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Inang Bayan’s New Clothes – A Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Shhh. This delightful children’s book may – or may not - be off-limits to Americans. So let’s pretend you didn’t hear about it from me. But it’s a best seller in the Philippines.

I first learned about Inang Bayan’s New Clothes from one of the few informative articles I’ve come across of late in State the State Department’s in-house magazine so I sent out feelers to see if I could obtain a copy.

Don’t ask how I got it but I did.

That’s best kept part of my “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy – because of an outdated law known as Smith-Mundt that restricts Americans’ access to learning what our taxpayers’ dollars are supporting overseas. Thanks to the Internet, however, you can at least see American Ambassador Kristie Kenney on the US Embassy’s webpage reading from the book to a group of Filipino girls in 2006 when it first appeared. It then took over a year for the story to appear in State – but better late than never.

Suffice it to say that I’ll bet you never dreamed that US government money would help finance a story about two Filipino girls – Feliza and Nurhana, one Christian and the other Muslim – who live in Mindanao, work in a dress shop after school and despite their families’ religious differences are best of friends.

The purpose of this book is to promote inter-communal understanding – and it is clearly aimed at Filipino girls. It is full of pretty clothes, lovely pictures, and paper dolls to dress. In so doing, it shows the multi-ethnic heritage of Filipinos and it also depicts how it is possible – two girls at a time - to play a part in overcoming the devastating religious cleavage that has bedeviled the southern-most part of the archipelago for years. The name Inang Bayan means the Philippine Motherland or Spirit. It dates back - at least - to the early 1900s. Inang Bayan is also known as the "first muse" of Philippine poets.

In short, this little paperback book with cut-outable inserts is a winner.

Its authors – Tony Perez and Agnes Caballa - are veteran Filipino public diplomacy staff at the US Embassy in Manila and its illustrator is Frances Alcaraz, a illustrator and Ateneo de Manila University professor. Perez is an award winning author in his own right and Caballa is a television script writer, lyricist and stage director, as well as co-editor of the magazine Muslim Life in the Philippines. The book was published by Anvil, a major Filipino publishing house, and its publication and production was financed by the U.S. government. Inang Bayan’s New Clothes is, apparently, still in print – or perhaps back in print because it is so popular. But don't expect to find it on Amazon. The text is in both Cebuano (the language of Mindanao) and English.

Now you might ask why the US government would invest in a children’s book of this sort. It’s not, after all, about promoting the US image abroad. But in the event you’ve forgotten, in 2002 the US sent a small number of troops to the Philippines to help the Philippine armed forces cope with Mindanao-based Muslim insurgents including those with ties to Al Qaeda. As far as I can tell, the insurgents as well as Philippine and US troops are still there and the government’s long-standing insurgency problem has yet to be resolved for numerous reasons.

Yet Inang Bayan’s New Clothes is, at the very least, a tiny – delightful - step in the right direction.

Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think: Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Earlier this month, a friend recommended one “must read” book for inclusion in a short list of books and other materials on the Muslim world for a hand out at a recent symposium the World Affairs Forum held in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The symposium was entitled “Meeting Minds with the Muslim World” and was conducted on a “non-attribution” basis.

The “must-read” book was Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think by John L. Esposito and Dalia Mogahed. It was published in 2007 by Gallup Publishers and it should be at the top of the reading lists for all three U.S. presidential candidates, their advisors as well as American voters, the vast majority of who desperately need far more accurate information about Muslims and the Islamic world than the US media normally provides.

Short, well organized, timely and an easy read

Who Speaks for Islam? is mercifully short (184 pages). It is well organized and easy to read. Its findings are a distillation of reams of first rate data collected by the Gallup organization between 2001 and 2007 in hour long, face-to-face interviews using open-ended questions with tens of thousands of “residents of more than 35 nations that are predominantly Muslim or have substantial Muslim populations.” As I understand it, the book confirms the results of numerous – but far less comprehensive - opinion surveys conducted by other western survey research organizations over the same period.

These results presented in Who Speaks for Islam? explode virtually every assertion about the Islamic world and Muslim views of the West that the Bush administration has promulgated since 9/11 to justify its controversial policies in the Middle East.

Islam’s Silenced Majority: the “clash of civilizations” is a canard

First, according to Who Speaks for Islam?, there is no “inevitable clash of civilizations.”

Sorry Professor Huntington, I’ve also never agreed with your overly simplistic and often inaccurate divisions of the post Cold War world on questionably-drawn religious/ethnic grounds. This includes your monolithic characterization of the Islamic world. In Who Speaks for Islam?, Esposito and Mogahed demonstrate that a majority of the world’s approximately 1.3 billion Muslims do, in fact, value democracy and human rights. So, Mr. Bush, pray tell, where is the “inevitable clash of civilizations” based on irreconcilable differences of values upon which you have based our foreign policy for the past seven years?

Most Muslims do not hate the West, or the US, because of our values – despite what Mr. Bush and his neoconservative supporters at the American Enterprise Institute and other rightwing think tanks continue to attempt to shove down our throats through various media outlets – the problem is most Muslims object to America’s not living up to those values. This begins with human rights abuses at Abu Graib and Guantanamo, the administration’s covert rendition and discriminatory visa policies and moves on to its ill-considered invasion of Iraq coupled with unconditional support for a greater Israel.

The Gallup data also tell us that there are major differences between how Muslims view the West. Just as we should - but too often do not - recognize that the Islamic “world” is far from monolithic, the majority of Muslims realize that there are major differences between France and Germany, for instance, and the US. France and Germany come out far ahead because of American unilateralism based on the Bush administration’s militaristic approach to the world, in particular the invasion of Iraq and the administration’s one-sided support for a greater Israel’s domination of the Middle East.

War against whom? Against what?

Practicing Public Diplomacy: A Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Yale Richmond’s latest book is aptly titled Practicing Public Diplomacy: A Cold War Odyssey. This short, readable volume is a treasure trove of sound advice wrapped in the recollections of one of America’s leading public diplomacy practitioners and top Soviet hands whose lengthy US government career spanned 44 years. Richmond’s career began in 1947 with the US Army, encompassed 30 years in the Foreign Service, and concluded with three years as a staff consultant to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, the US Congress’s Cold War human rights watchdog which ended in 1984. An initial 30 day stint as a consultant at the quasi-NGO Congressionally-funded National Endowment for Democracy that immediately followed ultimately lasted eight years.

From engineering student to diplomat

Richmond’s professional life started fresh out of Syracuse University with a degree in electrical engineering when the US military recruited him to become a Military Government Officer in West Germany in 1947. This shortly after that war-torn country had been divided into four zones and the US occupied the south and a sector of Berlin.

His transition from two years as a civilian with the US Military Government then five with the State Department High Commission in Germany occurred with remarkable smoothness: an oral exam and “abracadabra,” Richmond had joined the Foreign Service. He next exchanged woolens for a civilian wardrobe suitable to the tropics and departed for a remote corner of Indochina. A far simpler and faster transition to diplomatic life, I might add, then than now. Or, for that matter, when I joined the Foreign Service in 1970.

Aside from that early State Department assignment to Laos – a chapter that provides a bit of comic relief but also presages the storm clouds of an ever increasing US military involvement in Vietnam, most of Richmond’s public diplomacy career took place in Europe and or working on Soviet or Eastern European affairs in Washington, DC. This region and its peoples became his forté.

“An eye for an eye, if not always a truth for a truth”

Richmond knew the Soviet Union like few other American diplomats. This was undoubtedly because so much of his lengthy career was devoted to US-Soviet relations although in truth, he recalls that an early assignment at a happier time in his life to Poland was his favorite. It’s also because, in my experience, cultural officers and exhibit guides, in particular, had much greater opportunities to get to know the Soviet Union, its societies and its peoples than most others who worked in the U.S. Mission there during the Cold War. Richmond grasped this opportunity well - as so many of his anecdotes indicate.

Richmond’s relationship with the “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” began in 1967 when he first studied Russian. It concluded in 1980 as chief US negotiator for the renewed US-Soviet Cultural Agreement. The agreement itself fell to pieces when it was 97% completed because the Soviets invaded Afghanistan over the Christmas/New Year’s break and the U.S. government torpedoed - among other things - the almost finished cultural negotiations in retaliation. I remember this all too vividly as the most junior member of the delegation.

In Moscow's Cold War chill, cultural work was also political

Arthur C. Clarke, 1917 - 2008

by CKR

Arthur C. Clarke was an imposing figure of the twentieth century. His chosen field was science and its effects on us. He used the medium of science fiction to explore it.

He is being remembered in the media for the book behind the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," but he wrote many, many other science fiction short stories and novels.

I read somewhere that we mourn not so much for the people themselves who have died, but for the parts of ourselves that end with their death.

He was not my favorite science-fiction writer. I think that my love of science fiction came too early in my life to appreciate his writing, which required more maturity than I had in my teens. I did enjoy "The Nine Billion Names of God," which packed the punch I enjoyed at the time, in a simple, but mind-bending concept: that if all the names of God could be enumerated, the universe would have served its purpose and would end. A computer is programmed to enumerate those names. It succeeds, and the stars begin going out, one by one.

That's a very current story for today in multiple dimensions, many years on from the writing. I still get that same shiver down the back of my neck as I write this.

He imagined geosynchronous satellites long before they were a reality and looked forward to meeting aliens in space in more realistic ways (perhaps - we still don't know what will happen) than other writers. He combined the self-assurance of prediction with the profound humility of knowing that we really don't know what will happen, in the best way that science can.

He was a figure who I paid attention to, someone to be looked up to, someone whose name I noticed in the news, part of my intellectual world. I lost my interest in science fiction a long time ago, but Arthur Clarke continued. I tried to reread some of his books, recognizing that my immaturity might have contributed to my lukewarm response to them, but the science fiction part no longer resonated.

Here are obituaries and tributes from others.

New York Times

Washington Post

The Guardian

Kingdaddy

Armchair Generalist

Shane Deichman. Further links here.

Stirring the Greek Nation: A Guest Book Review

by John Brady Kiesling, Guest Contributor

Stirring the Greek Nation: Political Culture, Irredentism and Anti-Americanism in Post-War Greece, 1945-1967, by Dr. Ioannis D. Stefanidis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press, 300 pages, €87)

In early February 2008, I attended a lecture in Greek at the Athens Technical Chamber on the “Eleftherna Mechanism,” a piece of ancient technology recently discovered in Crete. For an hour, the lecturer wielded PowerPoint slides and CAT scans to keep us on the edge of our seats. Ultimately, the object of his research proved to be a rusty padlock on a chain – a padlock from AD 364 to be sure, and quite handsome in its way. After hearty applause, a well-dressed man stood up to hail this important scientific contribution “not just to Greece but to all mankind.” The next asked timidly whether this was indeed a Greek padlock and not a Roman one.

Early in Stirring the Greek Nation, Professor Ioannis Stefanidis quotes Maurice Barré writing in 1906 about his visit to Greece, “I have never seen anyone other than four-year old children … admire themselves with such naiveté and, I must add, sincerity, as this nation does” (p. 12). But Barré, a French nationalist himself, ought to have known better. National narcissism is universal. Greeks differ from French or Americans only in their craving for regular public reassurance that they deserve the Periclean pinnacle to which they cling.

Stefanidis identifies darker implications to this craving. Attempts to play an imperial game beyond its resources led Greece to military defeat in 1897 and to catastrophe in 1922. Unchastened, many Greeks felt little gratitude when the Paris peace conference of 1947 handed over the Dodecanese islands. Greeks’ moral and cultural superiority over their neighbors, combined with their sufferings in World War II, entitled Greece to much more: all of Cyprus, plus territory in Albania, Bulgaria, Yugoslav Macedonia, European Turkey, and perhaps even Libya.

The United States, however, failed to recognize Greece’s entitlement. With the Cold War looming on the horizon, the U.S. government wanted to avoid the mistakes of the Versailles Treaty. There would be no further rectification of Greek borders. That was a disappointment. But the U.S. government added insult to injury, treating Greece and Turkey, publicly as well as privately, as equally valued allies or (once the two quarreled over Cyprus in 1955) as equally blameworthy children. For proud Greek nationalists, this even-handedness was betrayal.

Jon Entine’s Abraham’s Children: A Book Review Essay

By PHK

Last week I visited the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico and stopped at its souvenir shop. In the middle of a collection of books for sale in Spanish and/or English about the history, culture, language and society of “New Spain” that I had expected to find in this country’s premier Hispanic Cultural Center was a selection of books on Judaism and the crypto-Jews. I’m unsure why books on Judaism were included because as I understand it few American Jews came from Spain and the Hispanic community’s dominant religion – indeed only religion for centuries after the Inquisition – was Roman Catholicism.

Yet crypto-Judaism is another matter and crypto-Judaism among Hispanics in the Southwest is a key to understanding this region’s unique culture, history, society, people and politics. The existence of Sephardic crypto-Judaism has, as well, implications for other parts of the former Spanish and Portuguese empires that ruled much of the “New World” from Cuba to the Philippines from 1492 to 1898. Meanwhile, crypto-Judaism’s remnants and its hybrid nature are difficult for many of today’s Jews and Christians to comprehend, countenance, let alone embrace. Indeed, far too many are ignorant of its very existence. A few others question the validity of the claims.

What Jon Entine’s Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People does, among other things, is help provide the genetic underpinnings to support the cultural and other findings about the crypto-Jewish origins of certain Hispanic families who have lived in New Mexico, southern Colorado and Western Texas for generations. This first came to light in the 1980s and has been recorded in earlier works especially in Stanley Hordes’ carefully researched To the End of the Earth (Columbia University, 2005). In addition to Hordes’ work, a few other books on Hispanic crypto-Jews are on the NHCC shop’s shelves. Unfortunately, Entine’s book is not there, but it should be. He, after all, devotes Chapter 8 to their story and also refers to them in other parts of his book.

Entine himself is a journalist and documentary film producer. He began to explore the importance of minute DNA differences among populations several years ago – not long after they became known in the scientific literature. I have utmost respect for writers who can turn scientific language into English: Entine does it well.

Abraham’s Children – although a questionable title for a book which deserves to attract readers beyond the Jewish community – raises important issues about the uses and potential misuses of DNA testing. The human genome research upon which DNA tests are based is, after all, still in its infancy. The genetic roots that Entine carefully describes are limited to male descendants of males and female descendants of females.

Yet, what he has been able to show - based on this still incomplete scientific picture - is a clear genetic link between several of New Mexico’s crypto-Jewish families including that of Father William Sanchez, a Roman Catholic priest in Albuquerque, and the ancient Jewish priestly tribe – or Kohanim that perhaps dates back to 2,500 BCE.

123 Meme

by CKR

ZenPundit has thrown another meme my way. I'll play along, but not pass it along. I've never been comfortable with chain letters and the like, even the harmless ones.

So here are the rules:

1. Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

The nearest book, literally, is one sitting on my worktable, waiting for a post I want to write. It is The Terrorists, subtitled "The Story of the Forerunners of Stalin," by Robert Payne, copyright 1957. The recent observation that some of our current terrorists are engineers fits to some degree with those nineteenth-century terrorists.

I was a bit puzzled about which side Payne believed were the "forerunners of Stalin." Toward the end of the book, it became clear that it was the terrorists themselves. That probably would have been clearer to readers in 1957; it seemed to me that the tsars whom the terrorists targeted could equally have been said to have been the "forerunners of Stalin." But that would be part of that post I'll write someday.

And here are the 123 sentences:

Instead they demanded an interminable act of expiation; and for them the importance of Nechayev's letter must have resided in the knowledge that Nechayev was perfectly aware of what was demanded of him.

Suffering from scurvy and dropsy, his lungs choked by the foul air of the Ravelin, his mind the prey of doubts and sudden paralyzing dreams of grandeur, Nechayev was slowly losing the one thing he valued more than his physical body -- his will-power. At the beginning of the year he had the guards at his mercy and was corresponding freely with friends outside the prison.

Afterword on a Strange Afterword

By PHK

At the end of my book review essay of Valerie Plame Wilson’s Fair Game, I wrote that Laura Rozen’s Afterword (or Epilogue) chapter on Greece was the low point of the book for me and that I would explain why in a later post.

Here’s that subsequent post and here's why. For the most part, the devil is in the details. The problem is that errors in, or misstatements of, several basic details made me begin to wonder whether Rozen, had – probably unintentionally and inadvertently – succeeded in rewriting portions of Greek political history, US-Greek relations, and, for that matter, life of US Embassy employees in Athens.

Where I began to have a queasy feeling about this part of Rozen’s Afterword was when she misnamed both major Greek political parties during the 1960s (p. 321). For the record, neither the Pan Hellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK) nor New Democracy (ND) existed prior to the downfall of the Greek military junta in 1974. The 1960s precursor to PASOK was named the Center Union (EK) and the precursor to ND was the National Radical Union (ERE). As Greek politics expert Richard Clogg explains in his 1979 book A Short History of Modern Greece “PASOK represented a new element in the Greek political spectrum, considerably left of the Center Union” and New Democracy’s “political philosophy was never very fully developed.” That’s not, however, how Rozen tells it.

Missing, ignored or slighted

What Rozen also missed, ignored, or slighted in her description of 1960s Greek politics was the significance of other elements on the political scene that helped lead to the April 1967 military coup – also known as the “Colonels’ Coup.” To be brief, these elements included the intrusive role played by Queen Frederica on the right and the significance of the extreme left – often represented by EDA, a coalition of Marxist parties or groups including crypto-Communists. EDA (United Democratic Left) regularly garnered 10-20 percent of the vote in post World War II national elections. This is important for understanding the origins of the home-grown Greek terrorist group N-17 – to which Rozen devotes much of her text because its leader and mastermind, Alexandros Yotopoulos, was the son of the Greek Trotskyite leader, an underground far left fringe group from the pre-World War II era.

It is also important to note that during the years just prior to the 1967 Colonels’ Coup, inflation had mushroomed, basic services had badly deteriorated, and political infighting – personalities and clientage networks are crucial to understanding not only this period but the entire sweep of Greek politics - had sky-rocketed close to the breaking point.

Question: A passport – or, hmm, was it really a visa?

Innovation Nation - Updated 1/6/08

by CKR

John Kao’s subtitle is “How America is losing its innovation edge, why it matters, and what we can do to get it back.” America’s economy now depends on how much we’re willing to buy of not-entirely-necessary goodies in innumerable variants. How long did it take you to find the designed-just-for you toothpaste in the twelve feet of shelf space devoted to dental cleaning products? We’ve just been through the breathless news and advertising coverage of the opportunities to buy at Christmas sales that begin at three in the morning, and the agonizing over the possibility that Americans will learn to share other kinds of gifts than those that must be bought in the store.

Can we return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when America provided the world with truly new products originated and produced here, when our GDP depended on something other than shopping until we drop? Do we need to? Better yet, can we come up with societal innovations to solve our problems?

The answers to those questions are not clear to me. I have to admit that I seldom do my consumerish duty in buying ready-made food or DVDs, not to mention clothing, which I hang on to for as long as it’s presentable. I’d rather see more suet for the birds in the meat counter, and less pre-soaked stuff for me that tastes all the same. I’d like to see America as the nation that I feel I helped to bring out of the Sputnik doldrums.

But people don’t innovate when they’re scared. They don’t innovate when they have to work 90 hours a week because their livelihood depends on it.

The trouble with John Kao’s book, for me anyway, is that it’s another business book. Kao follows the conventions: a bright optimism that if we follow his prescriptions all will be well; some neologisms to sprinkle into one’s vocabulary (wicked problems, dream spaces), the internet as a model. His recommendations may make sense, but they will never be realized whole. One wonders if he really expects that they could, because he ignores some significant political realities.

Valerie Plame Wilson’s Fair Game – Book Review Essay

By PHK

Over a lengthy, boozy lunch this past fall at the swank and discreet Café Milano in Washington, D.C.’s Georgetown, Richard Armitage told FT Pentagon and intelligence correspondent Demetri Sevastopulo that one of the lowest points in his career was his role in leaking (Valerie) Plame’s identity to columnist Robert Novak.

It’s obvious from Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, Plame’s recently published memoir, that this was also one of the lowest points in her career. In fact, Armitage’s outage of Plame – inadvertent or not – signaled the beginning of the end of her profession as a CIA operations officer working under deep commercial cover.

I found Fair Game intriguing for a number of reasons. First, despite the hatchet job by US government censors – apparently not only by the CIA worried about national security but more significantly by a White House more concerned about staying in power and saving well padded rear ends from uncomfortable, and perhaps drafty jail cells – there was enough left between and around the black-out lines to make Plame’s book well worth reading.

To begin at the beginning . . .

Plame began by providing me with a far better understanding of the kind of training CIA gave its operatives in the 1980s when she entered the Agency, how she and her colleagues viewed State Department colleagues (not favorably but then State and USIA Foreign Service Officers didn’t regard CIA operatives in a positive light either) and the intelligence agency’s female officer “glass ceiling” advancement problems. Similar promotion problems also barred too many women professionals from reaching the higher levels in State and USIA until glacially slow law suits that took years to wend their way through the courts began to change things. Just in time, I might add, for the post Cold War downsizing to destroy far too many careers regardless of gender or race.

I can only compare Plame’s entry level training with mine as a US Information Agency officer trainee in 1970. But I can assure you that Plame’s paramilitary classes did not even cross the minds of those in charge of teaching us the public diplomacy ropes – or, at the time, should they have. Besides, my USIA class largely trained with State Department colleagues so we, and the State crowd, learned the ins-and-outs of Foggy Bottom, how Embassies functioned and most importantly for the State officers amongst us the nitty-gritty of issuing – and not issuing – passports and visas. We in USIA were thankfully exempted from first tours in visa mills by our separate Agency status until after the 1999 merger in the State Department. While our State colleagues spent three weeks in Consul General Roslyn learning the consular game, we had three far more pleasant weeks discovering the basics of international media, education and cultural relations.

Don't ask, don't tell what?

I found more than enough in ensuing chapters of Plame’s memoirs to convince me that she had worked under deep cover and in positions directly related to the highly sensitive area of nuclear non-proliferation – or counter proliferation. The amount of censors’ black ink expended on these portions of the text alone is an excellent indication.

For individuals in the White House to claim that she wasn’t under deep cover when they leaked her name and agency affiliation to the media in clear retribution for her husband’s publicly authoritative questioning of the Bush administration’s erroneous rationale for invading Iraq is simply one of the many stupid, unthinking, short term calculating and illegal things Rove, Libby and others did while drawing far too large salaries and remaining ensconced in their plush and powerful executive office sinecure. Vice President Cheney should, in my view, also have been implicated. Whether W was in the loop is beyond me – he may well have been too preoccupied pedaling on his exercise bike or chopping wood at Crawford to have been told or remembered what he was told about his minions’ illegal behavior – but then again, one has to wonder.

Black on black

I have no access to the blacked out portions of Fair Game so I can only guess at what is missing. Regardless, I find it ludicrous that even Plame’s dates and posts of service and where and when she met her husband Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, IV were considered national security risks if, in fact, the information had been included in her original text which I suspect it was. That information was already part of the public record – as the book’s lengthy "Afterward" by journalist Laura Rozen points out.

Ironically, it was hunky-dory for Plame to write that she had studied a hard language in preparation for a junior officer embassy assignment in an unspecified southern European country in the late 1980s yet she couldn’t name the country. Give me a break. At that time there was only one southern European country that fit the criteria where a difficult language was spoken. There was also a nice photo of her at the Acropolis one wintry day in 1990 - not exactly tourist season – in the event you hadn’t already figured out her Greek posting.

Clearly Plame served her first tour at the US Embassy in Athens. So did I. In my case as a public diplomacy junior officer with the U.S. Information Service (1970-71). I served in Athens again from 1981-84 as Executive Director of the Hellenic American Union (HAU). For years this was America’s sole binational cultural center in Greece but in 1996 it was taken over in a “coup” that need not have happened. The HAU has subsequently become a cash cow English teacher language testing center while perched on land in Athen’s swankiest in-town neighborhood. The building and the land were purchased with US taxpayers’ money.

Plame loved Greece, a country about which she claimed that too many of her Embassy colleagues and particularly their nonworking spouses complained of the country’s idiosyncrasies like “impossible driving habits, bizarre store hours, corrupt and nearly nonfunctioning telephone service and . . . sullen shopkeepers” while finding solace at the Hamburger Hamlet on the now defunct US Airbase.