jack D. Ripper.
Until Israel’s politicians get control of their Security Services they are allowing the conservatives to blow up any road to peace on a whim. And of course while the UK and US allow a free pass to this type of behaviour, there is little incentive for Olmert and Peretz to deliver.
The 28 December announcement was more interesting than most since it inadvertently threw up a new angle. It took the Bush administration to task for seeing “nothing wrong in considering a plan to declare an independent Palestinian state with provisional boarders (sic)within the next 2 years.”
I suspect he meant borders. And in that sense I share his dislike. There should be a Palestinian state with its borders based on the 1967 Green Line with mutual adjustments agreed by the parties.
But his repeated mis-spelling of boarders does open up thoughts based on regarding Israeli settlers as “boarders.” In one sense of course, the word refers to temporary paying guests in a household, which opens up the possibility of telling the settlers to pay the rent for the last thirty years - and serving them a week’s notice to vacate the premises.
Secondly boarding is what pirates do to ships. “Repel boarders” is the cry in the Hornblower- style movies. And it is indeed true that the settlers are collectively guilty of a form of piracy, boarding and illegally seizing Palestinian territories. Interestingly, piracy still has a mandatory hanging sentence under old international conventions... but let that pass. After all, Saddam Hussein was not even charged with trying to invade Iran.
But by free association with swashbuckling, we move to the attacks mounted by the IDF on Ramallah this week, while Olmert was trying to enlist the cooperation of Mubarak. Even Israeli politicians were outraged, and prepared, at least off the record, to talk about IDF sabotage of the political leadership.
It is yet more evidence of the stranglehold of the Shin Bet and IDF, now overwhelmingly dominated by Likud appointees, over Israel’s allegedly civilian leadership, and vindicates yet again what I said November 12 on Impunity and Jack D. Ripper.
Until Israel’s politicians get control of their Security Services they are allowing the conservatives to blow up any road to peace on a whim. And of course while the UK and US allow a free pass to this type of behaviour, there is little incentive for Olmert and Peretz to deliver.
Wednesday, January 03, 2007
American for Peacekeeping? -- And Which American would that be?
Blair Cronyism derailing UN Reform
Here we, three days into the New Year, and it is already apparent that when the Permanent Five members talk about UN reform they are only kidding. The first major appointment of the New Year is in fact a Major appointment, albeit out of Blair.
When I heard that John Holmes was going to take over from Jan Egeland as USG for humanitarian affairs, my first confused thought was "The porn star with a ten-incher? But he's dead!"
Alas, no one so colourful. Rather Sir John Holmes is a protégé of Tony Blair and sometime host of the Prime Minister on his frequent freebie holiday junkets around the world. Before he was Personal Private Secretary to Conservative Prime Minister John Major, but his career survived that of possibly the least memorable and colourless premier in British history. The British wanted him for Political Affairs or Peacekeeping, and instead of putting forward several candidates, at Blair's instructions lobbied heavily for him alone when Ban visited London last year.
At least it was not the former BeeGee who was Blair's most recent host.
Ban Ki-Moon is of course under pressure to appoint staff from the P5, and it is even possible that in the best mandarin way Holmes could turn up trumps in the job, despite his complete inexperience in the field of humanitarian relief. However, the appointment sends a signal: that reform is what the West expects the Third World to do, not what the major powers do.
It reflects more discredit on the West than on Ban. Such outstanding ostensible cronyism, in the wake of the appointment of a former Washington Times editor and Bush protégé, is hardly likely to convince the majority of the UN members of the bona fides of the would-be reformers.
While few could take exception with the meritocratic but geographically balanced appointments of Indian Vijay Nambiar as Chef de Cabinet, or Haitian (and Francophone!) Michelle Montas as spokesperson, Ban's team is so far remarkably water-tight as far as leaks go and so at this early stage, reading the runes is made all the more difficult because there are so few runes to read, and each could be read in an opposite way.
The appointment of Alicia Bárcena of Mexico as USG for management could be taken as a double blessing. A non-American heading the department is a welcome break with tradition, and a discrete finger to those not unadjacent to John Bolton who demanded a complete break with the Annan team, not to mention her being Third World, women and all the other beancounting pluses.
On the other hand, it lets the Americans off my personal hook – for decades they have railed against UN management while all that time the person responsible has been an American Presidential appointee. More worrying is the implication that an American will get one of the really important posts: peacekeeping or political affairs. Quite apart from the nightmare scenario of John Bolton rising like Rasputin from the dead and being appointed to one of those positions, it is difficult to conceive of a Bush nominee in either position who would not confirm the growing suspicions of the rest of the world that the UN is there to further narrow American interests.
It would put every blue-helmet and UN staffer under increased risk – not to mention the political damage to the organization. If anyone knows how to slip a memo in Korean under the SG's door on the 38th floor, now would be a good time to do it.
Here we, three days into the New Year, and it is already apparent that when the Permanent Five members talk about UN reform they are only kidding. The first major appointment of the New Year is in fact a Major appointment, albeit out of Blair.
When I heard that John Holmes was going to take over from Jan Egeland as USG for humanitarian affairs, my first confused thought was "The porn star with a ten-incher? But he's dead!"
Alas, no one so colourful. Rather Sir John Holmes is a protégé of Tony Blair and sometime host of the Prime Minister on his frequent freebie holiday junkets around the world. Before he was Personal Private Secretary to Conservative Prime Minister John Major, but his career survived that of possibly the least memorable and colourless premier in British history. The British wanted him for Political Affairs or Peacekeeping, and instead of putting forward several candidates, at Blair's instructions lobbied heavily for him alone when Ban visited London last year.
At least it was not the former BeeGee who was Blair's most recent host.
Ban Ki-Moon is of course under pressure to appoint staff from the P5, and it is even possible that in the best mandarin way Holmes could turn up trumps in the job, despite his complete inexperience in the field of humanitarian relief. However, the appointment sends a signal: that reform is what the West expects the Third World to do, not what the major powers do.
It reflects more discredit on the West than on Ban. Such outstanding ostensible cronyism, in the wake of the appointment of a former Washington Times editor and Bush protégé, is hardly likely to convince the majority of the UN members of the bona fides of the would-be reformers.
While few could take exception with the meritocratic but geographically balanced appointments of Indian Vijay Nambiar as Chef de Cabinet, or Haitian (and Francophone!) Michelle Montas as spokesperson, Ban's team is so far remarkably water-tight as far as leaks go and so at this early stage, reading the runes is made all the more difficult because there are so few runes to read, and each could be read in an opposite way.
The appointment of Alicia Bárcena of Mexico as USG for management could be taken as a double blessing. A non-American heading the department is a welcome break with tradition, and a discrete finger to those not unadjacent to John Bolton who demanded a complete break with the Annan team, not to mention her being Third World, women and all the other beancounting pluses.
On the other hand, it lets the Americans off my personal hook – for decades they have railed against UN management while all that time the person responsible has been an American Presidential appointee. More worrying is the implication that an American will get one of the really important posts: peacekeeping or political affairs. Quite apart from the nightmare scenario of John Bolton rising like Rasputin from the dead and being appointed to one of those positions, it is difficult to conceive of a Bush nominee in either position who would not confirm the growing suspicions of the rest of the world that the UN is there to further narrow American interests.
It would put every blue-helmet and UN staffer under increased risk – not to mention the political damage to the organization. If anyone knows how to slip a memo in Korean under the SG's door on the 38th floor, now would be a good time to do it.
Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Out of the Closet
A version of this appeared in Investor Relations Magazine, December 2006 issue
Notes From The Throne,
Ian Williams brings the secrets of leadership out of the closet.
Five hundred years ago, Sir John Harrington, said 'Treason doth rarely prosper…for if it prosper, none dare call it treason.' He could almost have epitomized brown-nosing since at one point he won back the favor of Good Queen Bess by introducing her to his invention, the water closet.
With the oleaginous toadyism that lubricates most organizations, there indeed are few who care to challenge whoever is on the throne, whether it is the President of the US or the CEO of a major corporation. But they will all be quick to cheer whoever stabs them in the back to take their place.
So, despite all the respectful prose about them while in office, how can modern CEO's ensure their place in history when they leave, let alone when they've gone to that big boardroom in the sky?
A slave crowded into the chariot of Roman Commanders during their Triumphal parades whispering into their ears, 'Remember, you are only mortal.' The slave who drew the short straw for this assignment probably ended up in the arena shortly after, since the ego of Roman commanders exceeded even that of modern captains of industry.
Although modern executives can send hundreds of thousands to the unemployment lines to the cheers of Wall St, those generals in the Forum were serious, they could really execute, and sent similar numbers to their messy deaths without a twitch of their togas.
For all these centuries, Rome was considered the apogee of civilization, and its leaders heroes for all ages. Yet the Empire practiced brutal military aggression against its neighbors. Resistance provoked Roman orators into paroxysms of patriotic rhetoric, about the savagery of these natives resisting civilization as the invading legions killed and enslaved their people – or kept them for mass crucifixions or to feed the lions in the Coliseum.
Two millennia later, official history remembers the Emperor Trajan as one of the best of the Caesars. But his column in Rome shows his troops sacking cities and carrying away wagonloads of loot from his unprovoked annexation of what is now Romania. Julius Caesar, who ethnically cleansed much of Gaul, is a household name.
In contrast, most of the super-CEOs that now haunt the business pages will totally disappear from consciousness within a few years of their retirement. So how can a modern day Wall St Lord of the Universe preserve his or her name for posterity?
Well obviously, many of them pass the first test for posthumous fame – which by imperial precedent is tendency to preen themselves on doing harm to others, while enriching themselves.
On the other hand, can you imagine a Ken Lay Column, for example, erected in the centre of Houston, showing his success in looting companies, destroying livelihoods, and bribing legislators? It would not really cut the historical mustard.
My answer is a reform of corporate governance: every board should have a compulsory cynic on board to cut executives down to size. I am prepared to offer my services for a modest fee, with (preferably not backdated) options, tied to how much I can reduce executive compensation.
And I would also advise them that the secret of immortality is ostentatious philanthropy.
Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, were unscrupulous strikebreaking financial finaglers, but giving away their wealth to eponymous foundations has preserved their names for a century or so.
Of current magnates, who will remember a decade hence the chainsaw gangs who have vivisected thriving enterprises in search of bloated options? I would hazard that one name likely to survive is Bill Gates. If he had just been the CEO of Microsoft, his memory would have been flushed down one of Sir John Harrington's inventions like a crashing Windows system. But I would predict that thanks to his endowment, the Gates Foundation will be around when people will hazard that 'Microsoft' is a term for a detumescent organ.
Which, like Roman history, is unfair really. Warren Buffet modestly left his fortune to a foundation named after someone else. Now that should make the history books.
Notes From The Throne,
Ian Williams brings the secrets of leadership out of the closet.
Five hundred years ago, Sir John Harrington, said 'Treason doth rarely prosper…for if it prosper, none dare call it treason.' He could almost have epitomized brown-nosing since at one point he won back the favor of Good Queen Bess by introducing her to his invention, the water closet.
With the oleaginous toadyism that lubricates most organizations, there indeed are few who care to challenge whoever is on the throne, whether it is the President of the US or the CEO of a major corporation. But they will all be quick to cheer whoever stabs them in the back to take their place.
So, despite all the respectful prose about them while in office, how can modern CEO's ensure their place in history when they leave, let alone when they've gone to that big boardroom in the sky?
A slave crowded into the chariot of Roman Commanders during their Triumphal parades whispering into their ears, 'Remember, you are only mortal.' The slave who drew the short straw for this assignment probably ended up in the arena shortly after, since the ego of Roman commanders exceeded even that of modern captains of industry.
Although modern executives can send hundreds of thousands to the unemployment lines to the cheers of Wall St, those generals in the Forum were serious, they could really execute, and sent similar numbers to their messy deaths without a twitch of their togas.
For all these centuries, Rome was considered the apogee of civilization, and its leaders heroes for all ages. Yet the Empire practiced brutal military aggression against its neighbors. Resistance provoked Roman orators into paroxysms of patriotic rhetoric, about the savagery of these natives resisting civilization as the invading legions killed and enslaved their people – or kept them for mass crucifixions or to feed the lions in the Coliseum.
Two millennia later, official history remembers the Emperor Trajan as one of the best of the Caesars. But his column in Rome shows his troops sacking cities and carrying away wagonloads of loot from his unprovoked annexation of what is now Romania. Julius Caesar, who ethnically cleansed much of Gaul, is a household name.
In contrast, most of the super-CEOs that now haunt the business pages will totally disappear from consciousness within a few years of their retirement. So how can a modern day Wall St Lord of the Universe preserve his or her name for posterity?
Well obviously, many of them pass the first test for posthumous fame – which by imperial precedent is tendency to preen themselves on doing harm to others, while enriching themselves.
On the other hand, can you imagine a Ken Lay Column, for example, erected in the centre of Houston, showing his success in looting companies, destroying livelihoods, and bribing legislators? It would not really cut the historical mustard.
My answer is a reform of corporate governance: every board should have a compulsory cynic on board to cut executives down to size. I am prepared to offer my services for a modest fee, with (preferably not backdated) options, tied to how much I can reduce executive compensation.
And I would also advise them that the secret of immortality is ostentatious philanthropy.
Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, were unscrupulous strikebreaking financial finaglers, but giving away their wealth to eponymous foundations has preserved their names for a century or so.
Of current magnates, who will remember a decade hence the chainsaw gangs who have vivisected thriving enterprises in search of bloated options? I would hazard that one name likely to survive is Bill Gates. If he had just been the CEO of Microsoft, his memory would have been flushed down one of Sir John Harrington's inventions like a crashing Windows system. But I would predict that thanks to his endowment, the Gates Foundation will be around when people will hazard that 'Microsoft' is a term for a detumescent organ.
Which, like Roman history, is unfair really. Warren Buffet modestly left his fortune to a foundation named after someone else. Now that should make the history books.
Worse than Criminal- Stupid
Napoleon's talk of liberation of other countries soon turned into chaos and oppression as well. It was the hasty execution of another high-ranking threat to an aggressive regime that led Talleyrand, the French statesman, to say "That was worse than a crime; it was a mistake." In 1804, Napoleon had sent a snatch squad across the border and "rendered" the Duke of Enghien, one of the last of the Bourbons who was then executed after a hastily convened kangaroo military tribunal.
The echoes are deafening with the sordid execution of Saddam Hussein, of whom it must be said, nothing became him like his going.
Early media accounts carried the interpretation of one Iraqi official who claimed that he saw fear in the eyes of the victim. In contrast, on the grainy cell phone video and the officially released version, Saddam Hussein maintained his dignity when all around showed none.
With the help of a ghoulish participant voyeur with a cell-phone camera, those whom the US has put in power have made a martyr of a mass murderer. Congratulations are due. To hang someone, in such a sordid ambience, on the eve of the great Feast of Sacrifice, with a Koran in his hand, the Islamic declaration of faith on his lips, while the undisciplined bunch of thugs crowding the execution chamber heckled and chanted sectarian Shi'a slogans…. Really, short of inviting the Israelis to pull the lever, there is little more they could have done to vindicate the tyrant.
After four years of occupation, the US has succeeded in handing over the reins of power to a government that is so infiltrated with sectarian militia that it could not restrain them, nor even stop one of them poking his cell-phone under the trap door to catch the last unruly moments. Thanks to the technophile ghoul we can now hear why the official video was released without a soundtrack.
They even made Silvio Berlusconi seem saintly. Doubtless sensitized by the treatment of his political forebear Benito Mussolini at the hands of a lynch mob, he decried the execution as a betrayal of the civilization that Italian troops had been invited to take to Iraq. He was, in his own rightist way, entirely right. Compare that with the silence of known death penalty opponent Tony Blair, or the Pontius Pilate behaviour of British Foreign Secretary Margaret Becket, who said it was up to the Iraqis, perhaps forgetting Blair's retrospective attempts to justify the invasion of Iraq by saying it was to put a stop to the barbarism of the Saddam regime.
It is now claimed that the US tried to stop the execution being held so precipitately… but George W Bush is every bit as guilty as if he had personally tightened the noose. I have yet to hear a single convincing explanation for the invasion of Iraq, and the trial did not enlighten us at all. But throughout, there has been some deeply personal motivation on the part of George W. Bush against Saddam. "He tried to kill my father," Bush claimed in 2003 and without getting too Freudian, one can see that the wastrel draft-dodging frat boy did sincerely want to vindicate himself against his father's genuine war record.
But officially, Saddam was hanged for a mass execution in 1982. That was a very expedient charge. As I have said before, it was picked very carefully, and it was not just Republican prejudice against multinational tribunals that led them to conduct an in-house trial.
In an international tribunal he could have called on witnesses to testify how much support he had had from the US. He killed far more people after1982, and the US went on to support him diplomatically, financially and militarily for the duration of the long bloody war of attrition with Iran. It covered for him while he gassed the Kurds, and killed untold thousands of his opponents.
The US cynically incited the Kurds and Shi'a to rise after the first Gulf War, and then equally cynically abandoned them to their fate at the hands of the regime.
But think of the things that Saddam Hussein was not hanged for. He did not in any way assist or condone the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center, but dearly hath he paid for the Bush propaganda machine's association of him with it. And he paid for it on the week when US military dead reached 3,000, over-reaching the dead of 9-11. Not to mention anything up to half a million Iraqis dead, and as many more who have fled their country in fear of the consequences of American liberation. That is a very heavy price to pay for not having anything to do with Al-Qaeda or the World Trade Center. And one hopes that other panderers to Washington around the world draw the lesson of how deeply and murderously ungrateful the new Empire is to client states.
Not to mention how stupid, in converting a genuinely evil and murderous dictator into a martyr. In a crucially placed area, they have created Hobbesian anarchy and call it victory.
The echoes are deafening with the sordid execution of Saddam Hussein, of whom it must be said, nothing became him like his going.
Early media accounts carried the interpretation of one Iraqi official who claimed that he saw fear in the eyes of the victim. In contrast, on the grainy cell phone video and the officially released version, Saddam Hussein maintained his dignity when all around showed none.
With the help of a ghoulish participant voyeur with a cell-phone camera, those whom the US has put in power have made a martyr of a mass murderer. Congratulations are due. To hang someone, in such a sordid ambience, on the eve of the great Feast of Sacrifice, with a Koran in his hand, the Islamic declaration of faith on his lips, while the undisciplined bunch of thugs crowding the execution chamber heckled and chanted sectarian Shi'a slogans…. Really, short of inviting the Israelis to pull the lever, there is little more they could have done to vindicate the tyrant.
After four years of occupation, the US has succeeded in handing over the reins of power to a government that is so infiltrated with sectarian militia that it could not restrain them, nor even stop one of them poking his cell-phone under the trap door to catch the last unruly moments. Thanks to the technophile ghoul we can now hear why the official video was released without a soundtrack.
They even made Silvio Berlusconi seem saintly. Doubtless sensitized by the treatment of his political forebear Benito Mussolini at the hands of a lynch mob, he decried the execution as a betrayal of the civilization that Italian troops had been invited to take to Iraq. He was, in his own rightist way, entirely right. Compare that with the silence of known death penalty opponent Tony Blair, or the Pontius Pilate behaviour of British Foreign Secretary Margaret Becket, who said it was up to the Iraqis, perhaps forgetting Blair's retrospective attempts to justify the invasion of Iraq by saying it was to put a stop to the barbarism of the Saddam regime.
It is now claimed that the US tried to stop the execution being held so precipitately… but George W Bush is every bit as guilty as if he had personally tightened the noose. I have yet to hear a single convincing explanation for the invasion of Iraq, and the trial did not enlighten us at all. But throughout, there has been some deeply personal motivation on the part of George W. Bush against Saddam. "He tried to kill my father," Bush claimed in 2003 and without getting too Freudian, one can see that the wastrel draft-dodging frat boy did sincerely want to vindicate himself against his father's genuine war record.
But officially, Saddam was hanged for a mass execution in 1982. That was a very expedient charge. As I have said before, it was picked very carefully, and it was not just Republican prejudice against multinational tribunals that led them to conduct an in-house trial.
In an international tribunal he could have called on witnesses to testify how much support he had had from the US. He killed far more people after1982, and the US went on to support him diplomatically, financially and militarily for the duration of the long bloody war of attrition with Iran. It covered for him while he gassed the Kurds, and killed untold thousands of his opponents.
The US cynically incited the Kurds and Shi'a to rise after the first Gulf War, and then equally cynically abandoned them to their fate at the hands of the regime.
But think of the things that Saddam Hussein was not hanged for. He did not in any way assist or condone the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center, but dearly hath he paid for the Bush propaganda machine's association of him with it. And he paid for it on the week when US military dead reached 3,000, over-reaching the dead of 9-11. Not to mention anything up to half a million Iraqis dead, and as many more who have fled their country in fear of the consequences of American liberation. That is a very heavy price to pay for not having anything to do with Al-Qaeda or the World Trade Center. And one hopes that other panderers to Washington around the world draw the lesson of how deeply and murderously ungrateful the new Empire is to client states.
Not to mention how stupid, in converting a genuinely evil and murderous dictator into a martyr. In a crucially placed area, they have created Hobbesian anarchy and call it victory.
Saturday, December 30, 2006
No Juice For Saddam
The impending execution of Saddam Hussein could almost inspire black humour. The gallows is apparently of American construction, and one cannot help suspect that one reason it was chosen over the electric chair is that under American rule, no one can guarantee that the power system would deliver enough juice to the executioners.
If, or when, it happens, the hanging will symbolize all that is wrong and hypocritical about the American Occupation. In general, they are replicating the barbarity of the Baathist regime, since most of the developed world has now abandoned the death penalty. Indeed, one of the few fields in which the US is now competitive with China is in the number of executions carried out - and the way that the poverty of the victims matches the poor quality of legal redress.
I will not shed too many tears when he ends up on the end of a rope, any more than I donned mourning black when Slobodan Milosevic died in prison, or Augusto Pinochet met his end. But the fact remains, executing someone like Saddam Hussein is reducing yourself to his level
Saddam undoubtedly had a fairer trial than he ever allowed his victims. But it was incredibly stupid, as well as prejudicial, for the trial to be held in country under occupation rather than be referred to the International Criminal Court, or a special international tribunal. But of course American prejudices against the UN and multinational forces - not to mention complete ignorance about the likely domestic effects in Iraq, made sure that that did not happen.
In terms of justice, the crimes which Saddam Hussein was tried for, mass murder of rebellious subjects, had on other occasions been condoned and covered up by US administrations. Undoubtedly guilty though Saddam was of aggression, an impartial international court may have wanted to examine why aggression against Iran, which killed hundreds off thousands on both sides,, was commendable and worthy of Western support, while attacking Kuwait was unforgivable. Of course we know the political difference, but if you are conducting a court of justice rather than a show trial, these things do bear examination. And you are coinducting the trial, then you cannot be surprised when your own behaviour is weighed in the balance and found wanting.
It seems highly likely that more Iraqis have died bloodily and messily in the conflict since the invasion than Saddam Hussein killed in his campaigns against the Kurds and Shi'as.
His execution will doubtless add to the tally, while American political discourse about the war completely discounts the views of the alleged beneficiaries: more than half of Iraqis polled want the US troops out immediately, with another quarter wanting them to go soon. Now that is serious verdict by a serious jury of Saddam's peers -- and who in Washington is prepared to act on it?
If, or when, it happens, the hanging will symbolize all that is wrong and hypocritical about the American Occupation. In general, they are replicating the barbarity of the Baathist regime, since most of the developed world has now abandoned the death penalty. Indeed, one of the few fields in which the US is now competitive with China is in the number of executions carried out - and the way that the poverty of the victims matches the poor quality of legal redress.
I will not shed too many tears when he ends up on the end of a rope, any more than I donned mourning black when Slobodan Milosevic died in prison, or Augusto Pinochet met his end. But the fact remains, executing someone like Saddam Hussein is reducing yourself to his level
Saddam undoubtedly had a fairer trial than he ever allowed his victims. But it was incredibly stupid, as well as prejudicial, for the trial to be held in country under occupation rather than be referred to the International Criminal Court, or a special international tribunal. But of course American prejudices against the UN and multinational forces - not to mention complete ignorance about the likely domestic effects in Iraq, made sure that that did not happen.
In terms of justice, the crimes which Saddam Hussein was tried for, mass murder of rebellious subjects, had on other occasions been condoned and covered up by US administrations. Undoubtedly guilty though Saddam was of aggression, an impartial international court may have wanted to examine why aggression against Iran, which killed hundreds off thousands on both sides,, was commendable and worthy of Western support, while attacking Kuwait was unforgivable. Of course we know the political difference, but if you are conducting a court of justice rather than a show trial, these things do bear examination. And you are coinducting the trial, then you cannot be surprised when your own behaviour is weighed in the balance and found wanting.
It seems highly likely that more Iraqis have died bloodily and messily in the conflict since the invasion than Saddam Hussein killed in his campaigns against the Kurds and Shi'as.
His execution will doubtless add to the tally, while American political discourse about the war completely discounts the views of the alleged beneficiaries: more than half of Iraqis polled want the US troops out immediately, with another quarter wanting them to go soon. Now that is serious verdict by a serious jury of Saddam's peers -- and who in Washington is prepared to act on it?
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Burmese Centuries
The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma,
For many of us, most of what little background we have about Burma, apart from a vague impression of repressive military governments and Aung San Suu Kyi, is from the essays of George Orwell, or his novel Burmese Days. As Thant Myint-U says, in “The River of Lost Footsteps,” for most people, the remarkable upsurge of popular demonstrations in summer 1988 was “like hearing of a coup in Shangri-La.” Reasons for that included “the lack of television, summer holidays," but "also because Burma was almost entirely unknown.’
But as Thant Myint-U shows, it is a fascinating history that we have been overlooking. Orwell’s experience in the British police in Burma converted him to anti-colonialism and hence to anti-capitalism. Orwell honestly depicted the effect of a resented colonial regime on both sides of the equation, and confessed his own struggle with the temptation not to reciprocate the hate and resentment that the intensely nationalist Burmese offered him.
In later essays, Orwell complained at British neglect of events in Burma. Thant Myint-U’s book belatedly fills that gap in readable and comprehensive history of the country from early days to the present, and he shows how much of that history explains the present, and indeed Orwell’s experiences.
There are some good reasons for the amnesiac strand. It was not really in the interests of either the British government, nor the Burmese military rulers of the last four decades, to spell out that the British handed over power to a group whose core had trained and fought with the fascist Japanese.
In contrast to India, where Nehru cannily ensured that those who fought with the pro-Japanese Indian National Army were honoured but completely excluded from the independent Indian military, the Burmese Independence Army, whose reputation was laundered by a last minute defection from Tokyo as the war ended, are the root of the present Burmese military. But it says a lot for the unpopularity of British rule that so many Burmese leaders were prepared to embrace the Japanese - even if they were soon disillusioned with the realities of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Indeed the other trend was of those who were subscribers to the British Left Book Club, and admirers of Stafford Cripps, the leftist Labour MP represented by U Thant, the author’s grandfather.
Upper Burma was one of the last additions to British India, and Thant Myint-U suggests that the major motivation for the invasion was Randolph Churchill’s need for a colonial victory for the forthcoming election. Reminiscent of similar more recent adventures a laconic civil servant recorded “The people of this country have not, as was by some expected, welcomed us as deliverers from tyranny.”
Equally similarly, the deposition of King Thibaw led to the decapitation of the government and the disintegration of civil society.
One of the values of Thant Myint-U’s work is to remind us just how much we subliminally absorb the colonial prejudice that the societies incorporated into empire only joined history at that moment of annexation. Without romanticism - indeed he stresses the militarism of the early Burmese states -he sketches the rich and literate history of the country, and he also stresses the pluralism of the society, which had absorbed not only neighbouring nationalities but Turkish, Portuguese, French and other adventurers, bound together by mutual obligations and roles. The armies were armed with muskets - and in the eighteenth century Burmese shipbuilders launched teak warships for both the British and the French although that parity disappeared when the East India Company launched the first ever steam powered war vessel against the Burmese.
That was what disappeared with the British conquest. Indeed he postulates an alternative, and arguably better outcome, where the British could have kept the monarchy as a protectorate, one of the princely states, and assisted it to stay on its modernizing course, although he also points out that Western inspired government reforms were already undermining the traditional networks of government. (The development of a Burmese Morse code was one interesting aspect).
There is no romanticism in his dispassionate treatment. Thibaw was offered just such a deal but cavilled at the requirement to stop the mass political executions he was conducting.
His narrative is pointed so his emphasis on the martial tradition and the pluralism explains how the the present rulers developed their ideology of narrow ethnic nationalism, steeped in past military glory. Burma had been “suddenly pushed into the modern world without an anchor in the past, rummaging around for new inspirations, sustained by more sour nationalist sentiment, and Fidel finding voice in the extremist years of the 1930’s,” he asserts, while also showing how colonialism and racism created those conditions.
It was poor preparation for the tests to come when the Allies and the Japanese fought over the devastated land. “The Burmese had nothing to do with the war but it destroyed their country,” he says, showing how those militant nationalists made common cause with the Japanese, while conducting pogroms against the large minorities from Karens to Indians. While the Burmese were soon disillusioned with the Japanese, that did not imply any nostalgia for the rapidly retreated British.
The British reoccupation was a stopgap, while the various parties, of whom the strongest was the nationalist collaborators with Japan, juggled for power, but independence was celebrated with the assassination of much of the leadership so the new Republic launched itself with “several of its key leaders, including its nationalist hero, dead, its principal minority demanding an independent state, and another nationalist leader getting ready to lead a communist rebellion. It was not an auspicious start,” Thant says.
With his own family history tied inextricably in these events, the author made his reacquaintance with the land of his birth by accompanying the corpse of his grandfather, former Secretary General U Thant, back home after his death in New York in 1974.
It was a bizarre reintroduction with the revered deceased being kidnapped and shuffled around between competing groups and between popular demands for a significant memorial and General Ne Win’s hostility to Burma’s most famous citizen. Like the later democracy demonstrations, it was a telling demonstration of the inability of the bloated military to win the hearts and minds of the nation whose essence they claim to represent.
Thant Myint-U’s narrative is literate, drily humorous, personally engaged but politically dispassionate. This is a book that is worth reading for its own literary qualities, but essential for anyone who wants to understand Burma, or indeed the ripple effects of the end of empire around the world.
Lending authenticity to Thant Myint-U’s analysis is his acknowledgement that there are no easy fixes. Sanctions and isolation he points out are unlikely to affect a regime that actually wants isolation, and has a steady income stream from trade. He also suggests that the regime has not been given credit for its flexibility in coming to terms with many of the armed factions. It will be a long and hard road to rebuild a nation that, he points out, with over sixty years of conflict, effectively a continuation of the Second World War.
The publishers have done Thant Myint-U and the reader a tremendous disservice by missing out an index. In a complex narrative, with unfamiliar names of people, titles and places, this is a book that desperately needs one to complement the detailed and fascinating narrative.
Click to buy
The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma,
By Thant Myint-U, Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York $25
For many of us, most of what little background we have about Burma, apart from a vague impression of repressive military governments and Aung San Suu Kyi, is from the essays of George Orwell, or his novel Burmese Days. As Thant Myint-U says, in “The River of Lost Footsteps,” for most people, the remarkable upsurge of popular demonstrations in summer 1988 was “like hearing of a coup in Shangri-La.” Reasons for that included “the lack of television, summer holidays," but "also because Burma was almost entirely unknown.’
But as Thant Myint-U shows, it is a fascinating history that we have been overlooking. Orwell’s experience in the British police in Burma converted him to anti-colonialism and hence to anti-capitalism. Orwell honestly depicted the effect of a resented colonial regime on both sides of the equation, and confessed his own struggle with the temptation not to reciprocate the hate and resentment that the intensely nationalist Burmese offered him.
In later essays, Orwell complained at British neglect of events in Burma. Thant Myint-U’s book belatedly fills that gap in readable and comprehensive history of the country from early days to the present, and he shows how much of that history explains the present, and indeed Orwell’s experiences.
There are some good reasons for the amnesiac strand. It was not really in the interests of either the British government, nor the Burmese military rulers of the last four decades, to spell out that the British handed over power to a group whose core had trained and fought with the fascist Japanese.
In contrast to India, where Nehru cannily ensured that those who fought with the pro-Japanese Indian National Army were honoured but completely excluded from the independent Indian military, the Burmese Independence Army, whose reputation was laundered by a last minute defection from Tokyo as the war ended, are the root of the present Burmese military. But it says a lot for the unpopularity of British rule that so many Burmese leaders were prepared to embrace the Japanese - even if they were soon disillusioned with the realities of the Co-Prosperity Sphere.
Indeed the other trend was of those who were subscribers to the British Left Book Club, and admirers of Stafford Cripps, the leftist Labour MP represented by U Thant, the author’s grandfather.
Upper Burma was one of the last additions to British India, and Thant Myint-U suggests that the major motivation for the invasion was Randolph Churchill’s need for a colonial victory for the forthcoming election. Reminiscent of similar more recent adventures a laconic civil servant recorded “The people of this country have not, as was by some expected, welcomed us as deliverers from tyranny.”
Equally similarly, the deposition of King Thibaw led to the decapitation of the government and the disintegration of civil society.
One of the values of Thant Myint-U’s work is to remind us just how much we subliminally absorb the colonial prejudice that the societies incorporated into empire only joined history at that moment of annexation. Without romanticism - indeed he stresses the militarism of the early Burmese states -he sketches the rich and literate history of the country, and he also stresses the pluralism of the society, which had absorbed not only neighbouring nationalities but Turkish, Portuguese, French and other adventurers, bound together by mutual obligations and roles. The armies were armed with muskets - and in the eighteenth century Burmese shipbuilders launched teak warships for both the British and the French although that parity disappeared when the East India Company launched the first ever steam powered war vessel against the Burmese.
That was what disappeared with the British conquest. Indeed he postulates an alternative, and arguably better outcome, where the British could have kept the monarchy as a protectorate, one of the princely states, and assisted it to stay on its modernizing course, although he also points out that Western inspired government reforms were already undermining the traditional networks of government. (The development of a Burmese Morse code was one interesting aspect).
There is no romanticism in his dispassionate treatment. Thibaw was offered just such a deal but cavilled at the requirement to stop the mass political executions he was conducting.
His narrative is pointed so his emphasis on the martial tradition and the pluralism explains how the the present rulers developed their ideology of narrow ethnic nationalism, steeped in past military glory. Burma had been “suddenly pushed into the modern world without an anchor in the past, rummaging around for new inspirations, sustained by more sour nationalist sentiment, and Fidel finding voice in the extremist years of the 1930’s,” he asserts, while also showing how colonialism and racism created those conditions.
It was poor preparation for the tests to come when the Allies and the Japanese fought over the devastated land. “The Burmese had nothing to do with the war but it destroyed their country,” he says, showing how those militant nationalists made common cause with the Japanese, while conducting pogroms against the large minorities from Karens to Indians. While the Burmese were soon disillusioned with the Japanese, that did not imply any nostalgia for the rapidly retreated British.
The British reoccupation was a stopgap, while the various parties, of whom the strongest was the nationalist collaborators with Japan, juggled for power, but independence was celebrated with the assassination of much of the leadership so the new Republic launched itself with “several of its key leaders, including its nationalist hero, dead, its principal minority demanding an independent state, and another nationalist leader getting ready to lead a communist rebellion. It was not an auspicious start,” Thant says.
With his own family history tied inextricably in these events, the author made his reacquaintance with the land of his birth by accompanying the corpse of his grandfather, former Secretary General U Thant, back home after his death in New York in 1974.
It was a bizarre reintroduction with the revered deceased being kidnapped and shuffled around between competing groups and between popular demands for a significant memorial and General Ne Win’s hostility to Burma’s most famous citizen. Like the later democracy demonstrations, it was a telling demonstration of the inability of the bloated military to win the hearts and minds of the nation whose essence they claim to represent.
Thant Myint-U’s narrative is literate, drily humorous, personally engaged but politically dispassionate. This is a book that is worth reading for its own literary qualities, but essential for anyone who wants to understand Burma, or indeed the ripple effects of the end of empire around the world.
Lending authenticity to Thant Myint-U’s analysis is his acknowledgement that there are no easy fixes. Sanctions and isolation he points out are unlikely to affect a regime that actually wants isolation, and has a steady income stream from trade. He also suggests that the regime has not been given credit for its flexibility in coming to terms with many of the armed factions. It will be a long and hard road to rebuild a nation that, he points out, with over sixty years of conflict, effectively a continuation of the Second World War.
The publishers have done Thant Myint-U and the reader a tremendous disservice by missing out an index. In a complex narrative, with unfamiliar names of people, titles and places, this is a book that desperately needs one to complement the detailed and fascinating narrative.
Click to buy
The River of Lost Footsteps: Histories of Burma,
By Thant Myint-U, Farrar Straus & Giroux, New York $25
Asian Tsunami - All the UN’s Fault!
Two Years And Not a Neocon Blush
Last month Jan Egeland retired back to Norway after two years as the UN's Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs. He went quietly, but with the deep appreciation of many around the world - noted most recently for his forthrightness over Sudan and Darfur, and for his success in marshaling resources for rebuilding in Asia after the Tsunami. Who now remembers his American media lynching in the last two weeks of 2004, as he began that work?
Well I certainly do. I spent the week between Christmas and New Year in 2004 in end to end combat on the cable TV channels, from Fox to MSNBC to CNN. My role was not necessarily to defend the UN, or Jan Egeland, but rather to defend the truth in the face of a section of the American media that seemed to have out-sourced its fact checkers - to somewhere on a different planet.
The reaction of the cable channels to the Tsunami had been immediate - blame the United Nations. Of course not even Fox had the temerity to blame Kofi Annan directly for the tidal wave itself. But for a week, until the sheer scale of the disaster sank in on even the most addle-pated cable TV host, they filled their air time with attacks on Egeland.
In the course of a press conference about the tsunami on 27 December, Egeland had replied to a question about the development aid that the United States and other Western nations had been "stingy" in the level of their AID. This was entirely true, as demonstrated by any comparison between the percentage of the GDP that they give and what they themselves have set as a target.
Only Holland and three Scandinavian countries had reached the agreed target of 0.7% of GDP for which the US and other Western Countries had voted along with the rest of the world in the UN's Monterey Summit on development.
But Egeland hadd never specified the US. He did say "If actually the foreign assistance of many countries now is 0.1 or 0.2 percent of their gross national income, I think that is stingy really," adding "Christmastime should remind many Western countries at least, how rich we have become....There are several donors who are less generous than before in a growing world economy."
That evening, he was interviewed on CNN in a special about the Tsunami and reiterated his point, “The average rich nation pays 0.2 percent of its national income in international solidarity, in international assistance. We keep 99.98 percent to ourselves, on average. I don't think that's very generous when we see the images that you have just seen today."
When Anderson Cooper of CNN pressed further, "Are you saying richer nations should pay a much higher proportion?" Egeland replied, "A much higher proportion. I mean, usually in the old days in many religions, you should give one-tenth of your surplus. We give much less than one percent."
Within hours, that "we" had been transformed into "you" and "western countries" had become the USA. The Washington Times led its story on the Tsunami the following morning, the 28th with the headline "U.N. Official slams U.S. as 'stingy' over aid." It was an odd article, showing some suspicious signs of strong editorial direction. Both the headline, and the opening paragraph about Bush announcing a paltry $15 million donation sat oddly atop an otherwise fact-filled piece on how the world was rallying round to help.
The politically astute Washington Times editor who chose that peculiar way to open the article got his money's worth, unless he filched it from some unarchived cable or radio host. In any case, coming from the newspaper of record for the conservative right that headline acted like lit fuse for cable TV networks. It is possible that his headline was the epicenter of a perfect media Tsunami.
Which is why I spent Christmas week trying to bring festive facts into an American cable media that would probably have pilloried Santa Claus for wearing red, if it weren’t also the Republican Party colors.
None of them seemed motivated enough to check the original press conference transcript but preferred to adopt the aggreived tone of that Washington Times headline. All of them assumed that firstly, Egeland was talking about the US directly, which he clearly wasn't, and that he was referring to the US response to the Tsunami, which he also wasn't, and that finally, if he were talking about the US, he was wrong.
Now it is a truth universally admitted outside the Murdoch press, that the US is proportionately the meanest donor in the world. Indeed, it gave me some pleasure to be able to tell hosts and viewers that in fact Bush had increased Overseas Development Aid since it reached its lowest under Clinton.(Admittedly that was as much to do with the Congress as well, but Bill Clinton was never one too squander domestic political capital on overseas ventures.)
Bush, as has happened before during disasters, 9-11 being most notable, was missing on parade that Christmas week. That first US offer of $15 million was a pathetic joke, and as the week went on it rapidly increased-as soon as someone could be found to make a decision. For example by the time archaeo-con Robert Novak was on the case, on CNN's Crossfire the evening of the Times article, it was already $35 million, and at least Novak was not feigning indignation at the insult to the US. He showed his hatred for the UN whatever it was doing! "One of those nasty little bureaucrats at the United Nations sneered at the level of taxpayers' money helping victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Jan Egeland, a Norwegian, who's U.N. undersecretary- general for humanitarian affairs, suggested that the U.S. and other Western nations are stingy in charitable contributions. He even outrageously said we don't pay enough taxes to help the rest of the world."
Novak ranted on, "Secretary of State Colin Powell bristled at the U.N.'s bureaucrat's insinuation. As you might guess, Mr. Egeland backed down today and said he was misinterpreted. That's really in character for the U.N."
Well up to a point Mr. Novak. In fact, Egeland had specifically praised the generosity of individuals in the developed world, and as we have seen, he had not been referring to the Tsunami relief. And as for climbing down, what he actually said was entirely factual. "I have been misinterpreted when I yesterday said that my belief that rich countries in general can be more generous...This has nothing to do with any particular country or the response to this emergency in the early days. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive."
So when he tried to correct the serious distortions - calling them misinterpretations is a serious euphemism - the whole conservative media, like Novice accused him of "climbing down," or "backpedalling."
Any UN staffers who were not off with their families or skiing that week was being conscripted for the Tsunami relief effort, and so it fell to me, the Liberal lion, to be thrown to the Christian Right all week, doing the studio shuffle.
It was not easy. After all, if the Secretary of State and the President, once again, believed what the Neocon pundits and the conservative media told them about Egeland’s statement, without checking reality and primary sources, you couldn’t really fault lowly employees of moody and megalomaniac media moguls for deciding to follow the line, no matter how tangential to reality.
But all is well that ends well. The conservative media have pushed their memories of the whole sordid affair, a sort of dress rehearsal for the Oil For Food swiftboating of Annan, into the memory hole. Maybe even they have a sense of shame for trying to score poltical brownie points out of a hundred thousand plus Tsunami victims?
And as the UN Tsunami office winds up, we recall that it raised unprecedented resources for reconstruction, one reason being that the conservative furor over what Egeland did not say, helped the natural generosity of many developed country governments - none of whom could face their electorate if they were not demonstrably and massively more generous than George W. Bush.
Last month Jan Egeland retired back to Norway after two years as the UN's Under Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs. He went quietly, but with the deep appreciation of many around the world - noted most recently for his forthrightness over Sudan and Darfur, and for his success in marshaling resources for rebuilding in Asia after the Tsunami. Who now remembers his American media lynching in the last two weeks of 2004, as he began that work?
Well I certainly do. I spent the week between Christmas and New Year in 2004 in end to end combat on the cable TV channels, from Fox to MSNBC to CNN. My role was not necessarily to defend the UN, or Jan Egeland, but rather to defend the truth in the face of a section of the American media that seemed to have out-sourced its fact checkers - to somewhere on a different planet.
The reaction of the cable channels to the Tsunami had been immediate - blame the United Nations. Of course not even Fox had the temerity to blame Kofi Annan directly for the tidal wave itself. But for a week, until the sheer scale of the disaster sank in on even the most addle-pated cable TV host, they filled their air time with attacks on Egeland.
In the course of a press conference about the tsunami on 27 December, Egeland had replied to a question about the development aid that the United States and other Western nations had been "stingy" in the level of their AID. This was entirely true, as demonstrated by any comparison between the percentage of the GDP that they give and what they themselves have set as a target.
Only Holland and three Scandinavian countries had reached the agreed target of 0.7% of GDP for which the US and other Western Countries had voted along with the rest of the world in the UN's Monterey Summit on development.
But Egeland hadd never specified the US. He did say "If actually the foreign assistance of many countries now is 0.1 or 0.2 percent of their gross national income, I think that is stingy really," adding "Christmastime should remind many Western countries at least, how rich we have become....There are several donors who are less generous than before in a growing world economy."
That evening, he was interviewed on CNN in a special about the Tsunami and reiterated his point, “The average rich nation pays 0.2 percent of its national income in international solidarity, in international assistance. We keep 99.98 percent to ourselves, on average. I don't think that's very generous when we see the images that you have just seen today."
When Anderson Cooper of CNN pressed further, "Are you saying richer nations should pay a much higher proportion?" Egeland replied, "A much higher proportion. I mean, usually in the old days in many religions, you should give one-tenth of your surplus. We give much less than one percent."
Within hours, that "we" had been transformed into "you" and "western countries" had become the USA. The Washington Times led its story on the Tsunami the following morning, the 28th with the headline "U.N. Official slams U.S. as 'stingy' over aid." It was an odd article, showing some suspicious signs of strong editorial direction. Both the headline, and the opening paragraph about Bush announcing a paltry $15 million donation sat oddly atop an otherwise fact-filled piece on how the world was rallying round to help.
The politically astute Washington Times editor who chose that peculiar way to open the article got his money's worth, unless he filched it from some unarchived cable or radio host. In any case, coming from the newspaper of record for the conservative right that headline acted like lit fuse for cable TV networks. It is possible that his headline was the epicenter of a perfect media Tsunami.
Which is why I spent Christmas week trying to bring festive facts into an American cable media that would probably have pilloried Santa Claus for wearing red, if it weren’t also the Republican Party colors.
None of them seemed motivated enough to check the original press conference transcript but preferred to adopt the aggreived tone of that Washington Times headline. All of them assumed that firstly, Egeland was talking about the US directly, which he clearly wasn't, and that he was referring to the US response to the Tsunami, which he also wasn't, and that finally, if he were talking about the US, he was wrong.
Now it is a truth universally admitted outside the Murdoch press, that the US is proportionately the meanest donor in the world. Indeed, it gave me some pleasure to be able to tell hosts and viewers that in fact Bush had increased Overseas Development Aid since it reached its lowest under Clinton.(Admittedly that was as much to do with the Congress as well, but Bill Clinton was never one too squander domestic political capital on overseas ventures.)
Bush, as has happened before during disasters, 9-11 being most notable, was missing on parade that Christmas week. That first US offer of $15 million was a pathetic joke, and as the week went on it rapidly increased-as soon as someone could be found to make a decision. For example by the time archaeo-con Robert Novak was on the case, on CNN's Crossfire the evening of the Times article, it was already $35 million, and at least Novak was not feigning indignation at the insult to the US. He showed his hatred for the UN whatever it was doing! "One of those nasty little bureaucrats at the United Nations sneered at the level of taxpayers' money helping victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami. Jan Egeland, a Norwegian, who's U.N. undersecretary- general for humanitarian affairs, suggested that the U.S. and other Western nations are stingy in charitable contributions. He even outrageously said we don't pay enough taxes to help the rest of the world."
Novak ranted on, "Secretary of State Colin Powell bristled at the U.N.'s bureaucrat's insinuation. As you might guess, Mr. Egeland backed down today and said he was misinterpreted. That's really in character for the U.N."
Well up to a point Mr. Novak. In fact, Egeland had specifically praised the generosity of individuals in the developed world, and as we have seen, he had not been referring to the Tsunami relief. And as for climbing down, what he actually said was entirely factual. "I have been misinterpreted when I yesterday said that my belief that rich countries in general can be more generous...This has nothing to do with any particular country or the response to this emergency in the early days. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive."
So when he tried to correct the serious distortions - calling them misinterpretations is a serious euphemism - the whole conservative media, like Novice accused him of "climbing down," or "backpedalling."
Any UN staffers who were not off with their families or skiing that week was being conscripted for the Tsunami relief effort, and so it fell to me, the Liberal lion, to be thrown to the Christian Right all week, doing the studio shuffle.
It was not easy. After all, if the Secretary of State and the President, once again, believed what the Neocon pundits and the conservative media told them about Egeland’s statement, without checking reality and primary sources, you couldn’t really fault lowly employees of moody and megalomaniac media moguls for deciding to follow the line, no matter how tangential to reality.
But all is well that ends well. The conservative media have pushed their memories of the whole sordid affair, a sort of dress rehearsal for the Oil For Food swiftboating of Annan, into the memory hole. Maybe even they have a sense of shame for trying to score poltical brownie points out of a hundred thousand plus Tsunami victims?
And as the UN Tsunami office winds up, we recall that it raised unprecedented resources for reconstruction, one reason being that the conservative furor over what Egeland did not say, helped the natural generosity of many developed country governments - none of whom could face their electorate if they were not demonstrably and massively more generous than George W. Bush.
Friday, December 22, 2006
Christmas Carol
A Merry Christmas, Carefree Kwanzaa, Eid Mubarak, Happy New Year, and Happy Hannuka to all our readers. In our ecumenical mode we are happy to celebrate everyone's festivals, but will pass on the fasts.
Can there be a better way to celebrate than by buying the most aptly seasonal book since Christmas Carol "Rum: A Social and Sociable History" for your friends. One click and your last minute gift-buying conundrum is solved.
And in seasonal mode, check this link to see me on Democracy Now holding forth on Annan, Ban and Rum.
And here is my Christmas Carol, commissioned and then rejected by a business magazine that thought (can't think why!) that its Chinese advertisers may be upset by it. I was accused of China-bashing for my piece on Taiwan, so I thought I may as well put some truth in the rumours.
We three sharks of Orient are
Bearing stocks we travel afar
Field and roadshow, selling an IPO
Extolling yonder share
O share of wonder, share of might
Share of rosy prospects bright
Upward trending, never bending
Guide us to thy dizzy height
Born state-owned on the Yangtse plain
Golden prospects down the lane
Rising forever, dropping never
Over us all to rain
O share of wonder, share of might, etc.
Mind ye not the dodgy loan book
With Chinese banks, best not to look
Stock brokers are such jokers
Keep accounts in a Little Red Book
O share of wonder, share of might, etc.
A prospectus offered have I
The SEC cannot come nigh
Privatizing, launch price rising
Send your cash to Shanghai
O share of wonder, share of might etc.
Your few shares outvoted are
Beijing owns more stock by far
Minor holder gets cold shoulder
Even more than Delaware
O share of wonder, share of might etc.
Beijing rules, so best presume
The Comrades run the board-room
Party blundering, bleeding, plundering
Sealing your stake's doom
O share of wonder, share of might, etc.
Can there be a better way to celebrate than by buying the most aptly seasonal book since Christmas Carol "Rum: A Social and Sociable History" for your friends. One click and your last minute gift-buying conundrum is solved.
And in seasonal mode, check this link to see me on Democracy Now holding forth on Annan, Ban and Rum.
And here is my Christmas Carol, commissioned and then rejected by a business magazine that thought (can't think why!) that its Chinese advertisers may be upset by it. I was accused of China-bashing for my piece on Taiwan, so I thought I may as well put some truth in the rumours.
We three sharks of Orient are
Bearing stocks we travel afar
Field and roadshow, selling an IPO
Extolling yonder share
O share of wonder, share of might
Share of rosy prospects bright
Upward trending, never bending
Guide us to thy dizzy height
Born state-owned on the Yangtse plain
Golden prospects down the lane
Rising forever, dropping never
Over us all to rain
O share of wonder, share of might, etc.
Mind ye not the dodgy loan book
With Chinese banks, best not to look
Stock brokers are such jokers
Keep accounts in a Little Red Book
O share of wonder, share of might, etc.
A prospectus offered have I
The SEC cannot come nigh
Privatizing, launch price rising
Send your cash to Shanghai
O share of wonder, share of might etc.
Your few shares outvoted are
Beijing owns more stock by far
Minor holder gets cold shoulder
Even more than Delaware
O share of wonder, share of might etc.
Beijing rules, so best presume
The Comrades run the board-room
Party blundering, bleeding, plundering
Sealing your stake's doom
O share of wonder, share of might, etc.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Annan's Principled Pragmatism
So Farewell Then Kofi (not to mention John Bolton)
It will be interesting to see where they end up, but we will be watching Ban Ki-Moon in the meantime.
Annan's Principled Pragmatism
by Ian Williams
from the January 8, 2007 issue
Ban Ki-moon was sworn into office as the new United Nations Secretary General on December 14. Soon he will be sworn at, when once again the UN fails to obey US orders. Any secretary general's honeymoon in Washington is likely to be short. Who now remembers that outgoing Secretary General Kofi Annan was a US nomination back in 1996, or that he managed to persuade Jurassic Jesse Helms to cut a deal on paying off Washington's debt to the UN?
As Annan leaves, it gives him some wry satisfaction that John Bolton, the US ambassador who thought he was a viceroy, has been sent off the field by the new Democratic Congress. After spending his first term perceived almost as a secular saint, Annan spent much of his second being reviled by Bolton's soulmates as a global kleptocrat.
It was mostly in the United States that the sustained neocon Swift-boating, through the alleged "Oil for Food Scandal," muddied Annan's reputation. Fortunately, the rest of the world took little notice of those furious and hyperbolic exaggerations. Annan's historical position is now clearer, and it is not just customary valediction to say that he has been one of the most effective secretary generals in UN history. Successes in Sierra Leone, Liberia, East Timor, Lebanon and Congo's first free elections in four decades are no mean vindication of Annan's principled pragmatism.
Bill Clinton pushed Annan's appointment because of a misapprehension that he would be a reverse of his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali: more secretary than general. Clinton and his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, did not want someone with big ideas and a big mouth engaging in public debates with their Administration. They thought they could count on the reserved UN bureaucrat to deliver.
They were right about the big mouth, wrong on the big ideas. Annan is not a great orator. Audiences have to strain to hear his softly spoken phrases, whose content has usually been carefully polished to remove any language that would be too confrontational. Yet the big ideas kept coming.
As a cog in the UN juggernaut hijacked by the great powers, Annan was implicated in the bloody failures in Bosnia and Rwanda, and on taking office he tried to make "Never Again" more than an empty slogan, beginning with an unprecedentedly open report on the UN's role in those events. Human rights, development and global responsibility were his constant refrain over the years, and he reclaimed a role for the UN as a standard setter, making development a global issue.
Annan's quiet authority and palpable decency made him a perfect standard-bearer both for the organization and for these values. It was precisely those strengths that the xenophobic wing of the US media tried to undermine in his second term, when he stated the obvious truths about Washington's disregard for international law and human rights, most notably in Iraq.
However, there is a built-in contradiction in combining the roles of peacemaker and tribune of the world's peoples. The secretary general cannot bad-mouth perpetrators too strongly, since he may have to negotiate with them. Even some close aides wish that Annan had been more stentorian in his statements. Annan admits that sometimes he may have been too low-key, but he argues that "particularly when it comes to human dignity and individual rights, some of the positions I have taken...are also intended to empower others, particularly the civil society. In some countries people can quote the secretary general...and not go to jail. If they say it themselves they will be in trouble."
When Annan took office, the UN was still reeling from decades of Congressional assault--culminating in the US putsch against Boutros-Ghali. The organization had few friends in Washington. Annan realized the importance of engaging the United States actively--not just for the sake of his own survival but for that of the organization itself. That predicated cultivating a US constituency, and Annan was remarkably successful at it for most of his tenure. In particular, he engaged American Jewish organizations and worked hard to end the isolation of Israel inside the world body, at the risk of alienating key international constituencies. This led to criticism--some of it from supporters and close associates--that he was forgetting the Palestinians. However, Annan has consistently restated and emphasized the UN's legal and humanitarian positions on Israel, and he condemned the Israeli attack on the UN's Khiyam outpost in Lebanon during the summer war.
Annan had built enough trust from both sides for the resolution of this summer's war in Lebanon, which was perhaps the best vindication of his principled pragmatism. Once again, the UN had to cope with the consequences of Washington's refusal to listen to others. Annan called for a cease-fire when two permanent members, the United States and Britain, regarded it as "premature." While the Security Council was tied down by a threatened US veto, Annan had the UN pre-emptively preparing a solution--an expanded and reinforced peacekeeping force, which allowed the Israelis and their allies to climb down from the pole up which they had clambered. Ten years ago it was a major plank of Israeli, and consequently US, Middle East policy to exclude the UN from any role. Following ten years of Annan's tightrope diplomacy, the Israelis pleaded for the UN to step in.
While the Bush White House did not overtly join the assault on Annan's integrity during the so-called Oil for Food Scandal, it certainly did not try to curb the rabid right when they were calling for his resignation. Annan admits, "There have been times when it has been tough, particularly when some people on the Hill or the right wing begin attacking the UN and the Secretary General, and no one pulls them back.... If you undermine the organization to that extent, your own population may ask you, Why are you going to this organization that you've discredited so much?"
For fifteen years the US perception of the UN has revolved around the issue of Iraq. The organization was a convenient scapegoat for US policy failures, which ricocheted catastrophically from insufficient resolution to too much. Washington expected the UN to follow faithfully every wobble. Saddam Hussein did consistently violate the terms of UN resolutions, but Washington's positions, not least in treating weapons inspectors as a branch of US intelligence, succeeded in giving his defiance quasi legitimacy. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations made it plain they would veto any lifting of sanctions until regime change--even though this was not in any way a part of the UN resolutions. First Boutros-Ghali and then Annan had to negotiate compliance from Baghdad, even though Washington's veto insured that they could offer no "light at the end of the tunnel." Iraqi civilians paid the price for the obduracy of both Baghdad and Washington. In 1998, after negotiating with Saddam, Annan himself pointed out, "You can do a lot with diplomacy, but with diplomacy backed up by force you can get a lot more done." That was never consistently forthcoming.
Annan is deeply conscious of the collateral damage of the Iraq War on the global community: "It led to a major division in this organization and in the world. And it has not healed yet.... At the early stages the leaders themselves were quite divided, and they were very vocal about it.... They are trying to mend fences and work together, but we are not there yet."
In his typically oblique way, Annan lodges a criticism of the invasion: "The member states debated it fully here, and you noticed that the majority of the members in the Council could not bring themselves to vote for the military action. The US and others decided to go outside the Council to take action, and of course individual governments are free to take decisions that they wish to. But I think it was appropriate that the Council took the decision it did." True to form, even at this late stage, when he is beyond the reach of Rush Limbaugh and Norm Coleman, he persists in a nonconfrontational correction.
Following the UN's laudable but ineffective refusal to authorize the invasion, neocon warrior Richard Perle, a member of George W. Bush's Defense Policy Board at the time, crowed over the organization's troubles in an article headlined, "Thank God for the death of the UN." It wasn't long before triumph turned to quagmire, with Washington calling on the UN for its services.
The war was also to have profound consequences for Annan's media image in the United States, as it allowed all the obsessive UN-baiters out of their kennels. Hitherto the perception of him had been of one who was Teflon-coated and unassailable, exuding moral authority. No longer. One of the postwar responsibilities the UN accepted was the transition from occupation to Iraqi self-government, and the officials involved were well aware that the neocons' man, Ahmad Chalabi, was a self-promoting carpetbagger with a bigger constituency in Washington think tanks than in Baghdad. Chalabi and the think tanks bitterly opposed UN involvement, not least for that reason. He came to New York and threatened Annan's office with consequences--with the Oil for Food Scandal, in fact.
At the time Annan described the imbroglio as "a bit like lynching." A distressing number of American media assessments of his tenure are still presenting it as a taint on Annan's reputation rather than a blot on their colleagues' integrity for joining in the malicious Swift-boating. In fact, as demonstrated in these pages [see Williams, "The Right's Assault on Kofi Annan," January 10/17, 2005], by any rational standards Oil for Food was a success, so much so that Washington asked that it be continued in the year after the invasion. The Volcker Commission inquiry alleged that the OFF director had received $140,000 over four years in kickbacks from perfectly legal, if unethical, oil trades. The rest of the money allegedly transferred to Saddam was the result of oil sales in breach of sanctions but condoned by Security Council members, or from companies whose behavior was overlooked by member governments.
Still bemused by the media battering, Annan suggests that publicity during the inquiry was "patently unfair. What was interesting was the way they handled it, with rogue investigators leaking information and leading people astray. When the full story came out and they discovered that the scandal was not here but in the capitals, with the 2,200 companies involved in kickbacks, the story died." No part of the scandal was more dead than the $10 billion from the program that was given to US occupation authorities--spent lavishly and with very little paper trail. Representative Henry Waxman has been a lonely voice in Washington following the trail from OFF to GOP crony contractors. So far Annan's media persecutors have shown little interest.
Those who do not read or watch the Murdoch media will probably note that Annan's biggest historical legacy will be the "Responsibility to Protect." Rather than try to amend the UN Charter, in 2005 he maneuvered the heads of state at the UN's sixtieth-anniversary World Summit to reinterpret it. From now on, the threats to "peace and security" that the Security Council is chartered to fight include governments' failures to protect their own people, thus overturning the centuries-old principle of absolute national sovereignty accepted by the Charter.
Annan reminisces about the initial reaction to his raising the subject: "When I said, back in 1999, 'We cannot accept that governments can hide behind the shield of sovereignty and brutalize their people or allow these violations to go on,' quite a lot of ambassadors were very upset that I was encouraging interference in their internal affairs. And yet five, six years on, we have the 'Responsibility to Protect' as a principle accepted by all heads of state." It has taken several millennia for an accepted principle like "Thou shalt not kill" to be implemented, so we should not be too disappointed if the continuing carnage in Darfur casts doubt upon the sincerity of many of those heads. At least the concept strips the defenders of mass murder of any spurious legal or ethical defense based on national sovereignty.
Even if it is unfinished business, Darfur is certainly not Annan's failure; he has been remarkably outspoken about the culpability of Khartoum. "When I hear heads of state get up and say, 'The UN must act in, say, Darfur,' who is the UN here?" he asks. "We need to hold governments to the solemn pledge they made in the General Assembly. Most people believe that Darfur is a sort of test, so we need to remind them that they made this solemn pledge and we want them to redeem it. What's even more important is that peoples around the world can use this to push member states to action." He adds, "Without pressure from the population and civil society, I don't think they would do it."
Annan has done more than any predecessor to insure that those invoked in the opening words of the UN Charter, "We the peoples of the world," have a serious place on the UN agenda. Under very difficult circumstances, one of which was the negative role of US administrations, he has done remarkably well.
It will be interesting to see where they end up, but we will be watching Ban Ki-Moon in the meantime.
Annan's Principled Pragmatism
by Ian Williams
from the January 8, 2007 issue
the Nation,
Ban Ki-moon was sworn into office as the new United Nations Secretary General on December 14. Soon he will be sworn at, when once again the UN fails to obey US orders. Any secretary general's honeymoon in Washington is likely to be short. Who now remembers that outgoing Secretary General Kofi Annan was a US nomination back in 1996, or that he managed to persuade Jurassic Jesse Helms to cut a deal on paying off Washington's debt to the UN?
As Annan leaves, it gives him some wry satisfaction that John Bolton, the US ambassador who thought he was a viceroy, has been sent off the field by the new Democratic Congress. After spending his first term perceived almost as a secular saint, Annan spent much of his second being reviled by Bolton's soulmates as a global kleptocrat.
It was mostly in the United States that the sustained neocon Swift-boating, through the alleged "Oil for Food Scandal," muddied Annan's reputation. Fortunately, the rest of the world took little notice of those furious and hyperbolic exaggerations. Annan's historical position is now clearer, and it is not just customary valediction to say that he has been one of the most effective secretary generals in UN history. Successes in Sierra Leone, Liberia, East Timor, Lebanon and Congo's first free elections in four decades are no mean vindication of Annan's principled pragmatism.
Bill Clinton pushed Annan's appointment because of a misapprehension that he would be a reverse of his predecessor, Boutros Boutros-Ghali: more secretary than general. Clinton and his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, did not want someone with big ideas and a big mouth engaging in public debates with their Administration. They thought they could count on the reserved UN bureaucrat to deliver.
They were right about the big mouth, wrong on the big ideas. Annan is not a great orator. Audiences have to strain to hear his softly spoken phrases, whose content has usually been carefully polished to remove any language that would be too confrontational. Yet the big ideas kept coming.
As a cog in the UN juggernaut hijacked by the great powers, Annan was implicated in the bloody failures in Bosnia and Rwanda, and on taking office he tried to make "Never Again" more than an empty slogan, beginning with an unprecedentedly open report on the UN's role in those events. Human rights, development and global responsibility were his constant refrain over the years, and he reclaimed a role for the UN as a standard setter, making development a global issue.
Annan's quiet authority and palpable decency made him a perfect standard-bearer both for the organization and for these values. It was precisely those strengths that the xenophobic wing of the US media tried to undermine in his second term, when he stated the obvious truths about Washington's disregard for international law and human rights, most notably in Iraq.
However, there is a built-in contradiction in combining the roles of peacemaker and tribune of the world's peoples. The secretary general cannot bad-mouth perpetrators too strongly, since he may have to negotiate with them. Even some close aides wish that Annan had been more stentorian in his statements. Annan admits that sometimes he may have been too low-key, but he argues that "particularly when it comes to human dignity and individual rights, some of the positions I have taken...are also intended to empower others, particularly the civil society. In some countries people can quote the secretary general...and not go to jail. If they say it themselves they will be in trouble."
When Annan took office, the UN was still reeling from decades of Congressional assault--culminating in the US putsch against Boutros-Ghali. The organization had few friends in Washington. Annan realized the importance of engaging the United States actively--not just for the sake of his own survival but for that of the organization itself. That predicated cultivating a US constituency, and Annan was remarkably successful at it for most of his tenure. In particular, he engaged American Jewish organizations and worked hard to end the isolation of Israel inside the world body, at the risk of alienating key international constituencies. This led to criticism--some of it from supporters and close associates--that he was forgetting the Palestinians. However, Annan has consistently restated and emphasized the UN's legal and humanitarian positions on Israel, and he condemned the Israeli attack on the UN's Khiyam outpost in Lebanon during the summer war.
Annan had built enough trust from both sides for the resolution of this summer's war in Lebanon, which was perhaps the best vindication of his principled pragmatism. Once again, the UN had to cope with the consequences of Washington's refusal to listen to others. Annan called for a cease-fire when two permanent members, the United States and Britain, regarded it as "premature." While the Security Council was tied down by a threatened US veto, Annan had the UN pre-emptively preparing a solution--an expanded and reinforced peacekeeping force, which allowed the Israelis and their allies to climb down from the pole up which they had clambered. Ten years ago it was a major plank of Israeli, and consequently US, Middle East policy to exclude the UN from any role. Following ten years of Annan's tightrope diplomacy, the Israelis pleaded for the UN to step in.
While the Bush White House did not overtly join the assault on Annan's integrity during the so-called Oil for Food Scandal, it certainly did not try to curb the rabid right when they were calling for his resignation. Annan admits, "There have been times when it has been tough, particularly when some people on the Hill or the right wing begin attacking the UN and the Secretary General, and no one pulls them back.... If you undermine the organization to that extent, your own population may ask you, Why are you going to this organization that you've discredited so much?"
For fifteen years the US perception of the UN has revolved around the issue of Iraq. The organization was a convenient scapegoat for US policy failures, which ricocheted catastrophically from insufficient resolution to too much. Washington expected the UN to follow faithfully every wobble. Saddam Hussein did consistently violate the terms of UN resolutions, but Washington's positions, not least in treating weapons inspectors as a branch of US intelligence, succeeded in giving his defiance quasi legitimacy. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations made it plain they would veto any lifting of sanctions until regime change--even though this was not in any way a part of the UN resolutions. First Boutros-Ghali and then Annan had to negotiate compliance from Baghdad, even though Washington's veto insured that they could offer no "light at the end of the tunnel." Iraqi civilians paid the price for the obduracy of both Baghdad and Washington. In 1998, after negotiating with Saddam, Annan himself pointed out, "You can do a lot with diplomacy, but with diplomacy backed up by force you can get a lot more done." That was never consistently forthcoming.
Annan is deeply conscious of the collateral damage of the Iraq War on the global community: "It led to a major division in this organization and in the world. And it has not healed yet.... At the early stages the leaders themselves were quite divided, and they were very vocal about it.... They are trying to mend fences and work together, but we are not there yet."
In his typically oblique way, Annan lodges a criticism of the invasion: "The member states debated it fully here, and you noticed that the majority of the members in the Council could not bring themselves to vote for the military action. The US and others decided to go outside the Council to take action, and of course individual governments are free to take decisions that they wish to. But I think it was appropriate that the Council took the decision it did." True to form, even at this late stage, when he is beyond the reach of Rush Limbaugh and Norm Coleman, he persists in a nonconfrontational correction.
Following the UN's laudable but ineffective refusal to authorize the invasion, neocon warrior Richard Perle, a member of George W. Bush's Defense Policy Board at the time, crowed over the organization's troubles in an article headlined, "Thank God for the death of the UN." It wasn't long before triumph turned to quagmire, with Washington calling on the UN for its services.
The war was also to have profound consequences for Annan's media image in the United States, as it allowed all the obsessive UN-baiters out of their kennels. Hitherto the perception of him had been of one who was Teflon-coated and unassailable, exuding moral authority. No longer. One of the postwar responsibilities the UN accepted was the transition from occupation to Iraqi self-government, and the officials involved were well aware that the neocons' man, Ahmad Chalabi, was a self-promoting carpetbagger with a bigger constituency in Washington think tanks than in Baghdad. Chalabi and the think tanks bitterly opposed UN involvement, not least for that reason. He came to New York and threatened Annan's office with consequences--with the Oil for Food Scandal, in fact.
At the time Annan described the imbroglio as "a bit like lynching." A distressing number of American media assessments of his tenure are still presenting it as a taint on Annan's reputation rather than a blot on their colleagues' integrity for joining in the malicious Swift-boating. In fact, as demonstrated in these pages [see Williams, "The Right's Assault on Kofi Annan," January 10/17, 2005], by any rational standards Oil for Food was a success, so much so that Washington asked that it be continued in the year after the invasion. The Volcker Commission inquiry alleged that the OFF director had received $140,000 over four years in kickbacks from perfectly legal, if unethical, oil trades. The rest of the money allegedly transferred to Saddam was the result of oil sales in breach of sanctions but condoned by Security Council members, or from companies whose behavior was overlooked by member governments.
Still bemused by the media battering, Annan suggests that publicity during the inquiry was "patently unfair. What was interesting was the way they handled it, with rogue investigators leaking information and leading people astray. When the full story came out and they discovered that the scandal was not here but in the capitals, with the 2,200 companies involved in kickbacks, the story died." No part of the scandal was more dead than the $10 billion from the program that was given to US occupation authorities--spent lavishly and with very little paper trail. Representative Henry Waxman has been a lonely voice in Washington following the trail from OFF to GOP crony contractors. So far Annan's media persecutors have shown little interest.
Those who do not read or watch the Murdoch media will probably note that Annan's biggest historical legacy will be the "Responsibility to Protect." Rather than try to amend the UN Charter, in 2005 he maneuvered the heads of state at the UN's sixtieth-anniversary World Summit to reinterpret it. From now on, the threats to "peace and security" that the Security Council is chartered to fight include governments' failures to protect their own people, thus overturning the centuries-old principle of absolute national sovereignty accepted by the Charter.
Annan reminisces about the initial reaction to his raising the subject: "When I said, back in 1999, 'We cannot accept that governments can hide behind the shield of sovereignty and brutalize their people or allow these violations to go on,' quite a lot of ambassadors were very upset that I was encouraging interference in their internal affairs. And yet five, six years on, we have the 'Responsibility to Protect' as a principle accepted by all heads of state." It has taken several millennia for an accepted principle like "Thou shalt not kill" to be implemented, so we should not be too disappointed if the continuing carnage in Darfur casts doubt upon the sincerity of many of those heads. At least the concept strips the defenders of mass murder of any spurious legal or ethical defense based on national sovereignty.
Even if it is unfinished business, Darfur is certainly not Annan's failure; he has been remarkably outspoken about the culpability of Khartoum. "When I hear heads of state get up and say, 'The UN must act in, say, Darfur,' who is the UN here?" he asks. "We need to hold governments to the solemn pledge they made in the General Assembly. Most people believe that Darfur is a sort of test, so we need to remind them that they made this solemn pledge and we want them to redeem it. What's even more important is that peoples around the world can use this to push member states to action." He adds, "Without pressure from the population and civil society, I don't think they would do it."
Annan has done more than any predecessor to insure that those invoked in the opening words of the UN Charter, "We the peoples of the world," have a serious place on the UN agenda. Under very difficult circumstances, one of which was the negative role of US administrations, he has done remarkably well.
Taiwan's Independence
to which you should subscribe for its eminently rational look at foreign affairs.
Self Determination - It's the Law!
The latter figure, growing by 50 rockets a year, should give a clue to the weakness of
There is scope for wrangling on historical and legal claims. But the real question is what status the people of the territory themselves want. Do the people of
According to modern international practice and the principles of democracy, the Taiwanese do indeed have the right to “declare” what is manifestly already true: that they are an independent, sovereign state. It is also clear that the Taiwanese, on the political level, do not want to be ruled by
This is not just romantic nationalism. The Taiwanese pragmatically believe that falling under
Taiwan
Add economic autonomy, and
By blocking
It is worth considering why the Chinese are so unbendable on this issue. Perhaps the biggest problem is that the Communist Party of China has all but abandoned any social agenda other than the maintenance of power, and that leaves only nationalism as a ruling ideology. The “reunification” with
However,
Only after Chiang's death did the island move toward democracy and into the real world, by dissolving the all-China shadow government structures maintained by the KMT. Strangely, the comrades in
Definitions of Imperialism
In the modern world, with a few notable and messy exceptions such as in the Balfour declaration, irredentist claims based on ancient history have been unsuccessful in the face of popular sovereignty. There is more to a nation state than a shared language, common ethnicity, or certainly former imperial sovereignty.
According to its arguments based on former control,
Historical claims are essentially worthless. In a modern, civilized world, the views of the people themselves matter most. For example, no British government, not even one as control-minded as Tony Blair's, could force
Potential Compromises
Although it is not helpful in the adjudication of modern sovereignty claims, history does offer some examples of pragmatic solutions that could produce a degree of mutual satisfaction. For example, if the PRC had demonstrated more trustworthiness over Hong Kong, then something like the “compacts of association” between the Pacific trust territories and the
Perhaps a more exiguous form of association could be developed on the model of the dominions of the British Commonwealth, where the British head of state is also head of state of
However, for all these imaginative solutions, the Taiwanese need reassurance that some powerful members of the global community have the spine to argue with Beijing, to educate its leaders that their eccentrically Sinocentric view of the world is wrong, and to persuade those same leaders that threats of military action are completely counterproductive as well as unacceptable.
Why should the rest of the world care? Last year, the “Responsibility to Protect” accepted by the UN heads of state codified the instinctive feelings of many. The world should not stand by and watch military action crush a vibrant, successful democracy. And in terms of self-interest,
Ian Williams contributes frequently to Foreign Policy In Focus (online at www.fpif.org) on UN and international affairs.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Spirit of Christmas Past—and Future
Latest on the rum trail for the season
from fpif.org,
For centuries, rum has been a warming folk remedy for colds, flu—and indeed cold itself. As the winter solstice approaches in its various festival forms, one worldwide constant is the need for rum to bring a little tropical warmth into the winter. In places like the Caribbean, India, and Australia a solid rum-drinking tradition ensures that the amber nectar is savored year-around, but in colder climes, rum in eggnogs, Christmas cakes and puddings, mince pies and of course just rum in tots, are traditional accoutrements for the holiday season.
Rum is the world's biggest selling spirit—and both the European Union and the United States define it as any drink distilled from sugar cane products, so Brazilian cachaca is rum whether the Brazilians like it or not. (And they do tend to like it, whatever it's called.) While a certain formerly Cuban transnational corporation is, despite its bland tastelessness, the biggest brand,
Not So Useless Byproduct
Most rums are made from the molasses left over when the white sugar is crystallized out, and one of its original attractions was that it used an otherwise useless byproduct instead of competing for scarce food grains—as whiskey did for example. The American colonies banned whiskey distillation because it drove up the price of grain and hence bread. And when that happened, old Anglo Saxon tradition was that you rioted and knocked the Town Hall down until the authorities did something about it.
On current evidence,
The Portuguese in
Hot Hellish Liquor
People knew that the molasses left behind by sugar refining fermented easily, but only the bold risked drinking it. It continues fermenting in the stomach, according to some who've tried. However, put it through a still and you had a potent and palatable drink. They called it Kill-Devil, or rumbullion, “a hot, hellish liquor,”—and they loved it.
Rum was born.
Soon, they discovered that storing it in oak barrels did wonders for the palatability. Killdevil became rum or “Barbadoes Water” and was in demand across the Atlantic World, until in
It soon spread. New Englanders made rum from contraband molasses that they smuggled from the French colonies, where
They did so initially under the protection of the British Royal Navy, which won its wars with the French through the period not least because the British national debt was underwritten with the profits of the
Revolution Over Taxation
After defeating the French, the Royal Navy turned to defeating American smugglers who had been busily trading with the enemy, and the American Revolution began. The British felt that the American colonists should make a financial contribution to the biggest national debt hitherto that they had run up clearing the French threat from
Throughout the 18th century, the Caribbean was the equivalent of the modern
Not that it did him much good, but Napoleon devalued
Within a few decades, beet sugar and the anti-slavery movement had converted the Caribbean from being the engine of
Bacardi and Revolutionaries
The English-speaking islands had lost American markets to the new whiskey distilleries that Western grain made possible, and the French and Spanish colonies were finally allowed to make rum themselves. Even so,
Bacardi won prizes from the
Even as it saved the royal life, the family supported the Cuban revolutionaries against
Bacardi boss Juan Pépin Bosch brought a touch of the old connection between buccaneering and rum back to life in 1961 by buying a surplus U.S. Air Force B-26 Marauder medium bomber, to bomb a Cuban oil refinery. Later he was the money behind a plot to assassinate Castro.
In fact, the Castro takeover had not fatally wounded the company, which had already become one of the first trans-nationals. From 1955, Bacardi was headquartered in the
Evil Empire
Bacardi has been the evil empire to the other smaller
The
But tourism and rum could go together. The region's Rum producers should be selling more than a drink—they should be selling a concept, a life style. As Johnny Depp exulted, staggering round his desert island in the film Pirates of the Caribbean, “Rum, sand, and sun! It's the
And almost every shot you down will help development. Sugar cane only grows in the tropical zone, which as it happens, is mostly underdeveloped in the modern world. Selling high value-added branded spirits on the world market makes much more sense than trying to compete with cane sugar in a market where the EU protects sugar beet farmers and the
Pathetic Substitutes
These pathetic substitutes need high tariff protection and subsidies because there is nothing as efficient as cane for producing sugar and energy—and hence rum. As a result, as Fidel Castro discovered, mass marketing high-value added Havana Club rum across the world produces far more revenue than bags of sugar in the supermarkets.
Somehow, the Caricom island rum producers have to overcome their insularity. Just as the island governments have been selling the Caribbean as a concept, they should be boosting
Trade Spats
Caribbean Rum distillers have millions of potential customers coming into their territories who can take their acquired tastes back with them to the bars of
However, it takes more than variations on “Old” and “Aged,” on the bottles to build a brand. Discerning and affluent consumers want to see precise ages and they want a back-story for their bottle. And what a back-story rum has. It can beat any other drink with four centuries of
Every rum bottle on every cold northern bar shelf should be a spirited ambassador for
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