The Gazan Vespers

Chatting on the internet with a friend from Ramallah today, she wrote to me that, watching the slaughter currently taking place in Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed at least 30 civilians in the last day, “the most painful is not knowing what we can do to actually make a difference and stop it.”

Having been immersed in reporting on the rather catastrophic situation here in eastern DRC and having never visited the Middle East, I have refrained from commenting publicly on something that I know only from following the news and reading books as an educated consumer, and the conversations that I’ve had with Israeli and Palestinian friends.

With that caveat, though. and though I know this comment will be viewed as needlessly provocative by some, the ghastly collective punishment that Israel is currently meting out to the Gazans seems to me could only seem to be viewed as a sensible foreign policy when one learned military tactics at the feet of Nazi Germany. If there is one thing that I have learned in reporting on conflicts throughout the world over the last decade, it is that you can't continually bomb civilians, kill women and children, drive people off their land, illegally build settlements and an apartheid wall and not expect that those people aren't going to seek revenge some day. And I think that any reasonably person could only conclude that the course Israel has been pursuing over the last 2-3 years, from its disastrous and brutal invasion of Lebanon until now, makes the likelihood of the destruction of the Jewish state in the Middle East greater, not less.

If the United States is a genuine friend to Israel, it should not simply sit back and let a nation self-destruct in the way that Israel is now doing. And it should cease pretending that Israeli lives are somehow worth more than Palestinian lives. Lead as my country is by its own religious zealot in the form of the sinister, smug puppet George W. Bush, I can only hope with all my heart that the next administration in the United States will hold the Israelis responsible for their actions, as any friend should, and that the long-suffering Palestinian people, failed so miserably by their leaders and largely abandoned by the international community, will finally and unalterably be granted a state to call their own.

My thoughts are with the people of Gaza this Sunday afternoon in Kinshasa.

W’s Christmas present to American children: Vetoing health insurance

As one of the nearly 50 million Americans without health insurance, my feelings about the American healthcare system - where private health insurance companies and physicians reap enormous profits by charging exorbitant premiums, denying care to the sick and artificially inflating the price of drugs - could not be more vehement. The American healthcare system is utterly, completely broken and even some of the more well-known proposals for rectifying it (such as that of U.S. presidential candidate and New York senator Hillary Clinton) strike me as woefully feeble in terms of addressing what is a terrible crisis for so many Americans. Speaking as an American who has spent much of his life living abroad, I can say with some authority that I don’t think I have ever seen a more predatory, exploitative approach to healthcare than I have seen in the United States. When taken in tandem with a consumer culture than encourages people to eat unhealthy foods packed with unnecessary sugars and hormones, the approach seems doubly cynical.

Along with the Bush administration’s irresponsible, negligent approach to climate change (which has lead the European Union to threaten to “boycott U.S.-led climate talks next month unless Washington accepts a range of numbers for negotiating deep reductions of global-warming emissions”), the healthcare debacle has, in the last week, thrown in the starkest relief possible to me how terribly out of synch the U.S., for so long a leader on so many issues, is becoming with the rest of the world.

This week, as the United States enters its holiday season, President Bush marked the occasion by vetoing an extension of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which attempts to provides health insurance to children from families earning too much to qualify for Medicaid (a very low threshold indeed) but unable to afford private insurance. The SCHIP proposal sought to increase federal funding for the program by $35 billion over five years, adding around 4 million people, partially funded by a 61-cent rise on a package of cigarettes. To give you an example of the context of the price tag, the cost of the war in Iraq, by end of fiscal year 2007, was at least $456 billion, to say nothing of the lives of nearly 4,000 American service personnel and those of thousands of Iraqi civilians. Bush vetoed a similar bill in October and, in July, was quoted by The New York Times as saying that the bill was a step toward “government-run health care for every American,” "

You mean like every other country in the industrialized world? As the U.S. government has taken responsibility for the post office, the police, the fire department and the national defense, so should it take responsibility for providing health care for every American. Despite the many problems I have with the French government and other aspects of society here, I think that their health system, like that of some other European countries, remains a model of a responsible state approach to taking care of its citizens well-being that the United States could learn much from.

My native country simply cannot continue being so out-of-step with the rest of the world, so easily suckered by the false piety (married to brutal cynicism) of political snake oil salesmen like Bush and company. If the Democrats had any conviction at all and took their responsibility as guardians of the constitution seriously, we would be deep in impeachment proceedings by now. But alas, they greet this, like other outrages, with the feeblest murmurs of dissent.

My fellow countrymen have been fooled and lied to for so long by their government, I wonder if they will recognize the truth when it finally comes crashing down. Starting with the ridiculous banana republic farce of the 2000 election in Florida, continuing through the illegal use of torture and detention without trials of hundreds, possibly thousands, of people, through the illegal invasion of Iraq and the naked profiteering there that the administration’s cronies engaged in, the terrible abandonment of the people of Mississippi and Louisiana during Hurricane Katrina and now continuing with the denial of basic healthcare for American citizens, in a just world Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Feith, Mr Gonzales and many more fellow travelers would at least be facing criminal and civil prosecution in the United States if not an appearance at a tribunal in the Hague.

It a strange time to be an American with an internationalist outlook on the world, proud of the open, optimistic spirit and intense creative drive of my country, but very worried about the direction that its political leaders appear intent on taking it, which seems to be straight over a cliff, ever angrier, more closed-off from the rest of the world and more authoritarian by the day. It’s still not too late to change course, but I fear that the hour is growing ever more late.

I’ll be in a better mood next post, I promise.

On lyrical terrorists

Is it possible that Gordon Brown’s United Kingdom has joined George W. Bush’s United States in the questionable practice of locking up its own citizens for things that the government believes they might do sometime in the future as opposed to things they have actually done? It certainly seems like it.

Today in London, a 23 year-old Heathrow airport employee named Samina Malik, born and raised in England, was declared guilty of possessing material likely to be useful in terrorism.

Malik was charged and tried under the United Kingdom’s rather outlandish Terrorism Act 2000, Section 58 of which permits the charging of an offense and imprisonment of up to 10 years against anyone collecting or in possession of "information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism,” a definition that would seem improbably broad. It is hard for a writer such as myself to forget, for example, that the Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara was known to have studied Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and its meticulous descriptions of the Spanish Civil War while camped out with Fidel Castro's rebel army in Cuba's Sierra Maestra, or that William Butler Yeats wondered aloud, after learning that some of the Irish rebels of 1916 quoted his play Cathleen ni Houlihan as they faced the executioner: "Did that play of mine send out/Certain men the English shot?"

From everything I have read about the case, Malik indeed sounds like a somewhat, well, strange young lady. According to the Guardian, hardly a font of pro-government apologia, Malik, who authored poems with titles such as “How To Behead” and “The Living Martyrs,” apparently enjoyed collecting extremist Islamist propaganda in her spare time, including such tomes as The Al-Qaeda Manual and The Mujahideen Poisons Handbook. Malik was also apparently an aficionado of Abu Hamza al-Masri, the frothing Egyptian cleric convicted of terrorism-related offenses in Britain last year, and used the social networking site called Hi-5 to describe her favorite television shows being "watching videos by my Muslim brothers in Iraq, yep the beheading ones.”

Not exactly the kind of person you would want to be sitting across the table from on a blind date.

But how did the British constabulary apprise themselves of this? Try as I might, I could find no record of how the bobbies learned of Ms. Malik’s decidedly odd proclivities beyond a line in the Daily Telegraph that “police were alerted after finding an email from her on another person’s computer.

It would seem that, their own internment policies in Northern Ireland aside, the Brits in this instance would be borrowing a page from the rather rancid, extra-judicial “enemy combatant” status that the Bush administration has seen fit to employ. Remember the case of José Padilla, who was arrested in May 2002 and held as a material witness in relation to the September 11th attacks, then held under the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists (AUMF) as an “enemy combatant” and then finally, in 2005, on charges he "conspired to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas." There may well have been rather more convincing reasoning as Padilla was alleged to have in fact met with top Al-Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, but the legal sleight of hand that kept him from his day in court cannot help but disturb all of us who value America’s constitution more than the current occupant of that White House at any given time.

One thing struck me about the British case, though.

Malik was also apparently a hip-hop fan, whose first creative forays were into love poetry while attending Villiers High School in Southall, and then branching out into harder, more aggressive creations modeled on Tupac Shakur and 50 Cent, using the sobriquet Lyrical Babe. That in turn, when her interests...shifted, became Lyrical Terrorist, a moniker the British press made much of.

As someone who was in Manhattan on September 11th, I seek to make no light of the ghastly potential impact of terrorism on a mass scale. But I do wonder if Judge Peter Beaumont, and Prosecutor Jonathan Sharp had bothered to familiarize themselves with the oeuvre of the Philadelphia hip-hop band The Roots, whose song Clones, from their 1996 album Illadelph Halflife (which played as one of my soundtracks for a good part of that year), featured the following couplet from MC Dice Raw:

Dice Raw the juvenile lyricist, corner store terrorist.
Block trooper, connoisseur of fine cannabis.
Focus never weak, blow up the spot like plastique.
Leave a nigga shook, to the point, he won't speak.

While I’m not suggesting that Ms. Malik’s rhyme style had reached quite the level of Dice Raw’s, it still gives one pause that one person’s poetry is another person terrorist threat, much as the rapper Ice T once pointed out his confusion as to why people harangued him but didn’t get upset when Johnny Cash would sing the line “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” I may be wrong, but something about this case makes me wonder if 30 years ago, Ms. Malik wouldn’t have been sporting a Mohawk and a safety-pin through her nose and 15 years ago taking ecstasy and dancing to the Happy Mondays. But maybe not.

It just seems to me to be a slippery slope once you start arresting people for things that you think they might do in the future. And our current crop of political leaders - who have already managed to cause death and destruction on a mass scale - would seem to be the last people in a position to judge who will and who will not be a danger to society.

Put under house arrest for the time being, Malik must return for sentencing on 6 December.

We indeed live in strange times.

What to do in Iraq

A recent Op-Ed in the Economist, a magazine that I respect even though it occasionally seems to err on the side of having contributors who can tell good gin from bad gin as opposed to those who have genuinely in-depth knowledge of the countries they are reporting on, made an argument for the continued presence of United States and other forces in Iraq.

Titled “Why they should stay,” the editorial posited the following:

If America removes its forces while Iraq remains in its present condition, the Iraqi future is indeed likely to be disastrous. For that reason above any other, and despite misgivings about the possibility of even modest success any time soon, our own view is that America (and Britain) ought to stay in Iraq until conditions improve.

It is a horrendously thorny issue, with those on both sides of the issue, the neocons safe in Washington and much of the anti-war movement, safe behind their computer screens, arrogantly sure that they know the ONLY right path by which to succeed, while the Iraqi people themselves are aught up in a terrible whirlwind of violence, as typified by the recent murder of Sheikh Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha and the recent attack on Shiite villages north of Baghdad, both of which were apparently carried out by Al Qaeda-linked elements. Add to this the killing of nine people by private U.S. security contractors in Baghdad itself and you have only the tip of the iceberg of the suffering the Iraqis have had to endure over the last four years.

Regarding the Economist piece, a British acquaintance here in Paris wrote that “It's too late to avoid earthshaking regional consequences and the US or the UK are the last people to be able to head them off. The damage has been done, but like any imperial leadership, the US (which hasn't learned from the earlier antics of the UK, USSR, France) can't lose face and admit this.”

An American friend of mine, a fluent Arabic speaker who has spent a fair bit of time in Iraq, responded to the argument for a continued American and British presence in Iraq (in part) with the following:

I'm definitely scared of what will happen when we pull out, but as the article observes, it's already been happening. I think pulling out sooner rather than later would be a good idea, not because it would be a good thing, but I think things will get worse if we stay and the best thing to do at the moment would be to admit in a very dramatic fashion our total ignobility in this enterprise and to acknowledge that all of the chaos, sectarian violence, criminal mayhem, and civilian suffering and death is our fault and particularly the fault of this administration. Then hopefully either the situation in Iraq would improve or if, more plausibly, it deteriorated rapidly, Iran and Syria would have a newfound freedom to contain the situation which would probably have a better chance of restoring law and order . People here are obviously distrustful of both Iran and Syria, particularly Iran, but I'd trust Iran insofar as it has a much more direct and urgent need for a stable Iraq than we do.

For it’s part, in the Guardian, one columnist, Timothy Garton Ash, writes on the invasion of Iraq that “the likely consequences of Iraq range from the bad to the catastrophic. Looking back over a quarter-century of writing about international affairs, I can not recall a more comprehensive and avoidable man-made disaster.”

Another columnist from the same paper, Simon Jenkins, compared the Congressional grilling of America's senior commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, to Britain’s own often seemingly mute junior-partner status in the Iraq adventure.

“Britain should be so lucky,” Jenkins wrote. “A top general grilled on the Iraq war by skeptical representatives of the people. An ambassador summoned to explain his policy before the cameras. Three detailed reports challenging the official line submitted to Congress. A nation in a ferment of debate. Americans may have blundered into the Iraq morass, but they will retreat from it with political guns blazing.”

For my part, my thoughts on the matter (formed, like those of most people, from afar, without having ever set foot in Iraq) are roughly the following.

The invasion of Iraq was a terribly misguided affair from the beginning, undertaken with a willful deception of the public, an ignoring of expert advice, an almost magic-realist view of the likely consequences of U.S. military action and no desire or ability on the part of the Bush administration to face up to the cauldron of violent forces that toppling Saddam Hussein let lose on the country until it was too late.

That said, now that the U.S. and U.K. helped set into motion a multifront civil war, I think it would be immoral to say "Whoops, sorry we destroyed your country" and then depart to leave the Iraqis at the mercies of the Iranians, the Syrians, the Turks and Al Qaeda.

Unless one subscribes to a theory that news organizations across the board a conspiring to slant the news in favour of the now-thoroughly discredited Bush administration, articles written by journalists on the ground, in Iraq suggest that, however unpalatable the U.S. and U.K. presence in Iraq is (and for me, it definitely is), the alternative at present is far worse.

I don't know if any of the armchair commentators such as myself really have the answer for this mess, though some opinion writers certainly seem to think they do. I certainly don't have the answer, aside from hanging on a little while longer with Congress pushing the Bush administration to try and put Iraq back together again. I just more or less have always adhered to the "you broke it, you bought it" school of foreign affairs and, as such, feel that it would be wrong the throw the Iraqis to the wolves any more than they have shamefully been already. Hopefully, some day, the Bush administration. will be hauled into the dock to answer for all of this, but as disorganized and spineless as the Democrats often show themselves to be, I doubt it.

For further reading on the subject, I suggest two books: The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq by New Yorker staff writer George Packer and Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War by a Lebanese-American (and Arabic-speaking) Washington Post correspondent Anthony Shadid,

The first, written by someone who was a moderately pro-invasion left-winger, examines how, in the wake of September 11th and given Saddam Hussein's record - the invasions of Iran and Kuwait, the al-Anfal Campaign against the Kurds, the tens of thousands of Shiites murdered in the wake of the first Gulf War, the everyday brutality and monstrousness of the regime and behaviour of the two maniac sons he intended to bequeath it to - some rather decent folks such as Kanan Makiya and Ayad Rahim were able to justify supporting the invasion on humanitarian grounds (an ironic turn of phrase) and how that support was used by some of the most cynical, corrupt and least visionary political operators Washington has ever seen in mustering an agenda for the ultimately disastrous enterprise. I don't know if I have ever read a more scathing critique of the administration or its policy, its ignoring of its own Middle East experts and military planners or the fantasy of the neocons thinking they would remake the Middle East in their own image.

The second book paints a devastating picture of the effects that the war and its aftermath had on the lives of ordinary Iraqis, of whom Shadid appears to have interviewed hundreds. It is really reportage in the finest tradition and it gives a despairing picture of the human cost of the endeavour.

In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions or thoughts on the subject, please do comment away.

The Bush administration’s bad medicine

As the Bush administration, isolated but not, sadly, without weapons, draws to its shameful end, recent testimony by former Surgeon General Richard H. Carmona before a Congressional panel this week helped bring home just how rigid the regime’s quackery has been when it comes to matters of medical science over the last several years.

Among the points that Dr. Carmona made with relation to how he was told to do his job during his 2002 to 2006 tenure (that is, as the leading spokesperson on matters of public health for the administration) are the following:

• Dr. Carmona was ordered to mention President Bush three times on every page of every speech he delivered.
  
• On the topic of sex education, Dr. Carmona’s suggestion that the use of contraceptives be included was met with a refrain that the Bush government wanted to promote “abstinence only.”
  
• Global warming was dismissed as a “liberal cause.”
  
• Dr. Carmona was advised not to testify at a U.S. government racketeering trial of the tobacco industry by an administration that was simultaneously telling the government lawyer in the case that he, Dr. Carmona, was not competent to testify.
  

Quite a way to treat a double Purple Heart United States Army Special Forces veteran, no?

It’s good to know, as one of the 48 million Americans without health insurance, that the Bush administration had its priorities straight.