WhirledView

A Midwinter Break?

Posted by CR

With the holidays of midwinter, the news seems to be calming down. Stories stay on Google News for a day or two without much change, and the screaming of what is called the punditry seems to be abating.

People are spending time with their families instead of bombing a cafe or starting a war. They're cooking some special foods and sitting back and getting reacquainted outside of political debates. Or they're letting those political debates spoil the visits.

Yes, the carnage goes on in Iraq and Darfur and probably Chechnya, but we don't hear much about that. The reporters are taking time with their families too, or they have been assigned to cover holiday-like stories. Some of the politics continues there (Christians in the US concerned that stores are avoiding a "Merry Christmas" message--oh please!), but there is some attempt at good news during this one time of year.

And there is some genuinely good news. Turkey has been invited to begin accession talks with the EU. More of us may be able to get flu shots. The US has canceled Iraq's $4 billion debt.

And now maybe I can get to some posts for WhirledView that I've been thinking about. And doing a bit of housekeeping around the site.

A Crass "Alexander" and a Lovely "Grass"

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

My beef with Oliver Stone’s “Alexander” is simple. Where’s the hero?” Where’s the epic?

So forget “Alexander.” Look for a heartening, big little film I stumbled across the same week that had me emerging, in a state of stupefied discontent, from the monster-screen multiplex. That’s “Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life,” a black and white pre-talkie with the usual now-campy captions, a documentary made in 1925 to depict the extraordinary annual migration of Iran’s Bakhtiari tribe, not as an army, but herding huge flocks of goats and sheep.

The Macedonian, first. You may abhor imperial projects. World conquerors may not be your beau ideal. But you’ll have to admit that Alexander, the real one, couldn’t have got as far as he did, in the royal pecking order and geographically, if he hadn’t been a very impressive character: strong, audacious, courageous, inspiring. A hero, in short. A leader, who not only vanquished Darius of Persia, his own civilization’s arch-enemy, but kept an army together marching across deserts, scaling mountains, heading toward the edge of the known world (from the Greek point of view)—and beyond. The fact that Alexander died before getting home again is a detail. Whether he was poisoned by disgruntled member of his entourage or died from a violent prototype of Delhi belly is also only a detail. He reached the Indus. He brought Greek civilization massively in contact with Indian civilization. After that, going home and keeping a kingdom together, even one swollen into empire, would have been an anti-climax, a matter of housekeeping, not the usual career choice of proper epic heroes, which is early death and eternal fame. Boy babies in Pakistan are still named Iskander, and much is expected of them.

Oliver Stone evidently felt a post-Freudian compulsion to add psycho-complexity to the historical Alexander, who does come across as too beautiful to be true in those white marble busts of him that survive. Stone’s Macedonian is not a tragic hero suffering from a deep flaw in his own character. He does not inspire feelings of breath-catching awe and classical pathos. He’s a neurotic narcissist with nice legs and fashionable stubble, who inspires merely pity and impatience: get over it, kid. This fiddling with Alexander’s psyche is as unconvincing as the computer-generated images of one drag, one view-from-the-palace Baghdad. Who’d follow this punk? No wonder his father didn’t like him.

Stone cuts the epic landscape down to his own puny size, too. He gives us no compelling sense of the land as beautiful but treacherous, a source of dreadful suffering for all, survival for fewer, precisely the punishing sort of landscape that would inspire mutinies and, perhaps, assassination. To make the latter credible we’re fed some disgruntled remarks by characters Stone never clearly differentiates, and to prove the army is moving right along we get clip-artish, way station shots of an arid valley in Iran, a few snowy peaks in the Hindu Kush, a scrub-grown stretch of the Indus.

Another Failed Missile Test

By CKR

George Bush may have been looking for another announcement of how he is protecting the US to put into his State of the Union message. Well, scratch this one.

The interceptor missile didn't even take off. The good news is that that means that not all of the $85 million dollars for this test will be down the tube, but lots of the savings from the non-destruction of the missile will be spent in tracing down the faults that caused it to shut down.

This was the first test for the missile defense system in two years. Earlier tests, carefully orchestrated so that the interceptor would know exactly what its target was, had a spotty success record.

Not much being reported in the US press so far.

Unfinished Business

By CKR

The Washington Post today reminds us of some unfinished business: whoever sent those letters containing anthrax spores in October 2001 is still at large. That's a long time for an investigation not to turn up some evidence.

If there were any evidence at all that the anthrax letters were connected to al-Qaeda or Iraq, we could have expected to have heard that, given the propensities of the Bush administration. For a while, the investigations seemed to focus on disgruntled employees of biowarfare-related enterprises, but that focus seems to have receded with loud shouts from the suspects and their lawyers.

I'll argue with the Washington Post on one point, though.

Anthrax spores, used as weapons of mass destruction, were successfully unleashed with deadly consequences, and the killings remain unsolved.

These "weapons of mass destruction" killed fewer than ten people, although they caused a great deal of disruption. While any deaths from such an attack are a tragedy, this hardly is in the same category with a nuclear attack on a large city. In order to keep our thinking straight on these issues, we need to avoid confusing ourselves with our words.

NPT Verification

by CKR

You hardly ever hear the word “verification” in the news stories about nuclear proliferation, but it’s the centerpiece of NPT enforcement and the issue around which much of the fireworks revolve.

The media think it’s boring and perhaps it is. It is all the details about how, when, and where inspectors can inspect and the detailed results of those inspections. The details are hammered out in workaday sessions between people who know the technical ins and outs of building nuclear weapons and detecting nuclear material. For someone who doesn’t know the technical stuff, and sometimes for someone who does, it can be stunningly boring—arguments over words or place or timing that go on until a precise formulation can be agreed.

Armed with these details, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) does the inspections. The inspectors are experts from various countries who are, at that time, working for the IAEA, although they may ordinarily work for their country’s government or a private corporation.

The issue that the European negotiators have been working out with the Iranians is verification: how does the world know whether the Iranians are producing bomb-grade uranium? The difficulties in Brazil now seem to have been overcome by an inspection of the plant—verification that the plant is as Brazil says it is.

Verification is important because plants that can produce reactor fuel can also produce weapons materials. Inspections can show whether this is happening.

The NPT’s Article III requires the non-nuclear-weapon state parties to accept safeguards, meaning agreed-to inspections along with perhaps cameras or sampling devices installed in plants that might be able to produce nuclear weapons. Nuclear materials and equipment provided to those states are subject to safeguards. The safeguards should not hamper economic or technological development of peaceful uses of nuclear energy.

More recently, additional protocols have been required of all NPT signatories to increase safeguards. The protocols are negotiated individually, to suit the circumstances of each country. As of 25 November 2004, 61 countries have additional protocols in force, and another 26 have signed protocols that remain to be ratified.

Getting Desperate

The Jan/Feb 2005 AARP Magazine lists "five countries where the US is feted--not hated" as travel destinations: Northern Marianas Islands, Grenada, Belize, Andorra, and Luxembourg.

Left, Right and Ukrainian Elections

By Patricia H. Kushlis

I’ve been struck by a several recent stories coming from the political left but now also the right that accuse the U.S. government with wholesale meddling in Ukrainian elections on behalf of Viktor Yushchenko. These same reports studiously ignore the Putin Government’s machinations on behalf of its candidate Viktor Yanukovich – preferring to leave that, evidently, to others.

“The Guardian” perhaps initiated these one-sided reports. But surprisingly on December 5 commenting from Burlingame, California, U.S. conservative/libertarian Patrick Buchanan took “The Guardian’s” charges one step further by calling on “Congress to investigate . . . any organization that used clandestine cash or agents to fix the Ukrainian election.” (Article also appears here.)

According to the accounts, over a half dozen –mostly US - organizations took part in this “scheme” to swing the election to Yushchenko.

Despite its evident bias, the reports I’ve read in “The Guardian” are careful not to tie the organizations in question with covert CIA-funded operations even though the rhetoric comes close. Rather “The Guardian’s” writers foremost confine themselves to criticizing the West, and the US in particular, for meddling in Russia’s traditional sphere of influence which - for them - takes the story back to Milosevic’s downfall in 2000 and then throws in Nicaragua for good measure.

The charge hardest for me to swallow, however, relates to “the supposedly objective and neutral Organization for (sic) Security and Cooperation in Europe” – Buchanan’s characterization, not mine - which he accuses of “being part of the scheme.”

Come on. Is the promotion of free and fair elections through instruction on their implementation and the training and fielding of election monitors that have been accepted by the government in question a nefarious, perhaps even undercover, scheme?

What, by the way, is the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe, otherwise known as OSCE and before that the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE)? Is there something mysterious about its inner-workings that the US and perhaps other western governments manipulated in its oversight of Ukraine’s elections?

I don’t think so.

This international, non-treaty based organization is composed of 55 member countries that stretch from Vancouver to Vladivostok. Countries petition to join. They are not coerced into membership.

OSCE decisions are usually made by consensus. Its members include Russia and Ukraine as well as the other 13 republics of the former Soviet Union. In fact, the OSCE is the first and, today’s only, pan-European security organization.

Lest we forget, the CSCE was the Soviet Union’s brain-child, not America’s. The year was 1969. It took another six years – at the height of détente – for the US to agree to the first meeting. This took place in Helsinki, Finland, in 1975.

OSCE’s headquarters are in Vienna. At the end of the cold war this small, low-key and relatively weak organization that relies on contributions from its member states was charged with – among other tasks – helping to foster human rights and democratic practices throughout Europe. OSCE’s operating budget for 2002 as listed on its webpage was a huge 177.5 million Euros. Compare that with the approximately 6.5 billion dollars per month the U.S. now spends to “bring democracy” to Iraq through the barrel of a gun.

One of the OSCE’s chief tasks is to monitor elections: and some of its election observers are themselves parliamentarians. Election monitoring operates through the OSCE’s Office of Democracy and Human Rights, (ODIHR) pronounced Oh Dear (stress on the O).

ODIHR’s current chief is a career Austrian diplomat named Christian Strohal, a human rights specialist. OSCE election observer missions report their findings back to the member nations through the ODIHR. If you’re curious, the ODIHR posts regular press notices on its website with up-to-date reports from its election missions. These reports include Ukraine – as well as one on the 11/2/04 U.S. general elections.

Yes, the U.S. government as an OSCE member contributes to the organization and, yes, the US also helps recruit and field OSCE election monitors. This has been happening openly for years.

What’s so wrong with that?

An Alternative America

by CKR

Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America is an alternative history, playing the game of what if Charles Lindbergh had been elected president in 1940. It’s about the Jewish experience of America. So say most reviews. J. M. Coetzee’s in the New York Review of Books is one example.

I think there’s a larger point, although I may be viewing the book through too thick a filter of my own experience.

I grew up in a northern New Jersey very similar to Roth’s. His descriptions of a child’s Newark overlaid my own memories. Coetzee finds the book to be primarily a comedy. I laughed a few times; who hasn’t known a kid like Seldon Wishnow? But for me, the book rekindled the paranoia of the fifties, when I alternately worried that the Commies and the Redhunters would get me, the Commies through brainwashing and the Redhunters physically, if I said the wrong thing.

That paranoia was banked until the Bush administration sent it little puffs of oxygen. The commonality between Roth’s book and today’s America isn’t presidents in flight suits or an ideologue of a vice-president. It is the manipulation of people’s worst sides: fear morphed into hatred. In 1940, it was the fear of Nazis and Japs along with fear of economic ruin; now we have different evildoers but still wonder if our personal economies will survive. Hatred can be evoked from fear by the frequent use of that word by political leaders, along with careful choice of domestic issues. Suspicion that the external enemies have internal allies grows.

In The Plot Against America, those internal enemies become the Jews in a logical extension of Lindbergh’s alliance with the Nazis. Rhetoric heats up and inflames communities to riots tinged with pogrom.

And then, suddenly, it’s all over. Too suddenly if alternative history is the point. The story’s over, kids; the knight kills the dragon and wins the princess. This ending isn’t that happy. We are left with the flavor of nasty emotions run amok, paranoia justified, and the feeling that we’ve tasted it recently.

The box is opened, and the evils fly out. But Roth shuts the box in time to hang on to hope. The American people have allowed their emotions to be inflamed by their leaders, but they can also come back to their senses. The turning point is never clear, and things could turn ugly before then.

Or we may ponder an alternative world in which a more recent president decided to echo the actual history Roth chooses to play with: The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.