WhirledView

To Negotiate or Not To Negotiate that is the Question

By Patricia H. Kushlis

A must-read article on international negotiations has just appeared in the September/October 2009 Foreign Affairs magazine.

Unfortunately, the article entitled “Without Conditions,” plays sixth fiddle to those that precede it. Moreover, it is squeezed in just before a special - heavily featured - section devoted to climate change. Besides that you have to be a subscriber, buy the article, or visit a library with a subscription to read it.

There’s reams of just plain good common sense crammed into “Without Conditions.” My suggestion for those short on time is to forget the hype and the special and concentrate on six pages of jargon-free English aimed at US and Israeli policy makers in particular - especially those looking to employ quiet diplomacy in dealing with relations with adversaries - as well as for the rest of us who just want to understand better how a country can succeed at the bargaining table in resolving seemingly irresolvable differences without resorting to a call to arms.

Yet, if you don’t look carefully, “Without Conditions” (pp. 84-90) will most likely pass you by. That’s a mistake because author and Harvard Business School professor Deepak Malhotra raises some of the most important dilemmas facing this country today: when to negotiate with an enemy, and what, if any, preconditions to insist upon before doing so.

The preconditions dilemma

Soto Ayam: an Epic Soup and Easy to Make

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Java has its own version of the Indian epic known as the Mahabharata and its own ways of telling the story. All or parts are usually presented during night long puppet shows, sometimes via shadow puppets made of leather, sometimes via stick puppets, but always manipulated and narrated by masterful dalangs backed up by singers and a gamelan ensemble. Typically the Javanese versions also feature interludes of repartee thanks to a supplementary cast of beloved ignoble characters, who inject comic relief as the inexorable cosmic tragedy unfolds. Think Shakespeare, as in Romeo and Juliet, where puns and lewd humor serve the same purpose.

It's hard to envision Romeo dealing with a plate of slippery spaghetti much less Arjuna spilling soup on his dhoti, but the comic characters are allowed all the crude human functions like eating and drinking, etc., etc. And the audience certainly needs sustenance. So today I'm presenting, as my last salute to Farmers' Market vegetable soups, a version of soto ayam madura, which is to say chicken soup Madura style. Madura is a large island hovering in a broad bay just off the city of Surabaya in East Java, but some version of soto ayam is available wherever street food is offered in Sumatra as well as Java.

Join me in Indonesia. It's dusk at last. Strings of little electric lights are suddenly asparkle, to keep the gathering darkness at bay, with the help of the oil lamps standing on many tables and shop counters. The equatorial air is cooling, at last, and a hint of a breeze makes the evening even more refreshing, so the street is thronged with people shopping or strolling, like you. You pass food vendors selling boiled crabs or chicken satay or morsels of rice wrapped in banana leaves---or beer, realize you are hungry and slide into a bench facing a table laid with plastic or old fashioned oilcloth. A huge bowl, a cheap Chinese export, is plunked down in front of you, usually with a mouth-stretching stainless steel spoon, occasionally with a porcelain scoop. An island that's really a chicken leg or breast rises from a steaming lake of savory broth that barely covers a generous serving of rice and vegetables. In case the spicing doesn't burn enough, you may choose among bottles and shakers full of red stuff to make the meal as mouth-tingling as you like. Slurp! Slurp! Delicious!

Soto ayam also makes for a fun dinner at home. So here's how, with one caveat. Adjust all amounts to feed the gang you expect at the table:

Cut a chicken into serving-sized pieces, load it in a big pot and cover it with plenty of water. Throw in a piece of ginger half the size of your thumb and three fat cloves of garlic roughly chopped. Follow up with a tablespoon each of ground coriander and cumin plus a teaspoon of freshly ground black pepper. To make a richer broth, I also add a large onion, two carrots and three stalks of celery, all chopped. Sometimes I throw in six whole cloves. Simmer. When the chicken is done, still moist but not bloody inside, which could be within 30 minutes or less, remove the pieces you'll be serving, leaving the neck and back and tail and heart and gizzard in the broth while you boil it down for a more intense flavor. Once you are satisfied with the broth, turn off the heat, strain the broth and return it and chicken to the pot for reheating just before serving.

Meanwhile, you will have set your rice to cooking, and you have chopped up lots of green onions and a pile of fresh coriander. Now slice a lime or two into eighths. Finally, steam some green beans and some smallish cabbage wedges. While these are still a bit crunchy, add a few handfuls of bean sprouts to the steamer. All will be ready to serve in a minute or so.

Yes, you may add or substitute any other vegetables you happen to like as much or better. Home cooking needs to be free and creative. Personalized, not slavish. If you want something pure and absolutely authentic, find a restaurant or take a trip to Indonesia, which isn't a bad idea, actually, though a bit more expensive.

To serve: empty the reheated broth and chicken into a large bowl or tureen, which you'll set in the middle of the table. Arrange the vegetables, hot from the steamer, on a platter, and put the chopped coriander, the chopped green onions and the lime segments into little bowls for easy passing around. Finally, provide a bowl of sambal olek, which is a paste of red chilis - no vinegar, no onions, nothing but chili. This is the only exotic ingredient, and these days it's available in most grocery stores.

Now the fun begins. Everyone starts with an empty soup dish and fills it up with chicken, broth, rice, vegetables and condiments in any old order. Boarding house reach is a plus, when it comes skewering slabs of chicken or ladling hot chicken broth. This, naturally, leads to near collisions and much laughter - definitely an ice breaker, a wonderful comic interlude in the terrible seriousness of life and love.

Squeeze some lime over the combo. Stir in some sambal olek. As I said before: Slurp! Slurp!

Should there, by some miracle, be any leftovers, the solution is simple: dump everything (except the limes) into a pot for reheating the next day. I'd debone the chicken at this point, but it's hardly necessary.

Photos of Indonesian stick puppets by Patricia Lee Sharpe.

Pay for View the Murdoch Way: Money or Influence Which Is It?

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Oh my gosh, right wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch announced earlier this summer that he plans to charge for access to online news content. Since I’m no fan of Murdoch productions – online, in print, or in any other form – that’s just hunky-dory with me. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think he should be encouraged to do so.

Let me explain.

Although there are a very few news organizations that have successfully succeeded in firewalling off their content to subscribers only, most have failed. And the few that have succeeded – The Financial Times and Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal – do so because in Jeff Jarvis’ (The Guardian) view their “readers . . . make money on the content, and pass the cost on to their employers.”

If Murdoch’s goal is foremost to increase his oversized fortune – I wish him the best of luck – but if NPR CEO Vivian Schiller is right, and she should know, he’d be financially more successful if he left his news operations alone.

When you click on WhirledView.....

We love spontaneity and there’s no way we’re going to be bound to anything like an invariable format. The world keeps changing, new ideas crop up, even old players aren’t always predictable and we, like you, get easily bored. Still, readers and editors benefit from some predictability. You may have noticed a certain rhythm to our postings recently, but we’d like to make it explicit.

Monday through Friday we concentrate on the so-called serious stuff, the think pieces that WhirledView readers expect. Over the weekend we’ll try to offer lighter fare: travel, food, fun, life. And several times a month, often but not always on Thursday, we’ll aim to feature a guest post.

Every day we’ll hope for comments from some of you.

Reform in Iran: Let It Be

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

It would help if we [Americans] could learn occasionally to let things seek an indigenous solution.
                                                                                                        Barbara Tuchman                                                                                               
Often, during the run up to the recent Iranian presidential elections and since, U.S. President Barack Obama has been criticized by Republican hawks for not more robustly injecting himself  into the process.  No one who accesses WhirledView will be unaware of the vigorous campaigning of the Iranian opposition to Mahmud Ahmedinejad’s re-election, the numbers and enthusiasm of voters, the charges of a rigged election, the prolonged public protests, the arrests, the mass "trials" of reformists big and small now underway.  Always, it seemed,  Obama’s comments, were a little behind the curve, responding to events, not orchestrating them.

In fact, the Obama approach was inspired and just right.  At various times during the hard fought Iranian election campaign, defenders of the Ahmedinejad regime attempted to dismiss the reformers as tools of the U.S. or, more often, of Britain, home of the BBC, that very annoying purveyor of trustworthy news. (Would that VOA were still respected for its hard news!)  But the charges never stuck.  The opposition wasn’t bought.  It was heart-felt.  It was home-grown.

Not so, insisted the prosecutors in Tehran's four (so far) “show trials,” although the Arab Press is evidently not buying that line.  The Arab News ran a prescient pre-election piece, but has run no commentary since, a prudent wait-and-see stance, no doubt.   An article on Al Arabiya’s web-site features reformists’ charges of “mass burials” of murdered protesters and other alleged hard-liners’ abuses.  It also ran another long article headlined “Reformists and Khatami Aids on Trial,” in which charges and denials of Western interference are both mentioned more or less in passing.  Other Arab sources make no mention of the government’s charges, discounting them by silence.  This is true even of Aljezeera, that supposedly anti-U.S. TV operation.  Now it may be that Sunni Arab sources might not be all that deferential to a non-Arab government run by Shi’ite ayatollahs.  And yet, nationalism runs strong in the Middle East. If the evidence were strong enough, the Arab press would find it hard not to jump on the bandwagon.

There is, of course, pretty good reason for Iranian hard-liners in control of the government to suffer from some paronoia.  The Islamic Republic was founded on, among other things, a rejection of American influence in Iranian affairs.  The notorious embassy hostage situation was really just pay back in spades.  

But old habits die hard.  Back in 2006 the Bush administration was, quite noisily, planning to spend $85 million “to promote democracy” in Iran, while by mid 2008 “Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran,” according to the usually well informed Seymour M. Hersh. 

Yet, even then, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were reporting that

prominent activists and political opponents of Iran’s hard-line administration are warning that U.S. funds designated to help civic groups in Iran could backfire.  In fact, even reformers would resent foreign attempts to push Iran in this direction or that.  What’s more, “if activists were to accept U.S. aid, they would immediately be branded U.S. spies and accused of endangering Iran’s national security."

The Ali Al Magrahi Case: Compassion Plus

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I’ve a wee bit of Scots blood in me, and I’m a wee bit proud of Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill.

Ali al-Megrahi is dying of prostate cancer.  Since he has only a few months to live, he has, in effect, served a life sentence.  Why isn’t this a time for compassion? Why can’t he die in the arms of his mother?  So what if he devotes the enfeebled last months of his life to trying to prove that his conviction for involvement in the Lockerbie bombing was unjust?  Either he comes up with convincing evidence, in which case we can rejoice that a wrong will be minimally undone. Or he comes up with nothing, which means he’s still guilty in the eyes of most of the world. 

As for that brilliantly choreographed welcome home in Libya, maybe it was a promise breached.  Gaddafi père lies low, a bow to decorum, allowing Gaddafi fils to do a little politicking with the nationalist masses, since he hopes to succeed his father as leader of Libya.  Outside Libya, however, only the unredeemably anti-West will not see the wheels-down extravaganza as ungratefulness incarnate and in bad taste, too.  However, in so far as anything else was expected, that was a little naive, it seems to me. 

To the relatives of those who died so horribly at Lockerbie: would you not be willing to consider that this gesture of mercy sends a powerful signal to the Muslim world—a gesture that honors your lost ones in a most noble way?  How wonderful (indeed, how clever) to send a message of compassion to a Muslim population of which the majority do indeed worship God as “the Compassionate.”  Might it not inspire Muslims to respond in kind?  Might it not pull the rug out from under the mass murderers whom the generality of Muslims do not in fact applaud?   Might it not give support to this too silent majority?

Now, I am not naive.  I do not dismiss out of hand the real politik speculations about doing business with Libya that might have played a role in al Megrahi's release, though adequate proof of such possibilities has yet to emerge.  However, Scots being Scots, I could also imagine another non-sentimental consideration, which might be adopted by American prison reformers.  A man who is dying of cancer can do no significant harm.  A man who is dying of cancer has, as I noted above, served out a life term for all practical purposes.  So why not free him, assuming there are loving hands to receive him, and save on the huge cost of keeping a sick man alive?

Why Barbara Tuchman’s 1973 Speech on US Foreign Policy Remains Relevant Today

By Patricia H. Kushlis

On January 30, 1973, Barbara Tuchman gave a speech in honor of John (Jack) Service, one of America’s most experienced State Department China-hands. Service had years earlier lost his career – along with several colleagues – because of their accurate reports from the ground in 1940s China.

Their crime?

Service, Ambassador Clarence Gauss, Counselor George Atcheson and other China specialists in the war torn country at the time – or on the China Desk at the State Department - had the temerity to report to Washington higher ups that Chiang Kai-shek was losing the war and Mao Zedung and the Communists were going to take over the vast country.

For their candor, careers were lost, reputations destroyed and these hapless messengers persecuted at home. They were, in Tuchman’s words “hounded because able and honest performance of their profession collided with the hysterics of the cold war manipulated by a man so absolutely without principles as to be sinister like the man without a shadow.”

In response to an earlier post here on WhirledView, a friend told me about and then sent me a copy of Tuchman’s speech. I’m not going to repeat it in its entirety – it was her speech after all. But it's clear that many of her observations remain relevant today.

I’ve summarized them below in regular type face. Mine follow in italics.

• Foreign Service Officers are employed to advise policy-makers of actual conditions on which to base a realistic policy. Let’s get real: the State Department still needs skilled professional political and economic reporting officers in its embassies overseas and its bureaus in Foggy Bottom. Gaining such expertise does not happen overnight it demands a variety of skills gained on the job, through academic study and in specialized State Department training: twenty years with the Department and in service overseas is more like it.

• The expert reports are too often ignored because policy is formed by preconceptions and long implanted biases. The mental fix of President McKinley got this country into an ill-conceived and bloody war of oppression in 1898 in the Philippines because of his ignorance of the country and its people especially his failure to take into account the tenacity of the indigenous Filipino resistance. President Roosevelt’s favor of the progressive discounted and discouraged US Embassy Moscow reporting in the 1930s of the Stalinist purges. Right on both counts.

Muffins Muffed, Chilies to the Rescue

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

I planned to proclaim—Ta! Da!—that anyone can make a terrific muffin, anytime.  As I always have.  Super simple. Super successful.  This morning—alas!—I ended up with two dozen burnt-on-the-top, foam- rubbery blobs studded with lush, sadly wasted blueberries.  Two were edible.  Just.  The rest, I presume, are on their way to the Gulf of Mexico via whatever happens to waste water in Santa Fe.

Here’s the yummy anyone-can-do-it secret I planned to share with you, mainly because it prompted accolades from my grandson who voted yes! yes! yes! for last week’s batch of only twelve blueberry muffins: cinnamon sugar sprinkled plenteously over the batter just before the muffin tins are shoved into the oven.  My banana bread and apple cake often receive the same treatment.  Result: a delicate layer of spicy crunchy sweetness— and the prep’s quicker than mixing up a streusel.

Not that I would ever denigrate anything related to a crumb cake!  I make a weekly pilgrimage to a local bakery where I order a creamy cheese Danish sprinkled with crumbs a la français, plus a double espresso.  To earn this treat, I make myself walk six miles. It’s not torture, mind.  The route is lovely and not gruesomely hilly.  And the Sunday morning treats I remember most vividly from my childhood, aside from waffles flooded with real maple syrup: the crumb buns from a German bakery in South Jersey, whose closest kin I joyously found in Frankfurt-am-Main, when I was working the book fair one year.        

So what happened to the botched batch of muffins?  Stupid me, I forgot to turn a very hot oven down to 350◦ when the muffins went in.  The sugar burnt to black so fast all but two were beyond rescue by the time my nose detected trouble.  Also, having decided to make two batches at once, I blended the hell out of the batter when I was adding the milk and then the blueberries. Delectable muffin texture depends on a truly lumpy batter.  Finally, the butter had got so soft at tropical room temperature I figured I could whip it into the sugar instead of melting it and dribbling it in along with the milk.  Result of inattention  and bad guess experimentation: foam rubber. Usually I’m an apostle of spontaneity.  But, every so often, rules  matter.   How do you tell when?  Ah, well, age does have its compensations.

This tragedy, fortunately, has a deus ex machina.  The new chili season has begun. I’d already decided to turn a muffin story into a sumptuous breakfast story by making a green chili omelet. 

Everywhere in Santa Fe during these days of late summer there’s the smell of chilies being roasted.  This is how it’s done.  A huge cage-like cylinder is nearly filled with red or green chilies,  then rotated over a bed of coals.  When the skins look burnt, the chilies are ready.  (Some things are supposed to be scorched.  Sigh!)