Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton

Nicholas Kristof writes in today's New York Times about an issue ("The Dynastic Question") that has troubled me. Here's his comparative politics angle on Hillary Clinton's presidential candidacy:

We Americans snicker patronizingly as "democratic" Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Singapore, India and Argentina hand over power to a wife or child of a former leader. Yet I can’t find any example of even the most rinky-dink "democracy" confining power continuously for seven terms over 28 years to four people from two families. (And that's not counting George H.W. Bush's eight years as vice president.)

On the other hand, at least the countries Kristof mentions--except for Singapore--have had female presidents or prime ministers. The United States lags behind much of the world in this respect.

Mann in Zimbabwe

Simon Mann, the leader of a failed 2004 plot to use mercenaries to overthrow the corrupt government of Equatorial Guinea, has had his latest effort to avoid extradition to Equatorial Guinea denied by the High Court of Zimbabwe where he is being held. Mann, who will now appeal to Zimbabwe's Supreme Court, has claimed that he will likely be tortured if sent to Equatorial Guinea. His fear is very reasonable given the documented human rights abuses in Equatorial Guinea, but Zimbabwe's judiciary seems unlikely to place human rights considerations above politics.

The story of Mann's coup attempt was detailed in The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs and a Ruthless Determination to Create Mayhem in an Oil-Rich Corner of Africa by Adam Roberts.

Responding (or Not) to Genocide

Eric Reeves, the author of A Long Day's Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide, has a passionate commentary in today's Christian Science Monitor on the international community's failure to act in the face of genocide. He argues that the United Nations "desperately requires a substantial, robust standing force, prepared to deploy urgently to protect civilian populations facing genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity."

Unfortunately, even if the will to create such a force existed among the UN Security Council members needed to make it a reality, it seems unlikely that the will to authorize its use in Darfur and elsewhere could be mustered when the time comes. The inaction of states--including the United States--in the face of genocide and other serious human rights abuses is rooted in much more fundamental problems, one of which is the failure of democratic polities to hold governments accountable for moral failures in foreign policy.

If I seem overly pessimistic, it may be a result of having read Samantha Power's "A Problem from Hell:" America and the Age of Genocide, a work that details the many ways the United States has evaded its moral and legal responsibilities to prevent and punish genocide. I wish various UN reform proposals could, if implemented, solve the problems that have crippled the world's response to Darfur, Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and other modern crimes, but I fear that focusing on those reforms diverts too much of the responsibility from those of us living in democracies who ought to be doing more to ensure that our own governments do not get away with indifference to human suffering wherever it occurs.

Africa's Oil Boom

Today's Financial Times reports on the growing importance of oil production in Africa. Between 2002 and 2006, publicly-traded oil companies tripled their investment in Africa. By 2012, total production on the continent is expected to reach 16 million barrels per day.

As FT points out, however, this massive investment has not helped the development picture in Africa as much as might be expected. High oil prices, a key factor in the investment boom, have seriously damaged the economies of the thirteen African states with no oil resources to develop. In some states with significant production, an absence of refining capacity has meant high fuel import bills have cut into the economic gains from oil exports. Furthermore, government corruption and mismanagement of oil revenues have resulted in many states' failure to achieve export-led economic development.

When one adds to these problems the aggressive positions being taken in Africa by state-run oil companies from China and other Asian states, "one has the recipe for a new scramble for Africa," according to FT.

Taylor on Trial

The war crimes trial of former Liberian president Charles Taylor began in the Hague on Monday. Taylor is accused of a variety of crimes associated with his support for the rebels in the bloody civil war in neighboring Sierra Leone, crimes that include enslavement and the use of child soldiers.

For live-blogging of the trial and links to trial documents (including a report on the role of the diamond trade in Sierra Leone's civil war [.pdf] submitted into evidence by the prosecution), see this site sponsored by the Open Society Institute. The BBC is providing some of the best coverage of the trial, including this background story posted on Monday and this summary of Charles Taylor's career here.

Iraq: Casualties in 2007

Today's New York Times provides an interesting graphic representation of deaths among security forces in Iraq during 2007. The conclusion: "For those in uniform [both Iraqis and Americans], 2007 was the deadliest year since the invasion."

A Portrait of Guantánamo

Earlier this week, David Bowker and David Kaye published an excellent summary of what's been happening at Guantánamo over the course of the past six years. You can find their New York Times op-ed here.

The New Litmus Test

Rosa Brooks makes the point today in her Los Angeles Times column that, as a political litmus test, torture is the new abortion. You can read her argument here.

Updating a Classic

Yesterday, Maureen Dowd provided the revised version of George W. Bush's Second Inaugural Address--one that takes into account the new view of freedom and democracy necessitated by recent developments in Pakistan.

Here's a brief sample:

Original version:

In the long run, there is no justice without freedom, and there can be no human rights without human liberty.

Revised version:

In the long run, there is justice without freedom, and there can be human rights once the human rights activists have been thrown in the pokey.

The best line in the revised version:

Police tear-gassing lawyers is really just a foreign version of tort reform, which I support.

You can read the whole thing here.

"Elected" Leaders

"The List," a regular feature of Foreign Policy's excellent web site, this month includes six world leaders--five presidents and a prime minister--who have, on average, been in office over thirty years. Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo of Equatorial Guinea is fifth on the list at twenty-eight years in power. Foreign Policy notes that Obiang is Africa's richest ruler with a net worth estimated at $600 million.

Corruption keeps Obiang in power. Oil makes him wealthy.

The Deadliest Year

More American troops have died in Iraq thus far in 2007 than in any previous year of the war. Since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 3,857 Americans have died in Iraq. Of that number, 854 military fatalities have occurred this year.

For details, see the Iraq Coalition Casualty Count.

Ideological Exclusion

In the early years of the Cold War, the United States adopted a policy of denying entry visas to foreign nationals on the basis of their political beliefs, a policy now known as ideological exclusion. As the nation recovered from the self-inflicted wounds associated with McCarthyism and the "Red Scare," the policy of ideological exclusion was abandoned.

Now, however, ideological exclusion is back. Indeed, to borrow a phrase, the United States seems to have transformed the war of ideas into a war against ideas. Using authority granted by the USA PATRIOT Act, the Department of Homeland Security has been denying entry to scholars whose views don't match those espoused by the Bush Administration. Tariq Ramadan, a distinguished Swiss scholar who was offered a tenured appointment at Notre Dame in 2004, has been barred from the U.S. Adam Habib, a South African scholar and critic of the war in Iraq, was denied entry when he got off the plane at JFK International Airport in October 2006 en route to meetings at Columbia University and the Social Science Research Council. Ramadan and Habib are not the only foreign nationals who have been affected by the policy of ideological exclusion, but they have become particularly prominent as a consequence of lawsuits filed by professional organizations (the American Academy of Religion on behalf of Ramadan and the American Sociological Association on behalf of Habib) against the Department of Homeland Security.

For more on ideological exclusion, see the information provided by the American Civil Liberties Union here. For information on some of those who have been kept from teaching or addressing professional audiences in the United States since 9/11, see this article in Academe, a publication of the American Association of University Professors.

Humiliations

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

--Simone Weil

Mukasey and Waterboarding

It's almost as if Alberto Gonzales had never left.

Michael Mukasey, President Bush's nominee to head the Department of Justice in the aftermath of the Gonzales disaster, has told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee considering his nomination that he's not sure if waterboarding violates laws prohibiting torture.

In a four-page letter [.pdf] to the Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee, Mukasey stated:

I was asked at the hearing and in your letter questions about the hypothetical use of certain coercive interrogation techniques. As described in your letter, these techniques seem over the line or, on a personal basis, repugnant to me, and would probably seem the same to many Americans. But hypotheticals are different from real life, and in any legal opinion the actual facts and circumstances are critical.

Senator Richard Durbin (D-IL) pinpointed the problem with Mukasey's letter:

We asked Judge Mukasey a simple and straightforward question: Is waterboarding illegal? While this question has been answered clearly by many others . . . Judge Mukasey spent four pages responding and still didn't provide an answer.

Let's spell this out for Judge Mukasey: Waterboarding is a type of torture. As such, it violates both domestic and international law.

Period.

More Protests in Burma

On the sixth day of anti-government marches in Burma, an estimated 100,000 protestors took to the streets of the capital, Yangon. The government's religious affairs minister today warned of a possible crackdown against the Buddhist monks leading the protests.

In 1988, as many as 3,000 students were killed in the crackdown on th anti-government protests that led to the house arrest of Aung San Suu Kyi. However, some observers believe that international attention combined with restraints imposed by China will make a repeat of the 1988 crackdown unlikely.

The Dictator's Checkup

Equatorial Guinea's president, Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, visited the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota earlier this week for a checkup according to officials at the clinic. The 65-year-old dictator is reportedly suffering from prostate cancer and heart problems.

Why is one of the world's worst dictators free to enter the United States at will? In a word, it's oil. That alone seems to have been enough to prompt Secretary of State Rice to introduce Obiang as "a good friend" last year.

The March of the Monks

On August 26, 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi assumed the leadership of Burma's fledgling movement for democracy at a rally at Yangon's Shwedagon pagoda. The Burmese military crushed the movement and since then has kept Burma's only Nobel laureate under house arrest with only intermittent periods of freedom.

Today in Yangon, 500 Buddhist monks marched past Suu Kyi's home while another 1,000 monks assembled at Shwedagon pagoda and an estimated 10,000 people (including 4,000 monks) marched in the city of Mandalay to protest Burma's repressive military dictatorship. It was the fifth consecutive day of protests by monks against the regime.

Earlier this week, in a move designed to shame the government, monks began refusing the alms that are distributed by the military. Monks have reportedly been marching with their begging bowls held upside down to demonstrate their rejection of the regime.

Meanwhile, the Burmese military has responded by arresting pro-democracy leaders and using hired thugs to beat up marchers. While the monks involved in the protests are clearly supported by the populace (90 percent of which is Buddhist), thus far only a few non-clergy have been willing to march with them. The government clearly is capable of bringing great force to bear against the protests, although killing monks would risk enraging their silent supporters.

The recent protests were prompted by a fuel price hike imposed by the government in August. Bus fares have doubled in the cities creating great hardship in a country with a per capita income of $175 per year.

China Attacks

President Bush has told reporters in Sydney that he may confront Chinese president Hu Jintao over Chinese efforts to hack into Pentagon computers. Recent cyber-attacks on government systems in Washington, London, and Berlin have reportedly been traced to China's military. The PRC says, of course, that such claims are "groundless."

For more on the story, see this brief article in the Economist.

Off the Reservation

It doesn't bother me that five Advanced Cruise Missiles armed with nuclear weapons were flown on a B-52 from Minot AFB in North Dakota to Barksdale AFB in Lousiana on August 30, but I am somewhat concerned that the Air Force didn't know it.

The appropriate military authorities are also concerned and have launched--check that--begun an investigation.

"Push and Push and Push"

According to The Terror Presidency, a new book by former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (and current Harvard Law professor) Jack Goldsmith, attorneys within the Bush Administration pressed hard using faulty legal arguments to expand executive power at the expense of Congress and the courts. David Addington, Vice President Cheney's legal counsel at the time, said, "We're going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop."

The New York Times Magazine will publish a lengthy piece on Sunday (available here) about Goldsmith and the challenges he faced trying to resist the Bush Administration's legal maneuverings. According to Goldsmith, the president's lawyers adopted a "go-it-alone" perspective on the presidency "because they wanted to leave the presidency stronger than when they assumed office, but the approach they took achieved exactly the opposite effect. The central irony is that people whose explicit goal was to expand presidential power have diminished it."

Needless to say, similar ironies can be found in most of the Bush Administration's counter-terrorism policies.