With so-so news coming out of Tehran from the UN's chief nuclear inspector, Mohamed El Baradei (Iran's not cooperating very well, but nuclear progress is slowing anyway), Chris Hitchens tells Obama to take his case directly to the Iranian people (though the former may or may not have more pressing issues to deal with in Beirut). Roger Cohen says the Ayatollah's the one to focus attention on. The two propositions are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Acknowledging the Ayatollah as the one truly in charge of Iran's nuclear program is obviously a prerequisite for an effective non-proliferation policy (even if it was somehwat odd, as Michael Crowley notes, that El Baradei's remark that he was "quite impressed" with the Ayatollah's grasp of the nuclear issue directly followed the disapproval he expressed with Iranian intransigence). Not only does this step identify the interlocutor actually pulling the strings, but it refrains from fanning the bluster of extremists like Iran's bellicose President Ahmadinejad.
As for communicating with the Iranian people, addressing them in public fora, as Obama in fact already has, is all well and good, but its importance is really more symbolic than anything else. The key for America and other Western nations is not to elbow their way too aggressively into Iranian society and thus be perceived as meddlers by those on the fence about the "Great Satan." Ham-handed efforts to fund Iranian dissident groups, as the United States has an extremely counter-productive habit of doing, will not be as effective as letting ordinary Iranians tire of antagonistic leaders like Ahmadinejad without America exacerbating the situation.
(image from flickr user jeffq under a Creative Commons license)
In late December the United Nations General Assembly held a symbolic vote on a statement calling for the universal decriminalization of homosexuality. France spearheaded the resolution, which was a 13 point declaration "to ensure that sexual orientation or gender identity may under no circumstances be the basis for criminal penalties, in particular executions, arrests or detention." The statement received 60 votes in support, mostly from Europe and South America. Opposing the resolution, were the United States, the Holy See, and members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference. At the time, the Bush administration couched its objection to the measure in legal technicalities.
Well, that was then. This is now: At the so-called "Durban Review Conference" on racism and xenophonia underway in Geneva, Europe again put forward language condemning “all forms of discrimination and all other human rights violations based on sexual orientation.” According to UN Watch, "The Czech Republic on behalf of the E.U., with the support of New Zealand, the United States, Colombia, Chile on behalf of the South American states, the Netherlands, Argentina and a few others, took the floor in support." (emphasis mine).
The efforts to include language on discrimination based on sexual orientation ended up failing for lack of support from non-western countries. Still, it's relieving to see that the United States is now back on the side of the enlightened on this issue of basic human rights.
Earlier this week, a new United Nations report showed a 40% increase in civilian causalities in Afghanistan. About 55% of those deaths are attributable to the Taliban, meaning that the United States and its NATO and Afghan allies were responsible for a large proportion of civilian deaths. Most (65%) of these allied-inflicted civilian deaths came from U.S. air strikes.
Stories like this, however, tell you what statistics cannot:
I could see all the dead and injured bodies. My son’s wife was horribly injured. And my daughter had been killed already. … She had been baking bread inside the house when the bomb hit. Due to the blast, she was thrown into the oven. Her body was totally burned. She was taken to hospital, but she died. … My son had injuries on his feet and the force of the blast had thrown him over the tree. Another daughter – she was blasted into so many pieces that we still have not been able to find her body. She was in too many parts. My neighbors came and helped to drag the bodies out of the house. It was terrible, terrible. Haji Nasib, lost nine family members and suffered significant property loss due to an [...] air-strike in Wardak province.
This comes from the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) in a new report Losing the People: The Costs and Consequences of Civilian Suffering in Afghanistan. The report is a long but fascinating exposé of the haphazard way in which international forces compensate civilian victims of “collateral damage.” It finds that rarely -- if at all -- are compensatory payments made to victims or their families in a timely manner. Obviously, this does not endear local populations to international troops, which in turn harms international forces' ability to win the “hearts and minds” of local Afghans. That said, in the instances where the United States government or one of its NATO allies does pay some form of compensation, victims and their families generally consider the payment as a gesture of condolence and apology.
The lesson here is that coordinating and institutionalizing mechanisms for civilian compensation is not only a humanitarian imperative, but can be a strategic tool in the counterinsurgency toolbox. It would behoove the Pentagon to take note.
UNICEF Executive Director Anne Veneman and V-Day Founder Eve Ensler talk about the epidemic of rape in the DRC in advance of a five day tour to raise awareness about this terrible issue.
For more on the plague, check out Raise Hope for Congo
Anne Bayefsky is stillsputtering about the United States' cowardly decision not to pack its bags and fling them in the face of every other country interested in holding a meaningful conference on racism. Holding her nose, Bayefsky dives into the bureaucratic minutiae of the preparatory meetings to which -- gasp -- the United States decided to send a delegation and, unsurprisingly, is appalled by what she sees. The very Constitution is in jeopardy, in her frantic outlook, because the U.S. delegates did not reject out of hand the idea that countries should...wait for it...oppose hate speech. The provision in question:
States Parties condemn all propaganda and all organizations which are based on ideas or theories of superiority of one race or group of persons of one colour or ethnic origin, or which attempt to justify or promote racial hatred and discrimination in any form, and undertake to adopt immediate and positive measures designed to eradicate all incitement to, or acts of, such discrimination...
To assuage free speech concerns, the U.S. delegation made sure to cite a later provision reassuring "the right to freedom of opinion and expression." But far from calming Bayefsky, this only stokes her rage; by even referencing the UN's International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, rather than tearing it to pieces, the United States is, in her twisted paranoia, sacrificing its very sovereignty, and binding itself to the sordid agenda of the Durban Review Conference's more unsavory participants (the Irans and Cubas and North Koreas of the world that the Right will stare down so readily when it comes to military bluster, but to which they ascribe a bizarrely aggrandized influence when it comes to diplomacy).
In a remarkable reverse-Orwellian feat, Bayefsky unconcernedly relies on assumptions that, when it comes to Durban, everything means exactly the opposite of what it appears to mean. Thus, the anti-racism conference is invariably a "racist confab," and any motion to curb hate speech is certainly an insidious attempt to eat away at our treasured principle of free speech. By ceding the territory of meaning to the conference's nefarious actors -- that Iran has an anti-Semitic agenda should come as no surprise to anyone -- Bayefsky is essentially stooping to their level. Human rights have meaning and value, and it would be encouraging to see skeptics like Bayefsky express some interest in strengthening the concept worldwide, instead of simply retreating and retrenching in America's own fortress of freedom.
UNICEF says that the LTTE, otherwise known as the Tamil Tigers, are conscripting children caught in the conflict around their northern Sri Lankan base.
“We have clear indications that the LTTE has intensified forcible recruitment of civilians and that children as young as 14 years old are now being targeted,” said Mr Philippe Duamelle, UNICEF’s Representative in Sri Lanka. “These children are facing immediate danger and their lives are at great risk. Their recruitment is intolerable.”
Meanwhile, The UN Country Team for Sri Lanka condemned both the LTTE and Government for violating the so-called "safe zones" in the northern Vanni region, where there is a high concentration of civilian non-combatants. In a statement the country team also worried that the LTTE were effectively holding civilians and UN staff hostage.
The LTTE continues to actively prevent people leaving, and reports indicate that a growing number of people trying to leave have been shot and sometimes killed. There are indications that children as young as 14 are being recruited into the ranks of the LTTE. [Empasis mine]
Fifteen United Nations staff and 75 of their dependents, 40 of whom are children, and 35 of whom are women, remain in the same area, having also been prevented from leaving by the LTTE. Fifteen of these children have contracted respiratory diseases, a serious indicator for a population which is now in dire need of humanitarian assistance.
We are acutely aware that the suffering of our own UN staff and dependents is just one part of a much larger picture. However their release would be a good gesture and would strengthen the capacity of the UN to assist the tens of thousands of people both inside the Vanni pocket, and the approximately 30,000 IDPs who have left for government held areas.
The LTTE insurgency seems to be in its last throes. They are a pretty odious group who brought to the world the phenomenon of suicide bombing. That said, the Sri Lankan government's counter-insurgency has often placed civilians in LTTE areas at high risk.
Civilians have born the brunt of this conflict for the last 20 years. Even in what seems to be the war's final days, that sad fact has not changed.
There was one telltale sign: his decision not to bomb the air force in Sudan so that it could not be used to kill more people in Darfur. And it wouldn't have been that hard to do. But he decided against it, fearing that - after having attacked Afghanistan and Iraq - attacking yet another Arab country would have been very poorly received in the Arab world - and much of the rest of the world....
So, given the consensus about Darfur, and given the military ease with which an operation could be carried out against Sudan, if Bush didn't do it, that was certainly a hint that he wasn't going to turn around and feel it was fine to bomb Iran. [emphasis mine]
Abrams' point can be demonstrated by a little arboreal analogy: if Bush didn't take the low-hanging fruit of bombing Sudan, then he wasn't going to reach for the higher-up fruit of a similar ArabMiddle Eastern er, generically autocratic tree. The flaw in Abrams' comparison is clear, as Sudan and Iran were very dissimilar cases (not to mention not both "Arab" states), and I'm sympathetic to Michael Crowley's confusion at his logic -- Darfur could have just been not as important on the administration's agenda, and therefore not as worthy of bombing. Nonetheless, Abrams' comments do reveal some interesting dynamics within the Bush team's Darfur thinking.
First, if the option of bombing Sudan's air force was indeed considered, then that means that the administration was thinking seriously -- or at least wants us to believe in retrospect that it was thinking seriously -- about imposing tough measures on Khartoum. Second, if the decision to eschew a strategy of bombing Sudan had such resounding effects on a much bigger foreign policy fish for the administration (Iran), then we can be sure that the ripples were felt within the Darfur portfolio. Namely, if not bombing Sudan made the United States not bomb Iran, then it also severely attenuated the actions that it did take on Darfur. Indeed, having turned away from the unilateral military option, the Bush administration basically washed its hands of the question of how to bring U.S. pressure to bear on Khartoum, instead punting the problem to the UN.
Then again, consistent with an argument I've made before, Abrams' account of the decision not to bomb may fall under the more self-serving objective of exonerating the administration's inaction in one case (Darfur), while praising its ultimate caution in another (Iran). Central to the former is the creation of a false dichotomy -- bomb Sudan or shunt all responsibility over to the UN -- that both appeases Darfur constituencies and makes the administration appear multilateral. But in actuality, the Iran-Darfur comparison should both bolster Crowley's skepticism and prove the faultiness -- logically and on a policy basis -- of the bomb-or-blame-the-UN paradigm. Whereas the alternative to bombing Sudan proved to be very limited U.S. engagement on the issue, the administration by no means shuttered its Iran portfolio even after allegedly foreclosing the military option. So the biggest "might have been" that I take out of Abrams' problematic comparison is not the possible bombing of the Sudanese air force, but a concerted leveraging of American pressure on Khartoum that could have approached the level of intensity with which the administration dealt with Iran.
Hat tip: SB(image from flickr user dev null under a Creative Commons license)
Japanese finance minister Shoichi Nakagawa resigned today after this drunken performance at a G7 news conference.
Andrew Sullivan dryly notes "If you were Japan's finance minister right now, wouldn't you be reaching for the sake too?"
But what I want to know is what is it about these kinds of meetings that engenders such hard drinking on the part of policy makers? To wit, watch Nicolas Sarkozy stumble into this April 2007 G8 press conference. He basically admits that he is drunk--and that it's Vladimir Putin's fault!
Methinks the next G7 or G8 meeting should be held in Salt Lake City.
The United Nations just posted this 2008 year in review video of MINUSTAH, the Peacekeeping mission in Haiti. The video takes a look at some of the highlights and low-lights of the year, including the April 2008 food riots and back-to-back hurricanes that devastated the Gonaives region last fall.
There's some cool footage in here of MINUSTAH in action, including photos of a harrowing rescue operation at a flooded orphanage in Gonaives. The video also explains some of MINUSTAH's routine but exceedingly important jobs like training local police, patrolling Haiti's coast, rebuilding schools, and fighting organized crime. Check it out.